Movie

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ To tell a dramatic story by means of pictures to a miscellaneous collection of movie fans, wise in the niceties of this new method of narration, in such a way that the interest of the on-lookers is won at the outset, maintained throughout succeeding scenes, and intensified as the climax is reached, is to accomplish a feat requiring a combination of technical skill and imaginative inspiration that places a real triumph of the continuity writer’s art high upon the list of worth-while creative achievements. ”

“ It is a safe bet that the majority of my readers can remember the time when they looked upon motion pictures with a mingling of contempt and impatience, realizing vaguely, perhaps, the promise the screen suggested of better things but disgusted with its seemingly stubborn adherence to cheap claptrap, crude melodrama, and unspeakably vulgar farce. My personal experience in connection with the movies is, I imagine, typical of that which has come to thousands of Americans during the past quarter of a century. ”

“ It’s the things that we see, the things that we hear, the things that we read, the things that we feel and do, that taken together make us, in large measure, what we are. Yes, the movies among the rest. ”

“ 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. ”

“ THE MOVIE AS A PEDAGOGUE The utilitarian evolution of the movie has been as remarkable as the recreational—though much less spectacular. The screen seems to have come like a poultice to heal the blows of ignorance, of worn-out methods in schools, hospitals and laboratories, and to act as a tonic upon all the movements and enterprises that make for the betterment of the race. Modern scientists, philanthropists, statesmen, educators, sociologists, uplifters of all kinds, may appropriately paraphrase Robert Burns by exclaiming “a screen’s amang ye takin’ notes.” ”

“ The reader gets a clear idea of how the films are made and he is immensely entertained with the accounts of the manners and customs of the inhabitants of the vast movie villages—manners and customs unique in many respects. ”

“ Before going on to a discussion of the utilitarian as contrasted with the recreational functions of the movie, it seems advisable to consider for a moment a type of screen presentation that is both entertaining and educational, fascinating the observer by its dramatic presentation of the adventurous spirit that has forever urged mankind to dare the perils of the outlands while, at the same time, it preserves for posterity phases of wild life that may conceivably become obsolete in the near future. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ THE MOVIE AS THE HOPE OF CIVILIZATION No conscientious writer begins the final chapter of a book that has engaged his energies for a considerable period of time without a feeling of mingled regret and apprehension. ”

“ This book gives us the long look, the authentic perspective. It may tend to slow down our glibness, to clothe our fancy with fact, and to deflate any notion that the movies belong exclusively to our own well-publicized 20th Century. ”

“ Movies—of course, movies. Four times a week the same people, usually each entire family, conscientiously change into their best garments and go to the movie palace. The children and young people fill the first rows, the grown folk bring up the rear. Four times a week young and old get fed on society dramas, problem plays, bathing girl comedies. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ This contemporary form of amusement is such an accepted 59 part of modern life that we hardly need to read the books about the cinema by Allerdyce Nicoll, Lewis Jacobs, Maurice Bardèche and others to understand “the Rise of the American Film.” Personally I go to the movies to escape from routine and from painful thoughts of our own times. Occasionally I allow myself to be educated about Steel or The River. I prefer to industrial films or films of social problems like lynching, prison conditions, housing, films with biographies of great historical characters: Pasteur, Zola, Rembrandt. ”

“ THE MOVIE TAKES ON NEW FUNCTIONS Solves Many Problems—Becomes Actor, Artist, Singer, Scientist, Teacher, Drummer—As a Hamlet Shows Mother Earth Two Pictures—Will the Race Go Up or Go Down—The Screen Possibly a Savior. ”

“ 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? ”

“ Suppose we endeavor to isolate four of these mysterious qualities in art and call them poignancy, appeal to the imagination, exquisiteness, and reserve.
Any one who goes frequently to the movies must have felt more than once a certain poignancy, a strange fascination in some pictorial arrangement, in some curiously appealing movement on the screen. ”

“ Cannot even the most uncompromising pessimist admit that from those pioneer days when a crude scenario written by a cub office-boy was screened, for want of better material at hand, to the present moment when there is nothing too majestic in the imaginings of master-fictionists to deter the camera, become a dramatist, from making use thereof, there 77has been an upward trend of the movies that is not merely encouraging but intoxicating? ”

“ The screen may commit—yes, frequently has committed—mayhem, assault and battery and actual murder upon the revered form of some great masterpiece of narrative literature; but you who are well-read, you who love the “old melodious lays that softly melt the ages through,” and the tales told by the great romancers, pause before you recklessly indict a new art, groping its way toward a full realization of its possibilities and powers. ”

“ We have got to learn—you and I and the rest, now that the movies have come along to claim our time and attention—something about123 story-telling, and a lot more about how movies are made, and who makes them. ”

“ Again I do not refer to people who really do think that the movies are gripping. I refer to that mean and hypnotized state of mind which allows persons of superior intellect to say, in private or in print, that the motion pictures in their present state are "a great art," when they know perfectly well that they have never seen a motion picture which dis =played one atom of art except good photography or possibly an honest intent to reproduce grandeur by prodigious pains and unlimited expense. ”

“ There are among them forward-looking exploiters of the latest story-telling medium who have formulated, in rather a vague and general way, a possible solution of the problem confronting them. They are encouraging writers possessing imagination and originality to take part in the development of a new form of the dramaturgic art which makes direct 89rather than indirect use of the screen. In other words, the movie displays a growing tendency to demand from creative minds its own special requirements ”

“ 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. ”

“ INTRODUCTORY NOTE TO PART II Whether you desire to break into the movies as writer, actor or director, your most important consideration will be the scenario. In the scenario you will find all the elements of the photoplay; everything is built upon that as a foundation. The actor or director who sincerely desires to do good work studies his script assiduously. The ambitious writer analyzes not only his own photoplays, but those of other people.
It is exceedingly difficult to talk technique to anyone who has never read a scenario. ”

“ I have acquired the habit of late of patronizing the theatre that advertises a picture-play derived from some novel, old or new, and recounts, by means of the silent drama, a story worthy of repetition. ”

“ The sun had gone down behind the tall apartments of the movie stars in the West Fifties, and the clear voices of children, already gathered like crickets on the grass, rose through the hot twilight:
“I’m the Sheik of Araby. ”

“ From this brief survey, you can see that the avenues for breaking into the movies are almost unlimited. You can be an actor, director, cameraman, scene builder, cutter, titler, scenario writer, or anything else if you will begin at the bottom and learn the game. All of these positions are highly paid and all require a high knowledge of motion picture technique. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Movies are still being made from the stories, they still appear in television commercials, they have their own candy bar, and some current authors have even lent their talents to filling in the gaps between the novels. ”

“ The cinema began with cowboy drama, with silly pursuits on horseback, by motor-car and by train, but that was only because, for the first time, movement could be reproduced. The reproduction of movement was a new pleasure, and so the mob clamoured for it. Carry yourself back to your first film and, be you as highbrowed as you like, you will not deny that you enjoyed those febrile races, those people falling out of windows, crashing through ceilings, the violent opening and shutting of doors, the rush of flying crockery. ”