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436 Building Theatre Patronage
mean that the working hours of the average showman were cut in half.
There is a fascination in the work which makes men forget to keep an eye on the clock. The fascination lies in this: They are selling happiness. There is little fascination in setting bricks, or turning cranks, or pulling ropes, or driving nails, or casting steel. There is real fascination in selling happiness.
Reformers claim that the "show business is selling sex." No institution can last and depend for its revenue upon a decent public, and sell anything but decency. A few exceptions are illogically used to condemn a business which is, and which must be, decent because it caters to the majority, and the majority is always decent. God made people that way.
When sex magazines, sex novels, sex tabloids, sex legitimate plays are constantly selling "dirt" to a small minority, it is significant that the motion-picture theatre is still selling decently to the majority, and selling decently because the majority is decent. There will be a change only when God makes people differently.
The manager of even the smallest theatre can hold up his head in any community. If he is measuring up to the responsibility which has been entrusted to him, he takes his place with the educator, the doctor, the social worker, the publisher, the clergyman, the newspaper man, the soldier, the policeman, and the merchant.
This may seem exaggerated at first glance. Yet he is curing what doctors cannot cure. He is co-operating with the social worker. He is educating visually, while the educator must use the tedious, round-about medium of words. Like the publisher and the newspaper man, he is helping to circulate messages that will instruct and inspire. Like the policeman, he has entrusted to him the safekeeping of many lives with the same moral responsibility. If the clergyman teaches and guides and inspires, so does the man who gives the community the instruction and the inspiration which comes from "The Covered Wagon," "The Ten Commandments," "Beau Geste," "Old Ironsides," "The Iron Horse," "The Big Parade," "The