Picture Play Magazine (Mar-Aug 1921)

WHAT DO YOU LIKE If you like thrills, action, suspense — you are sort of person; if you like sweet and simple one. This article tells you the reason for that, most popular in By Helen Klumph The screen is a sort of magic mirror in which people see themselves as they would like to be IF socially you are a dud, if your solitaire no longer outshines those of your friends, if you want to keep little Rollo's croup and grandpa's own idea of the League of Nations out of the conversation, or if for any other reason you want first-aid to the center of the conversational arena, just step forward snappily some evening and say: "What do you like in the movies?" The age of theorizing about movies is hard upon us, so you will be an instant success. Most people do not know what they like in the movies, but they love to tell you. For several weeks the writer asked that question of every one she met — though not for any of the above reasons, of course. She asked it of the corner bootblack, a prominent evangelist, the owner of a chain of theaters, some chorus girls, and a convict — not to mention thousands of persons engaged in less colorful professions. A college professor could have a beautiful time with the data thus gathered. He could write a weighty tome on psychology that proclaimed among other things that vice and crime pictures are excellent for children, as they make them too blase to want to steal ; that saccharine ingenues are a preventive of divorce, because the sight of them makes a man love his sarcastic wife — the more sarcastic, the better ; and even that democracy means romance for every one. To understand that last we must look at case No. 3027, who is none other than Columbia the gem of my kitchen. Since arriving in this country and becoming a devotee of the movies, she is convinced that some day she will sprain her ankle in front of a hero with patentleather hair, who will forthwith carry her off in his arms, and they will live like people in a fade-out in the movies ever after. Some nice old professor could do that, but I have to be brief, so I will skip the first eighty-two chapters of my adventures and let you in oh the summary. But first let me remark that this wholesale cross-examination of audiences was not original with me. The Goldwyn company has been carrying on such an investigation since last September, for their guidance in producing pictures in the future, and other companies are constantly doing it in one way or another. But they aren't telling what they found out, and I am. Any producer who finds himself a million dollars richer because of what he learns from this article can send his autographed photograph to — to — well, to al most any one but me. But to go on to the carefully collected data : Heroines, to please women who are inclined to be stout — I am told there is no such thing as a fat woman ; do my eyes deceive me? — must weigh in at the ringside at not more than one hundred and twenty pounds. Alice Brady, Estelle Taylor, and Rubye de Remer are the particular favorites of this group. The wild antics of Douglas Fairbanks are the particular joy of the most conservative business men. They like to see him leap across an office desk and hit some dignitary a resounding whack between the shoulder blades — even though they wouldn't allow young blood so much freedom as changing the color of the blotters in their own office. Pillars of the church, and ministers, fancy desperadoes of the William S. Hart variety. Brisk women lawyers, and welfare workers approaching tie dead-line of thirty, like their heroines guileless, and no older than Bessie Love or Mary Miles Minter. Newspaper men like news films or crude melodrama, or any story in which there are explosions, wrecks, or disasters. You remember the story of the retired workman who bought an alarm clock, set it for five o'clock, and when it went off said: "I don't have to get up, darn you," and then turned over and went to sleep again. The case of the newspaper man at the movies is similar. In real life, any big occurrence is the signal for him to get out and dig up the facts about it, but at the movies anything can happen while he smiles in rest and content.