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64
Photoplay Magazine
and those aloof stage celebrities who, while "going in for" pictures, do not wish to mingle with the common lens herd.
At present, four more producing companies headed by women are actually grinding out plays; one stage star of picture repute is forming her own company, and a lovely minx with whom the country in general has become acquainted only in the last year has a company with a famous director almost completed on the managerial stocks.
Nowhere does the spirit of imitation grow in ranker weediness than by the photoplay roadside. It is not prophecy, but a statement of logical sequences to say that in six months there will be an avalanche of these demi-star manufactories choking up the exhibitor's every avenue. We are not arguing for the programme against the individual play — as a matter of fact, we believe that every play must stand firmly on its own legs of situation and character — but for reason and art as against mere wildcatting of personalities.
The motion picture star-system now imminent is as preposterous, anarchistic and insidious an evil as has ever been introduced into dramatic art in America. The results of its frantic competition can be eradicated only by years of combat.
The power of combination and co-operation, in the arts and in business, is the premier discovery of this era. These alleged artists would drag film-making back to its days of solitary, suspicious feudal inefficiency.
IN spite of the quadruply-exposed war of Ince; in spite of the intimate clinics of flowing blood in "Intolerance," the movies are gaining in subtlety and losing in slaughter. The sheer physical thrill is passing for the spiritual thrill of situation. The dramatists of the continent found long ago that mere murder is a soporific; a dead man has no emotions; there is no drama in decease. Problems are much more terrific when everyone is left standing on his feet, and the audience realizes that death, the gruff but really easy old solver, is not coming to the rescue in the last quarter-reel.
Physical thrills have their place, and always will have. Mr. Ince could not very well substitute tracts and powder-puffs for the blasts and blows of "Civilization," nor could Mr. Griffith limn the Babylonian intolerants solely with sounds of harp and psaltery and the glimpsing of pleasant dances. Yet the beloved gun in the drawer, the ready cliff, the burning house, the sinking ship, the suspense of the gallows, the lurking assassin and the providential avenger are slaying properties less and less in use.
On the whole, the motion picture directors and the motion picture authors are beginning to realize, as did Mr. Ibsen, Mr. Pinero, or our own Mr. Thomas, that the most terrific dramas of life are acted within domestic walls; that the things of heaven and earth about which Horatio has not dreamt rise in no concourse or court-room; and that the heart-moving substance of literary and dramatic art — the picture play is an amalgam of both, plus — dwells in the casual processes of everyday life.
Less Slaughter;
More Subtlety.