Picture Play Magazine (Oct-Nov 1915)

The Right Film Humor By Samuel S. Hutchinson (President American Film Company, Incorporated) A discussion of the healthy trend of the literature of the motion picture, the necessity for keeping the film a true picture of American life, full of the interplay of lights and shadows and essentially wholesome. SCREEN literature," the literature of the motion picture, has come int<> being. This birth of a new literature has been an almost unconscious development. The motion picture came to us as a novelty of invention, and has remained to develop into an art. I can think of nothing save the printing press which is so much a part of the life of the people. This intimacy of the motion picture with the people has held the film to a true picture of life. Schools and fads of painting and the art of the printed word, because of the limitations of their patronage, have been able to succeed despite their wanderings into strange, unwholesome realms. Not so with the motion picture. It is of the people, for the people, and answerable to the people. Hence we see the demand for. and the tendency to supply, clean, healthy, sane pictures. Successful production of modern motion-picture plays demands the strictest attention to the standards of the people. The present-day film, as a picture of life, must stand for those qualities which we find the most admirable in men and women — strength, beauty, purity, cleanliness, and a sense of the right. The photo play which depends for its appeal on distasteful topics, like the "dope" habit, excessive drinking, deathbed scenes, tortures, murders long drawn out, suicides, the morbid, and the suggestive, has no place in this new "screen literature.'' The motion-picture audience is most in sympathy with the dramas dealing with everyday human endeavor. This does not mean that a solemn workaday world is to be reflected on the screen. It means that the drama of real life, with all its wonderful lights and shadows, must be presented. The successful photo play, the kind of a photo play that will live, must pre Samuel S. Hutchinson, president of the American Film Co. and author of this article. sent human documents. It must deal with reality presented in the pictorial language of reality. The weird, the bizarre, and fantastic must he handled very gingerly. Just how the public accepts and rejects, in its choice between the natural and wholesome on one side, and the unnatural and unwholesome on the other is well demonstrated before us in literature. Alexander Dumas' adventure novels, startling, but realistic in that they dealt with real people, have to-day a greater following, according to the records of the public libraries, than the perhaps more technically perfect, but less human, stories of Balzac. The readers of the intensely human works of O. Henry outnumber the readers of Hawthorne and Poe by a ratio of thousands. "The Fall of the House of Usher,'' a masterpiece in horror an< shudders, is known to a few. But mil lions have read, laughed, and cried ove "The Unfinished Story"-^the story o a shopgirl, a picture of Kitchener, anc a very despicable man. "The Unfinishe< Story'' deals with life and makes yoii know that it is life, but "The Fall 01] the House of Usher" is an affair of tin terror land of bad dreams. When I chose this subject of "Tht Right Film Humor." I had no intention of discussing comedy films. The smile in films that I have in mind is the occasional bright light of humor that flashes in the drama of real life. Without this I think the photo play is untrue and a failure as a part of the art of the motion picture. Perhaps we can illustrate it best by an example from life. We are in a courtroom. A big murder trial is in progress. The principal witness has been on the stand for hours. The examination has filled the atmosphere with tenseness. There has been a terrible, nerve-racking recital of evidence. The jury, the lawyers, the spectators have been keyed to the highest pitch. It is a scene of the most desperate earnestness. The prosecutor, in recross-examination, has paused in the middle of the question to gain the weight of impressive deliberation. You can hear the fall of the well-known pin. Then a juryman in the front row grows red in the face, gropes swiftly in his pocket, snatches out a handkerchief, and buries his face — just in time to half throttle a sneeze. A titter starts in the back of the room, and in a moment the courtroom is upset with a storm of laughter. It was over nothing, but it had to break from the tenseness of it all. As the laugh subsides, the court raps for order, and the trial proceeds. But. meantime, the air has been cleared by this trivial incident. The crowd was due for a laugh, and took it at the earliest opportunity.