The educational screen (c1922-c1956])

From Hollywood This department is conducted personally by a member of the English faculty of the Indianapolis Public Schools. It will be written from a distinctly opti- mistic standpoint, treating various topics from month to month, and especially certain aspects of commercial motion-picture activities which seem significant of real progress. Adverse criticism of the movies can be found everywhere but it is surely worth while to point out also the signs which promise better things. The possibilities of the future—rather than the serious shortcomings of the present and the past—will be the primary concern of the editor of this department.—The Editor. WHETHER you view the "movies" from the heights of a superior high- browism or sit among the ardent host of habitual followers of the "silent drama," you will have to admit that whenever you find a flaw in the pictures, you criticize, and that right vigorously. We all do if. Not long ago I saw a film play whose locale was a small Indiana town. Being a Hoosier, I was prepared to be shown familiar scenery; but it was a totally unknown Indiana that presented itself to my astonished eyes—a land rimmed and shadowed with moun- tains ! "Ha! Mountains in Indiana!" I muttered scathingly, and viewed the rest of the film in a slightly contemptuous silence. Some- body made a mistake: as a result, every Hoosier, every Middle-Westerner who sees that picture will either laugh at it, or de- plore the inaccuracy of the movies. Yet a tremendous amount of time and thought and energy is spent by producers to avoid just such mistakes as that. A visit to the research department at the Lasky Studio in Hollywood does much to make one realize something of the great care which goes into the working out of the de- tails of motion picture productions. The room which housed the research de- partment was filled with book shelves—and the shelves were filled with books. Big filing cases, bursting with data of every imaginable kind, were backed up against the walls. There was a litter of magazines, American and foreign, on the two desks in the room. Clippings fluttered. The place had the appearance of use and of useful- ness. They told me—the two young women in charge—that practically every moment in the day, every day, the files or the book- shelves were used by everyone from direc- tors down to extras. The department subscribes to fifty maga- zines on architecture, decoration, fiction, out-door life, motion pictures, travel, the theater, etc. Every article and every pic- ture that could possibly have a bearing on any phase of motion pictures is'clipped and filed; and at the same time care must be taken to avoid the accumulation of useless reading matter. The subjects in the files range over an unbelievably wide field from Art to Zoology; the books in- clude encyclopaedia of all editions, his- torical treatises on fashions, works on architecture, travel, customs, transporta- tion, laws, superstitions, creeds and rites, and pictorial histories of wars and battles of every nation on the globe. They showed me a few of the many amazing things those files contained. I saw, for example, a communication in the former Kaiser's handwriting, with his own seal and his signature, written on his personal stationery. It had been necessary in a picture to show a closeup of that particular item; no substitute 25