Photoplay (Jul-Dec 1922)

HO Photoplay Magazine — Advertising Section What $1.25 Bring You More than a thousand pictures of photoplayers and illustrations of their work and pastime. Scores of interesting articles about the people you see on the screen. Splendidly written short stories, some of which you will see acted at your moving picture theater. The truth and nothing but the truth, about motion pictures, the stars, and the industry. You have read this issue of Photoplay so there is no necessity for telling you that it is one of the most superbly illustrated, the best written and most attractively printed magazines published today — and alone in its field of motion pictures. Send a money order or check for $1.25 addressed to PHOTOPLAY MAGAZINE Dept. 7-G, 350 North Clark Street, Chicago and receive the August, 1922, issue and five issues thereafter. Photoplay Magazine, Dept. 7-G, 350 North Clark Street, Chicago Gentlemen: I enclose herewith $1.25 (Canada $1.50) for which you will kindly enter my subscription for Photoplay Magazine for six months, effective with the August, 1922, issue. Send to Street Address City State Thomas Armat was in charge of the showing. James H. White, who was destined to figure in picture production for years, Charles Webster who took the Vitascope into Europe, and Percy L. Waters, a motion picture executive of note in the affairs of many concerns from the General Film Company to Triangle, were at the projection machines. They were all Raff & Gammon peep show experts drafted for this screen showing. They were mere operators then, nowadays known as projectionists. THE pictures shown were old kinetoscope subjects made for the peep show machines. The film was dull and merely translucent with a ground glass finish on the blank side. With the most powerful arcs the pictures were dim and obscure as compared with the projection of today. They were wonderful enough then. Annabelle danced on the screen. There were pictures of the English Derby, the waves at Atlantic City and a flash of a boxing bout. The subjects were about fifty feet in length, each. The New York Herald, the next Sunday, May 3, carried the best of the illustrations of the showing. It is reproduced with this chapter. It will be noted that it was a silk hat audience in the galleries. Also a glance at what the artist got of the machines shows that the "Edison Vitascope — Armat Design" ran its film from spool banks like the kinetoscope peep show machines. The Latham loop principle applied the year before in the eidoloscope had not yet been adopted in the otherwise superior Armat machine. The loop permitted the use of long film on reels, doing away with the cumbersome spool bank with its multiple loops of film. Among those on the bill at Koster & Bials that night was Albert Chevalier, the famous coster singer. There comes a sense of a long faded past in consulting the newspapers of the day. That same April 27 Grover Cleveland, the president, went fishing down in Virginia, the Greater New York consolidation bill had just been passed by the legislature. Down at the Church of The Strangers in New York the Rev. D. Asa Blackburn that Sunday preached a blazing sermon in which he exclaimed "It is impossible to serve God and skylark about on a bicycle!" The bicycle was new and it was as fashionable to lambaste it from the pulpit then as it has been since to lay all sin to the motion pictures. The late Charles Frohman was in the audience at the Koster & Bials' showing that first night. He was interviewed at length by the New York Times the following day. In the. course of his talk Mr. Frohman with rare vision forecast a great future for the motion picture. "The time will come," he said, "when all scenery on the stage will be eliminated. The actors will perform in front of a living scene thrown on the stage by means of these motion pictures." Mr. Frohman was correct, except that he did not foresee that the actors would be projected right along with the scenery. And today — Charles Frohman, Inc., the theatrical concern standing as a memorial to his genius, is in effect the property of Adolph Zukor, the proprietor of a little Chicago fur shop then, in i8q6, the dominant motion picture figure of the world in 1922. Now again the tale swings back to the chapter that might well be called "the luck of the Lathams," a fate drama with a climax in the destruction of a dream of glorious hopes and the tragic termination of a love romance in the midst of the first screen expedition in foreign lands. (To be continued) Every advertisement in PHOTOPLAY MAGAZINE is guaranteed.