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Menaces
The crowds that talkies attract: adult, well-dressed, educated. Night crowds. In the daytime it is rare to see groups of children similarly waiting outside talkie theaters
SUPPOSE you had been making a neat profit out of your business and then, quite suddenly, it began to decline. In order to correct this, you made a vital improvement in your product that restored your profit very satisfactorily, and the rose tints again graced the financial skies. And then suppose that your improvement was alienating four or five per cent, of your customers, which reduced your profit again very materially. What would you do?
That is the situation of the motion picture producers and exhibitors who have discovered that talking pictures are keeping the children out of their theaters. The cry used to be "The movies are a children's entertainment, appealing chiefly to eight-year-old minds." Now the exhibitors are actually begging the producers to make some pictures that will attract the children and stop the appalling losses among the kid fans — losses that threaten the industry with one of the most serious crises it has yet had to meet. Special children's matinees, kid comics, animal shorts, one and two-reel fairy stories, cartoons and novelties designed to appeal to children are part of the program
Mary Astor, Monroe Owsley, Ann Harding and Robert Ames in "Holiday" the kind of picture children do not like
The Vanishing
Mean
By CAMPBELL
of every movie house and studio these days. And even these threaten to be unavailing to bring back the enormous child-audience which the talkies have lost the industry.
Few of us are previsionary, so we adopt certain developments of our civilization without much thought or knowledge of how these are eventually to affect us in other directions.
The Audience Changes
THERE came the talking pictures, for example, when audiences stormed the theaters that were first to show them — and when I say audiences, I mean women, men, adolescents and children alike. They wanted to hear the shadows talk. And they continued to storm the theaters all through two satisfying years. But in January of this year of grace the exhibitors began to observe a change. Not that there was any particular diminution of interest, but they noticed that the composition of the audiences was different. There were fewer children!
And that was important, because to a considerable degree children draw adults in their train.
Inquiry developed and then it became apparent that youngsters under the age of twelve years did not care greatly for dialogue pictures — that is, the average example of the audible cinema. The reason was not far to seek. The primitive or immature mind is by instinct respondent to ideas in action, while the more mature mind can easily respond to ideas in words. (Don't be alarmed, for we're not going too deeply into applied psychology.)
And about the same time this fact was beginning to percolate through the producers' minds, it also became apparent that sound pictures were not the best possible medium for plots of violent action. Douglas Fairbanks came right out and admitted that he doubted whether his type of fast-action picture could be made at all with dialogue, and on that account he was considermg quirting the game, so far as his own feature pictures were concerned.
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