Movie industry

“ 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. ”

“ 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much, in their development from year to year, that any survey of this vast, chaotic new industry is in danger of being out-of-date long before its time.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. ”

“ The time is now close at hand when motion-picture investments will rank much higher than formerly, so that intelligent dollars may come in without losing their self-respect. When the industry is regarded as quite as honorable a field for investment as in the case with, say the newspaper or book-publishing business, we shall have far better pictures. ”

“ For the making of reels that will carry information for students, that will take truth and wisdom to whole generations of scholars, is an honorable and conscientious undertaking. With money profitably invested in motion-picture ventures of this new, and inevitable, kind, the whole motion-picture field will take on a new aspect, and attract the more intelligent dollars, the more honorable dollars, that will in turn gradually lift the character, and the quality, and the products, and the results, of the entire industry. ”

“ Next, let us turn to the beginnings of the motion picture industry. We find the same conditions that made possible sudden wealth and sudden death, hold-ups and hangings in the Kern River valley, seventy-odd years ago.
Impossible? Let us see.—First, who goes to the gold country, anyway, in the first mad rush?
Not the fellows with steady jobs, who have already made good in their own particular field. They have too much at stake. ”

“ On a large canvas it is the same picture that the movie presents in miniature from grime to Griffith. The great weakness of the motion picture industry throughout its formative years, a weakness still too much in evidence, is at the top and not at the bottom. The movies for years lost the support of the more enlightened classes of the community not because camera-men, carpenters, electricians and stage hands were not competent but because the powers in control of the completed output, the “bosses” of the new industry, failed to make the best use of the power that had come to them. ”

“ From the very start, the mechanical and inventive end, as well as the commercial and organization end, of the industry in this country outstripped competition. Combined with Griffith’s story-telling ability, this technical supremacy and commercial organization put American films in front of those produced elsewhere.
American movie-palaces mushroomed into existence by the hundreds, and we developed a huge domestic market that made possible extravagant spectacle-productions costing first tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands of dollars. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Motion-picture publicity is so pliable that arranging with movie theaters to put on a film of your product in the making and equipping salesmen with a reel and apparatus to demonstrate before prospective customers does not exhaust its uses.
I have unearthed a New York manufacturing concern in a large way of business who have fathomed the all-important matter of deriving the fullest value from their movie-advertising investment. They utilize their film to teach salesmanship to the employees. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ At its present rate of progress, the cinema will soon become more powerful as an influence upon the minds of the masses than are the newspaper, the novel and the play taken together.
For the sun never sets upon the screen! Day and night, in all parts of the civilized, and an increasing portion of the uncivilized, globe the motion picture is making its imprint upon the minds and souls of countless millions of men, women and children. ”

“ The possibilities of making a motion picture at comparatively little expense were first drawn to public attention five years ago when two young men, both of whom have become well-known directors, made a saleable photoplay in their own back yard. These boys had many theories about what a movie should and should not be, but they could never find a company willing to give their theories a trial. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Of course, the regeneration of the photoplay must be, of necessity, a slow process. We must look facts and figures in the face and admit at the outset that the millions of Americans who daily attend movie theatres are not, on the average, highly intellectual, nor over-prudish as critics. They pay their money to the box-office to be amused, not instructed nor uplifted, to get recreation rather than rescue. A stream cannot rise higher than its source, nor can a picture-play win success if it soars above the head and heart of the average movie fan. ”

“ This all means that cinematography has become a gigantic industry, giving employment to hundreds of actors, photographers, and the army of men and women engaged in making and showing the films, to say nothing of the thousands of picture theatres that have sprung up in every city and town in the country. ”

“ The early runners of the television industry326 came on their knees to Hollywood and begged the movie men to help them. “You’ve got the factories to make the product, we’ll get the outlets to show it,” they said. “Let’s co-operate, and we’ll all grow rich.”
Oh, but the studio heads were too smart for that! They could have held television in the palms of their hands. Instead they jeered: “Who’s going to stay home and watch a little box?” They sneered: “What have you got—women wrestlers and bike races? It’s a fad like Yo-yo. It can’t last. Movies are better than ever.” ”

“ Although it then referred to the legitimate stage, as it does now, it can to-day apply aptly to the motion-picture theater. A good story is, also, the ideal vehicle for film advertising.
The twenty million movie fans in this country frequent their favorite form of amusement to be entertained, and some greatly resent the pure advertising or semi-educationals which they often have to sit out. ”

“ I believe that price control should extend even to places of amusement such as motion picture theaters. The movie has come to be a major cultural institution looming large in the lives of many of our people. ”

“ Masterpieces are coming not through spending millions on supes, and “real” temples, and forts; but rather by writing a scenario particularly adapted to film-production, hiring and training actors that know how to act for the camera, preferably those without bad stage habits to unlearn, cutting out all unreal scenery, costume and make-up and keeping everything as simple and as close to the actual as possible. The best movie play I ever saw was in a ten-cent theatre in St. ”

“ It has been said that until producers recognize that the principles of Art must come before commercial considerations the film industry is doomed.
It is for the people to insist on the best, and only the best, being “screened,” and the various “corporations” that are giving us [16] mediocre matter will be crowded out by the far-seeing producers who realize that the Public, unlike the Law, is not “a ass.” ”

“ That would be worse than forever playing tennis with a man who could never hope to ever equal your own game.
Do you see what we are getting to? Leadership!
Motion pictures, are, in a certain sense, a part of the great publishing business of the United States. They publish stories in picture form. And in those stories they publish ideas, and ideals, and rules of conduct, and good taste, and good sense,—or the lack of all those things.
It is through the publishing business—the movies as well as books or magazines or newspapers—that we get the information and ideals153 by which we live. ”

“ Unfortunately, the movies are dependent to a great extent on those tainted arts, fiction and the drama, for their materials. Movie-scenario writers cannot write fast enough to supply the demand, so books and plays have to be drawn upon. The public, moreover, has not yet been completely weaned away from these dangerous sources of enter. tainment, and they like to see famous books and plays done over in the movies. This fact is responsible for the slight suggestion of reality, with all its attendant demoralization, that has crept into the movies. ”

“ It is simply that those men who make and distribute pictures have associated themselves to do jointly those things in which they are mutually but non-competitively interested, having as the chief purposes of such association two great objectives—and I quote verbatim from the formal articles of association, which have been filed in the office of the Secretary of State at Albany, N.Y.: “Establishing and maintaining the highest possible moral and artistic standards in motion picture production and developing the educational as well as the entertainment value of the motion picture.” ”

“ The next few years of the industry’s history is the tale of numerous patent suits that wound in and out of the courts. The legal battles accentuated the naturally bitter competition to be expected in exploiting the new wonder. But the public had given a hearty welcome to the latest form of entertainment, and the picture-makers waxed prosperous, despite the handicap of internal strife. Theaters in all the big cities were showing the pictures as novelties, and traveling exhibitors were frequent. ”

“ In the New York Evening Mail we renewed our acquaintance with Director Brennan one night by reading the following ad:
GET INTO THE WONDER INDUSTRY OF THE WORLD.
The motion picture producing business. Hundreds of fortunes have been made and are being made in it. Successful motion picture playwright and director offer part ownership in a series of powerful, emotional plays for the screen, entitled “When Dreams Come True,” “Time Will Tell” and “Inspector Flynn.” ”

“ Along comes another producer who has made a picture that isn’t half so good or as true to life—but it cost more money to make, or it has 145some spectacular sets in it, or it is based on some novel that had a big sale, or it has a catchy title, or a well-known star, or is made from a popular play. ”