The Story World and Photodramatist (Mar-Jun 1923)

VanLoairs IN a recent issue of the Exhibitor's Herald, Martin Quigley gives us some interesting information as to how things are getting along in our industry. He tells us that there are over 300,000 people employed steadily in all branches of the pictures; that the wages paid employes annually at the studios amount to over $75,000,000 and the approximate cost of pictures produced last year amounted to $200,000,000. More than 600 feature films were produced during 1922 and 1,500 short subjects, news reels and scenics. Of these about 84 per cent were made in California; 12 per cent in New York and 4 per cent elsewhere in the United States. It is estimated 50,000,000 persons attend motion picture shows every week in the 15,000 theatres now operated. The seating capacity for one show is 7,605,000 of these 15,000 houses. The paid admissions amount to $520,000,000 annually. The number of persons employed in film theatres is 105,000. The average number of reels per show is eight. The average number of houses running six or seven days a week is 9,000; while about 1,500 are open four or five days a week and 4,500 only open one to three days. The average cost of making a feature film is $150,000 with the present cost of materials and high salaries. The film companies spend annually about $5,000, 000 advertising in newspapers and periodicals, and another $2,000,000 for slides, posters and other accessories. It cost $2,000,000 for lithographs and $3,000,000 for other printing and engraving last year. These are interesting figures and will make valuable data for the reader and for the exhibitor who wants facts and figures for his local Chamber of Commerce, or Board of Trade. It will give them some idea of the magnitude of the film business. I would advise every aspiring writer to ponder over these figures. Such an industry is worth taking very seriously. A gathering of gentlemen in New York declared recently that there was no art in the cinema. They wondered how art could be introduced into the moving picture. Apparently the problem weighed heavily upon them. We are rather curious about this, for this group is similar in respect of the value it places upon its own opinions, to the so-called intellectuals who solemnly declare there is no literature save that of the ultra-modern school to which, of course, they belong. They have waved aside all fiction from that of Victor Hugo to O. Henry. All the early playwrights, with possibly the reluctant exception of Shakespeare, they efface by one smudge of their inky fingers. For poetry they cite the product of Ezra Pound and his imitators. They like the poisonous playlet that oozes nastily from the pages of the current magazine. They are the futurists and cubists and impressionists of letters. They annoy but they do not instruct. To say there is no art in the cinema is to utter a denial of terms, for the production is all art; faulty as yet, sometimes, feeling its way tentatively to better methods of expression. The trouble with the group, rendering with such easy confidence a verdict to the contrary, is that each has his own notion of the form in which that art should be presented. One suggested that the business should be taken up by select coteries, men of brains and character, probably of which the speaker was a fair example. He would have the pictures fairly luminous with the spirit of art as interpreted