Photoplay (Jul - Dec 1916)

142 Photoplay Magazine An art rises in response to an artistic feeling in its vicinity ; where there is no artistic feeling expression keeps its dead level of hopelessly uninspired mediocrity. The artistic photoplay is a kindler of emotion and favorable sentiment, but it is not a selfstarter. If there is something to draw clever people to the silver-sheet temples, the clever people will see that clever plays are not neglected. But if our manufacturers continue to offer yellow-back adventures, servant's romances and messengerboy thrills what clever person is going to pay any attention to the optic playshop? Our producers won't find it hard to bellring an audience into attending a "Civilization," or "A Daughter of the Gods," or a "Macbeth," but big audiences for these pictures is not the crying need of the photoplay field-general. We must have good plays in our programmes, for every day in the year it is the programme material which diverts the nation. The great multi-reel feature comes only once in awhile. If the spurious dramatic coin now circulating is standard, something is wrong with the standard-setters. If this stuff is right, we are a nation of dubs, bounders, slackers, and half-wits. "It's easy to tear down," you say? Certainly. Then let's build up. We need intelligent authorship and less demand for mere quantity. Some one said, recently: "Photodrama burns up stories faster than all the creative imaginations of the world can make them. Plot falls down because it is bleeding to death. The authors simply can't keep going as long as the motto of a jaded public is 'a play a day.' The plays have got to be mediocre because there are so many of them." Here's an expression diametrically opposed: "It is the producing manager who cuts the soul out of the plays. The producing manager has no belief in the intelligence of his audience. He is assured that the public does not want innovation, boldness or cleverness. Above all. according to his gospel, it does not want the truth. It wants to be lulled rather than stimulated ; it wants the smirk of a sweetened lie in invariable preference to the roughlv invigorating fist of honesty. According to the manager, the public wants pretty plays with taffy endings, and the fellow who can grind out this schedule most unfailingly is the little white-haired boy among authors.'* For ourselves, we believe neither of these statements. That is, we do not in any sen>cbelieve them wholly. We. think overproduction rras used up a lot of story-notions, and we know that managers are conventional and ofttimes timid, yet — Our best producing managers are men who succeeded because they were different from other men. Opulence has no doubt dulled the fine edge of their daring, but we doubt very much if they have the dreadful opinion of the American public which the pessimists prescribe for them. The managerial sin — and this goes for pretty nearly every one of them — is overfaith in a director's ability to pick and write, and in underpaying the author. Time was when the director was czar — and deserved to be. But the art-business has broadened and widened until it has reached the specialization age. No longer can one manor one set of men do it all. Nowadays the director should no more be expected to write or originate his plays than he should be expected to keep the books or draw the payroll. Big authors will put their spiritual inventions into the camera's field only when the material return is proportional to the return for the same flow of originality' between covers or behind footlights. Gold can't be melted into genius, but genius has learned to melt itself into gold. But do not forget that the manager is victim of a svstem which makes him produce more plays than he can possibly issue with profit. A MONG the very few pieces of the past ^"^ month which have any worth at all, Morosco's "Pasquale" sticks out like a sore thumb on a pianist. It's fairly wonderful, when you come to think of it, that no one before Mr. George Beban and his collaborator dreamed of applying the war-problems of foreign born American citizens to purposes of dramatic plot. Here we have a perfectly lifelike Italian grocer and a perfectly lifelike Italian banker, both moved by a great love for the fatherland — and both setting the match to incipient domestic tragedies by their departures. Had Mr. Beban found a way out of his five-fathom suspense other than through the death of his unwanted people, "Pasquale" would have been a complete (Continued on page 160)