Moving Picture World (Jan-Jun 1910)

THE MOVING PICTURE WORLD 507 CHICAGO NOTES. HELPFUL HINTS TO EXHIBITORS. By a Picture Lover. Being a lover of moving pictures, and having been for some time past a reader of your valuable and interesting publication, I wish to give expression to some thoughts that have occurred to me during the last few months, when I have been studying the pictures on the screen. I greatly admire the Moving Picture World for its open policy and its earnest endeavor to improve the moving picture in every possible way. Its pages contain many items that well repay its readers, and many single issues are worth the subscription for a year. Your representative, "J. M. B." (Mr. Bradlet), certainly made it warm for our Chicago theaters, and they show a good deal of improvement, but he did not make it hot enough for them in some respects. Judged solely from the viewpoint of perfect presentation of the picture itself, there is not one house downtown that does present its pictures as they should be, in every way. I have been in a few of the outlying theaters, some of which run vaudeville, and have found better conditions than in any of the downtown show places. There are several factors in this poor presentation of the pictures which I shall try to set down as they occurred to me. I do not intend to touch on the subject of the music — Mr. Bradlet has thoroughly covered that — but shall confine my remarks to the appearance of the pictures on the screen. 1. Screens. — The screen seems to receive a little less attention than any other part of the equipment for the exhibition of the pictures. It is often found taking the place of a drop curtain where vaudeville is shown, and rolled up and down at least twice at every performance. This alone would not necessarily injure it, but it is often entrusted to careless stagehands, with the result that it becomes wrinkled, wavy, dirty, torn and patched, and altogether unfit to project a good moving picture upon. The way in which so many screens present a wavy surface for the picture to fall upon causes a good deal of distortion, especially apparent to those who are close to it, and often painfully evident when an object in the picture with straight lines, such as a boat or a train, moves across it. And, too, it is often coated with a paint of very coarse grain, which makes the texture of the film seem coarse also, and does much to destroy the sharpness of eveji the sharpest pictures. These are all faults which are evident the moment the picture is thrown on a screen which has them, and yet the cost of getting a good screen and keeping it in good condition is not prohibitive. 2. Lighting of the House. — All of the Chicago theaters are lighted houses, being required by city ordinance. But in almost every case the fundamental principles of picture house lighting which have been repeatedly expressed in The World as "the thing to be guarded against, are light striking directly on the screen and light shining directly into the eyes of the audience" seem to be very thoroughly ignored. Some of the theaters here are remarkably light, even to the detriment of the pictures, as the lights are allowed to shine directly on the screen. The result of this brilliant lighting is that all detail is lost in the shadows of the picture, halftones lose their value and the picture has a tendency to become merely a white silhouette. The delicate shadings of a Biograph or Pathe become flat, and the rich soft darks of a sepia-toned Vitagraph become dull, uninteresting patches of a nondescript yellowish-brown. Very few pictures have the lights and shadows so arranged in them that they can be thrown on a light screen and look at all well. The distinction between white and black on the screen is at best but a relative one, and the more light that shines on the shadows, the less effective the picture becomes. It seems to me that the theaters could be lighted with some system of indirect lighting, such as has been installed in the Crerar Library and a few other buildings here, and it might pay their managers to study these systems. 3. Operating. — The operators here are mostly good, but a few of them deserve to lose their city licenses. Some of them cannot run their films at anything like the proper rate of speed. Some time ago, in a small theater on Adams street, I saw the beautiful Pathe picture, "In Ancient Greece," actually murdered — there is no other name for it. The film was run through at 30 or 40 per cent, excess speed, and the motions of the dancers could be made out only with difficulty. Being run so fast is not only very hard on the film itself, and the machine as well, but it is very, very hard on the eyes of the people who see it, as a film run so much too fast is never steady. I believe that an unsteady, jerky picture is responsible for more eye strain than any other fault in a picture, due to the constant effort of the eye to follow motion too rapid for it, in the same way that reading on a car causes eye troubles. I believe that the steadiness of a picture has more to do with its effectiveness than anything else, for if it is not steady it can not be clear, though if the picture merely sways in its frame slowly, without any jerks, it does not seem to hurt the eyes; only the picture loses the appearance of stability it has if steady. It seems to me, too, that the size of a picture has little to do with its steadiness; unsteadiness is just as noticeable in an 8-foot picture as it is in one three times as large. I wish to say a few words about the downtown theaters here. Even the very best of them, the Orpheum, does not put on the picture to the very best advantage. First of all, it is not properly lighted for a picture house; the lights are of high candle power, simply enclosed in ground glass globes, and no attempt is made to shade the screen from their light. It is here that I think a system of indirect lighting referred to above could be used to advantage. Also, here the relation between the screen and the projector is not what it should be, and the picture on the screen shows a marked degree of distortion. The screen is nearly vertical, while the operating room is far above it, and the picture is thrown downward, the rays striking the screen at a sharp angle. It seems to me that since the Orpheum has adopted the policy of exclusive pictures, and has found it to pay, they could with advantage erect a permanent screen of rigid construction, such as an inclined wall of lath and plaster, coated with a good screen paint, at the proper angle for projecting the picture upon it without distortion. The Orpheum is so well managed, and treats its pictures with so much respect, that I hardly think its manager would hesitate to do everything he could to improve their presentation. On Madison street the pictures are generally put on badly. Only one of the houses there, the Pastime, puts on the picture in a way similar to the Orpheum as regards size of picture and steadiness; but there are some faults here. The bulbs in the house lights in the front of the house are so low that they shine directly into the eyes of anyone seated in the front of the house and cause eye discomfort. The exit lamps at the sides of the stage cast their red light on the center of the picture, destroying the quality of the dark portions there. There are also some wires strung across the house, in the path of the rays of the lens, which cast a sharp shadow across, the upper part of the picture, which generally crosses the faces of the people in the picture and injures the effect of the fine facial expression of the actors in some pictures. The Alcazar nearly ruins its pictures by allowing all the light from the house lights to shine on the screen, without any attempt to keep the screen in shadow. It seems all the worse because the remedy is so simple: If they would just hang a little piece of metal in front of each light, large enough to cast a shadow covering the screen, their pictures would be improved 50 per cent. They have very fine pictures here, and they are well lighted — if they were not well lighted they would not show at all on the light screen. The operating room of the Casino is not in the proper relation to the screen for good projection — not all the picture is in clear, sharp focus, the picture is too large for the throw and the screen is in wretched condition. The Boston runs its pictures so very unsteadily that they are extremely trying to the eyes. Last Saturday I saw the Gaumont picture, "Rabelais' Joke," here on its first run, and it jumped about the screen. Now I know from experience that this could not be blamed on the film. They have good pictures here, too; they do not always have first run, but have films that have shown themselves to be worth seeing the second time, though they ruin their effect by their unsteady projection. There is no excuse whatever for an unsteady picture; the films and machines now are mechanically perfect enough to show a whole reel of film without more than momentary periods of unsteadiness. But some managers will pay a figure like $100 per week for film service, and then run the films through an old machine that ought to be on the scrap pile, with an operator (?) who seems to have first learned to turn a crank in the sausage making department of a country butcher shop and applied the knowledge gained there to the crank of a moving picture machine — some of them certainly do butcher the films. And this poor work is made all the more noticeable by contrast to the really good houses which respect their pictures and give the films a chance to show what is in them. C. Y.