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COASTLANDER READING 115
ads for the vendors who serviced them, such as drama teachers and plastic surgeons—that made Lane's publication possible. Yet within this familiar framework, Lane pushed Film Mercury in a distinctive, innovative direction. The result may be Hollywood's first and last avant-garde trade paper.
One year before creating Film Mercury, Lane had published a scathing book of film criticism. Titled Whats Wrong with the Movies?, Lane's book provided several answers to this central question, with each chapter offering an indictment of a different sector within the industry. But Lane was able to convey his core thesis in a mere seven words: “The photoplay is an art without artists’? The potential of a remarkable art form, in Tamar Lane's estimation, was being utterly squandered. In Film Mercury, Lane offered weekly updates on this same general theme. He was aided in this mission by his sister, Anabel Lane, who contributed film reviews to Film Mercury and pulled no punches when it came to calling out Hollywood's shortcomings.
The Lanes did not arrive on these views within a vacuum. Their taste sensibility combined two critical frameworks of their day: a Mencken-esque cynicism and modernist theories of film art. Because the combination of these critical frameworks tells us something about 1920s Hollywood culture, each of these traditions merits briefly unpacking. In The Decline of Sentiment: American Film in the 1920s, Lea Jacobs details how H. L. Mencken and a coterie of other critics in the late 1910s and 1920s established new values for taste culture and the evaluation of literature, film, and art. Mencken's magazine, American Mercury, panned sentimental novels and films, dismissing them with the pejorative label “hokum.’ As these taste assumptions spread among film critics at other publications, they resulted in the critics imagining American audiences as bifurcated between sophisticated urban viewers and small-town moviegoers who clung to old-fashioned conventions. Jacobs notes the strong degree to which Variety's film reviewers in New York City adopted this disdain for hokum.*' Tamar Lane, however, embraced the sensibility just as vociferously from his office on Hollywood and Vine:
The general public has a right to demand hokum entertainment if that is the sort of silent drama it prefers—and judging from the films that are flooding the theatres of the country the public is getting its belly full. To say, however, that every film must be made in accordance with the mentalities of the morons and nit-wits that make up most of our theatre audiences is nonsense. . . . It is quite possible for an institution to be both popular entertainment and art. That is the point being overlooked.”
As this passage makes clear, Tamar Lane shared Mencken's contempt for most of the American public, who bore considerable responsibility for “what's wrong with the movies.” And Lane's decision to title his magazine Film Mercury may have been a nod to Mencken. But what separated the two writers, at least in the way Lane saw it, were their theories about the potential of film as an art form. Mencken primarily concerned himself with writing and language. From Film Mercury's