Film year book : 1922-23 (1923)

In addition to these efforts for new usefulness, we should not be unmindful of such things as have been accomplished in connection with better amusement pictures. At the end of the six months period since the organization of the Association, it has been of some interest to the members themselves to review what has been attempted and to invite the attention of the public to the accounting. It was an earnest action indeed last May when the producers sent orders to the studios as to the pictures to be made this summer and to be made in the future, directing that above all things else the purposes of the Association be foremost. It means very much for the general good when these men who had the vision, the industry, the nerve, if you will, to have made this thing what it is in twenty years, now make it their chief business to establish and maintain the highest moral and artistic standards. Beginning a new drive this year for the best possible pictures, measuring up toward what the standard should be and which many pictures already had achieved, earnestly asking the public's cooperation and hoping, of course, from every possible standpoint, selfish and unselfish, to move in the right direction, they have brought out, and are bringing out, a series of pictures which we are hoping will attract the public's attention, as the evidence both of their good faith and their ability to accomplish, and as an augury for still better things to which their every effort shall be directed. The maintaining of the highest standard is quite as essential as its attainment and there can be and will be no slipping backward, nor loss of any improvement that may be accomplished. These pictures are being received in appreciation, and the public will not be unmindful either of the impossibility of pleasing every one with every picture or the necessity of different types of pictures for the various types of taste and interest. What Pictures Can Do I have come to visualize this great new thing as my attachment to it becomes deeper — I have come to know it as a great, unbelievably great, three fold instrument for good. It can do three great things and it will do these three things as no other instrument that I know of can do them. In the first place it can and will fill a necessity — the necessity for entertainment. In the second place, it can and will instruct — which is indeed a most precious power. In the third place, and I am sure that my enthusiasm does not warp my judgment, it will do more than any other existing agency to unite the peoples of the world — to bring understanding between men and women, and between nation and nation, than which no greater thing can be done. "The Romantic History of Motion Pictures" (Through the courtesy of Terry Ramsaye, the author, and the publishers of "Photoplay Magazine.' pre presented excerpts from this remarkable and unusual document.) In April, 1922, when the first article appeared, it was anticipated that it might run through six or seven issues. The December issue found the material far from exhausted, however, bringinp: the history only to the period of about 1902. It is suggested, therefore, that this material be retained in conjunction with the excerpts of the remainder of the "History" to be published by Photoplay during 1923, which will be found in the next volume of The Film Year Book. Our beginning is the year of 1888, and the place is the experimental laboratories of Thomas A. Edison. Two years before, in 1886, Edward Muybridge, one of many investigators who had attained some promising success with his experimental work in recording motion, had called upon Edison. Muybridge had made some pictures of a running horse, taken with a row of cameras, in California. He had arrived at an instrument for showing these pictures, producing in a highly limited way a sort of an illusion of motion. He called it the "Zoopraxoscope." He showed these pictures to Edison. T'-CTD-D Nothing seems to have developed out of that meet TERRY RAMSAYE jng in West Orange at the time. Muybridge went back Author of "The Romantic to his laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania and History of Motion Pictures" went on with his experiments.