Entertainment industry

“ But I have it in my power to make it vastly more interesting than any theatre has ever been."
"You have a play?" the manager inquired; amending this, after another glance, to "You know of a play?"
"Play? No. I'm not troubling about plays," said the caller. "Plays—what are plays? No, I'm bringing you a live idea."
"But I don't wish to make any change in the style of my performances," said the manager. "If you're thinking of a new kind of entertainment for me—super-cinema, or that 'real revue' which authors are always threatening me with—I don't want it. ”

“ As in other industries, the theatrical industry has a variety of interests constantly urging it to go in one direction or another ; but I think the experience of theatrical producers shows that however experimental certain of their efforts may be, ultimate success is awarded by the public to the producer when he has given them what they want. ”

“ It is his business to create his proffered entertainment into a valuable piece of property that shall declare actual cash dividends at the box office. That is being a successful showman, and he who does this exhibits real showmanship. ”

“ I admit that your invention may revolutionize our industry. If a man can sit in his own home and listen to a radio program, and, at the same time, see the performers, he certainly won’t put on a starched shirt and a stiff collar and pay from two to seven dollars for a seat in the theater. ”

“ The complete control of the drama in America by the business men of the theater started at about the time I entered the lists and continued for about twenty years. Under their rule prosperity came to us and lasted up to the time when the public became tired of a drama that soon became a factory product, as was the natural result of a system that put the business man in control of the creative artist. ”

“ As the representative of leading producers and distributors of American films, I can say that in no industry or art will be found men and women more earnest to progress in the right way. With a full sense of our responsibilities, and an ardor toward perfection, we are at work to do the best possible things for the motion picture and its world-wide audience. ”

“ The scenario writer sits down in the morning and works out a scene; he wakes up the director, who packs some actors and a cameraman in an automobile, together with a picnic lunch, and goes out to make the picture on some lovely hillside. Then, having finished the photoplay, they take it around to your local theater and exhibit it at twenty-five cents a seat.
As a matter of fact, the movies, now the fifth national industry in the United States, has as many phases, and as many complexities as any other industry in the world. ”

“ The rapid growth to-day in what may be called social consciousness has quickened our sense of the social significance of an institution that, whatever its esthetic and intellectual status, is an enormous influence in the daily life of the multitude. Gradually those who think have come to see that the theater, this people's pleasure, should offer drama that is rational, wholesome amusement; that society in general has a vital stake in the nature of an entertainment so widely diffused, so imperatively demanded and so surely effective in shaping the ideals of the people at large. ”

“ The Movies constitute the fourth largest industry in the world; they command the respect of governments, the service of the press, the participation of captains of industry, cabinet members, international bankers. ”

“ In this country the Commercial Theatre stands for that form of big business in the theatrical world that produces dividends on the money invested comparable to those earned by the most prosperous of the large industries. ”

“ In either case, the business man earns his living by exploiting the products of the artist, and the artist earns his living by bringing his goods to the market which has been opened by the industry of the business man. ”

“ The opportunity afforded to get a true idea of the play is made quite secondary, and sometimes entirely lost sight of.
Nor will the trained observer in the theater be cheated by the dollar mark in his theatrical entertainment. He will come to feel that an adequate stock company, playing the best plays of the day, may afford him more of drama culture for an expenditure of fifty cents for an excellent seat than will some second-rate traveling company which presents a drama that is a little more recent but far less worthy, to see which the charge is three or four times that modest sum. ”

“ Comedies of merit are in greatest demand, not because more comedies are produced—the reverse is actually the case—but because less good comedy is written. Follow the pictures that are being shown in the theaters if you would keep in definite touch with the studio demands, or else read one of the trade journals that give theater-owners advance information of the pictures that are to be produced. ”

“ Since the first of these three forms of intellectual production includes mainly science and the second the fine arts, so what we have to say now applies to the utilization of all spheres of intellectual activity, but particularly, however, to the heroes of the pen and the stage, to whom now stand opposed as capitalist directors of industry, the publishers, periodical owners and theater directors. ”

“ There was a time when theatres and theatrical companies were managed or directed by men who were actors, or had been actors, or by men who had a love for the business, and had some particular talent or fitness for the trade; but nowadays all that is changed, and all sorts of chaps have butted in for the sake of what's in it for them. It is not, let me tell you, an unusual thing to find the druggist of yesterday, or the commercial drummer, or newspaper man of the week previous, become the impresario of an opera troupe or the manager of a playhouse the following week. ”

“ Moving Pictures.—A certain form of recreation may be secured through amusements which involve mere passive participation upon the part of the spectators, as in various entertainments, dramatics, [Pg 159] etc. As long as those giving the entertainment are local people, friends or relatives, the audience takes a more or less sympathetic part in the performance and is not actuated solely by the desire to purchase pleasurable sensations as is the case with commercial amusements. ”

“ Theatrical productions will be run on a sort of improvement upon contemporary methods, but there will be no cornering of talent possible, no wild advertisement of favoured stars upon strictly commercial lines, no Theatrical Trust. ”

“ But under no circumstances must or can a national theatre, in the proper use of the term, be made an object of personal or commercial profit. Nor can it be a scheme devised by a few individuals for the exploitation of a social or literary fad. ”

“ The connection of the drama with the show business is intimate, and it always has been. In the long history of the theater there is no period without its successful pieces, the appeal of which was mainly sensuous—to the eye and to the ear, rather than to the emotions and to the intellect. While the drama is an art, and perhaps the loftiest of the arts, the show business is a trade. ”

“ Musicales and amateur theatricals provide an exhibition of skill, cultivate the æsthetic nature, gratify the dramatic instinct, and furnish opportunity for mutual acquaintance among the people of the community, who meet all too seldom in social gatherings, and at the same time they furnish wholesome entertainment for the community at small expense. ”

“ WHETHER it is due to publishers becoming producers, or to the less commercial producers for organizing a literate audience, or to the movies for purging it by drawing away the lowbrow elements, Broadway is putting on better and better plays—plays that are actually literature. ”

“ If you think well of my idea we may even go so far as to reward the actors and musicians who entertain us best. Let it be known that this company is formed more as a means of starting various contests for music, oratory, and acting, and is open for all entries, young, aged, small or large citizens. ”

“ It is the custom to offer exhibitors a fee for showing an advertising film, but in this instance the picture was meritable enough as a comedy to offer a theater in each town the exclusive rights for a special price. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The only chance a person would have of discovering that your stock slide is used by a competitor would be if he happened to be a patron of more than one motion-picture theater. Here, again, you would gain a brilliant victory. ”

“ II DRAMATIC ART AND THE THEATRE BUSINESS
Art makes things which need to be distributed; business distributes things which have been made: and each of the arts is therefore necessarily accompanied by a business, whose special purpose is to distribute the products of that art. ”

“ Although the essays vary in quality and some companies are more extensively treated in separate studies, American Theatre Companies is the fullest single compendium of information on American theater companies. ”

“ What movies – giving in to the instincts of the crowd – offer can never be produced in the same dimensions and amount by theater, bound as it is by its limits. Shaking its head, the public notices the helpless effort. And runs to the movies. For what should bind the public most to the theater: art, is for the most part shamefully neglected. ”

“ Prices to first-class entertainments here are higher than in America, and programmes have to be paid for always. They employ young women as ushers. Between acts, ices and cool drinks are brought to the audience, but a round price is asked for them. ”

“ The theatre is either a business or a gamble, and in the hands of men like Sir Alfred Butt it looks less like a gamble every day. Enlightened business self-interest would look a little to the future, to the fostering of authorship in provincial towns, to the establishment of many Repertories. ”

“ The society based on modern industry is not accidentally or superficially spectacular, it is fundamentally spectaclist. In the spectacle — the visual reflection of the ruling economic order — goals are nothing, development is everything. The spectacle aims at nothing other than itself. ”

“ The acute American business man, who is always a business man, whether financing a railroad or a Broadway farce, is not slow to profit by the penchant of the public for “big” names. By means of unlimited advertising and the right kind of notoriety, he builds up ordinary actors into valuable theatrical properties. ”

“ The people who patronize these presentations now will have got ahead in the world, and will be able and willing to pay more generously for their entertainment, and it is to be hoped that the people who turned to moving pictures from cheap melodrama—which, in its whilom prosperity, we are to consider in our next chapter—in due time may turn from moving pictures to adequate representations of classic, standard and popular plays. ”

“ OBTAINING THE BEST RESULTS FROM SLIDE ADVERTISING
Not even the most successful business man makes good in every enterprise he undertakes. That is an impossibility, especially in these competitive times, but, if certain rules are observed, success can be achieved in the majority of cases.
The photoplay theater is a comparatively new advertising medium. You may have tried it out and failed, while your competitor, for some reason you are unable to fathom, has won out. ”

“ I do say that the capital power of the commercialised theatre in England to-day is so great that it has been able to impose its standard on nearly all the people who are habitually in contact with its merchandise ... ”

“ From the five-cent show, with its audiences of crude farce- and melodrama-loving people of small or limited education, had sprung the million-dollar theaters, including the rich and poor, the learned and the ignorant, the young and the old in their vast, changing throng of patrons, demanding something always better. ”

“ Therefore, in writing this series, we shall start with an old saw—a warning to amateurs to look before they leap. No industry in the world presents so many angles, varying from technical work in the studio, to the complexities of high finance. If you really wish to break into the movies, go to the studios and see for yourself what you are fitted for. ”

“ To put it coarsely, brutally, I do not suppose that any other business receives so much gratuitous advertising, except the theatre. It is, enormous, the space given in the newspapers to literary notes, literary announcements, reviews, interviews, personal paragraphs, biographies, and all the rest, not to mention the vigorous and incisive attacks made from time to time upon different authors for their opinions of romanticism, realism, capitalism, socialism, Catholicism, and Sandemanianism. ”

“ As our experimental theatres increase in number—and they are increasing—it will probably play its part, and perhaps no insignificant a part, in the development of a national drama through the development of a local drama and the cultivation of a taste for self-expression in various communities. It is only when these experimental theatres are sufficient in number, and the amateur spirit has been sufficiently aroused in various communities, that the commercial theatre of tradition will be seriously influenced. ”