Picture-Play Magazine (Sep 1916 - Feb 1917)

And They Made Her a Star 231 era man had some unexposed negative he didn't know what to do with, or the general manager was trying to cut expenses— and so they made her a star. She was a star for from three to five reels, and then nothing but a cinder, burned out. That was in the olden days. The very star system itself has protected the public and has driven out the incompetents. Now a girl must be an actress before, not after, she gets her name on the three sheets and her picture in the magazines. It was the illadvised motion-picture magnate who tried to make an incompetent famous, and, hoist by his own petard, he has perished. The companies that have survived are the ones that early in the game conceived the idea — at that time quite radical— that a play should be acted by actors and actresses, not by acrobats or persons notorious. These companies, for the most part, were headed by men who had been theatrical producers before they went into motion pictures, and who realized that the motion-picture play was to be something more than something to look at; it was to be something to think about. A motion-picture play must have a star. Some authorities will say the star system is wrong, but stop and think. How do you pick the pictures you are going to see? Do you say, "Let's go over and see 'The Sins of the Populace,' or 'The Undertaker's Bride ?' " Of course you don't. You say, "Let's go see Mary Pickford," or Theda Bara, or Florence La Badie, or Marguerite Clark, or Gladys Hulette, as the case may be. Motion-picture fans follow stars. Advertising may make the patrons go see an actress once, but if she doesn't satisfy they never go to see her again. The better she is advertised the more easily they remember that they don't like her. It's the same theory that is used in selling soap or breakfast food or smoking tobacco. The publicity may make you take a chance, but if the product is no good you don't try it again. All of which has made motion-picture producers careful about selecting stars. They try them out first, and they do not open a big advertising campaign until they are sure that they are going to make good. The stars you see in motion pictures to-day get their names into the electric lights because they have made good, because men who make it their business to know talent when they see it have decided that the girl or the man has talent, that the public is going to like her or him and will pay money to get in for a look at five thousand feet. There's no sentiment in it now. It's business. Now we're into the story. That was just the introduction, meant to lead you on, to instruct you so that you would understand the why of the announcement from Edwin Thanhouser that he has decided to star Doris Grey and Wayne Arey. Doris Grey was the prettiest girl at the ball given by the Boston motionpicture exhibitors in Boston last December. Mr. Thanhouser had agreed to take the prettiest girl and put her into a picture. He promised nothing more than that. He had not promised to make her a star. In fact, he had not expected to. Doris appeared in a three-reeler called "What Doris Did." Doris did various things. Until she joined the Thanhouser Company she never had seen a motion picture in the process of making. Her histrionic efforts had been confined to amateur entertainments at Dorchester High School, and what she had learned in a Boston school of expression. You probably imagine that she was pretty bad. You're half right. She was pretty, but not bad.