Motion Picture News (Nov-Dec 1921)

November 5 , 1 9 2 1 2411 PIIIIP'IIIIIIIIIIUIIIIIIIIIIIIIUII^^ IMIIIIIIIIllllllllliillUUII'IIIIIIIIIIIIUIlin Trade Faces Future in Optimistic Mood aiiimiiiiiminiiniffliiiiiii™ REPORTS received at the News office during the week indicate that the trade in general is looking forward optimistically to the future and the rapid resumption of healthy business conditions in all sections of the country. A statement from L. M. Miller, president of the Southwestern Amusement Company of Wichita, Kan., reflects the general tenor of the prevailing opinions in many quarters. He warns that it is high time that everyone connected with the industry realizes that the past few years have been abnormal and cannot be accepted as a criterion of sound business conditions. He declares it to be his opinion that compared with the business done several years ago when times were normal the alleged "slump" of the past few months has been grossly exaggerated. While the words of Edward L. Hyman, managing director of the Brooklyn Strand, do not strike as highly an optimistic note 1 as those of Mr. Miller's still the outlook is painted as most promising, and the screen is upheld as an effective medium to combat the spirit of depression resultant from the wide-spread unemployment. "Ye have experienced no such thing as a 'summer slump.' The talk we heard during the past summer and early fall season concerning the 'summer slump' is simply irresponsible discussion by those who know nothing of what they are speaking or of the motion picture business in general." This sentiment was voiced by L. M. Miller, president of the Southwestern Amusement Company of Wichita. Mr. Miller's company owns the Palace Theatre, a First National franchise holder, the Regent Theatre, and the Princess Theatre. The viewpoint of this Kansas theatre head on the situation should bequite valuable to the theatre owner, for it probably will set some of them to thinking along new lines. "Compare your business for the last six months, with the same six months last year or the same six months two years or three years ago. What do you see? You probably don't see much of a 'summer slump' in those periods. Because those years were abnormal years. From the standpoint of the theatre man, more perhaps, than any other business man, the war years and the years immediately following the war are admitted to be not average years," said the Wichita man. "The truth is that we are just getting off our high war perch and getting down to real brass tacks of steady, everyday, goand-get-it business tactics, if we only knew it. That's the trouble. Some of us don't 1 know it. Some of us haven't that faculty of l perception which permits the cognizance of salient, important facts, tendency, and features of the times until they are gone and we look back and see what we couldn't see at the time. "The sooner the exhibitor forgets all this talk about the 'summer slump' or any seasonal slump, and gets down to business and digs in, and works like he meant it, the better for him, and for his business and for the entire industry. "This is an important time in the life of the average theatre and the average theatre owner, inasmuch as the changing conditions of the business world are prone to affect the theatre even more than ordinary institutions. He should set himself to realize conditions as they are and not as he suspects them to be or has been told that they are. Consequently, the danger in the false talk of seasonal slumping in the summer just past. "The theory of seasonal slump is wrong, since the conditions on which the arguments of the slumpers are predicted appear to be fallable. For instance the very conditions of the seasons and weathers which those who argue for the seasonal slump advance may be used with impunity to defeat them. "There is a peculiar psychology about the business which operates rather disastrously in the case of the theatre owner who believes in the doctrine of seasonal slumps. Too often such owners believe the slump is coming and then are willing to sit down and see their receipts dwindle on the theory that it's inevitable, rather than getting out and working in an effort to prove the fallacy of the belief. Such a psychology as this is dangerous to the theatre operator. Its tendency is toward the killing of all initiative and punch he might have. He ought not be content to sit by, hopeless, under the illusion that 'it can't be helped.' " "Theatre men should make the best of real conditions, rather than struggle along under wrong theories. " It is my opinion that those who talk of the summer slump are basing their arguments on the wrong theory. The war-days boom caused many persons to think along lines with war conditions as bases. The war days were simply the result of unusual conditions and business became inflated to a large degree. Now business may have fallen off from its level of those days. It simply means it is getting back to a sane and normal basis once more and it does not mean that business is rotten and going to the dogs. "We are not particularly alarmed over conditions," Says Mr. Miller, and his business dealings and actions bear out the statement. All the houses in which he is interested are going after business at a great rate and a man who would start a several-hundred-thousand dollar show house at this time with a similar house under process of construction at the same time in the same city does not appear to be a man who was suffering from chilled pedal extremities as to the general conditions in the show business." Another angle of the industrial "slump" is supplied by Edward L. Hyman, managing-director of the Strand Theatre, Brooklyn. He believes that one of the most effective weapons to combat unemployment and the resultant depression is the screen and recommends that the programs of the picture theatre play up the cheerful and humorous in life rather than the tragic and melancholy. Mr. Hyman says : "The Unemployment Conference could have achieved no more laudatory thing than to have called upon the motion picture industry to supplant woe with smiles in every programme made up for showing in a motion picture house," believes Mr. Hyman, who contends that worry of the individual caused by pessimistic business reports when allowed to become chronic only hasten depression inasmuch as the individual loses courage and hangs onto his money because of a fear he will need it badly later. "Everytime a motion picture manager makes a patron laugh this fall and winter he is striking a blow that will eventually down the bogie, depression," insists Mr. Hyman. "I am not an advocate of the Polyanna scheme of life, yet when the motion picture acts as an agency to remove either real or fancied troubles of the individual through a smile or a laugh I feel that the manager is not only making his own business better but will send the smiling patron away with less gloom and more push in his or her system. "It seems to me that in trying to picture realism producers are not called upon to linger so much upon the tragedy, irony and vexations of life," said Mr. Hyman. "It always seemed to me that there is an equal measure of happiness in life, and that the motion picture screen was the proper place to exploit that cheerful equal half, especially at a time when encouragement rather than discouragement is needed to stimulate a sick country. "An unemployed man or woman distressed because work seems only a memory with jobs a thing of the past won't find anything to further depress them in the Brooklyn Mark Strand, if I can help it," declared Mr. Hyman. "I'd a darn sight rather send that unemployed person out with a new determination to land something, for there is much more of a chance of his coming back to the Brooklyn Mark Strand for if he lands a job he will naturally have the money to give him the amusement he needs. In my opinion the public now needs an overdose of cheerful screen entertainment. Too many are staying away from the theatre now because they are becoming accustomed to being gloomy."