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20
Million-dollar Housewarmings
A Gus Edwards presentation, of the type now being sent about to the different Publix Theaters.
fifty-five cents in the afternoon, or eighty-five cents in the evening, you may be able to bask in such comfort as was formerly known only in the big city theaters ; hear music well played; and see a feature picture, a news reel, and a comedy. Note that I say, "may."
But, of those thousands of seats, more than half must be filled at every performance, if the theater owner is to make a profit. It is just possible that there aren't twenty-five hundred nor even one thousand people in your immediate neighborhood with the same tastes as yours. What is the theater manager to do ? He is playing for crowds. Will he get them by raising the artistic level of his entertainment or by lowering it?
Don't answer. You would only be drowned out by the loud, harsh guffaws of book publishers, newspaper editors, and garment makers, in chorus with the theater owners and motion picture producers. You can profitably maintain a high, artistic level in any product offered f or sale, only so long as you have to appeal only to the cultured few. Appealing to masses is, in a way, an infinitely harder task, though one that calls for cruder materials.
The one outstanding fault of motion pictures— the one great block to their progress — has been that for sound, commercial reasons, they have had to be made to appeal to the greatest possible number of persons. The)' have had to be keyed down to an average level of intelligence and taste. They have had to deal almost entirely with the great common denominators of human interest — ■ heavy sentimentality, lust, revenge, and lavish display.
Richness and ornateness are the characteristics of the new movie palaces. This picture is of the stage and orchestra platform of the Uptown Theater,
in Chicago.
There have, however, been sonic really good motion pictures made in spite of the widespread acceptance of the rumor that four out of five of us are half wits. But in booking these, the theater managers have hoped only for the patronage of the fifth. There have been a few pictures more subtle in treatment than the ''whatever I am is only what you have made me" school of fallen-woman melodrama ; more sophisticated or realistic than the Cinderella or Horatio Alger themes ; more restrained sartorially than the De Mille fashion displavs and emotionally than the works of Elinor Glyn. But not many. The latter are sure-fire stuff. And the bigger the theater, the more dependent it is on trusted formulas.
A theater owner who is operating a house seating
from eight to twelve hundred, in a town where competition is not keen, may be willing to take a chance on an adult — or shall we say Lubitsch ? — entertainment, but that same man may not dare to take such a risk when he has five thousand seats to fill, and a competitor opening a new theater just around the corner.
If he does dare to book any such higherclass film, he will do it under what we may as well call the counterirritant system. Theater managers call it balancing the program. This consists of building up a diversified bill surrounding the feature picture, so that the program may find favor with those who do not like the picture.
Under this plan, we find that, with Lubitsch caviar, a nursery tea is served,