The Moving picture world (April 1921)

April 2, 1921 MOVING PICTURE WORLD 475 Consolidated System of Production Is Passing Away, Says J. D. Williams THE day of huge groups of consolidated producing units is rapidly passing away on the West Coast. Production is becoming decentralized. Individual producing effort is taking its place. Stars and directors alike, instead of renewing affiliations with great producing organizations, are breaking away and setting up their own independent units. The result is a great increase of healthy competition, which is already beginning to make itself felt in the improved quality of the pictures thus made, and which is bound to result in better pictures than these same stars and directors ever made under the old consolidated system. These are the developments in production that J. D. Williams, manager of Associated First National Pictures, Inc., found most significant in his recent visit to Los Angeles. Mr. Williams returned to New York on Sunday, March 20, after an absence of three weeks in the West, thoroughly delighted with the results of his trip. Independents Multiply "There is a marked change in production methods at the West Coast studios," said Mr. Williams, "and one which is most assuredly going to result in better pictures and bigger pictures — pictures that will be better and bigger from an artistic as well as from a box office standpoint. The change I mean is the breaking up of the huge consolidations of stars and directors and the formation by these stars and directors of their own independent producing organizations. These have multiplied on every hand until there are twenty producing units, each one competing with every other, where there were two or three top-heavy groups before. "It is a change that was bound to come, and every one interested in the progress and development of the motion picture should welcome it. Its effect upon the quality of pictures will be not only decisive, but it will be almost instantaneous. When twenty stars or directors are working, each independent of the other, to produce the best possible product for the same market the competition is not only many times keener than before, but many times healthier. The incentive to strain every resource to turn out the finest pictures that can be made amounts to a positive necessity. And the result must be pictures that the exhibitor will welcome and the public enjoy to a degree that has hitherto been unknown. "The independent producing system is the only one that will give the exhibitor the • •really 'super-productions' that are now more necessary than ever to the continued popularity and prosperity of the picture theatre. The old system has proven, in operation, its own condemnation. It has written its own death sentence. Attractive in theory and capable of plausible proof on paper, in practice it only results in the strangling of individual effort, the throttling of individual ideas. It tends to make stereotyped productions, and every showman knows that productions turned out by a formula or a given prescription are doomed as soon as the public has had a taste of two or three of them. "The motion picture production must always be the creation of individual personality. It cannot be standardized or reduced to a rule-of-thumb. Only when the creator of a picture has absolute freedom to put into his work everything of which he is capable, without being hampered or hindered by anything that resembled a rigid 'factory' system, does_ he ever produce a great picture. Of Individual Appeal "Shoes, automobiles, clothing, soap, can be manufactured on an infinite scale according to an invariable formula. They are most successful when they are so made. But motion pictures are not manufactured; they are created. Each one is a separate work in itself. Its greatest charm and appeal is that it is individual, inimitable, that it is not the duplicate or replica of some other picture. "And it is the clear realization of this fundamental fact that has led the most successful stars and directors of the American screen, one by one, to forsake their old affiliations, form their own producing companies, finance their own activities, and give themselves up wholeheartedly to the production of the best pictures they are capable of making. "It is the finest thing that could', ever have happened to the American motion picture industry. It will supply the answer to the cries of 'overproduction,' which have been heard so often of late. For it is one of the. merits of the independent system that it makes fewer pictures and better pictures; it places the emphasis on quality, where it belongs, instead of on quantity. In self-defence, the independent producer must take all the time he needs to make the best possible picture; the result is three pictures a year, let us say, instead of ten or twelve, but three pictures, any one of which will have more value than all the ten or twelve mediocrities that he would have turned out." Business Outlook Bright The outlook for business in the Northwest is bright, and every effort will be made during 1921 to make the territory 100 per cent. Vitagraph, Robert Cotton, newly appointed manager of the Minneapolis exchange for that organization, declared upon his return this week from a conference with his superiors at New York. Mr. Cotton was particularly impressed with the production of "Black Beauty," which he saw at the Strand. McGurty on Road E. J. McGurty, formerly American Film Company representative in the Pittsburgh territory, is now on the road for Pathe there. EVERYBODY'S HAPPY J. D. Williams, manager of Associated First National; Edna Purviance and Charlie Chaplin enjoying the famous sunshine out in California