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

102 Cfje Cbeatre interests in both fields will awake to the significance of a condition that reveals 90 per cent, (instead of 10 per cent, as recently as a decade ago) of a populace as theatregoers. And there is much to indicate that with the adjustment of admission prices to a scale almost equal with the two modes of public entertainment, that the film m.agnate, possessed of the showmanship instinct, and provided with playhouses and widely distributed stock companies, recognizing the trend of the motion picture to materially add to the patronage of the spoken play, will himself enter the older field and demonstrate the correctness of the writer's viewpoint. No one believes that there is the least danger of the motion-picture play replacing the spoken play as an entertainment, but that the form_er has routed off the boards all but a few of the traveling companies and has driven cheap melodram.a entirely from large and sm.all cities alike, is admitted; and now that the rosters of the film studio include more well-known players than the speaking stage — v/ith the very last of the producers in the older field, Charles Frohman, capitulating to the lure of the camera man — a condition exists wherein the season of 1914-15 is due to witness a complete change in the theatrical map. Whether the experienced theatrical managers now affiliated with the film industry take the initiative to induce the millions of amusement patrons created by the photoplay to become patrons of the so-called regular playhourse, or whether the effort will be made by the gentlemen who have amassed fortunes in the newer field, and who are now in an impregnable position to make such a m.ove, it seems certain that before the year is ended, as a result of the many affiliations