Myron M. Stearns

“ They bring all people, and all times, before us on the screen. But the poor pictures that we see twist out of shape our ideas of people and life; they show things that are not and could not be true, they gloss over defects of character that a fellow should—that a regular fellow will—face squarely. A clothing-store-dummy “hero” does things that no decent scout would do—and we’re just as much hurt by watching him on the screen as we would be by watching that flat-footed center fielder on the losing baseball team. ”

“ The intelligent dollar is the dollar of a really intelligent investor, who expends it wisely, and fairly, and in such a way that it will bring him both a sure and an honorable return.
In motion pictures, the average investor, up to the present time, has been either a “sucker” who simply lost his money, or a speculator who took a blind chance, or a “wise guy” who knew the picture business and merely played it for what he could get out of it, with little or no regard for the other fellow, or the public, or American prestige, or anything else that didn’t directly affect his own pocketbook. ”

“ You will remember that a chain is no stronger than its weakest link. A motion picture, that is made by the combined efforts of a whole group of people, all pulling together, is much the same way. If any one of the group, on whom some particular duty depends, is ignorant, or inexperienced, or lazy, or pig-headed, the defects of his work will mar the finished film.
If the actors can’t act well, the picture will be laughed at; if the camera man is poor, the photography will be poor, and so on.
The property man is the one who has to see that the details of a picture are correct ”

“ Motion pictures are still changing so much, in their development from year to year, that any survey of this vast, chaotic new industry is in danger of being out-of-date long before its time. With this in mind, I have attempted to stress those phases of movie-making, and of the story-telling that underlies each photoplay, that do not change. A generation hence, the fundamental problems confronting the makers—how to show real people, doing interesting things in interesting places—will be the same. ”

“ Movies are so complicated, in the making, that dozens of people, hundreds often, have to pull together when they are being made.
That very thing is one of the big reasons why moving pictures to-day aren’t any better than they are. Mostly movie people haven’t yet learned to pull well together, or how exceedingly important it is in the making of pictures.
If you can’t work with other fellows without bucking and kicking,—don’t ever try motion-picture work. ”

“ In the laboratory we visit first the developing-room, feeling our way cautiously into the dark around many corners that cut off every possible ray of light from outside. Walking on wet slats we reach at last the chamber in the middle of what seems to be an almost impenetrable labyrinth, and in the dim red light can barely make out the vats where the strips of celluloid, wound back and forth on wooden hand-racks, are being dipped into the developer. ”

“ Not in dollars and cents, because, alone, the money side of the picture industry is neither exceptionally important nor particularly interesting. The film industry is now, I believe, the fifth largest in the country, and its exports and imports run to millions of dollars annually. American pictures for the whole world would mean more dollars coming our way, and more prosperity in this country; but that is neither more nor less than can be said of half a dozen other industries. Money is not the only thing we need to make America the greatest country in the world. ”

“ It was why Rex Ingram, in “Turn to the Right” made a picture that was about down to the level of an eight-year-old child, in spite of its beautiful production. It was why such pictures as Universal’s “Merry-go-’Round” drop to cheap and overdrawn sentimentality in places, instead of sticking to the real thing.
The danger with distributors and exhibitors as well as producers, is that they are afraid of losing money on pictures that are “too good.”
What they are afraid of is a real danger: it is true that pictures may be “too good.” ”

“ Whenever we watch motion pictures, we see somebody doing something, somewhere.
It may be a young fellow from the country, who has come to the city to make his fortune, and finds work as a truck-driver, hauling piano-boxes that are filled with rifles for shipment to the Soviet. It may be a girl who decided to wake up “Ellum Center” by putting in a real live department store. It may be an old man who sails away to the South Seas to try to locate his runaway grandson, and finds a pearl island as well. But always it is somebody, somewhere, doing something. ”

“ Up to the present time, the producers or “owners” in motion pictures are mostly just the run of little fellows who have happened to land on their feet, and made the most of it.
And, since in making pictures, as in everything else, the final product can be no better than the brains at the top of the organization, we have had to wait for better pictures until, little by little, the movie game assumed greater stability, and began to attract men of larger caliber, with better ideas of just what was really worth while, and what was not. ”

“ To him, the movie dollars seemed so selfish, so short-sighted, so unintelligent, that he refused to let his own dollars associate with them.
Every time, though, that your father, or Dug’s father, or Henry’s father, chances to invest dollars in any motion-picture scheme that turns out better pictures, that pay by being better,—and such investments are now possible every once in a while—the unintelligent dollars in the movies are crowded a little farther along the bench, and the whole industry, and indirectly the whole country, is that much better off. ”

“ On the other hand, if a picture has certain fundamental points of popular appeal, a romantic love-story or a thrilling climax or a wonderful setting of unusual beauty or charm, and good selling-points as well, such as a famous author or a great star, it can be just as good as anybody is able to make it. Under those circumstances it cannot be too good. Look at the best Griffith pictures, or the best Rex Ingram pictures, or the best pictures that Douglas Fairbanks has made, like “Robin Hood,” or the best that Mary Pickford has made, or Charles Chaplin, or Harold Lloyd. ”

“ Autos have zigzagged around corners, or skidded in impossible circles, men have climbed like lightning to the tops of telegraph poles, and nursemaids have run baby-carriages along sidewalks at racetrack speed until we are a little inclined to yawn when we see one of the old stunts coming off again.
But there are always legitimate uses of slow cranking—as in the case of the train and the automobile. ”

“ Having secured the picture “sight unseen” for the Islands, they had to play it to get their money back. But they felt, after seeing it, that possibly their Japanese audiences would not particularly care for it—so they prepared carefully165 an exploitation campaign worthy of the best advertising brains in this country. “Intolerance,” they said, was at once so artistic that it appealed to the highest intelligence, and so simple that any man of good sense could appreciate it. To fail to be moved by its beauty and artistry would mark anybody as being—well, stupid. ”

“ If you have a good director, and assistant director, and photographer, and actors, what difference does a property man make? It would seem, would it not, that the various assistants would look out for all the details necessary, dividing the work up among them?
But they can’t. There was the cat, for instance.
We were taking some of the early scenes in a city of the Middle West (one of the great charms about movie-making is that you often travel to the places you want to photograph, instead of trying to “fake” them in the country around the studio) and the script called for a cat. ”

“ There are two other parts of the motion picture industry, just as big, and just as important, as production.
One of them is selling or renting the films to the theater-owners who project them on the screens of their movie-palaces the world over. This is known as the distributing end of the business. There are great nation-wide organizations, sometimes embracing a number of associated producing companies, that are formed for the purpose of carrying it on. ”

“ In other words, if the leadership element is present at a motion picture, if it is a picture that is thoroughly worth while, and yet is not too good to “get across,” it will both make money and build business, while a cheap sensational picture, though it may make more money than a better film at the time it is released, will in the end lose business for the firm producing it, because in the long run it drives away business instead of bringing it in. ”

“ A dozen or more big distributing companies, blanketing the whole country, each trying to sell the pictures it is handling to the greatest possible number of the fifteen thousand exhibitors for the best possible price. Not to the audiences, mind you; that is the exhibitors’ look-out; the distributors are not trying to sell pictures to the people who sit in rows and look at them—at least, not directly. They are selling them to exhibitors.
Along comes a picture producer who has made, perhaps, an excellent picture of ordinary, everyday people just like you and me. ”

“ Our American motion-picture producers are specializing on candy, because—for the moment—more people want it. But they’re over-doing the thing. If they want to hold the world leadership in movie-making, they must turn out more roast beef. ”

“ If they have the stamp of genuineness—if they do the things that you or I would do, and think as you or I would think, the people that produced the film are on the right track.
But when, if you stop to think, the old men in the pictures are not natural, and the women are not natural (young girls playing the parts of married women of thirty or forty and so on) and the men and boys are not doing what everyday men and boys would really do, we can classify the picture as a second-rater at the best. ”

“ And every time we see c. f. on a snappy nine, playing right on his toes, turn and race after a liner that looks like a home run, and lunge into the air for it as it streaks over his shoulder, and stab it with one hand and the luck that seems to stick around waiting for a good try, and hold it, and perhaps save the game with a sensational catch—why, we’re that much better ball-players ourselves, for the rest of our lives. ”

“ So that on the screen everything happens about one-fifth faster than it did in real life, and frequently even faster than that—much faster, since more and more there is a tendency to “speed up” still further, until the feet of marching men in the news reels almost dance along the street, and their knees snap back and forth like mad.
Of course, you see more in a minute, watching26 in a theater where film is run through the projection machine so fast—but what you see is distorted, instead of being quite so much of the real thing, as would be the case if it were run more slowly. ”

“ If you have never been inside a motion-picture studio, an interesting experience lies ahead of you. For what soon becomes an old story to any one working “on the lot,” is fascinating enough to any one who sees it for the first time.
At Universal City, California, just across a range of hills outside Hollywood, lies a motion-picture plant that covers acres and acres. ”

“ It’s easy to think you can do that—and most motion-picture producers and financiers are sure they can. But as a matter of fact, an editor, trained for years in the selection of stories, could probably do a lot better.
In motion pictures, the man who puts up the money for a production has to be pretty wise to realize how much less he probably knows about motion pictures than the men he hires to make the pictures for him. ”

“ Folks standing at the curb to see us start from the hotel probably wished that they too might be journeying off into the open country, with all the glamor of adventure surrounding the expedition—but they knew nothing of the long, long hours of waiting through the day, while the director rehearsed and rehearsed one or two actors in a particular scene, or the whole company just shifted from one foot to the other, hour after hour, ready to be on the job the moment the sun came from behind the passing clouds—if it ever did. ”

“ It seems a pity after watching one of the really well-made historical photoplays, to have to see a picture of the American Revolution so carelessly made, in spite of its cost of nearly $200,000, that you feel sorry for the poor British redcoats at the battle of Concord, when the American minute men, outnumbering them about ten to one, fire on them at close range from behind every stone wall and tree or hummock big enough to conceal a rabbit. ”

“ All about is a labyrinth of still standing sets—here a corner of a business office, and just beyond the interior of a drawing room in a rich home, with a beautiful curved stairway mounting ten feet or so into nothing at the right. ”

“ When the overhead of a single company is running at hundreds of dollars a day, a property man will not be forgiven if he holds up the whole production while he scours the city to save money on beer-bottles. ”

“ There is always enough danger in playing “opposite” a lion to make it easy for any actor to “register fear.” Note how the lion is baring his teeth.
There, in a nutshell, is one of the big difficulties that anybody who wants to help along the moving-picture industry, either by making better pictures or by encouraging better pictures, is up against. Between the public on the one side and the big distributors and producers on the other side stand the exhibitors, who must be “sold” on a money-making basis, before any great change can come about. ”

“ But on the screen, when the picture is completed, we jump from the close scene of the thief throwing up his hands as the car reaches the edge of the cliff to the long shot of the car falling with the dummy, and the illusion is perfect.
Before the car is pushed over the edge for the real fall, the engine is taken out, and everything else of value that can be salvaged is detached. In the final scene of this tragic death these accessories may be scattered around the wreck of the car, adding to the total effect of utter destruction. ”