Photoplay (Jul - Dec 1920)

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speaking Movies of the Bowery Decorations by Norman Anthony. TV DOWN on our East Side, a few blocks from the East River, where eichty per cent of the community are Hebrews, there is a movie house in Clinton Street which employs two lecturers as a bass and treble to accompany the films. This is a relic of the days when the kinetoscope was number "jM" on the cont i n u o u s variety program. Those were the days when an elucidator was necessary to explain the choppy career of the film in its St. Vitus' dance stage when no sub-titles were counted up in the footage. There are two of these "speelers" who have learned to run the gamut of every tone and expression in a running conversation accompanying the film, so that the audience not understanding the titles, may yet know the story. Suddenly from the dark an explanatory voice in heavy bass thunders: "Ah, girl! So you refuse to press my pants?" and a loud slap stick illustrates "Erstwhile Susan" in the form of Constance Binney on the screen, being slapped by her father. The conversation is in the vernacular of Clinton Street and as most of the audience presses pants for a living it is a very wise and human touch. Miss Binney, turning into the kitchen, is followed by the wailing female voice: "Oh dear! How I do hate to wash them dishes!" A remark which brings forth sympathetic sighs from the stooped, be ■lir 'I The Odeon's "Speelers" must know the psy !y ' audiences. :holo^y of their By THEODORE MARCONE If some of our film stars had any idea of the words likely to be put into their mouths, their imagination would never carry them as far as does that of these two lecturers who have to keep up a conversational ad lib performance for a different film every day in the week without even a rehearsal. It takes some presence of mind to see a film for the first time and follow it with extemporaneous lines suitable to the continuous action. Xo wonder as the picture winds off, mistakes are hurriedly turned into jests to comply with the action on the screen such as when the heroine rushes into a young man's arms and the female voice purrs forth: "Oh, Lionel, I do love you — I do," and just then fla.shes the approach of the real lover while the lecturer seeing that she has mistaken the brother for the real lover, nothing daunted continuous: "But as a sister. Vou see here comes my fiance now." But the audience is quick in discovering these ventriloquial changes and the lecturers not only must be fine diagnosticians of movie gestures and gesticulations, but they must know the psychology of their audiences. Titles are especially annoying to them; they limit their imagination and they could get along much better, they say. without any reading matter whatever. Even the "Birth of a Nation" i would hold no fears for them, for each one is capable of assuming any number of parts within the range of the human voice. This is truly exemplified when the aristocratic lady in J "Erstwhile Susan" brushes away Susan's hand with a female voice denouncing the act of an aristocrat by saying: "Don't touch me, you lirty woiking goil!"' And oh, how that proletariat y audience smacks its lips over that wise appeal to its understanding! Xo title denied the words, so why not interpret the action to your audience's satisfaction? They know their audience and the Odcon audience is the same year after year. If you doubt it, ask any motorman or conductor going through the East Side where the theater is with the film lecturers and he will put you off at the "place he's been going to fer