Moving Picture World (Jan-Mar 1913)

THE MOVING PICTURE WORLD "What the Public Want" 341 By W. Stephen Bush " C T TE are giving the people what they want." Such \\/ is the most common and persistent plea urged in defense of inferior, morbid and ultra-sensational films. "The public," we are told by certain manufacturers, "want their amusement 'red-hot' and 'raw.' We know what the public want, and we give them what they want," is their confident assertion. I do not believe that this plea is always sincere or made in good faith. In many cases "the wish is father to the thought," and cheap reels are turned out, not because the producers think them popular, but just because they are cheap. The cry, "We are giving the people what they want," catches many unthinking exhibitors and imposes on not a small portion of even the public. The loudest shouters often defeat for the time being the best reasoners and temporary triumphs of lungs over brains are not rare. Of all the pleas for the cheaply sensational or sensationally cheap film, none is more specious and worthless than this same motto: "The people want the blood-andthunder product, and children cry for it." The man who can look at any subject wholly free from bias and guided solely by the light of reason, is rare. If his own personal interest is concerned, no one will expect him to be impartial and unprejudiced. We might on this ground alone reject the claim of the producers of ultra-sensational stuff that they serve a popular demand. We might also say that every creature delights in its own likeness, and very few are able to look beyond their own tastes and desires. The producer who is himself fond of cheap and coarse comedy or who personally dotes on cowboy reels is as a rule quite incapable of understanding how other people differ from him and hold in sincere abhorrence the very things which he prizes. No man, however, is fit to be either a critic or a producer who cannot take a broad view and detach himself from his own preferences. Every audience consists of men and women of widely dift'ering tastes. It is clear that all of these tastes cannot be gratified all the time, and it is even clearer that some of these tastes cannot be gratified at all. Assuming for the sake of argument that there is a considerable portion of the public who want to see the lurid and the hideous and the stupid rather than any other kind of films, it does not follow by any means that the producer of motion pictures is called upon to supply such demands. There is probably no spectacle in all the world which would draw a bigger crowd than a public execution. Within the memory of men still living, the public execution in city or country was a magnet always sure of capacity, and there never was enough capacity. By whom then have public executions been abolished? Surely not by the mobs that attended them. They were done away with by the good sense and the humanity of the few in the teeth of popular indignation, which declared that "the people wanted the public execution." We have no longer any public pillories and public whipping posts, except here and there on the outskirts of civilization. It is not likely that we shall go back, though at the time of abolishing these horrors there were many good people, some editors among them, who deplored this curtailment of the "people's rights," i. e., the rights to witness such barbarous scenes. In ancient days the people wanted to see blood flow in the arena. The mobs fed on the sight of human beings fighting wild beasts in struggles for life or death. In our own day there are many who love to see two naked men pummel each other and who are willing to pay well if the affair is only bloody and savage enough. The morbid tastes still exist today, lively in some and dormant in all of us. These vicious tastes are still gratified quite largely by the yellow press, but why should the motion picture descend to this level? Why should the noble invention of kinematography be used for pandering to low and degrading instincts? The motion picture is destined to march with progress and civilization, to be an aid in the advancement of the race rather than a hindrance. Here enters the dear old showmah to tell us that he is not here to educate the people, but just to amuse them, and that he will give them anything they want. He reluctantly realizes and recognizes the legal prohibitions, but for the ethical side of it he cares just nothing at all, and is quite willing to sink to the lowest level if the public is sinking in the same direction. Looking at it even from his point of view, we believe that his conclusions are wrong. He will in the end be a loser financially and in every other way. The same decent public sentiment which has thrown the veil of secrecy about the horrible things in our modern civilization and forever removed them from the public gaze will ultimately prevail in the show business, especially in the field of motion pictures. This sentiment is constantly finding expression not only on the statute books and in the press and pulpit but in the minds of the public itself. In the olden days civilization was nothing but a succession of triumphs of the minority. In our broadened American democracy this order has happily been reversed, and resistance to morbid and disgusting displays of any kind nowadays come from the majority. A most significant example in point is the recent federal law forbidding the transportation of prize fight films from one state into another. While we believe that Congress exceeded its authority in passing such a law, which may possibly lead to an indirect and oppressive censorship, we cannot overlook the fact that there is a strong public sentiment behind the act, and that it was in deference to this sentiment that the law was put on the statute book?. Judged by all known and recorded manifesations, modern tastes and modern sentiments are in favor of clean pictures above all things. The majority will follow no false leads. The present healthy tone of the American stage is but a response to a well-crystallized public sentiment. The art, music and literature of today are in the main serving good ends. ' The audience in the electric theater is no exception to the general rule. They must often take what is given to them, but wherever they have a choice betwen the cheap and flashy place and the better class of theater, they know how to discriminate. They resent a flood of cheap, unwholesome and monotonous pictures. They are hungry for the picture which has a message to humanity. They want to take a pleasant or cheering idea with them when they leave their seats. They like to discuss the picture in the home. The little discussion in the bosom of the family after the return from the moving picture might with profit be taken down in shorthand and read to those producers who imagine that they can guess and serve the public taste by furnishing time-worn melodrama or the exaggerated portrayal of the dark sides of life.