The Photo-Play Journal (Jul 1919-Feb 1921)

44 PHOTO-PLAY JOURNAL July, 1919 ffi S A Department Conducted Personally by Madame Olga Petrova ffl My Dear Madame Petrova : I like going to the movies better than anything else in the world, but my mother — of course, she is my mother, and I like her — tries to stop me going to see some of the players I like best. She says they unsettle a girl of my age and they won't improve my mind. Now, in the first place, I am sixteen, and old enough to know what's good for me, and in the second place, my mind doesn't need any improving. I go to be amused, and not to be lectured. I don't want any arguments with my mother, so I just go anyway, but sometimes when I have to ask her for the money she questions me and I have to tell her an untruth. I notice you always play girls who go their own way, so that's why I am writing to you to ask you if you don't think I'm in the right. I am enclosing an envelope for your reply. Mary Blossom, Indianapolis. My Dear Miss Blossom : What a very extraordinary young person you are if your mind is really so perfect that improvement is unnecessary and impossible. I have never heard, or read, or known of anyone who had attained such a state of grace. I salute you. And yet what a sad, sad outlook life must be for you. The only real joy in living is learning, and by learning, improving, and if you have already arrived at the stage when your mind needs no improving, your mission is fulfilled, and an early grave yawns before you. Nothing is so significant of ultimate and real greatness either in an individual or in a nation as its desire to improve its mind. Show me the person who wants to learn and 1 will show you the person who will some time teach. Good brawn and muscle are all very well, but they never have and never will reap the same reward, financially or spiritually, as good brains. It is the man with the brain who profits by the labor of the multitude. Of course I quite sympathize with your not wanting to be "lectured" in the moving picture theatre, but can't you strike a happy medium somewhere between the plays and actors you mention as being of the amusing type and others you designate as bores? I have eliminated their names, of course, from your letter. For the life of me I can't see that you can t be amused and improved at the same time. You certainly are not going to accuse Miss Pickford of lecturing you, are you ? And yet I have never seen anything in a Pickford picture that would unsettle a girl of your age. There are pictures though that might very easily have that effect— pictures that show a theif like Raffles garbed in the trappings of a hero of romance. Here is a man who eats salt with his friend, partakes of his hospitality and accepts shelter under his roof, only to steal from him under cover of the night. This type of picture is not good for minds that either need or do not need improving. The type of picture that shows you the apparently dazzling surroundings of heroines who are living what is called a life of sin are unsettling because they are fundamentally misleading and are not true to life in any sense of the word. Pictures like these are apt to lead the unthinking to suppose that the "sinner" is very materially better off than the "decent" woman. This is not the case. The tinsel is only tinsel and in real life the "dazzling" surroundings are so unstable a quality that like Aladdin's palace they have a habit of disappearing overnight, leaving their ex-mistresses to face the cold grey street, the hospital or the river, as inevitable alternatives. I am speaking plainly, but since you have been undergoing a course of such pictures, such plain speaking; must appear dull in comparison with the thrills these picture plays have afforded you. Now as to whether you are justified in telling your mother an untruth to avoid an argument EDITOR'S NOTE— This most interesting department, which Madame Petrova contributes exclusively to PHOTO-PLAY JOURNAL, is a permanent feature of this magazine, and we are proud of the honor of being able to present such interesting opinions and viewpoints of such a remarkable lady genius regularly. Madame Petrova we/comes letters upon all subjects pertaining to the cinema art, and she personally reads all which are addressed to her in care of PHOTO-PLAY JOURNAL. is a matter for your "mind that needs no improving" to decide. For my own part, lying is such a confession of personal cowardice that I cannot see any justification for it at all. If you are self-supporting and do not live under your mother's roof then you are justified in going your own gait, provided of course that you are always willing to stand by the consequences of Mme. Olga Petrova your own actions. But if on the other hand, you are not self-supporting then, even apart from any love and respect which might or might not be your mother's due, you have no right whatever to accept her care and support without obeying her wishes. If any character which I have played during; the last two years has led you to think that my sympathies are with the girl who demands all the privileges of self-expression without being willing to share the inevitable responsibilities, I should like to know the name of that character that I may make clear any points that may have misled you. Dear Miss Petrova : I have always wanted to be in the movies and after writing to every actor and actress I could get the addresses of I finally got an answer from Air. "Blank" of Los Angeles. In his letter he said that if I happened to be around the studio some time he would see that I got a chance as an extra. Now, as you see, I live in Cleveland, what can I do? — Amy Briggcs, Cleveland. Dear Miss Brigges : Move. Dear Madame Petrova : I sent you a story last year when you were in San Francisco, to the St. Francis Hotel, asking you to read it immediately and send it back if you didn't want it. I have never heard from you from that day. I have heard that you always answer all letters personally, so I am giving you this chance to do so. — Mrs. IVcllman, San Francisco. Dear Mrs. Wellman : I have no record of having received a story from you at any time so that you see no discourtesy has been shown you. I wonder if you know that I was in San Francisco only a few hours and that every possible moment of my time was fully occupied with the work I had come some thousands of miles to do. To illustrate — I remember that I arrived in San Francisco after a dreadful journey through a terrible sand storm and with the thermometer at ninety-eight, after previously visiting fifteen cities in an equal number of days. I had not seen any . bed but a Pullman berth since leaving New York. On my arrival, travel stained, breakfastless, tired, with lack of sleep and the eternal rocking of the train, I was met by a contingent of newspaper men all armed with cameras, who in spite of my humble request that I might be allowed a bath before the operation, insisted on my looking pleasant and being photographed then and there. On the way to the hotel I asked my manager to find the freight entrance so that I might slip upstairs through tortuous back ways and, eluding the fast gathering mob, pursue the tub. But no such luck was to be mine. Another committee formed of the War Savings officials recognized the car, hailed us to the front entrance, and more youths armed with more cameras transcribed my dishevelled self to various specimens of Mr. Eastman's films. The gentlemen of the press then requested that I be interviewed and for some reason or another unknown to me seemed determined that I should commit myself to the most intimate statements regarding my unimportant life from the cradle to the grave. My bath didn't seem to interest them at all, although I promised I would come back and be interviewed as soon as I had had an opportunity to investigate one of the tubs for which the St. Francis is so justly famous. The interviewers disposed of and the clock pointing to one-thirty, the War Savings Committee and I held a caucus until two-thirty on the best tactics to be pursued in order to make the natives of San Francisco subscribe a maximum of stamps within a minimum of time. This over I again weakly remarked that I was even more dusty and travel stained, not to speak of breakfastless — I had dined on a sandwich and a cup of tea, one in each hand, at six o'clock the previous evening, between trains — than I was on my arrival. No one heard me but one of the gentlemen pulled out his watch remarking that we only had fifteen minutes before my scheduled appearance at the theatre and that he would employ that fifteen minutes in refreshing himself and us. Fifteen minutes before theatre time — I like longer time for my ablutions, but on a trip like mine one cannot afford to be luxurious in the matter of baths. I have often thought since that that poor man must have thought me quite mad, for I flew from the room to the one adjoining which boasted one of the aforementioned tubs and regardless of the inner man I scoured the outer woman and — I was at the theatre at the appointed time. Mr. North, my manager, protested that I must have something to eat before the second showing, which was timed for fourthirty, but bless my heart, I shook hands with at least a thousand people in the interim who would have thought me extremely temperamental and discourteous if I had hesitated between the material pleasure of food and the spiritual pleasure of meeting and knowing them personally. When I finally returned to the hotel as six. there were at least a hundred people gathered (Continued on page 52)