Motion Picture News (Oct 1913 - Jan 1914)

By r€. COMNIFIC! Thank you, Mr. Klauber, of the New York Times. I avow myself one of your constant readers. Theatrical criticism is one of the many trades I have touched at times — God help me. My favorite author, Lord Beaconsfield (Disraeli) stigmatized theatrical criticism as "the last resort of the mentally destitute." I was not mentally destitute when I took up the work; I was broke. At best it is a thankless job. In return for all the appreciatory and critical stuff that I have written in my career, I have received far more kicks than ha'pence. But that is in accordance with the fitness of things. A man who is so far driven as to be a critic (conceding his ability to think and write even Laura Jean Libbey's stuff) deserves no pity. -i^ CO having been a critic I endeavor to see what the best men in the game are doing, simply, I guess, by way of pity and sympathy. Most of us who have been to school or college revisit those places in after life just to see what it is like ; just to see the new fellows suffer as we have suffered. I read theatrical criticism simply because I like in a way to contemplate the mental gymnastics in which a critic is bound to indulge. And now and then I get an idea from these gymnastics, which I can switch for use in my mental survey of the motion picture field. * * * "\/T R. KLAUBER'S description of a recent play as somnific is a master-stroke of incisive writing. He tells anybody like myself, who is in the game, that the play was dull, that it would send one to sleep. It was somnific, somnificational, somnificatic. Hey, fellows, here is a fine series of lingual curiosities for you to struggle with. When you read such a description as this in ordinary dramatic criticism, you are driven to wonder whether, outside a terse analysis of the play, detailed criticism is worth a red cent. It suggests to you that the managing editor of the daily newspaper might be content to afford just sufficient space for telling what are the salient characteristics of the play : no more ; no less. Such as — well, such as can be readily imagined. You could apply the principles of quantitative and qualitative chemical analysis to your play. When you submit a sample of an unknown body to a chemist for analysis, he sends you a little slip in which he tells you in effect that in a hundred parts of the substance there are so many parts of this, that or the other thing making up the "demnition total" (to quote Mantalini) of a hundred parts. * * * MR. AUGUSTUS THOMAS, as was pointed out the other day, has adopted the synthetical method of making motion pictures, because he charts and plots the movements of his characters. He builds up his pictures. That is synthesis. Analysis is another thing. Analysis means that you simply take the thing to pieces and see what it is made of. And that is what Mr. Klauber did in his criticism from which I am quoting. He practically said : "In a hundred parts of this play there is somnificitis q. s." In other words, the play, though good in many respects, was so dull that it would send you to sleep. And dullness is an unforgivable sin in any play — or in anything which is designed to interest and amuse. * * * COMNIFICALITY (oh, my, how I do love to fondle over this blessed word) is the besetting sin of a very large percentage of motion pictures as now made. They are dull because they are undramatic or old in theme. They outrage the formula given time and again : A good play, well acted, well photographed. Of course every photoplay cannot be a good one any more than all stage plays can be good ones. William Lord Wright on another page is doing fine work in teaching the photoplay aspirant the rudiments of the subject. He is attending to the story part of the formula. He is inculcating the enormous value in these photoplays of action. There wasn't enough action in the play Mr. Klauber criticised, and so he somnificated ! ! ! r WENT into the Automat the other day. This institution impressed me very much. There were serried rows of little receptacles on the wall. You drop a nickel into them, and you take pie or what you want to the value of your nickel. You build up your lunch by automatic means in 5-cents worths. You get down, in the Automat, to the unit system of lunching. Well, that is what you have to-do in the matter (Continued on page 16)