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THE COMEDY THEATRE
I2I
ally the failures of “still” photographic studios, understood lighting only dimly. Irritating glimmers and jerky action still blurred the images on the screen. No one as yet understood moving-picture make-up; faces appeared sudden black or ghastly white. The actors were the small people of the legitimate stage. Established actors, even when they needed the money, fought shy of the cinema. To appear in a “film show” was to confess cheapness; it prejudiced one’s chances for a real job. No one had learned as yet that the screen is a more realistic medium than the stage; that even the best stage acting seems affected before the camera. The Great Train Robbery had told its story without titles; it remains in that respect an archaic technical marvel. The lesser directors had invented the title to supplement their sluggish imaginations and to compensate for the very brief time allowed them on the screen. To-day these also seem strange and awkward. “John Tells Mary His Love,” read the legend, or, “Two Years Later, Bill the Bandit Rode into Tucson”; and immediately you saw John or Bill doing it. Though Porter and the forgotten director of the May Irwin Kiss had introduced the close-up, producers used the device but seldom; and never, as nowadays, by way of registering the emotion of a character. For it tended to expose the uncertainties and defects of their photography and lighting. Said Zukor in summing it all up years later: “They put some brains into their mechanical devices and into