Motion Picture News (Nov-Dec 1922)

Motion Picture News Back to Normal I ASKED a prominent and very successful producer of stage plays, the other day, how business was. “ It’s the old story, isn’t it? ” I suggested. “ The big hits have packed houses; the others are starving.” “ No,” he answered, “ The hits are not doing as well as they might.” ;{: :)c jjc “ Why is the amusement business off? ” I asked. “ Well,” he said, “ I could answer you at length, but I’d just be talking. Maybe we’re not giving the public just what it wants. That’s always one answer.” “ What is your guess — of what it wants? ” “ I’ve got a dress rehearsal on tonight,” he said. “ Come and see it. It’s my guess.” * * * The play was a corking good one. The knowing ones present pronounced it sure-fire. The story had a good many successful ingredients in it: but one note was supreme, namely faith acquired by some human souls in the love and wisdom of God. * * * To an exhibitor who books for some seventy theatres; to a New York theatre manager; and to other keen and experienced minds I have recently put the same question : “ What does the present day public want? ” And we set down here, as a sum total, what seems to be the nucleus of their thoughts. * * * First of all, people everywhere want to get back to normal. To normal living and thinking. Bonar Law sounded the note in London, the other day, when as the new Prime Minister of Great Britain he walked to the king with a pipe in his mouth. The great crash of the World War is gone, VOL. XXVI and .with it its false prophets; — its shallow prosperity, wrong ideals, over-spending, luxury, poverty; over-patriotism, over-militarism — all the jumble of hectic living and emotionalism that makes the wake of a war. ^ ^ People we repeat want to get back to normal and they want to — mighty badly. Normal ways and normal people. They want to, because they were happier in normal times. They want to feel something solid under their feet and over their heads — something of the hearthstone warmth of life and, yes, some of the happy uplift of religion, something of sanity, simplicity, sense, wholesomeness, goodness. They want to see real people in real action again. * * * In pictures we have gone to the theatric about as far as we can go. There has been a vast straining after effects till the sublime has caught the tail of the ridiculous — in rain storms that sweep away the face of the earth, in bigness too big, in richness too rich. We are not criticizing. Fine pictures have been produced. The intense effort back of them is admirable, to say the least. We know somewhat of and we have an intense respect for production — its guesswork, its courage, its cost, its tribulations. But there’s one sure thing — anyway, about the amusement business, about the public taste it strives to meet and that is that it moves in cycles. If it goes to one extreme you can be sure it will swing around the circle to another. And, all in all, it does seem to us that the public has had enough of the hectic and is ripe for the simple and substantial; less of the hard flare, however gorgeous, is wanted and more of warm reality and humaness of everyday life. Why not some dramas of the daily human chessgame with the finger evident on the board of the Supreme Deity. 'H? vfc Of course, it’s just our guess. But, anyway, here it is. William A. Johnson. No. 22 NOVEMBER 25, 1922