Photoplay (Jan-Jun 1920)

Photoplay Magazine — Advebtisixg Section The Stage and the Screen ( Concluded) framed up charge of her husband. She said, "If this be justice, then God pity ali women !" Dramatic silence would follow these words in the court, or in a courtroom scene on the stage. The careless or unknowing motion picture director would not have stopped for the "curtain."' He would have gone right on without giving the mmd of the spectator the equivalent of silence, a moment of blankness from fresh impression. But we have said that Albert Parker has a mind for details. "The stage and screen are becoming more and more inter-dependent and supplcmen tary," says Mr. Parker. "Though, of course, there are still prejudiced motion picture directors who rail against stage actors, and who say that they would rather have players with no experience and train them in picture technique than to take people trained for the stage. "There are stage producers who say the pictures are going to be the ruination of art and the stage and everything — but that isn't true either, I believe. You only have to look at the prosperity of the theater during the past season to mistrust what these people say. If they give the public what the public wants, and look to their art, instead of wasting their time decrying pictures, they will get along all right." Mr. Parker believes the pictures are suffering from a super-abundance of nosey ness on the part of the public. "Would bankers, would manufacturers, would men in any other line of business under the sun stand for the poking into it, and the criticism of it from people who don't know anything about it, that the motion picture industry does?" he asks. "It has been a mistake to let visitors into the studios wholesale as has been done. "Oh, isn't the waste in a motion picture studio terrible?' yowls some choir leader from Peoria, Texas. "Why, when I was in California I went to see them make pictures at the Toogood studio, and they had to sit around two hours, make up on and all, while somebody went and got a pistol. 1 think it's a sin. The government ought to do something about it." "You do not hear people howling about the waste on the stage. There is just as much time lost. The difference is this. A play rehearses for weeks and weeks. During this ^pell of rehearsing a play can be rewritten five times, recast again and again, and fitted out with any number of different sets of scenery. Each rehearsal is a 're-take.' The screening of a picture is a constant dress rehearsal. And when this dress-rehearsal has been recorded in celluloid it is usually too expensive to take it over, even if. on looking at the film after development, the director finds that a retake would greatly improve the finished production." There is one other thing that ought to be said about Mr. Parker before we close. He does not believe that a director has any right to be temperamental. "It's a director's business to harmonize, not upset, and if he gets temperamental and snappy and peevish how can he expect to get good work out of people?" he says. "I remember hovv. when I was a young actor, I used to get terrified when people shouted at me, and I have alw-ays tried to spare people I have since worked with the embarrassment I suffered at the hands of thoughtless people." Mr. Parker started his directing days under Allen Dwan at Triangle. Among others he has directed Douglas Fairbanks and Clara Kimball Young. Every advertisement in PHOTOPLAY MAG.\ZIVE !3 guaranteed.