Photoplay (Jul - Dec 1920)

CLOSE-UPS &diiorial Sxpression and Timely Comment Brickbats and Whence comes the thanks nli^s Hniisps for uplift? There are several Lrlass Houses. ^^^^^^ disgusted actors among those the sincerity, of whose ideals has prompted the stage to put on real plays year after year — plays too good to last — in the hopes that those people who proclaim loudly that they want good things and write letters to the papers, decrying the present state of theatrical affairs and bemoaning the fact that the drama is going to the bow-wows, will come out en masse and make those efforts pay! One of these actors, a very fine gentleman of the old school whose name has been associated for years with the best in the theater, let the cat out of the bag at c^uite a fashionable dinner for Lord Dunsany, the Irish poet-playwright, a few weeks ago. He told of a federation of women's clubs of greater New York that has always made a great to-do about "better plays" and "uplifting the drama" and the like. The club bought out the entire downstairs for a matinee performance of "Aphrodite," the spectacle play featuring Dorothy Dalton — a play which, however decent it may be in reality, was blared into New York with a fanfare of unquestionably suggestive advertising. At that very moment, there was more than one play of real merit that was dying a slow death from lack of appreciation. The patronage of these women would have given new courage to players and producers who were trying to do things inspiring. But what they did drowned out their shoutings. The pictures, as well as the legitimate stage, suffer from busy-body reformers who do a lot of talking and interfering, but who are always missing when it comes to the vital point — making worthy effort pay for its bread and butter. Them Was John Barrymore, the most -I , successful legitimate actor on tne Uays . Broadway, ran into Sam Bernard, Broadway's most successful musical comedian, recently. "Do you remember, at the old Famous Players on Twenty-Sixth Street — " Bernard got no further, for Barrymore interrupted him. "Yes, I remember a very hot day in summer. You were playing a gentleman in evening dress and a fur coat. You were perspiring away a pound a minute. I was playing a souse who had fallen under a shower bath. You were new to the film business, and you struggled over to the edge of my scene and peeped in, whispering something." "What did I say?" asked Bernard. Western Hustle. "You said: 'How long must I be in the film business before I can get a part like that ?' " West of the Mississippi river the presentation of motion pictures has taken a dominant business note in two entirely different ways, each characteristic of its section. On the Pacific Slope the architectural features of the leading cities are actually being changed by the literal picture palaces that seem to be going up in profligate abandon, and then, stranger still, are prospering as profligately. In San Francisco — that American Paris — architects predict that in another year the photoplay theater will be the ruling edifice of the principal streets. In Kansas, Nebraska and Iowa, on the other hand, the small-town theaters and even "neighborhood" houses at country cross-roads are speculative material alike for the opulent farmer and the equally opulent village banker. Dozens of really powerful combinations have been formed, and many a straw-chewing Reuben owns a string of little theaters in addition to his hogs and his corn and his wheat stored in the great elevators of Chicago. Very new, and very interesting, isn't it ? And quite a far, far cry from the little mutoscope peep-shows of less than twenty years ago ! shadow This form of pugilistic art has alT» • ways been deemed more developing o* than profitable; but now, developed daily in tanks of hypo, it is proving about as compensating as two minutes' sparring in Toledo on the Fourth of July. The reference is to the pugnacity picture exploiting— usually in serial form — the successful public slugger. The popular delusion which makes a fellow an actor just because he has seen the third man counting a solemn ten over his prostrate fellow-debater is a little hard to analyze, but .... there it is, anyway, like the unjailable lawyer in jail. Mr. Dempsey, who probably thinks Irving just the name of a High School, is one of the most illustrious of these biceptrions at the moment. His contract is probably greater than that of Bennie Leonard, who only got a measly $100,000 for showing up Barrymore. Jess Willard, now as historic as Johannes Barleycorn, made an enormous sum. The movies, through public curiosity, are making today's fighters as much money as the really great fighters of yesterday earned throughout their careers.