Motography (Apr-Jun 1916)

1028 MOTOGRAPHY Vol. XV, No. 19. the program distributor, who supplies the "filler" and nothing more. The two distributors are in competition on that exhibitor's screen; they are dividing a service that should go to one or the other. It would go to one if that one could supply all the elements necessary to make the show. The feature distributor with a constant and consistent supply of single reel fillers has the best appeal for the exhibitor's business today. We do not know that this should be so, but evidently it is so. And yet, even conceding the feature's hold, the program manufacturer, not the feature maker, is the indispensable factor in the game. The program maker can furnish a complete show; the feature man cannot. The exhibitor can go to the program man and get all he needs in his business. But if he goes first to the feature house, he must go to the program man anyway for a single reel or two. So the program house is sure of business, such as it is ; but it runs the risk of being less than a half loaf share. The feature house never gets all the business, but it frequently gets the biggest end of it. Therefore, the ideal distributing house will not specialize on either features or fillers, but will specialize and concentrate on facilities for supplying everything that may be needed for a complete show. The manufacturers who supply the component parts of a program, operating through a single distributor, can specialize to their hearts' content. So long as the aggregate of their efforts gives all the variety there is, each may concentrate on his own particular and peculiar talent. But the distributor who would monopolize the hearts of the exhibitors must aim to leave no room for a possible division of his trade. If some competing distributor takes away a customer now and then by fair competitive methods, all right ; that is business. But it should be all or none. When an exhibitor is forced to go to one distributor for one part of his show and to another distributor for the rest of it, there is too much lost motion and efficiency is low. This is in no sense a criticism of any existing conditions. It is merely an outline of what appears to us, and to many exhibitors, the ideal provision for film service. Every distributor, we believe, should be prepared to supply the whole show for every exhibitor. The Mortality of the Films THE life of the best of photodramas being two years, on the word of Mr. Frohman, Charles E. Whittaker in Harper's Weekly says it is not art; it has no persistence. Of course his logic is inadequate. Art is art, though the painter destroy his canvas as soon as the paint is dry. We may concede the evanescence of the film. Mr. Frohman was undoubtedly right, with a few exceptions. (The Fly Pest, for instance — it's five years old if it's a day, and we had an inquiry for it last week; but it is not a drama, and scarcely art.) The Birth of a Nation is getting old, by photoplay standards, and no doubt still has far to go before it dies. Maybe it will be immortal; our art has not lived long enough to demonstrate anything but mortality so far. But Mr. Whittaker and those who agree with him, and possibly Mr. Frohman for that matter, should not forget that the vast majority of new literature dies in infancy also. Of our best sellers among novels the publishers in two years get out a fifty-cent edition and go after the country and hall room trade because the first run business is exhausted. Only one literary "release" in a hundred thousand becomes immortal. All the rest die in their infancy. The motion picture producers have not yet given to the world fifty thousand photodramas, yet already there are glimmerings of immortality among them. Of the short stories in literature not one in ten million can claim the right to live even the two years life of the average film story. Yet the film story is, as a rule, a parallel to the magazine short story. And it already outlives its most "artistic" prototype several hundred per cent. The death rate among films is actually lower than it is among the supposedly more esthetic branches of art.