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The National Guide to Motion Picture
(THADE MARK)
PHOTOPLAY
January, 1928
Close-Ups and Long-Shots
THEY are still hunting for the man who blew up a Hammond, Indiana, movie theater with a bomb. Ten to one it will turn out to be some chap who paid a dollar for a loge seat and had to stand through a bum overture, five acts of third rate vaudeville and a prologue, and then had to leave before he saw even a news reel.
JUST as we were getting rid of the oldfashioned movie pests who read all the titles out loud to little Oscar, and broadcasted misinformation about the players, along comes the boll weevil theater manager who is so determined to demonstrate what a great showman he is that a visit to a motion picture theater becomes an endurance contest between the management and the patrons.
Twenty years ago motion pictures were used by vaudeville houses as "chasers." Today vaudeville is chasing patrons out of motion picture houses. If these theater managers ever get down to selecting good features and giving us a well chosen program of news reels and short subjects, with a fairly good musical accompaniment, the radio business of the country would be cut to half its present proportions.
OTRIPPED of all pretense, presentation is a ^substitute for good picture entertainment. It is served up on the same principle that inspired French chefs to invent piquant sauces to smother a questionable fillet. Then they became so intrigued with their art of camouflage
that even the tenderest and juiciest steak was lost in a sea of paprika gravy, truffles, mushrooms, and condiments.
It has gotten to the point where every jerkwater exhibitor tries to smother a picture in a sea of vaudeville gravy in the hope that his patrons will acquire a taste for the gravy and disregard the meat of the program, the feature picture, when he serves up a rancid one.
npHE high priest of the presentation cult, ^ Sam Rothapfel, nationally known as "Roxy," with the greatest movie temple in the world named after him, carried his rituals to the point of absurdity when he cut about three reels out of "What Price Glory" to make room on his elaborate program for a half hour prologue.
Of course, he drew a record crowd to his temple, "The Cathedral of the Motion Picture" he devoutly calls it, when the great war picture was exposed, there to his congregation.
"How's 'What Price Glory' going?" someone asked the Reverend Roxy, one Sunday afternoon as he was about to conduct vesper service,
"Great, brother, just great," replied the holy man, "You should see how I put it over with a prologue,"
That's not gilding the lily, brothers, that's gold plating the Kohinoor diamond,
"T>EAU GESTE" suffered painfully from
-*^the crude surgery of presentation mad
exhibitors, I happened to see it for the fourth
^7