Photoplay (Jul-Dec 1922)

I I Photoplay Magazine — Advertising Section Dr. Lawton's Guaranteed FAT REDUCER FOR MEN AND WOMEN Will show reduction taking place in 11 days, or money rafiin/lar) Results come usually in rerunaea. three or four days> but if von do not see positive reduction taking place in 1 1 days (the full trial period) , return the Reducer at once, together with the instruction book that accompanied it, and your $5 will l>e refunded. Dr. Lawton, shown in 'picture, reduced from 211 to 152 pounds in a very short time. The Reducer is not electrical; made of soft rubber, and wciptlis but a few ounces. Whether you are 10 or 100 pounds overweight, you can reduce any part you wish, quickly, safely and permanently, by using Reducer a few minutes, night and morning. By a gentle manipulation, the Reducer breaks down and disintegrates fatty tissue which becomes waste matter and is carried out of the system through the organs of elimination; thereby the blood circulation is improved For years. Dr. Lawton's Fat Reducer has been successfully sold and is used by thousands. It is ENDORSED BY PHYSICIANS, and its use requires no dieting, starving, medicines or exercise. Sold generally by druggists everywhere, or will be sent direct to your home, in plain wrapper, upon receipt of S5 plus 20c to cover cost of Parcel Post and Insurance ($5.20 in all.) Send for your Fat Reducer today. Remember, U is guaranteed. Or if you prefer, send for free booklet. DR. THOMAS LAWTON 120 W. 70th St. Dept. 78 New York Oh/fou Skinny/ Why stay thin as a rail" You d n't have to! And you don't have to go through life with a chest that the Tailor gives you j with arms of childish strei gtli ; with legs you can hardly siand on. And what about that stomach tli.it nin.hrs every time you try a square meal ? Are you a pill-feeder? Do you expect Health and Strength in tabloid form — through pills, potions and other exploited piffle? You can't do it; it can't be done. The only way to be well is to build up your body — all of it, through Nature's methods— not by pampering the stomach. It is not fate that is making you a failure ; it's that poor emaciated body of yours; your hall-sickness shows plain in your face, and the world loves healthy pc pie. So be HEALTHY— STRONG— VITAL. Don't think too lone; send a ten ccnl pieco tone dim,') to cover mailing expense? ot Special i alkon Thinness ami my ho, k. "Promotion and Conservation of HeMth. Strength and Mental Energy, "written hv | the atrom LIONEL STRONGFORT Physical and Health Siiecinlist Depl. 927, Newark, N. J. (Founded 1895) BUNIONS PEDODYNE "Solvent." New way. .Pain immediately vanishes. Acts like magic on worst Bunions. Hump gradually disappears. SENT ON TRIAL lge II > Tv^tto'tiii'SDoDYNE o introduce we will gladly crrange to send a Box of " Solvent' ' to try for your own Thousands are sending. ^ Simply KAY LABORATORIES, Dept. A356 186 No. La Salle St., Chicago, Illinois "BOW LEGS and KNOCKKNEES" UNSIGHTLY Send for Tiooktet showing photos of men with and without THE PERFECT LEG FORMS. PERFECT SALES CO., Dept. 54 140 N. Mayfield Ave., Chicago, III. It was a scene from a current stage success containing what they called a spicy episode in those days before Al Woods came along to give the public what it enjoys most. The picture was a violent success of a sort. It certainly pointed to the power of the screen ;o give a dramatic accenl far over and beyond the stage. This picture went out to Vitascope customers. In Chicago it got the first press criticism of the screen and the first suggestion of censorship. Browsing in a second hand book shop a few weeks ago Randolph Bartlett, the author and screen editor, came upon a copy of "The Chap Book" dated June 15, i8g6, published in Chicago, in which Herbert S. Stone, the editor, in his column of notes remarked: "One's acerbities of temper are not pleasant things to emphasize, and geniality and indulgence are tempting. But the ever recurring outrages to decency and good taste which I see in books and on the stage force me constantly into the role of Jack the Giant Killer; in common phrase 'I have my hammer out most of the time.' "Now I want to smash the Vitascope. The name of the thing is in itself a horror, but that may pass. Its manifestations are worse. The Vitascope, be it known, is a sort of magic lantern which reproduces movement. Whole scenes are enacted on the screen. LaLoie dances, elevated trains come and go, and the thing is mechanically ingenious, and a pretty toy for that great child, the public. Its managers are not satisfied with this, however, and they bravely set out to eclipse in vulgarity all previous theatrical attempts. "In a recent play called The Widow J ones you may remember a famous kiss which Miss May Irwin bestowed on a certain John C. Rice, and vice versa. Neither participant is physically attractive, and the spectacle of their prolonged pasturing on each other's lips was hard to bear. When only life size it was pronounced beastly. But that was nothing to the present sight. Magnified to Gargantuan proportions and repeated three times over it is absolutely disgusting. All delicacy or remnant of charm seems gone from Miss Irwin, and the performance comes very near being indecent in its emphasized vulgarity. "Such things call for police interference. Our cities from time to time have spasms of morality, when they arrest people for displaying lithographs of ballet-girls; yet they permit night after night a performance which is infinitely more degrading. The immorality of living pictures and bronze statues is nothing to this. The Irwin kiss is no more than a lyric of the Stock Yards. While we tolerate such things, what avails all the talk of American Puritanism and of the filthiness of imported English and French stage shows." To prevent a confusion in the reader's mind, it may be remarked that the phrase "living pictures" as used by Mr. Stone refers to staged tableau effects, not motion pictures. This explosive condemnation, brought on, ne might admit, because of the crass obvious demonstration of the power of the close-up, which remained practically an unutilized screen property for many years after. It is worth while here to pause and point out that the matter of the content of screen pictures was left cpjite casually to the whim of the camera men, a group of inventors, machinists and "experts, " graduates of the peep show parlors. There was no recognition of the large editorial functions of picture production. The motion picture was a method of getting the money, and that only. No one expected it to last more than a few months as a novelty of the day. The experience of years had to come to drive the picture makers to seek the services of the writers and dramatists, makers of ideas. The beginnings of the screen were as a parasite on ready made sensations and subjects. And in that period of primitive opportunism the motion picture committed its basic sins against taste and intelligence which survive in a degree today. Also these primitives awakened against the screen a prejudice which should have more fairly been expressed as a judgment against the makers of pictures rather than the medium. In England the casual attendance of an impresario's wife at a scientific lecture was the tiny first link in a chain of development of the screen in the United Kingdom. It was the night of February 28 in this same eventful year of 1896 that Robert Paul appeared at the Royal Institution with his "Theatrograph," which projected animated pictures on a screen. This showing was in itself an important recognition by one of the world's greatest scientific organizations. The motion picture got there a dignified attention and acceptance of a sort that it has never to this day received in the United States, the land of its birth. Paul was warmly congratulated by the eminent scientists in attendance at the showing. For the very reason that the motion picture had received no scientific recognition or standing in the United States, these English scientists knew nothing of the prior work of the Lathams, or of Armat. Nor it seems had they heard of the also earlier achievement of the same result by Louis Lumiere in France. TN that audience at the Royal Institution ■*■ was Lady Harris, the wife of Sir Augustus Harris, the famous British showman, who had acquired the Olympia. She gave the "Theatrograph" a keen discerning attention and reported enthusiastically to her husband. The next morning Paul received an invitation to breakfast with Sir Augustus. Harris surprised Paul by telling of a report of the same sort of a machine invented by Lumiere, probably with a shrewd purpose in the back of his crafty head. Then, having thus prepared the way, he asked Paul for a proposition for the showing of the "Theatrograph" at the Olympia. Paul hesitated. He apparently had doubts about the value of the device for public entertainment. "I suppose it will not draw for more than a month, but what do you say to a sharing basis, 50 per cent, on the receipts," Harris suggested. Paul agreed.' The machine went on at the Olympia and proved such a pronounced ness of the purpose of the picture, is the more success that the manager of the Alhambra, significant because it is not written at all in the usual manner of Mr. Stone. "He was," says Mr. Bartlett, "simply a literary highbrow, and paid little attention to anything but esthetic matters." Certainly Mr. Stone was riled by that kiss. IT will be recalled that the first close-up was a sneeze by Fred Ott of the Edison staff, about which was built the first seedling of a screen comedy. And now comes the second close-up with a kiss, a long full grown vamp kiss and, presto! the censorship movement starts. There could hardly have been a clearer a vaudeville house, engaged Paul to install another machine for a fourteen-day run. That run extended to four years. Paul engaged with a feverish activity in the exhibition of pictures and the making of projection machines, which he sold to all comers at eighty pounds each. The motion picture caught on with a rush. The little workshop at 44 Haddon Garden ran night and day. Candy butchers, carnival men, green grocers, all manner of men rushed to the newly found quick money business, the living pictures. For weeks the Paul establishment was thronged by pressing purchasers. Lines formed to wait for machines. Every advertisement in PHOTOPLAY MAGAZINE is guaranteed.