The Motion Picture Director (Sep 1925 - Feb 1926)

6 September I X MOTION WfTMU director in our furnaces and fireplaces, if he so much as dared to tinge them with that side of him that is Mr. Hyde. One of this author’s books that you have read and enjoyed was picturized not so long ago and was enormously successful as a picture. At another theatre in our city for a small admission fee, we could witness on the screen perhaps the most disgusting exhibition of subtle indecency we have ever seen — both written, mind you, by the same man! The story of how one producer purchased a certain well-known novel is interesting. Passing through two Pullman cars on his way to the diner on the train on which he was traveling, he chanced to observe that seven people held copies of this novel. Upon arriving at his destination, he was amazed to find two gentlemen seated in the lobby of the hotel, their noses buried in the pages of the same book. He approached the book-stand to purchase a copy, but the clerk added further to his amazement by saying that she had just sold the last one and that she had disposed of more than a hundred in two days, but that she was expecting more tomorrow. Mr. Producer immediately entered a telephone booth and advised his office in New York to place a large option on the motion picture rights of said masterpiece. All of this, if you please, without having read the book! It so happened that in this instance the picture he finally succeeded in presenting to his public contained few of the elements above mentioned that could have aroused unfavorable criticism. But suppose it had been otherwise! The funny part of all this is that we in the picture business go right straight ahead buying up the rights to these unnecessary riots of indecency and translate them to the screen with a fair degree of accuracy and then squawk our foolish heads off about censorship. This monumental paradox is only one of the few things that is “what is the matter with the • Off movies f Another angle of this unfortunate condition is this: Foreign countries, whose trade we covet and have hitherto successfully established, have through their representatives rejected many of our recent films of the type we are considering, in quite the same manner as they have rejected some of those luscious examples of scarlet debauchery that have more recently adorned the Broadway stage. It certainly is a laugh when you stop to consider that any European country will turn down an Americanmade product because of its indecency! We, who are supposed to sit on the top of the world as far as morals, education, and the integrity of the great American family are concerned, are confronted with the caricature of a European thumbing his nose at us because of our alleged laxity of morals! And that is precisely what we get for teaching untruths about ourselves. It serves us right! Can you imagine a French Board of Censors insisting that certain cuts be made in an American film, written by an Ameri can author, directed by an American director, and acted by American artists, because of its indecency? That is exactly what has occurred! Thus, in apparently raising the standard of American imagination in pandering to an extraordinarily fickle public, we cause our foreign market to rise in arms and stand aghast at our present assaults on good taste, good manners, and consistently honest thought, for which we are supposed to be representative examples. We like to argue that the future security of motion pictures rests upon the hold we can impress upon the heart of the great American family. If this is true— and our newspapers, our women’s clubs, and our pulpits are beginning to insist that it is — why do we, who are purveyors to the screen, still insist upon injecting these forms of indecency, be they obvious or subtle, into the very homes whose families we are seeking to lure into our theatres that we may thrive? We have never seen a father yet who chuckled over the fact that his young daughters read shady literature or indulged in illicit enterprises, and it is absurd to declare now that one can with the gilt of subtlety disguise the unsightly appearance of a dump. The scourge of this newly coined phrase “sex appeal,” is certainly going to metamorphose itself into a most deadly form of boomerang, if we don’t mend our ways. All the beautiful love stories of our present society don’t necessarily have to include untrue and wildly imaginative pictures of modern brothels to supply the necessary conflict for the drama any more than all the beautiful love stories of the past have had to depend upon junk-heap settings for their beauty. Don’t forget that the public has not yet gotten over the fallacy of “seeing is believing.” The “New” Director INTO the life of every enterprise there comes a time when expansion becomes inevitable, when it seems that the activity of the past should be broadened in scope and limiting barriers leveled to permit a wider range of usefulness and service. So it has been with The DIRECTOR. After a successful year of activity as the official publication of the Motion Picture Directors’ Association, during which we have received the loyal and whole-hearted support of the industry of which we are a part, the time has come when expansion seems to be the logical move. Having firmly established ourselves in the field of local activity, we are now entering upon that broader field of national service in the furtherance of the premise upon which The DIRECTOR was originally founded: the creation of a closer understanding between those who make and those who see motion pictures. With this issue, The DIRECTOR emerges as a semitechnical, semi-national publication of direct inter