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The Public and Motion Pictures — Johnston 45
dollar top prices, and these theatres I believe will succeed because there is also a public for this class of theatre. I can also remember when distributors tried to sell long and short features out of the same hand. Today, out of twelve national distributors, two specialize in short subjects. That is progress. And as for production, one company in recent years turned a heavy loss into a profit by going definitely and courageously into a policy of producing pictures for the several thousand smaller houses of the country who want a particular type of picture at a rental price they can afford to pay. It is my contention that this preference on the part of the small town houses is not merely a matter of price but also of product; in other words, they prefer Ailene Ray in a good serial to Gloria Swanson in "Madame Sans Gene" or Fred Thompson in a roughriding romance to Douglas Fairbanks in "The Thief of Bagdad."
Let me briefly refer to a parallel in the publishing business. I happen to be interested in the People's Home Journal, an old established family fiction magazine which goes to a million families in the small towns of the United States. There were never more than three high priced authors w^hose serials our readers would have cared for, namely, Harold Bell Wright, Gene Stratton Porter and Zane Grey. And we haven't needed even these best sellers. Our readers want good, wholesome romances, peopled by characters and stirred by events they can understand and so live the stories themselves. The author's name is of no consequence. The readers resent literary finish as a pose and an insincerity. And so it is with the small town movie pubUc, that is to say the prevalent type of movie goers. I shall speak of the other kind in a moment.
As I say, classification is going on — and naturally so. Take the older amusement business of vaudeville. Today it is definitely settled in its amusement grades of big time, family time, etc. The family time house may want an occasional big time act but not as a steady diet. The varying audiences are content with their own class of entertainment and, as I say, it isn't purely a matter of price.
There is another point in connection with the small towns of the country — and these towns are important not only because haK of our theatres are located there but because this small town public should and does have its say about motion pictures. The small town wants clean pictures. There isn't any question about this fact but I doubt if it is clearly understood. I am inclined to think that producers in general don't know much about the small town. They