Motion Picture News (Jan-Feb 1922)

Motion Picture News Dogs and Dummies AN exhibitor gave us a big thought last week. It seemed big at the time; and it grows bigger. He knows what he is talking about, because he has been watching picture audiences closely for at least fifteen years and studies the present day public in his dozen or more city and country theatres. * * * “ The trouble today with pictures and the public ” — said he — “ I mean the broad public and I mean pictures broadly — is that they are, mostly, not sincere .” * * * We are considerably impatient over picture criticism. There’s too much of it, especially from those who know neither pictures nor the public. The public fools the best creative minds right along, and pictures by and large are pretty good right along; and anyone who really knows is bound to have a vast respect for the effort and resources required in the production of pictures. When anyone begins: “The trouble with pictures today — ” we feel like getting hastily out of the way. But — and we speak only from a commercial standpoint— it is known today that the public is “ bilious ” on pictures. And when a keen showman says why, and says it so earnestly, it's worth mighty careful consideration. * * * What were the outstanding features of the picture shows on Broadway last week? At the Capitol there was an unusual picture — “ The Silent Call.” A dog was the hero. He held the audience spell-bound. The story, the presence on the screen of two-legged actors got only a lukewarm and incidental interest. The dog was supreme! At the Strand there was another unusual picture — u Schooldays.” And its most appealing scene was that of a boy and a dog. So the audience thought. At the Rivoli — where, by the way, there was an extraordinary feature — “ One Glorious Day ” — the audience stirred with greatest interest when a foxterrier bounded into a beautiful Post Nature Picture. Among the first of the new Bruce Wilderness Tales — not yet released, but viewed by the writer the same week — there’s a story of an old man and a mongrel pup. It grips you. * * * What is the human interest here — and why? It isn’t that we love dogs and children. It is because they act without self-consciousness, because they make us feel, because they express themselves to us with genuineness — Because, to sum it all up, they give sincere portrayals of life. ;}c >fc I he exhibitor went on: “ the screen today is too true a reflection of the industry itself , of its impulses and ideals. And we, most of us, are not sincere. The public is feeling it.” What he means is this: If any producer entered this field because of the dollars he might make — and therefore only incidentally of the pictures he might make — then that impulse and that ideal will show in his pictures. The public will see it if he doesn’t. No man, in all the history of human activity, ever made a good product of any kind except he had in mind the goodness of the product; and the dollars came incidentally and because the public found out the product was good and bought it. That’s true as daylight; just as true as that no man ever held a job well if he had his mind only on his salary. * * * In this industry we’ve got the cart before the horse. The dollar sign comes first — and the impulse, the ideal, the ability, conle next, if at all. That’s true of jobs as well as pictures. We are not sincere. * * * And so on, along the line. jjc jjc If a young clerk suddenly becomes a popular leading man only because God gave him the required facial lineaments and physique; and if he believes that all that is required of him is the devoted care of his spats and mustache — why, of course the mirror of the screen will tell the public the truth about this person. And so of the pretty young thing — who doesn’t know that years of grinding study and supreme self-sacrifice are needed to destroy the self-consciousness and bring out the soul of the woman who can make people feel. The public will stop — it has stopped — paying its money to look at motion photogravures of handsome males and pretty girls. * * * We are not asking that pictures express sincerity for art’s sake. Our reasons are wholly commercial. It’s a question of making pictures that will sell to the public. The public is on a strike today — for sincerity in pictures. Wm. A. Johnston. VOL. XXV FEBRUARY 18, 1922 No. 9