Talking pictures : how they are made, how to appreciate them (c. 1937)

Develop in g the Film container. Then eight or more reels, comprising a completed picture, are packed in a wooden or fibcrboard box. These boxes go by train, plane, and ship to all parts of the world, there to entertain or to instruct, or to accomplish both functions at the same time. It will be recalled that the start of the whole filmmaking process was the search for and the purchase of a vivid, striking story, filled with interesting human values. At last that story has become a filmed reality. The values it originally had have been interpreted by competent actors playing before constructed settings. The reality of this photoplay, as it physically sits there on the table of the shipping room, is not impressive. It is a wooden box which looks as if it might contain twenty cans of tomatoes. But take out the reels of film in that box and feed them into the projection machine of a theatre. Your story takes life, and characters which were merely so many printed words when the story was bought six months before, walk, run, and dance, live, love, and die before your eyes. In such progression lies the marvel of modern motion picture making ; the thing that has grown from the peep show to the modern air-cooled theatre. It is a far cry from the cheap "chase films" of thirty years ago to the finely planned theatres of today, and photoplay productions of such quality, literary value, and good taste as Little Women, Sequoia, David Copperfield, Quo Vadis, Ben-Hur, Winter set , The Informer, Romeo and Juliet, Anthony Adverse, Captains Courageous, Lives of a Bengal Lancer, A Tale of Two Cities, Clive of India, Rembrandt, and Lloyds of London. [235]