That marvel - the movie : a glance at its reckless past, its promising present, and its significant future (1923)

Record Details:

Title:
That marvel - the movie : a glance at its reckless past, its promising present, and its significant future
Date:
1923
Publisher:
New York : G. P. Putman's Sons
Volume:
That marvel - the movie : a glance at its reckless past, its promising present, and its significant future
Leaf #:
00064
Language:
English
Collection:
Books
Format:
Books
Contributor:
Media History Digital Library
Sponsor:
Media History Digital Library
Coordinator:
Media History Digital Library
Description:
Date Added:
December 21, 2023
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50 THAT MARVEL— THE MOVIE achievement that was of itself sufficiently interesting to warrant my presence in that audience of long ago. But my subsequent activities as a movie fan in embryo were of short duration. Like thousands of my fellow Americans I came, I saw, but I did not conquer — in fact, I was repelled. For years thereafter I avoided the movie palaces, realizing that I was temperamentally unfitted to enjoy optical contacts with adultery, murder, theft and sudden death. Nor was my sense of humor of a kind that found anything to laugh at in squash-pie farce. But even the cupidity and stupidity that had their effect upon the screen in its earlier years could not kill the goose that was destined eventually to lay something better than golden eggs. Though ignorance, avarice and vulgarity for many years influenced, to too great an extent, the movies, they could not destroy its inherent power of regeneration, nor the cumulative force exercised by the higher type of producers which eventually made that regeneration possible. How the screen was saved from becoming the exclusive property of the underworld by the survival of the fittest, or the most enlightened, of the early promoters, will be told presently, but it is interesting, at this juncture, to discuss for a moment the question as to why its earlier career was so deplorably reprehensible.