Motion Picture Classic (Jul-Dec 1930)

Menaces of the Movies be. And while I believe that in the past, pictures for children have not been successful, I think this was because the child intelligence was rated too low. Children have the faculty of seeing truth with slight efTort, and they are often prone to detect sophistrj' and poor drama more quickly than their eiders. " It is difficult to tell a false story without false emotions, and if the emotions are false, the story is likely to label itself as cheaply untrue. Since children are direct and natural in their responses where adults may incline to the artificial, they resent cheap pathos. Our efTort will be to provide suitable dramatic action in picture form that will ring true and that will plainly interpret the simplest basic human emotions, such as 'Rawhide' with Bill Boyd, 'The Painted Desert 'and ' North of the Moon ' on our next year's schedule. "The patronage of children is vital to the motion picture theater, not only because of the cash involved, but because the habit of imbibing good entertainment at regular intervals is likely to persist in later years, and the child begging to-day to be taken to the picture theater will tomorrow be able to gratify this desire out of his own pocket." Griffith Knows DW. GRIFFITH, . dean of all motion picture producers, has always regarded the child mind as the most valuable gauge of motion picture entertainment. Recently he talked with me of the possibility of driv'ing the children from the talking picture theaters as something serious. "Motion pictures are wholly unlike the stage or literature in almost every important phase," he said. "To begin with, the spoken drama has never made a tremendous appeal to children in the mass. Occasionally some great spectacle like the old Drury Lane pantomimes, illustrating the familiar fairy tales, might interest the young ones, but in the main the stage makes its appeal to the elders. Besides, the stage can and does classify its audiences, as does literature. Melodrama, comedy, farce, se.x, poetry or the classics can be produced at reasonable cost and attract enough patronage to return a profit over the cost. But the motion picture is {Continued from page 26) different. Its first expense is tremendous if it is to be effective, and to return that cost it must appeal not to hundreds of persons, but to hundreds of thousands! "For that broad appeal to be possible, the picture must be elerhental in its plot and unfoldment. Long ago great playwrights discovered that five or six emotions reached the generality of human beings. Then when newspapers became entertainment factors in the late Nineties, their editors made the Gary Cooper is riding high as one of Paramount's biggest assets in the crusade to bring back the children, and still hold the adults. He stays outdoors, and gives them action same discovery that Euripides, Sophocles, Aristophanes and Shakespeare had made centuries before. They learned that for a tale to have universal attraction it must deal with love, revenge, wealth, self-sacrifice, high adventure or the supernatural. From the castle to the cot, those elementals are rooted in all of us." The Test of Time THERE is a very useful tip for all picture producers. If we go back to Griffith's work twenty-two years ago— back to that old Biograph studio on Fourteenth Street in New York — it is difficult to find one of his efforts that do not bear out his argument. For example, "Judith of Bethulia,' "The Escape," "The Battle of the Sexes," "The Birth of a Nation," "Broken Blossoms," "Way Down E^st," on down to "The Drums of Love" and "Abraham Lincoln," they all deal w-ith elemental human emotions — which, after all, constitute real drama. Cecil de Mille, it is safe to say, made the same discovery early in his career. Anyone can test for himself the truth of the Griffith contention. Take the story of "Hamlet," tell it in modern English to a group of children — just the bare skeleton of the story — and see the tremendous interest it arouses. Note the avidity with which the old Bible stories are absorbed by the young folks, and we're forced to admit that it all comes down to basic emotion. If the pictures have to some extent lost the child patronage, they can get it back — and still keep their adult customers — by giving us a few more "In Old Arizonas," "Virginians" and the like. Even a "Broken Blossom" or two. However, as a final word, the falling off is not solely a production problem. It has also to do with changes in exhibition. The rise of the palatial showhouse, w-ith the accompanying decline of the little neighborhood theater, is a factor. You see, the big house must have a big admission price to pay for the gold and marble and gorgeous uniforms, where the little house can operate on a small price. Also, the big theater is in the crowded centers of population, and the little theater in a residential district. Parents could give the children fifty cents and send two or three of them around the comer to the small theater, knowing them to be both safe and close at hand — and from under foot for a few hours, but they can't send them downtown at a cost of seventyfive cents each. Also, "little pitchers have big ears." And parents are not going to let their offspring hear things beyond their years. All in all, it is a problem that is putting wrinkles in a number of lofty movie brows. 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