Photoplay (Jan-Jun 1920)

The Family Circle First of a series of monthly heart to heart talks By MARGARET E. SANGSTER THE name of Margaret E. Sangster has held a peculiar place in the hearts of American readers for fifty years. It is because the owner of the name has devoted her understanding, kindly, pliilosophic pen always to the cause of humanity and its problems. The first .Margaret E. Sangster died about ten years ago, and her mantle fell on the slioulders of her granddaughter, who inherited her name as well as her genius. Ever since she wa.sl fifteen years old, .Miss Sangster has been on the editorial staff of one, of the religious magazines. At the same time lier poetry, her stories and her essays have been appearing in other periodicals and in books. Photoplay takes great pleasure in bringing you the gift of Margaret E. Sangster, second, through its columns. Miss Sangster has been given a page. .She is going to fill it up each month just as she wishes — but she will always touch on some phase, some problem, some thought that has to do with the motion pictures. Miss .Sangster tells you in this, her first article, for Photoplay, what she plans to do. She invites you into her friendship. She will be glad to consider your own perplexities. THE term "Family Circle" has always drawn a vivid mental picture for me — the picture of a cozy hearth fire with an easy chair or two standing in front of it and a great dog, or perhaps a fluffy kitten, dozing in its warm light. It isn't a startlingly original picture, but its comfortable and satisfying. It's comfortable and satisfying because it typifies a home. A Home is the most important thing in the world, I reckon. It is the foundation that world civilization is built upon, it's the reason why men fight — and die — in wars. It's the reason for the great fundamentals of life and for the little, seemingly unimportant trifles. If it wasn't for the Home there probably wouldn't be books or magazines or theaters or moving pictures. Because the real audiences — the worth-while audiences who buy magazines and books, who go to theaters and motion picture shows — are home people. They are home people though some of them live in lonely hall bedrooms with never a fireplace, though some of them have only a geranium on a window sill for a garden, though some of them will never have a real conception of home except in their souls. Every one in the world, underneath his own particular veneer of sophistication or ignorance or carelessness, is a home person. And, back of every home, is the family circle, the meaning of it all— the circle that groups itself around the hearth fire (even though that hearth fire is an imaginary one) and talks over its troubles, and confesses its perplexities, and asks, unashamed, for advice. It's the tender memory of such a family circle that has kept many a weary heart alight with hope — it's the dream of such a family circle that has snapped many a chin up, made many a spirit courageous. So it isn't strange, at all, or out of place, that every theater where plays or motion pictures are shown should have a definite number of seats which it calls "The Family Circle." And it's typical that, while those seats are not the most expensive seats or the most prominent seats in the house, they are in the center of the theater, filling a certain gap and holding the other seats together. I AM a newcomer to the pages of Photoplay Magazine. But, for a good many years, from a magazine that is primarily a home magazine, I have watched Photoplay and the great industry that it stands for. And I think that I can understand what moving pictures have come to mean to home people — people who have hearth fires and easy chairs and all the rest of it. Take my own home, for instance. Every night at dinner Margaret E. Sangster time, my mother and my brother and I sit down at the diningroom table and take up our soup spoons (or grapefruit spoons, as the case may be) and look into each other's eyes and start to talk. My brother and I both have our work, work that is interesting and absorbing to us, but work that my mother in no way understands. And my mother has housekeeping problems that, though they go to make up her whole life, seem small and insignificant to us. If she talks about the outrageous price of sugar, or the advance in the cost of beef steak, or the way that laundries tear linen sheets, we are apt to be bored. And if we talk about making up pages, and printers' strikes, and free verse, .she is interested — on the surface— but there is a vague question in the depths of her eyes. And so we have come to talk, across our dining-room table, about the movies — a subject that we are all interested in — that we can all look at from the same point of view. It makes the dinner hour easier, chummier, more pleasant for all three of us. Mother is just as eloquent on the subject of her film favorite as my brother and I. She can argue a point with as much intensity and logic as we can. We are all puzzled at the same technical triumphs, we are all enthusiastic over the same successes. The motion pictures have come, in a very few years, to be our common meeting ground, our big common interest. And I fancy that they mean the same thing to many other families. THAT'S the side of the motion pictures that I want to wrhe about in Photoplay. It's the home side, th3 family side, that I want to emphasize. I don't want to tell you intimate details about high salaried stars (I don't know any intimate tletails about them!) and I don't want to discourse learnedly on dramatic effect, and continuity, and picture values (the terms don't mean any more to me, really, than they do to you!). I want to talk with you, jrom the outside, about something that we're both interested in. And I want to talk with you, not as an authority who knows the ins and outs of the business, but as an acquaintance of yours — as some one who sees things in your own way. I want to be as close to you as the woman next door, as the girl who shares your luncheon table in the restaurant, as the young person who has the apartment on the floor above your own. This is going to be a home page. And it's going to be more than that! It's going to be a real family circle if we can make it so, you and I. It's going to be our common meeting ground and our big common interest. And through it we're going to be friends! 41