Motion Picture Classic (Jul-Dec 1930)

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Menace or Messiah? {Continued from page 97) necessary', the precious benzine is spilled by awkward hands on the ground— never mind! It is a baptism. Only a beginning, but in the next five years there will be twenty-five such farms, and then others — and others. Red Russia is turning green at last. "Vou shall sec these pictures, and so understand what is the truth about the greatest experiment ever tried by any people. Not one of your writers yet has seen Russia as she really is since the Revolution. Those who visit my countr\ go first to the cities, to Moscow — always overcrowded, now ten times more so. They do not understand that the cities mean nothing: that crowding and hunger and the rest of the miseries they note down mean nothing: that it is in the great countr\ sides that the Communist exp)erimcnt is being worked out and is succeeding. We in Moscow d> not mind standing in line for our bread, and even going without enough bread, because we know what is hapjiening all o\-er the land. We know that they are learning to raise bread enough for all. The Russian people — I say it honestb— are happier than they ha\ e ever been before. America Has Not Suffered "TT is not an individual thing that is hapX pening in Russia to-da)-. It is a mass drama. That is why I make pictures of the masses. Here in America, I do not know. Vou Americans are not accustomed to thinking in terms of people, of humanity — but of individuals, yourselves, your neighbors, your latest newspaper hero. Your pictures do not interpret America as a whole. Except, perhaps, those of King \'idor. You have other great directors: Milestone — but he is a Russian; von Stroheim and von Sternberg — but they are Germans. "I should like to hope that I might show you in a motion picture, to yourselves, a great chaotic country, thinking along a thousand lines, instead of gjroping toward one common idea, seeking many things instead of one ideal. I have seen your unbelievable cities. I have watched pigs cut up into tiny bits in your slaughter houses, and tiny bits of iron flung together into automobiles in your factories. I have spoken to your students at the universities. And so far I do not find a mass movement in America. Perhaps you have not suffered enough yet. "Talkies? To me, dialogue is a childish use of the great power of the microphone. Motion pictures still must move. They have no call to be poor imitations of the theater, which in itself was always a po<ir imitation of Life. But Sound — that is different. That is marvelous. "When wc can add to our motion pictures the sounds of life — the sounds that are not national, but understandable to all the peoples of the world — then we shall begin to make good motion pictures at last. The sounds of rain on the ground, of breathing crowds, of cries of joy and grief, and that most dramatic sound of all — the sound of the machines that are modern gods rfiiiu to free humanity. It is these that the talkies mean to me. We have here in the movie studios not a completed thing, but a crude beginning whose end we hardly dare to prophesy." So You Take the $1,500- And trot around the globe . . . Or buy that Straighter Eight . . . Or save the old homestead . . . Or start the new one . . . Or — but you have your own ideas. You know what you could do with it. And don't get cynical. You won't have to work for it — That is, if you have More brain than brawn, More wit than wishbone. It's a game, a diversion. Amusement, entertainment. You play. We pay. A new picture game — A game of pictures. You send in titles — We send out checks. The first will be for $1,500. The second, $1,000 Third. $500 -Fourth. $250— Fifth, $125— Sixth. $100— Seventh, $75. Eighth to twelfth. $50 Thirteenth to twentieth, $25 — Then. 50 for $10 eachFifty for $5 each — And 250 for $1 each. $5,000 in all. If Time is Money, Don't lose any. Turn in a hurry To Pages 40 and 41 Of the October MOTION PICTURE 103