Reel Life (1915-1916)

The established high standard of the three reel features will be maintained throughout every release, giving these program productions the strong box office drawing power and advertising value so essential to the exhibitor’s success. The single reel productions on the Mutual Program are coming in for important attention. They are being made specialties of unusual merit, comedies swift and snappy, and the topicals, The Mutual Weekly, and See America First on the split reel with Keeping Up With the Joneses. glass covered studio, and increase in technical equipment which meant the building of a three-story property and transformer building, a scenery dock and painting, finishing and upholstering rooms, was made so that the American offerings to the Mutual tri-weekly Masterpicture De Luxe releases could be readily produced. It was partly to permit outdoor work, and partly to allow for the enlarging of the Gaumont Company’s Flushing studio so that it, too, would be able to meet the new De Luxe Edition requirements, that the two Gaumont companies were sent to Jacksonville, Fla. Only last week was announced the proposed acquisition of a third Gaumont Company of stock players, which will combine with the present company, in the support of the well known Broadway stars featured in Gaumont releases. David Horsley has added several new members to his force at Los Angeles. In addition he has tripled the efficiency of his studio by adding a new indoor studio and indoor work shops, which will give his directors 20,000 additional feet of floor space. Betty Hart, Gypsy Abbott, Brooklyn Keller, all newcomers to the Horsley company, are well known picture players. William Bowman and Ulysses Davis have recently been added to the directing force and Frank Stammer and Frank Crompton have been put in charge of the technical department. Two of the Thanhouser stock companies have already gone south to Florida, and a third company will leave shortly for Hudson Bay, while work will continue at the New Rochelle studios as usual. Mr. Thanhouser promises a great variety of Masterpicture material from his widely scattered forces. The expansion of the Mutual program bringing in an additional three-reeler, giving the program a total of three a week. This gives the Mutual, with the three Masterpictures De Luxe Edition, a total of six feature releases a week. Among the new three-reel features to come are Lille of the Sulu Seas, Across the Sunlit Sea, The Extra Man and the Milk-fed Lion and Water Stuff. The high standard of the three reel productions will be maintained through every release, giving these program features the strong box office drawing power and advertising value so essential to the exhibitor’s success. The single reel productions on the Mutual program are coming in for important attention. They are being made on reel specialties of unusual merit, comedies swift and snappy, and the topicals, the Mutual Weekly and the See America First on the split with Keeping Up With the Joneses. The Mutual Weekly is being made particularly attractive with its remarkable scope of news service and Paris Fashions presented in colors. There is a Mutual cameraman on the job where ever anything happens. Under the direction of Pell Mitchell, of the Gaumont Company, editor of the Weekly, there are camera men in the trenches of Europe, the far-away cities of the Orient, the harried ports of Mexico, in India, Africa, South America, and all the important centers of the United States and Canada. Many thousands of feet of film are taken every week to be submitted to the editor of the Weekly, whose blue pencil is a pair of scissors. The thousands of feet of pictures are trimmed and pruned and edited and boiled down to produce the 1,000 feet in the Weekly reel which goes out to give the people the news of the world in pictures. Nothing but the live, real news survives. It is like the process of producing a newspaper, where hundreds of columns of matter are discarded every day in the selection of the most interesting and the most important. The Weekly is one of the expressions of “specialty” policy for the one-reel releases on the Mutual program, which makes these reels so particularly effective in the hands of the exhibitor seeking proper program balance. An army of stars, unlimited studio facilities, new and unusual stories, plays and scenarios, a new higher standard of production — that is what is summed up in the Mutual product and the new De Luxe Edition of Masterpictures. Every literary and dramatic resource the world offers is being considered in the plans of the makers of the Masterpictures, De Luxe Edition. In mapping out lines of action in the production of these Masterpieces, De Luxe Edition, the Mutual Film Corporation and its group of manufacturers have had available the whole literary market of the world. Great plays, famous books, the works of famous writers, the best in the scenario production of the day — all these have been spread out for consideration in the selection of the material of the coming Masterpicture, De. Luxe Edition, releases. Mutual pictures and Mutual’s “service beyond the films” are the exhibitor’s guaranty of success in the final test of the boxoffice report. Coming Mutual Masterpictures DE LUXE EDITION SILAS MARNER — George Eliot’s famous book, featuring Frederic Warde. THE OTHER SIDE OF THE DOOR— Lucia Chamberlain’s great novel, featuring Harold Lockwood. “VENGEANCE IS MINE — Featuring Crane Wilbur. THE BAIT — Featuring William Clifford and Betty Hart. THE IDOL OF THE STAGE — Featuring Malcolm Williams. THE FIVE FAULTS OF FLO — Featuring Florence La Badie. LORD LOVELAND DISCOVERS AMERICA— Featuring Arthur Maude and Constance Crawley. AS A WOMAN SOWS — Featuring Gertrude Robinson. REEL LIFE— Page Three