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

262 Cfee Cfjeatre making, so one day, just five years ago, Seay wandered into the Edison studio. He is there yet. For two years he acted before the camera. His Mike Flannigan, in Ellis Parker Butler's "Pigs Is Pigs," will never be forgotten. When Seay joined the Edison Company it had only three professional players in a very long cast. To-day the stage professionals predominate, and Seay has observed with no little resentment the spectacle of the theatrical managers and producers seeking a share of the film prosperity, for he recalls how these same interests were unwilling to engage an actor who played for the pictures, and now, after they have been nearly bankrupted in their own field, they are rushing pell-mell into filmdom as if they were the original discoverers of a new Klondike. Mr. Seay told the writer that from his own observations he believed the photoplays v/ere developing a technic superior to that of the stage, because of the insistent demand for naturalism. As a director he has been uncompromising on the elimination of theatrical effects. What he says about the superior technic is best confirmed by Charles Frohman's official announcement that next season he will compete with the photoplay by presenting spoken plays, so that they will "go over" in true "movie" style. It requires just such an experienced actor and showman as Charles M. Seay to fearlessly express the trueisms of the present situation in the amusement field. "Out of the present scramble of the 'new' discoverers of motion pictures," says Mr. Seay, "who are trying to start the same upheaval in the new field that ended their usefulness in the older one, there m_ay arise one or two v/ho may join in the effort to establish high ideals, but these men are after som,e quickly