Movie star

“ 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. ”

“ We'll pick a good staff, select our stories with care, get the best men to write our scenarios, and gather round us a group of actors, like those who have made the Continental cinema what it is today, more interested in their work than in themselves, willing to take their chances of scoring in fine ensemble acting instead of insistent that every story shall be distorted, every scene directed, every picture cut to throw a so-called star into prominence. ”

“ If you can answer these questions in the affirmative you may have a career before you in the motion pictures. If you cannot answer any of them but the last in the affirmative, you may still be successful as a movie actor, for "types"—whether of gunmen or millionaires, villains or saints—are much in demand. ”

“ And in any single section of the motion picture the fixed design and the movement, the accentuation and the harmony, the work and the play, must be co-ordinated and all this technique must itself be subordinate to spontaneous enduring inspiration. Without such mastery no movie-maker can ever win to the far goal of art. ”

“ The appeal that it makes to countless millions who have been hitherto indifferent to, or ignorant of, the outstanding achievements of our great imaginative writers is a new and potent factor in the intellectual and spiritual life of the people.
Furthermore, the movie, in its traffic with the best in fiction, is of service to the man of letters who is sufficiently open-minded to welcome new contacts with old masterpieces. The screen does not merely bring great stories down to the masses, it frequently revivifies the enthusiasm of the aging and jaded book-worm for great stories. ”

“ THE MOVIE CONTEST BALL
Town Hall, April 1, 8 p. m.
Local Merchants Will Give Valuable Prizes
Admission $5.00
"Who could represent Roseville in Hollywood like Lotta?"
The Art of
Motion Picture Acting
As Explained By
Hollywood's Greatest Directors
and Stars
In that contest lay a way out—Ella decided it was the time to act—and to act she must get that book.
EYES
The greatest requisite to stardom is the eyes. Master the art of expressing every emotion with the eyes.
The following pages contain eye exercises.
Fig. 6⁠FLIRTATIOUS
Fig. ”

“ Hence the fireworks.
18Anytime you see an “it” on the streets of Hollywood wearing English riding breeches wider than an embarrassed pancake, leather puttees wound round legs thinner than a producer’s heart; a waxed and pointed mustache sillier looking than shirred humming-bird’s eggs—lay a hundred to one bet that you are looking at a moving picture director pulling down a measly thousand a week. The question of the Sphinx: Must movie men of the studios look like Asses? ”

“ You and I, and Dug and Henry, in the last analysis, are the bosses of the whole motion-picture industry. The movies are made for us. If we do not like the kind that is shown, the movie people will try to please us by showing another kind. ”

“ That a work based upon the more personal aspects of the movie’s evolution can be both readable and timely has been proved of late by the success achieved in book form by the personal reminiscences of one of the leading producers in the motion picture realm. ”

“ Lincoln asserted that you can’t fool all the people all the time, but 97at one period it seemed as if the screen were stubbornly endeavoring to perform this miracle. A picture-play, whatsoever might have been its origin, succumbed, as a rule, to a tendency to underrate the general intelligence, the power of memory, and the knowledge of life and human nature possessed by the average movie audience. ”

“ What sort of a chap will we find in a really worth-while movie?
One who, to begin with, is genuine. A regular fellow.
Mostly, photoplays don’t have them. If we want to find regular fellows playing the big parts in a picture we have to make up our minds to pass by a large proportion of the127 films that come along, except in the pretty big picture-theaters. Actually, the men making photoplays hardly seem to know, as yet, what regular fellows are. In pictures you don’t often see the real thing—yet. But it is coming. Every now and then a regular fellow gets on the screen. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In approaching the conclusion of the first half of this series of articles which has given, inadequately and sketchily, a bird’s-eye view of the past and present of the movie as a purveyor of amusement, the writer finds himself turning to other fields of endeavor in which the screen is pushing forward as a pioneer with the hope in his heart, amounting to a certainty, that the screen drama in America is upon the threshold of a great and glorious future. Revolutionary changes in the photo-drama are being brought about by methods arousing intense scientific and technical interest. ”

“ If you have been reading these pages about motion pictures carefully, you have probably by this time been impressed with two things: First, that the movies are tremendously important—enormous, fascinating, influential, popular forces, capable of improving, or injuring, our entire American civilization ”

“ I have taken the liberty above to refer to my early inclination to become a movie fan, to my disgust and revolt as the screen for years failed to show regard for its higher possibilities, and to my comparatively recent renewal of a hope that had been almost destroyed by the photoplay’s youthful indiscretions—to use a term rather mild and inadequate. ”

“ When an actor comes on the screen, in the early scenes of a photoplay, we look at him without much interest. But if we see him chop wood, or come through a fight, or learn what a time he had selling papers when he was a youngster, we unconsciously begin to get more103 interested in him. ”

“ As a medium for drama the screen is only just beginning to break away from the influences that controlled it when it first set out on its career as a pioneer in a new art, namely, the silent presentation of plays and stories. It is still necessary for us who enjoy a photoplay of real merit to exercise care at the entrance to a movie theatre lest we be confronted presently by a screen drama unworthy the attention of intelligent observers. ”

“ We actors are mere details of an artistic conception. We have now been in Hollywood for five months, yet few people who casually notice us at the hotel or on the streets have any idea that we act for the 'movies.' Sometimes we appear publicly in the streets, in characteristic costume, and proceed to enact our play where all may observe us; but there are so many picture companies in this neighborhood that we are no longer looked upon as a novelty and the people passing by pay little attention to us. ”

“ He must be depicted, in my film book, just as he stands before me, just as he acts—and reacts—toward the producer, the director, and toward the poor people who make up the crew of supernumeraries. I have got to have the man, and not his mask, if I am going to succeed with him on the screen. The poetic play associated with this type of acquired information and insight is at once singular and fascinating. We lift a human flower up out of its original soil with its tender roots and transplant it to a new clime and a new earth. ”

“ CAME DAWN AT HOLLYWOOD
Before any one else can say it first, let me admit that I was no earth-shaking success in the movies. If the truth must be known, I died on the silver screen; I sank majestically beneath the oily waves of the cinema sea and never was heard of again. Not so much as a life belt or a spar was picked up. The fact that a gallant company of stage celebrities perished with me made my demise less poignant personally, but not the less indisputable. ”

“ But from the point of view of significance, they are widely divergent arts. The value of each to, and the effect of each on, striving humanity is poles removed, the one from the other.
Let us repeat—the film is not an art of the intellect but of the soul. It does not serve ideas; it serves feelings. The greatness of the stage actor lies in and is measured by the circle of his thoughts. The greatness of the film actor lies in and is measured by the warmth and depth of his heart, and by the gracious power through which he seizes the spectator and convulses his soul. ”

“ And every film will have this artistic and commercial success which glows with real passion because it has been wrung from powerful feeling. The art, the very soul of the motion picture, cherishes no desire for subtle, intellectual form or forms. ”

“ But alas, the cinema has taken our breath away so often, investing us in all the splendours of the splendidest American millionaire, or all the heroics and marvels of the Somme or the North Pole, that life has now no magnate richer than we, no hero nobler than we have been, on the film. ”

“ That’s the way most of us watch motion pictures—with the accent on the sit.
We don’t use our brains enough, where the movies are concerned, either in the selection of pictures to go to see, or in analyzing—and appreciating or criticizing—what we see. ”

“ There is plenty to be said of the movies as an institution, an art and an influence on modern life, and plenty are saying it. I confine myself to personal grievances. First, the art does not appeal to me as an actor. The appeal of acting to those who practice it lies in the enkindling of the emotions of an audience and the reward of applause, laughter and tears then and there. This is the actor's daily bread, and the movies offer him a stone. ”

“ Every movie fan has heard audiences at some time or another break into wild applause for the shadows on the screen, and we were even more forcibly reminded of the strength of the personal illusion, no matter how inanimate the symbol, during the world's series. ”

“ THE MOVIE AND THE CONTINUITY WRITER The Screen Demands the Inevitable—Movie Audiences no Longer Easily Fooled—They can Tell a Hawk from a Hernshaw—The Value of the Screen as a Mirror of Life—Man’s First Universal Means to Self-Knowledge. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Thus as we analyze the optical aspects of a motion picture we are amazed at the number of things that may conspire to hurt our eyes, and we sympathize more than ever with the sincere cinema composer. He, the new hope of the movies, feels the need of other equipment than a line of talk and a megaphone. He no longer applies for a position in a studio on the strength of his record as an actor, as a stage director, as a city editor, as a college cheer leader, or as a drill sergeant in the army. He has begun to think in pictorial composition and not in words. ”

“ If we are to be captivated, carried off our feet as it were, the action has got to be strong; it must set forth not mere wish but will, too. Those elementary passions that spring forth from sensuality—that is, from the ensemble functioning of all our senses, constitute the field of mimic portrayal. The motion picture has as its goal the great and captive passions. And characters that are bound to earth, full of soul but in the plight of the unhappy Prometheus, make up the strongest expression of the art of the motion picture. ”

“ To judge a film manuscript on this dual basis is, however, not so difficult. The motion picture is art for the masses. This truth eliminates of itself all cold-blooded and un-felt texts. A warm, vivacious, animated, artistically valuable motion picture book has got to please—that is, it has got to lead up to a commercial success. The dramaturge who takes this view of his business is an exceedingly important personage among his company’s acquaintances. He is its artistic conscience; he is its reliable guarantee against failure. ”

“ I was of course interested in the movies, though they no longer had the same hold over the public imagination that they had had in earlier decades when a process of film before light could project, larger than life, not only on vast screens but also upon the impressionable minds of an enormous audience made homogeneous by a common passion, shadowy figures which, like the filmy envelopes of the stoic deities, floated to earth in public dreams, suggesting a braver more perfect world where love reigned and only the wicked died. ”

“ Turning to movies, it must be admitted that actors are tremendously important, but it must not be said that they act motion pictures. They only act while motion pictures are being made. We cannot thank them for the poignant beauty of glowing lights and falling shadows, of flowing lines, and melting forms, and all that strange evanescence that makes up the lure of cinematic forms. ”