Photoplay (Jan - Jun 1926)

102 Photoplay M igazine — Advertising Section There's a big place in music for Popularity, pleasure, a big income, all may be yours if you start now to cultivate your musical "bump" with a Conn saxophone! You're sure of quick success because of Conn's exclusive features: simplified key system,] patented tuning device, foil vacuum pads, perfect scale, beautiful tone, easy blowing. If you can i whistle you can learn to play. The bi< stars, Isham Jones, Ted Lewis, and j hundreds more, choose the Conn. Send coupon now for details ] of Free Trial; Easy Payments, on ony ■ Conn. We a re the only makers of every [ instrument for the band. The Conn C Melody Saxophone is the beginner's "best bet." Ask us about it, now. Dealers and Agents Throughout the World <m I cate ends with the baby doll — because he has been disappointed with the other types. Helooks at the baby doll's pastel prettiness and he says to himself. 'My dear, there is nothing about you that can fool me. I'll just have you about to gaze at your thoughtless loveliness and know that I can't get hurt any more.' A II. we all admire the sophisticated attiMude," he said. "The reason we people here in America admire it particularly is because , it is foreign to us. We are accused of being dollar chasers but we are actually more impressed by manner than wealth. Go into the most expensive restaurant in Xew York, our richest city. Let a gentleman enter who wears his dinner clothes correctly, who wears. say, a small mustache and a monocle, and (he eyes of every woman present will follow him. He may not possess a dollar but his appearance makes him eligible almost anywhere. Behind him may come the usual American business man. He may be worth sixty millions. But the women present will pay little attention to him as an individual. They will bow to his millions but not to his mind. The sophisticated man suggests leisure and wealth. In this country where most of us have to work for everything we get. we are impressed by the man who can get along by doing nothing at all charmingly. The woman living by the same method does not interest us so sharply. We are more accustomed to her. Women in .America until recently have been our only leisure class."' Griffith was calling and Mr. Menjou rose to go. "Two things I want to do before my screen career is over." he said. "One i a picture with Cloria Swanson. We've got the story — a tired man of the world and a tired woman of the world going away, each of them to a little mountain hotel to forget their disillusion. Thev meet and then . . ." "What'" "The inevitable love. It always happens. But Gloria and I can't do it. Not now at least. The star system. . ." He shrugged. "And then." he continued, his eyes lighting. "I want to do a costume picture — without gestures. I want to show that people have always been the same. Just because they lived three hundred years ago they didn't walk differently. That picture is my big ambition. Always existence has been the same — love and life and death. Always down the ages the romance search has been on — with the same result." Peter B. Kyne's Prayer f COXTIXLTD FROM PAGE 37 ] C. G. conn. LTD., 528 Conn Bldg., Elkhart, Please Bend "Success in Music" ami details of 1ml. free trial on ( Instrument ) Name St. orR.F, City. State County . . . . l Wntc with pencil, please) subscribers, nor do they arrogate to themselves, like the boob picture producer, the attribute of infallibility. Mr. Lonmer manages to please 2,500,000 purchasers of the Saturday Evening Post weekly and has been doing it for lo, these many years. Mr. Long, with Cosmopolitan, is making fast strides toward pleasing 2,000,000 Cosmopolitan readers monthly. If we figure, conservatively, that three persons read each issue of the magazine which one person purchases, it will readily be seen that these two gentlemen are able to find more intelligent persons in these United States than the movie editors are. I repeat: Nobody knows what the public wants and it is sheer hogwash to claim such infallibility. I am just completing a novel. Now, I KNOW this novel will be a best seller. That is not arrogance nor is it conceit, but a prediction based on past performances. I KNOW, out of an experience of seventeen years that I cannot please the public and that I do not know what the public wants, but I know mighty well what I want, and I want exactly the thing I create, whether it be good, bad or indifferent, according to the critics who assume to make pronouncements. 1 know that if the job pleases me, it is going to please a sufficient number of people of my grade of intelligence, and that number will be sufficient to place me out in front and make me a very satisfactory living. I have done a great deal of public speaking. I have had the so-called intelligentzia listen to me, the people who aspire to what they call the better things of life; the Rotary clubs, the Optimists chilis, the dens of lions, the women's clubs, the literary clubs, troops, labor unions and high school cadets. In a word the same audience that patronizes motion pictures. 1 have never found the audiences dull or stupid; I have never found it necessary to talk down to the level of their intelligences. 1 have always insisted upon titillating my own intelligence in making an address and the interest, approbation, smiles and applause of my audience is never niggardly. The audiences 1 hawtalked to are as quick lo sense irony, satire or delicate, unctions humor as they are to respond to a story of the two famous Irishmen. Pal ami Mike. 1 love audiences. They're kind ami they're intelligent and very wistful. Motion pictures, with the exception of a few, Brer; advertisement in PHOTOPLAY MAGAZINE cuarantet fail of their primary mission which is to entertain. That is 1 ecause the people who make the pictures do not know how to entertain. To be an entertainer is to he something of an artist. Charley Chaplin always entertains me. I laughed at "The Gold Rush" until I wept. I went there for a heart v laugh and it was worth more to me than the price of admission. I see where Charley's artistic foot slips occasionally, where he blahs the note, where he achieves bathos rather than pathos, but I think it would be mean and unsportsmanlike to mention that, to be hyper-critical, because he doesn't pretend to infallibility; he gives you so much that is joyous, wistful, artistic, great that the minority report just isn't worth bringing in. He fulfils his duty to the people who trust him. He gives them their money's worth, and he is tremendously concerned with doing just that and not at all with a consideration of what a marvelous artist Charley Chaplin is. T_T£ is a success because he is a gifted man in ■*■ ■'-his line — a real genius — and like all men of genius he keeps his eye and his thoughts on the job for the job's sake. He makes no pseudomagnificent gesture, no hollow promise that explodes like a pricked toy balloon. He has established an honest basis of quality, his trade-mark stands for something, we all know it. we believe it and we patronize him and wish we could patronize him oftener than we do. What bally rot to say that when the public evinces a distinct desire for better pictures the alert ami gracious producer will supply him jusl that! What arrogance! How the devil docs the producer know he can do that? If lie could the idiot would do it now and not wait to lie prodded into action by a public which is. indubitably, inarticulate. Any man. in any line of endeavor, who isn't striving upward all of the time is already on the toboggan and how pitiful to see him strut when he doesn't even know he is headed for artistic oblivion! I could never write down to the literary level of True Stories, but the readers of True Stories can and do adventure on my literary level. Sometimes I read True Stories myself just to keep touch with my job! Sometimes one finds a gem of literature wasted there! Vet. is it wasted? Who shall make such a pronouncement and cease to be fair and humble?