Moving Picture News (Jan-Dec 1911)

8 THE MOVING PICTURE NEWS voted wholly and entirely to the animated picture business that we are quite fully concerned that only the highest and best customs and ethics shall prevail in the profession. It is a difficult matter to fill a paper with original composition, and quite another to edit a paper exclusively with a paste pot and a pair of shears. The first effort rec[uires mentality of a high degree of perception, perspicacity and refinement ; the second could well be done by any boy who has attained the standard of education prescribed for several grades below graduation in the ordinary grammar school. Such an imposition is far from editing a publication, it amounts simply to an ignorant semi-supervision of space filling and nothing else. We may and probably do at times make mistakes, because any two minds weighing and passing judgment upon the same statements are not unlikely to arrive finally and honestly at opposite conclusions. But the paste pot and the shears are forbidden utensils in our editorial department. A'V e do not claim infallibility, but our readers are given the square deal in original research and writing, excepting in the very few instances where some item of information is openly acknowledged to be taken from some accredited and reputable magazine. And when such an exceptional paragraph is used the originator is given proper credit. There are journals claiming respectability which fail to observe such reasonable standards ; whose aim is to claim everything, abandoning professional ethics and all phases of honor and integrity in the vain hope that by claiming much, stealing more and pilfering indiscriminately, they will in the end gain the limelight of pubic favor. For a time such methods seem to succeed, but only for a time ; when rising to a, final goal they are signals of failure, the sign-posts of disappointment meeting an untimely end at the crossroads of virtue and dishonor. Merit alone is real success ; it may be frustrated momentarily, but in the end it rises over all obstacles into the pure and upper atmosphere where it is recognized for just what it is, gaining the praises of men and the financial compensation earned and deserved. And all the foregoing is equally as true of inventors as it is of journalists, and vice versa. THE KINDERGARTEN AND CINEMATOGRAPHY. "Kindergarten" in this country has come to mean little besides a school for the tiny tots who are just setting their baby feet on the lowest step of the ladder of learning. But in the broader sense, all life is really, or ought to be, a kindergarten, for humanity is composed of children and the world a garden. To some extent every exhibitor can be of use in the kindergarten of learning, and without much effort on his part either. The moving picture operator of the future will be a man of resourcefulness, ready at all times to make new uses of old ideas, and new ideas too. If he does this rightly, he is helping on the edlicational movement and advertising his show at the same time. Take an example : In the lower grades of school work clay modeling takes some part. Now and again exhibitions of the children's work are held at the schools. If you want a bit of cheap and good boosting, Mr. Exhibitor, get up to one of these work displays, make half a dozen kodak pictures of the show and give the children a free admission Saturday afternoons. Don't stop at that. Get out your kodak i)rints for the poster easels of your front, and make lantern slides of them also, with, where possible, the names of the youngsters shown. "But," you say, "I haven't a kodak." Then you have no right to be in the business. Go right away and buy one, any price, from the $2.00 Brownie up, and if you are a novice, don't overlook the No. 2 Bull's Eye. It will be the best advertising money you ever spent. "Then," you say again, "I don't know how to make a lantern slide." You don't have to, but it's a shameful admission, especially if you get the Moving Picture News regularly. If you haven't time, get your local photo supply house to do the work for you. The point is, if you make use of your opportunities, you will create a desire for these little educational localisms, and it doesn't take many dimes to pay for a do^^en slides. There are scores of other things the little hands are doing in the schools whilst you are hanging around the box office in the morning, wasting your time in talking to deadheads who value your time as the}' do their own as a negative quantitv. Get in the kindergarten of this picture work yourself, and KEEP IN IT. It pays. You cannot value these local and topical slides too highly. If you'll put a litttle brain work on them, you will make more out of them than out' of advertising slides. And you'll very soon be surprised to find how your own mind will evolve new uses for the old idea. That is the indisputable proof that pictures are educative in that they "lead out" of a hardened old picture theater man a desire for more knowledge of everything". And don't forget that IT PAYS. ACCENTUATE THE USEFULNESS OF MOVING PICTURES BY COMBINING NOBLER EMOTIONS IN FILMS. By Margaret I. MacDonald. Love, race prejudice, and finance — three important factors in the world's upheavals, were the subjects which attracted my attention this week in one of the West Side moving picture houses. I was delighted to find the class of pictures presented in this particular theater of very good quality, in a moral sense. Race prejudice has played, and does play, a conspicious part in the unhappiness and dissatisfaction of the human race. The black man, the red man, the yellow man, etc.. versus the big "I am," the white man. Why we should have been scattered over the face of this diminutive planet, such a variegated, particolored throng we do not know. Why the Infinite should have chosen so many difl^erent colors and shades wherein to manifest Himself is a subject too great and ponderous for us to attempt to answer. The fact remains, we are all of one mind on one particular question, in connection with each individual race and color : The red man thinks all men should have been red, the black man is of the opinion that through some unfortunate condition of nature the color was bleached out of we poor "white trash," and the white man. inflated with the result of his superior opportunities, and those of his ancestors, would wipe from the face of the earth everything which has not pink and white tinted skin like himself. The flowers group together and there is no question of color. The lower animals, speckled, spotted, black, white, and so forth, have no particular objections to