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CI.B4325 9 8
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MOTION PICTURE MAGAZINE
JULY, 1919
Romance or Realism?
/F you stop to analyze the reasons for your attendance at picture theaters today you will realize it is because you are seeking romance.
Motion pictures are to grown-ups what fairy stories are to the days of childhood.
They are the magic carpet which carries us to the make-believe land of our youth. We, of the great middle classes, whose days are spent in the everyday round of doing things that have to be done, wish an hour of what might-be, at night.
Pictures have given us this.
They have given us glimpses of mountain and valley and stream after a hot day in an office, they have given us peeps into the world of silken-clad people. They have pictured for us heroes, such as we have all treasured in our hearts, and dream girls that seem the realization of our longings. ,
Pictures have supplied the romance for which even the most prosaic people are hungry. They have helped us to retain the belief that our wonderful visions for the future are possible.
But nozv, some of those gentlemen who are always dissatisfied are stirring up the stream of production.
We must have realism, they say. If the screen is to advance, we must have pictures that depict life as it is, with all its sordidness and unhappiness, its problems and vexations.
The result is an influx of realistic pictures.
During the last month we have been oppressed with the hopelessness of existence. We have seen one photoplay whose story took place mainly in filthy dives, and depressing poverty-stricken surroundings of which we had before had no knowledge. We have /teen realistic plays of police court and reformatories j
of orphanages and burglar dens. We have seen prison plays. We have watched unfaithful wives ruin their husbands without a quiver of their beaded eyelashes, and we have become smothered with the overpowering thought of how hopeless is the struggle of humanity.
Even tho our inmost thoughts tell us that all girls are not perfect, nor all men heroes, even tho we know that some people are forced to live in holes in the ground, and that hate and envy and greed do exist in the world, is the picturization of this, under the pretext of realistic art, going to help humanity?
Is not the primary definition of art, the creating of something beautiful?
Whether your art be the creating of a statue, a play, a poem, a picture, o,r just kids, is it not a greater, a more joyous art, if you know you are creating something beautiful, something that is going to give JOY to the person who comes in contact with it?
And so we would say to the producer, we would proclaim as one voice from the thousands of throats of those that attend the picture theaters as a means of finding and making strong their illusions, their dreams; give us more of romance and less of realism.
Not a sugar-coated romance, but a romance that shows us wide and beautiful avenues, and the possibilities of bigger and better and more beautiful lives.
Stop hemming us in with sordid productions, furnish us with the broad vistas of what MIGHT happen.
Play fairy tale to your tired work-a-day children — the people who need the movies.