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

122 CJje Cbeatte Maurice Costello's film career was not unlike John Bunny's, and he, like his mirth-making colleague, has been a member of the Vitagraph Stock Company since his debut on the screen. I recall the handsome Costello as a popular leading juvenile, with various stock companies, and have always maintained that the nowcelebrated photoplayer was due to reach New York's theatre zone. Such as he invariably, too, have quickly scored when metropolitan opportunity was theirs. As it happened, Costello made his impress instanter in filmdom, because he invested each portrayal with a sort of realism that has always impressed me as wholly untheatrical ; in fact, it is this simulation of "the actuality" that illustrates the very essence of the motion picture art. Few there are who possess this quality, and strangely enough, it is to be found less frequently among experienced actors such as Costello than in the "studio product," such as Carlyle Blackwell and J. Warren Kerrigan, two young men who played together a few years ago in "Brown of Harvard." Neither accomplished anything of note on the stage, but both are veritable stars of the screen, and like Costello, they are handsome, manly, and have mastered the technic of the theatre of science. Each has written many successful photoplays and all have incomes now five times greater than the best they ever had in the older field. In the Vitagraph Company are a few players who have achieved a far greater fame in the few years they have been identified with it than in all their prolonged stage careers. Van Dyke Brooke's influence in the Brooklyn studio is probably as great as Kent's, and that is the best tribute I can pay to an actor of the old school, who after a quarter of a century's combat