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The Unspeakable Photo-Play 173 The effrontery of the picture-maker s been equalled only by the toler- ce of the picture-hound. Nothing :apes his vandalism. We have seen akespeare, Goethe, Ibsen and other eat dramatists ruthlessly subjected the perverted horrors of the screen, terary classics as well as contem- rary novels of merit are seized by e greasy hands of ignorance and sled out in mutilated form, retaining tie or no resemblance to the orig- ds; their significance destroyed, iir intellectual qualities lost, a mass physical "action" substituted to able the camera to record something telligible. The result is revolting to rsons familiar with the original >rk and misleading to others. The :ture man knows neither respect nor verence; he prides himself on his secrations. There is no impossible ;k that he will not tackle blithely, nfident that his is a universal and impotent medium, and that there is thing so ideal, so abstruse, or so iritual that it cannot be translated to the cheap and vulgar symbols of e animated pictures. It is remark- le that Plato, Kant and Emerson ve thus far escaped his cock-sure at- ntions. We may expect "Back to ethuselah" to appear soon on the reen, with Shaw's ironic commen- ry and drastic philosophy replaced trick photography, whereby the arvel can be shown of a man going rough the process of living three indred years within the actual space an hour and-a-half. The taste of the average motion picture patrons may be childish, but it represents maturity when compared with the standards of the manufac- turers, directors and "actors." Men of defective mental vision, as a rule, they excel chiefly in juggling the "hokum" of their trade. The author who writes a consistent, logical story for picturization finds his product practically unrecognizable by the time it has passed through the hands of the scenario writer, the continuity man, the director and the "actors." Unless he is a hardened character, when he sees it projected he has a strong desire to hide his face forever from his fam- ily and friends. And yet the photo- play conspirators are not wholly to blame; they have converted the ma- terial into the only form, perhaps, that the screen permits. They are moti- vated by purely mercenary considera- tions; easy money is the impelling force of the photo-play industry; nothing else matters. An uninter- rupted stream must flow forth to meet the demand of the exhibitors. Con- ventional models and methods are fol- lowed, varied now and then by a bit of mechanical ingenuity, or an oc- casional gleam of a sense of beauty revealed by the camera-man. Prominent picture "actors" who have had experience in what the movie people condescendingly designate as the spoken drama (just as though there were any other sort of drama!) tell us that their work is uninteresting; that screen characterization offers no