The theatre of science; a volume of progress and achievement in the motion picture industry (1914)

86 C5e Cfieatte are the best means of productivity for the camera man?' No, I do not. The stage is a development of centuries, based on certain fixed conditions and within prescribed Hmits. It is needless to point out what these are. The motion picture, although a growth of only a few years, is boundless in its scope, and endless in its possibilities. The whole world is its stage, and time without end its limitations. In the use of speech alone is it at a disadvantage, but the other advantages of the motion picture over the stage are so numerous and powerful that v/e can well afford to grant the stage this one point of superiority. The conditions of the two arts being so different, it follows that the requirements are equally dissimilar. Stage craft and stage people are out of place in the intense realism of motion-picture expression, but it may well be that a little motion-picture realism would be of immense advantage to the stage. "To your second question, 'After the plays of other days are exhausted, who will supply the needs of thirty thousand theatres?' I would refer you to the opinion expressed in the foregoing paragraph. The plays of other days are not essential to the motion picture, and I am not sure that they are not proving a positive harm. If motion-picture producers had no access to stage plays, they would be obliged to depend upon their ov/n authors for their material, and, since the picture dramas that would thvis result v/ould be composed entirely for picture production, they could not fail to much more nearly reach a perfection of art than could ever be hoped for while writers and directors are trying in vain to twist stage dram.as into condition for picture use. When the plays of other days, and of these days are exhausted, as they will be, motion pic