That Marvel The Movie A Glance At Its Reckless Past Its Promising Present And Its Significant Future

Keep Your Card in This Pocket

Books will be issued only on presentation of proper
library cards.

Unless labeled otherwise, books may be retained
for two weeks. Borrowers finding books marked, de-
faced or mutilated are expected to report same at
library desk; otherwise the last borrower will be held
responsible for all imperfections discovered.

The card holder is responsible for all books drawn
on this card.

Penalty for over-due books 2c a day plus cost of
notices.

Lost cards and change of residence must be re-
ported promptly.

Public Library

Kansas City, Mo.

TENSION ENVELOPE CORP.

D 0001 MSlOHQb 3

That Marvel The Movie

That Marvel Tile Movie

A Glance at Its Reckless Past, Its Promising
Present, and Its Significant Future

By

Edward S. Van Zile, LittD.

With an Introduction by
Will H. Hays

G. P. Putnam's Sons
ls(ewYork & London
tJ3je ^nickert acker Pr
1923

Copyright* 1923

by
Edward S Van Zila

Made In the United St*t* of America

INTRODUCTION

To grasp the past progress, the present significance
and the future possibilities of the motion picture;
to express them with restraint and yet with clarity;
and to impress the mind of any reader with the logic,
as well as with the sincerity, of his viewpoint: these
are a few of the qualities in this book which make it
interesting and important. Mr. Van Zile visualises
the motion picture as more than an entertainment
feature; and if his prophecies of its future seem
over-optimistic to some, they need only to recall the
flickering, crude apparitions of twenty years ago and
the total cinematic blankness before that,

If, in twenty years, the motion picture has ad-
vanced from an awkward toy in a laboratory to the
marvelous screen art and drama of today, who shall
say what are the limits of its progress and its power?

The other arts are old* Music was bom with speech
and architecture came soon thereafter. Literature
and sculpture were created when the first primitive
man hacked an image on a bit of rock or bone,
Misty ages have cradled their growth. The art of the

vi INTRODUCTION

screen is new, and yet in its quarter of a century of
life it lias produced achievements as valuable in
affecting human thought, as notable as those many
great plays and operas and pictures have produced.

To the extent that it has grown so rapidly its
importance is intensified. It is better that we should
learn to crawl before we walk, and run before we fly.

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 worldwide
audience. Mr. Van Zile not only gives us a word
of cheer, but he puts into the public mind some
thoughts about pictures which will pay for their
lodging.

WILL H. HAYS,

CONTEXTS

CHAPT;K

BY WILL II. HAYS , v

I, THK MOVIK'H NKW SHSXIFICANOB . 1

II. THK MOVIB AT rm Bnrrn ... 10

III, TUB MOVXK'H FWWT STEW . * S3

IV, THK MOVIK GOES TO Tine BAD . . 45

V. THK MOVIE DKVKLOPB A ('ONSCIKNCB 50

VI, -TlIK MOVIE ANI> THE LlBKARY * 69

VIL THE MOVIJB\S APPKTITK FOE PLOTS . 81
VHI. THK MOVIB AND THE CONTINUITY

WttlTKli , ..... 03

IX* Tim MOVIE IMPEOVISB ITS MORALS . 108

X. THE MOVIE MAKETH WHAT KIND OF

A MAN? ..... 115

XL Tim MOVIEJ AND THE COMMITTEE ON

PUBLIC RELATIONS . 185

XIL THE Moviu AS A PUDAGOGXJB . . 1S5

XIII* THE MOVIE INTERPRETING THK PAST . 145

XIV, THE MOVIE TAKES ON NEW FUNCTIONS. 155

viii CONTENTS

CHAPTEE PAGE

XV. THE MOVIE AS A WORLD POWER. . 165

XVI. THE MOVIE AND THE CENSOR . .177

XVII. THE MOVIE AS A WOELD LANGUAGE . 189

XVIII. THE MOVIE AS THE HOPE OF CIVILI-
ZATION ...... 201

APPENDIX A STATISTICS SHOWING THE
SCOPE OF THE MOTION PicTtrKE IN-
DUSTRY ...... 15

APPENDIX B THE SCREEN AS A NEW
LIFE GIVER TO LITERARY CLASSICS , 18

APPENDIX C WHAT MASSACHUSETTS
THINKS OF MOTION PICTURE CENSOR-
SHIP 1

APPENDIX D SIGNIFICANT DATES IN THE
EVOLUTION OF THE MOTION PICTURE 222

APPENDIX E WHAT THE MOVIE HAS
DONE FOR A GREAT RAILROAD . . 224

APPENDIX F FACTS AND FIGURES SHOW-
ING THAT THE SCREEN HAS BECOME

THE FIRST WORLD CONQUEROR , .

APPENDIX G MEMBERS OF THE COM-
MITTEE ON PUBLIC RELATIONS CO-
OPERATING WITH MOTION PICTURE
PRODUCERS AND DISTRIBUTERS OF
AMERICA, INC ....

That Marvel The Movie

CHAPTER I

THE MOVIE'S NEW SIGNIFICANCE

' Civilization in Peril Leaders of Thought give Warning
Mankind Repeats Old Errors Needs a Universal
Language The Motion Picture the Only Esperanto
Can the Screen Save the Race? Why a History of the
Movies is of Crucial Importance.

CHAPTER I

THE MOVIE% NEW SIGNIFICANCE

WITH striking unanimity contemporary writers
dealing with the problems vexing humanity to-day
express amazement at the fact that the race has
learned so little from its variegated past, that age
after age it commits, under new conditions and with
changes in terminology, ancient blunders resulting,
as they did aforetime, in the tragedies of war,
revolution, famine, epidemics and poverty. As of
old, the four horsemen of the Apocalypse periodically
sally forth, to have their evil way with men; more
potent, through long practice, in their iconoclasm,
as they have proved in recent years, than they were
in the days of our ancestors. The individual, unless
he be a moron, learns lessons from experience, avoids
committing errors that marred his past and may
become, eventually, worthy the name of a civilized,
even a highly civilized, being. But there are many
experts in mob psychology who despondently assert
that, while the individual may demonstrate his

3

4 THAT MARVEL THE MOVIE

well-nigh infinite superiority to his jungle pro-
genitors, the seeming progress of the race as a
whole has been merely illusory, that mankind is
inherently as savage to-day as it was countless
centuries ago.

But why should not the race at large follow the
course pursued by the average individual and derive
from its past errors a mandatory enlightenment
enabling it to avoid those recurrent retrogres-
sions that furnish the cynic with arguments against
the proposition that mankind is gradually ascend-
ing to a higher plane of civilization? Various an-
swers may be given to this query, but the one to
which this chapter calls attention is to the effect that
to the vast majority of the human race the story of
mankind's struggles and failures, triumphs and
defeats, attainment of high civilizations only to lose
them again, is a sealed book. The individual man
can recall every detail of his experience of life and can
pursue a course of safety by aid of the lighthouse of
his past. If this prerogative of the individual could
be magnified to include all mankind might not the
time come presently when no generation would
repeat the costly errors of preceding generations?
Would not the mass learn and profit by experience,
as does the unit?

Now, is there any possible method whereby the

THE MOVIE'S NEW SIGNIFICANCE 5

human race can be induced to go to school to its
recorded past, to the end that our posterity may
establish eventually a civilization permanently safe
from the internal and external forces of disintegration
that have destroyed so many mighty civilizations
founded by our forefathers? Is there any way by
which men in the mass may employ mass history in
the same advantageous manner adopted by
individuals who use their "dead selves as stepping-
stones to higher things?" Lothrop Stoddard's
recent book, in which he demonstrates most ably the
disquieting fact that contemporary civilization is
menaced by many and grave perils, presents to a
public that habitually resents disturbance of its self-
complacent optimism an array of startling data
making the above queries, to put it mildly, ex-
tremely pertinent. "Of the countless tribes of
men, 5 * says Stoddard, "many have perished utterly
while others have stopped by the wayside, apparently
incapable of going forward, and have either vege-
tated or sunk into decadence. Man's trail is littered
with the wrecks of dead civilizations and dotted
with the graves of promising peoples stricken by an
untimely end."

But wrecks, whether they be of former civilizations
or of .vessels lost upon fatal rocks and reefs, have
their value for succeeding nations and mariners.

6 THAT MARVEL THE MOVIE

They serve to point warning fingers away from the
shoals of destruction toward the far-flung deeps where
progress and safety are to be found. It was with
this thought in mind, we have no doubt, that Wells
and Van Loon gave to the reading public recently
their absorbingly interesting volumes dealing with
the rise of man from the amoeba to his present status
as lord of the earth. Both these authors have been
shocked and horrified by the race's manifestation in
recent years of its tendency to revert at times to the
murderous practices of its cave-man progenitors.
That an antidote against periodical returns upon
mankind's part to the evil practices of the past might
be found in the popularization of histories telling a
coherent story of our race's ups and downs was a
thought that must have come to both Wells and Van
Loon when they essayed the stupendous tasks that
they have so worthily accomplished. But while the
basic idea underlying their activities as historians
is sound for mankind must take cognizance of its
past errors if it is to indulge in hope for the future
the depressing fact confronts us that the printed
book, no matter how great may be its apparent
vogue, reaches but a very small percentage of even
the highly intelligent public. No. If the evils af-
flicting mankind were to have been cured through
books the race would be free to-day from the major

THE MOVIE'S NEW SIGNIFICANCE 7

disorders that threaten the health, if not the life, of
existing civilization.,

Upon this point, Frederick Palmer, in his interest-
ing and inspiring book, "The Folly of Nations," says:

Our increasing library shelves are heavy with the
records of all human activities, colossal accumulations
of historical and scientific researches and the literature of
imagination and philosophy but one who seeks works
on how to keep the peace finds that he has meagre refer-
ences. ... I have before me a list of the books and
pamphlets the Carnegie Endowment of International
Peace has published. If I have found little new in them,
or in any books on the subject, it is because it may be
needless for me to search among their details for the great
truths I have seen in the vividness of gun flashes on the
field of battle. . . .

The sentence in italics above, in which Palmer
asserts that the great truths that have been revealed
to him have come to him not from books but from
the vividness of gun flashes on the field of battle,
brings us to the crux of our argument, and will be
used presently as a point of departure for what may
prove to be a constructive suggestion of some value*
If mankind is to be taught to follow the method
employed by the individual in using the errors of the
past to ensure a better future the race must be enabled
to visualize its past. If it refuses to gain enlighten-
ment through books some other medium for making

8 THAT MARVEL THE MOVIE

history the savior of posterity must be found. And
it has been found. The great truths that were
revealed by gun flashes to Frederick Palmer can find
their way to the hearts and minds of the masses of
men if we are wise and far-sighted enough to make
full and intelligent use of a new medium through
which Man may gaze upon the mistakes and short-
comings of his past, and, forewarned, avoid them in
the future.

The race has found at last its universal language,
its Esperanto not of the ear and tongue but of
the eye. The evolution of the motion picture,
developing in a few years from a toy kinetoscope to a
Griffith wonder-worker, has made possible, for the
first time in the history of humanity, an appeal to the
heart and mind and soul of man that overcomes the
ancient handicap of the confusion of tongues."? After
many centuries the check to human progress given at
the Tower of Babel has come to an end at the
entrance to the motion-picture palace. It has been
made possible at last for history to reveal its secrets,
and vouchsafe its warnings, not to the comparatively
few who read scholarly books but to the millions who,
as democracy conquers the earth, have become
masters of the destiny of nations.

In a brilliant and impressive address delivered last
July by Will H. Hays at Boston, Mass., before the

THE MOVIE'S NEW SIGNIFICANCE 9

National Education Association, the speaker pre-
sented facts and figures demonstrating the marvellous
progress made of late by the motion-picture as a
medium for instruction in both schools and colleges.
He said:

To reflect on the possibilities of the motion-picture
in education is to regret that one's school days were
spent before this great invention came to us as a poultice
to heal the blows of ignorance, but there is consolation
in the fact that since the advent of pictures the whole
world, regardless of age, can go to school.

"Regardless of age" yes, and, also, regardless of
race, language, inherited or acquired prejudices, and
the hot passions that result in man's inhumanity to
man. In other words, the human race may now sit
before a screen and learn through the universal
medium of the eye those great truths that have been
revealed to Frederick Palmer by the vivid flashes of
the battle-field.

Dreams, you say? Generalities? A vision that
begets nothing but vain hopes? Suppose, then, that
we make a concrete suggestion that, should it arouse
interest and create discussion, might result event-
ually in giving to what you call "airy nothings'*
a "local habitation and a name." The insuperable
obstacle that has prevented heretofore the establish-
ment somewhere upon earth of a university designed

10 THAT MARVEL THE MOVIE

for the educational needs of the race at large has been
linguistic. In a polyglot world a great central
station for the dissemination of knowledge was
impossible so long as that knowledge could be
inculcated only by means of the written or spoken
word. But to-day, as Mr. Hays points out in the
address quoted above, instruction is given, from our
primary schools up to our universities, through the
method of visualization; and, furthermore, repeated
tests have shown that students prepared for examin-
ations by aid of pictures obtain higher marks than
examinees whose coaching was confined to the media
of books and lectures. It is almost impossible to
exaggerate the significance of the above in connection
with the dream we have taken the liberty to dream.
A world university, a fountain of all acquired knowl-
edge for the race at large, became practicable the
moment the linguistic problem was solved by the
Esperanto of the Eye. No longer was the vision of a
race finding, as do individuals, strength and wisdom
for meeting the perils of the future by contemplating
the mistakes of the past a vague, shadowy mockery,
destined to vanish with a return to common-sense.
On the contrary, common-sense had become suddenly
associated with a project that had left the realm of
the abstract to enter the domain of the concrete.
For what, in the name of common-sense, could make

THE MOVIE'S NEW SIGNIFICANCE 11

so impressive an appeal to the practical man of
affairs as the perfecting of a method whereby the
recurrent set-backs to progress that peoples, and
mankind at large, inflict upon themselves can be
reduced to a minimum or, perhaps, rendered perma-
nently obsolete?

Let us suppose that what we will call, tentatively,
our Lighthouse of the Past had found its Rockefeller
or Carnegie, that several hundred million dollars
were available for the establishment of a world-
centre of enlightenment wherein all the peoples of
the earth could study what man has done in his dual
character of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, is it not
certain that the evil influence of the latter would lose
its grip eventually upon a race that is so strangely
compounded of the god-like and the diabolical?
Seeing is believing. Show mankind both the glories
and the horrors of the past, let each tribe, nation,
race ponder its own achievements and its own failures,
reveal to the pilgrim students flocking to our light-
house from every corner of the earth both the
microscopic and the telescopic aspects of history, to
the end that they may return to their respective
native lands inspired and eloquent advocates of a
better world, and, lo, the problems seemingly in-
soluble to us to-day will be solved through a mass
enlightenment that, before the advent of the screen,

12 THAT MARVEL THE MOVIE

was beyond the wildest dreams of the most optimistic
visionaries.

And where, you ask, shall our Mecca for the
pilgrims of progress be located? For many reasons,
there is but one country to-day available for the
project briefly outlined above, and that is the United
States. Geographical, historical, diplomatic, finan-
cial, educational and racial factors interwoven in
the enterprise combine to make ours the only land
in which this Lighthouse of the Past, this university
of universities, could stand a fair chance of function-
ing successfully. Somewhere in our country there is
an ideal location contiguous to one of our great cities
adapted by man and nature to the needs of our
experiment in racial regeneration. Where this
location may be is a question to be answered in the
future. Upon this site, however, when it has been
chosen, can not you who have read the foregoing,
and have begun, perhaps, to dream my dream,
picture a vast group of buildings, both beautiful and
utilitarian, within which all that mankind has done
of good or evil shall be revealed, year after year,
generation after generation, to the critical but hope-
ful eyes of the race at large? Give full rein to your
imagination in this connection! Here shall be
shown to our Mecca's pilgrims all of Man's achieve-
ments in the realms of science, art, government,

THE MOVIE'S NEW SIGNIFICANCE 13

industry, commerce, social betterment. Here shall
be revealed, also, the blunders, the failures, the
tragedies that were the price paid for these
achievements.

Here may you visualize the epic tale of Man's rise
from protoplasm to power, from an amoeba to ruler of
the earth. Here may a Chinaman study the past
uf his people through forty centuries of weal and woe;
the modern Greek glory in the splendors of ancient
Athens or appraise his compatriots' achievements of
yesterday; the Norseman, the Slav, the Teuton, the
Celt, the Anglo-Saxon, the Latin, the Jap, the Arab,
the East Indian learn from the screen what his race,
or nation, or tribe has done for or against and
they have all done both the cause of advancing
civilization. There shall radiate, if our dream comes
true, from this great centre where all knowledge is
visualized a light that shall grow ever brighter, as the
generations come and go, routing the errors of ignor-
ance and racial prejudice and making possible that
for which the great hearted of the race have so long
striven in vain, namely, the brotherhood of man.

Let me transpose two sentences from a timely book
from which I have already quoted. Says Frederick
Palmer on the last page of his enlightening volume
"The Folly of Nations": "The world of to-day
thinks through its eyes looking at the screen. Where

14 THAT MARVEL THE MOVIE

are our millionaires who seek worthy objects for their
benefactions?" And, from another recently pub-
lished book, "The Salvaging of Civilization/' by
H. G. Wells, can be most aptly quoted the following
pertinent excerpt:

It has become clear that the task of bringing about
that consolidated world state which is necessary to
prevent the decline and decay of mankind is not primarily
one for the diplomatists and lawyers and politicians at all.
It is an educational one. It is a moral based on an
intellectual reconstruction. The task immediately before
mankind is to find release from the contentions, loyalties
and hostilities of the past, which make collective world-
wide action impossible at the present time, in a world-
wide common vision of the histories and destines of the
race. On that basis, and on that alone, can a world
control be organized and maintained. The effort
demanded from mankind, therefore, is primarily and
essentially a bold reconstruction of the outlook upon
life of hundreds of millions of minds.

During the past eight years the human race has
undergone the bloodiest ordeal of the ages and,
succeeding it, the bitterest disappointment that
mankind has yet been forced to endure. A confusion
of tongues that made European diplomacy helpless
at a great crisis rendered a world war inevitable and
the lack of a common medium of enlightenment at
Versailles postponed indefinitely the establishment

THE MOVIE'S NEW SIGNIFICANCE 15

of permanent peace upon earth. Had Wilson, Lloyd
George, Clemenceau and Orlando been obliged every
morning at the Peace Conference to spend several
hours, before tackling the affairs of a disordered
world, in front of a screen upon which was depicted
before their keen eyes the immediate tragic past and
the deplorable present of the nations of the earth
the final outcome of their deliberations might have
been of greater value to the cause of civilization than
it has proved to be. Had the Esperanto of the Eye
been adopted as the official language at Versailles
could not the Conference have avoided a repetition
of the fatal errors that crept into its verdicts as an
evil heritage from its century-old predecessor, the
Conference of Vienna? Did not Wilson and Lloyd
George fail to take advantage of a new medium of
enlightenment that was denied a hundred years ago
to Metternich and Talleyrand? Is it not even
possible that had the cinema played an enlightening
part at Versailles that which is of real value in the
basic idea underlying the League of Nations might
be exercising greater potency in a quarrelsome world
to-day than it appears to be?

These queries and conjectures are put forward not
for the purpose of stimulating further controversy
regarding the details of what I have called above
"the bitterest disappointment that mankind has yet

16 THAT MARVEL THE MOVIE

been forced to endure/' namely, the Versailles Peace
Conference. They are thrown out merely to em-
phasize the comprehensive fact, recognized by
Palmer, Stoddard, Wells, and many other able
contemporary writers, that mankind, if it is to make
use of the errors of the past to avoid the pitfalls of the
future, must find a way to get great truths into the
mind of the race at large not through the lurid flashes
of the battlefield but by means of a universal lan-
guage. There is, and for an indefinite future there can
be, but one such medium of expression, namely, the
Esperanto of the Eye. Through it, and through it
alone, can Wells, and those who believe with him that
civilization may yet be salvaged, further that ** world-
wide common vision of the histories and destinies
of the race" that has become of late the one great
hope mankind can to-day reasonably cherish,

A Lighthouse of the Past, a university of univer-
sities, a fountain of all revealed knowledge inculcated
through a medium understood of all men, a Mecca for
the pilgrims of peace and progress from all corners of
the earth, forever adapting itself to the growing needs
of mankind for enlightenment, sending forth, year
after year, its polyglot graduates to carry its teach-
ings, warnings, promises to every tribe and nation on
the planet is it not a consummation to be devoutly
wished, a dream worth every sacrifice to bring within

THE MOVIE'S NEW SIGNIFICANCE 17

the purview of reality? If your answer to this query,
dear reader, is in the affirmative, the chances seem to
be that you will find the following chapters of this
book worthy of your earnest consideration.

CHAPTER II

THE MOVIE AT ITS BIRTH

Muybridge's Trotting Horses Edison's Kinetoscope
The Problem Eastman Solved The Movie as a Universal
Language A Toy for Children that Became a World
Power The Men Who Rocked the Cradle of a New Hope
for the Race.

19

CHAPTER H

THE MOVIE AT ITS BIRTH

FOR countless ages Man watched the birds in
flight, realized his own motor handicaps, and rele-
gated his hope of flying to a life which he might
eventually lead in the world of spirits. An insect
or an angel might have wings but the lord of the
earth was by nature debarred from the air. Then
somebody somewhere invented a kite, and for another
series of centuries Man played with a toy whose
ultimate significance he failed to grasp. He had not
as yet sensed the picturesque truth that the world's
most potential inventions have come to us, by a
process of evolution, from children's playthings.
The laboratory had its beginnings in the nursery.
The cave-man's children taught him progress.
/ Through suggestions from the kite, the Wright
brothers made air navigation possible. From an-
other toy, Edison's kinetoscope, has come the
cinematograph. And even its inventor, possessing,

22 THAT MARVEL THE MOVIE

though he does, the creative imagination, failed to
realize until recent years the startling possibilities
imbedded in the plaything with which he entertained
the cosmopolitan throngs that flocked to the World's
Fair at Chicago in 1893.

When Edison recently made a visit to the General
Electric Company's plant at Schenectady, N. Y., to
recall old memories and to forecast the future possi-
bilities of electrical devices, he found there still
standing two insignificant old sheds by the river
bank, the modest plant of the original Edison Ma-
chine Works of 1886. In amazing contrast to this re-
lic of the past there stretched away in every direction
factory after factory, covering an area of 523 acres,
and vouchsafing to the Wizard of Menlo Park a
concrete manifestation of the fact that in this age of
progress even the wildest dream may eventually
come true. But the contrast between Edison's
work-shop of 1886 and the General Electric plant of
to-day, astounding as it is, is, in its outward aspects, a
local phenomenon. To visualize it, you must go to
Schenectady, N. Y. The difference between
Edison's kinetoscope of thirty years ago and the
moving picture of the moment can be appreciated,
on the other hand, by a mere effort of the memory
and the imagination combined. The kinetoscope
has been relegated to the attic but the moving

THE MOVIE AT ITS BIRTH 23

picture has acquired as its domain not merely the
earth but the starry heavens and the realms of space.
Eventually the very outer edge of the physical
universe is destined to be screened.

Before recounting presently the amazing and
romantic story of the evolution of the motion picture
from a plaything to a medium unrivalled for the
promulgation of both good and evil, a Frankenstein
created by Man's ingenuity that must be given a
soul to make it safe for the world, it may be well to
pause at the outset to answer the query, frequently
put to the writer, as to why what seems to be merely
a popular form of amusement should be taken
seriously as a factor in the struggle modern civiliz-
ation is undergoing to save itself from destruction.
Perhaps no better answer to this question can be
given than is furnished by certain facts and figures
presented by Will H. Hays to the National Edu-
cation Association in session at Boston, Mass., in
July, 1922, in the following illuminating words:

s-

In a little over fifteen years the motion picture has
grown from a naked idea until to-day it is the principal
amusement of millions. It has become one of the great-
est industries in America, having an investment of
$1,250,000,000, with $75,000,000 paid annually in salaries
and wages, and $520,000,000 taken in annually for
admissions. In the United States, in the big cities and
in those ample-shaded towns and villages which comprise

24 THAT MARVEL THE MOVIE

America, there are perhaps fifteen thousand motion
picture theatres and in those theatres more than seven
million seats. Taking into account at least two perform-
ances a day, and applying the collected statistics, we
estimate that every seven days between Maine and
California, fifty million men, women and children look
for an hour or two at the motion picture screen. V

Nothing further need be said in regard to the
importance of the general subject we have under
consideration. A medium for expression which
makes its imprint weekly upon the minds of approxi-
mately one half of our population is worthy of the
closest study by the people of this country. Its
origin, its early growth, its present status and its
future as a universal language, destined, perhaps,
to be the greatest civilizing medium the race has
known, are topics the timely importance of which
can hardly be over-rated. To paraphrase an old
political truism, as goes the screen so goes the country
and, possibly, the race at large.

Briefly the early history of the cinematograph is in
substance as follows: By the revolutionary achieve-
ment of the Frenchman Daguerre, who discovered a
method whereby sunlight could be made to fix a
permanent image of an object upon a sensitized
surface, a door was opened showing the way to
the marvellous triumphs that the last century has
vouchsafed to the camera. But impasse after

THE MOVIE AT ITS BIRTH 25

impasse checked the progress of the pioneers of
photography. When Daguerre began his historic
career as the first photographer, an exposure of six
hours more than twenty thousand seconds was re-
quired to obtain a permanent impression of the object
photographed. Instantaneous photography seemed
at that time as remote a possibility as photography in
colors appeared to be but a short time ago. But the
time came when Chemistry, the mother of modern
marvels, solved the problem confronting the early
photographers. The laboratory found a surface so
sensitive to light that it could take and retain a
picture perfect in detail in less than one thousandth
part of a second a feat which in Daguerre's time
would have required an exposure twenty million
times as long. How important in connection with
the eventual advent of the motion picture was Man's
mastery of the time-element in photography is tersely
explained by Frederick A. Talbot, an authority on
the early history of the cinematograph, as follows:

The wonderful achievement of instantaneous photo-
graphy assumed at first a scientific rather than a
commercial value. Many a "snap-shot" is taken which
does not betray whether the plate has been exposed for
six hours or only one-thousandth of a second; but, on the
other hand, a "snap-shot" of a quickly moving object
may seize upon and fix an interesting characteristic
motion. It was this fact which led certain ingenious

26 THAT MARVEL THE MOVIE

minds to perceive in instantaneous photography a
valuable means of analyzing motion. If a single photo-
graph reproduced the exact posture of a moving object
at any given instant of time, they argued that a series of
such photographs, if taken in sufficiently rapid succession,
would form a complete record of the whole cycle of
movements involved, for instance in the jump of a horse
or the flap of a bird's wing.

Thomas A. Edison, in an interview given to Mr.
Hugh Weir and recently published in McClure's
Magazine, enlightens us regarding Mr. Talbot's pro-
position. Asked what first suggested to him the
idea of the motion-picture camera, Mr. Edison said:

The phonograph. I had been working for several
years on experiments for recording and reproducing sound,
and the thought occurred to me that it should be possible
to devise an apparatus to do for the eye what the phono-
graph was designed to do for the ear. It was in 1887
that I began my investigations, and photography, com-
pared with what it is to-day, was in a decidedly crude
state of development. Pictures were made by "wet"
plates, operated by involved mechanism. The modern
dry films were unheard of. I had only one fact to guide
me at all. This was the principle of optics, technically
called "the persistence of vision," which proves that the
sensation of light lingers in the brain for anywhere from
one-tenth to one-twentieth part of a second after the
light has disappeared from the sight of the eye,

In other words, the fact that the human eye is a
photographic camera possessing memory may

THE MOVIE AT ITS BIRTH 27

eventually save civilization from the cataclysm of
which contemporary prophets warn us, in that it has
made possible a medium of communication for the race
at large denied to us by the tongue.

Posterity will owe a great debt of gratitude to
Thomas A. Edison for various revolutionary
inventions but it begins to be apparent to optimistic
observers that perhaps his chief claim to the thanks
of mankind will be due to the initial impetus he gave
to the motion picture, vouchsafing to a bewildered
race the universal language of the eye, by which,
possibly, the brotherhood of man may eventually
function to overcome the evils that have darkened
our past. Says Edison: "I do not believe that any
other single agency of progress has the possibilities
for a great and permanent good to humanity that I
can see in the motion picture. And these possibilities
are only beginning to be touched."

Will it not repay us, then, to examine the
"possibilities" to which Mr. Edison refers, to the end
that we may take the screen more seriously than
heretofore, may regard motion picture theatres more
attentively and hopefully as being, perhaps,
civilization's one best bet? Unless, however, we get
a somewhat comprehensive view of the variegated
past of the movies "the permanent good to
humanity" that they can accomplish will not be

28 THAT MARVEL THE MOVIE

apparent to us. Let us, therefore, get on with our
story.

The early history of the cinematograph presents
a study in international rivalry. The United States,
England and France wrote names on the scroll of
fame upon which the scientists and promoters who
rendered motion pictures possible make their bid for
immortality. Edison and Eastman, Americans,
Daguerre and the Messrs. Lumiere and Sons, French-
men, and Muybridge and Robert Paul, Englishmen,
are the leading names among the dramatis personce
who took part in the first act of a drama that began
as an amusement for children but which now promises
to develop into a miracle-play regenerating the
human race.

Scientific technicalities have no place in a book
designed to tell the story of the movies from
what is called in newspaper circles "the human
interest standpoint/* but it is necessary to apportion
credit here for what the three nations above men-
tioned did respectively toward solving the initial
problems confronting the pioneers who raised
photography from a tortoise to a bird, giving it
pinions that defy time and space. To change the
metaphor, Daguerre, a Frenchman, rocked the cradle
of photography, Muybridge, an Englishman, taught
it to run, and Edison, an American, gave it wings.

THE MOVIE AT ITS BIRTH 29

Behold here, at last, a triple alliance that is changing
the face not merely of a continent but of a planet.
The mountains were in labor and brought forth not a
little mouse but a marvellous creature whose dyna-
mics for both good and evil can not be over-estimated.
The claim that England can put forward for
furnishing first aid to the movies bears the date 1872
and is summarized as follows by Mr. Edison:

1 An Englishman of the name of Muybridge, who was an
enthusiast on two subjects cameras and race horses
was visiting, at his California farm, Senator Leland
Stanford, who was also something of a "crank" on the
subject of blooded trotters. During the visit the merits
of a certain horse, owned by the Senator, came under
discussion, Stanford contending for one fact, and his
guest arguing for another. To settle the dispute Muy-
bridge conceived an ingenious plan.

Along one side of the private race-course on the farm he
placed a row of twenty-four cameras. Attached to the
shutter of each, he fastened a long thread, which in turn
was carried across the track, and then, to make sure of
obtaining sharp exposures, he erected a white screen
opposite to serve as a reflector. When all was in readi-
ness the race horse was turned loose down the track.

As it dashed past the rows of cameras the various
threads were snapped, and a series of photographs,
establishing each successive point in the "action" of the
horse, were automatically registered. When they were
developed they revealed for the first time a complete
photographic record of the minutest details of a horse in

30 THAT MARVEL THE MOVIE

actual motion, and Muybridge had the satisfaction of
using them to win his argument.

He would have laid the pictures away in his private
collection, but someone suggested trying the effect on a
Zoetrope (akin to the Kinetoscope) apparatus. The
result was so startling that it created something of a
public sensation. But, except as a novelty, there was
little practical benefit gained. To have made an actual
motion picture, lasting even for the space of a single
minute, at the rate of twelve exposures per second, the
minimum for steady illusion, would have required, under
the plan of Muybridge, seven hundred and twenty
different cameras.

Half a century has passed since that historic day
when Muybridge demonstrated that he had a better
eye for trotting horses than Senator Stanford and put
California on the map as a prominent centre of
motion picture progress, a position which that State
has most brilliantly maintained. During the fifty
years from 1872 to 1922, the period from Muybridge
to Griffith, the scientific problems confronting the
pioneer inventors of the cinematograph, and they
were many and difficult, were solved; and from the
crude pictures of a trotting horse in motion were
evolved the screen marvels of to-day. The high
lights of that crucial half century in the development
of the movies, a development that is not only inter-
esting in itself but full of encouragement to the
optimist who believes that the new and universal

THE MOVIE AT ITS BIRTH 31

language of the eye may be employed to warn
the race against repeating the errors of the past,
will be considered in the following chapters of
this book.

CHAPTER III
THE MOVIE'S FIRST STEPS

The Movie Learns to Walk George Eastman's Great
Achievement The Kinetoscope Goes to England John W.
Paul Throws Motion Pictures on a Screen London
"Bobbies" See the First Movie Ever Shown America,
England and France the Triple Alliance of the Screen.

CHAPTER III

THE MOVIE'S FIRST STEPS

No story of the evolution of the motion picture
from an experiment in photography to a factor in the
daily lives of millions of people would be complete
without a passing reference to the impetus given by
George Eastman, of Rochester, N. Y., to what was
at the outset a toy for children destined eventually
to challenge the untried resources of the laboratory.
Thomas A. Edison says: "Without George
Eastman I don't know what the result would have
been in the history of the motion picture/' For a
long time after Muybridge had demonstrated the
possibility of photographing objects in motion any
real advance in what was practically a new art
was impeded by the weight, fragility and general
inadequacy of the glass plates employed in camera
work. Gelatine, transparent paper, and other
substitutes for glass, were tried in vain. How
Eastman finally solved the problem by the use of

36 THAT MARVEL THE MOVIE

celluloid is explained tersely and clearly by F. A.
Talbot as follows:

In the early part of 1889 experiments were being made
to discover a varnish to take the place of gelatine sheets.
One of his chemists drew Mr. Eastman's attention to a
thick solution of gun-cotton in wood alcohol. It was
tested to prove its suitability to take the place of the
gelatine, but was found wanting in practical efficiency..
However, Mr. Eastman recognized the solution as one
which might prove to be the film base for which he had
been searching. He had had such a medium in mind
when engaged in his first experiments in 1884, which
resulted in the production of the stripping film. He
decided to utilize this solution of gun-cotton in wood
alcohol and fashion it into the foundation for the sensi-
tized emulsion, so that stripping and other troublesome
operations of a like nature might be avoided. He was
moved to this experiment because this solution could be
made almost as transparent practically as glass. Ac-
cordingly he set to work to devise a machine to prepare
thin sheets such as he required from this mixture. Success
crowned his efforts, and in 1889 the first long strip of
celluloid film suited to cinematograph work appeared in the
United States.

Thus had George Eastman removed for Thomas A.
Edison the one obstacle that had hitherto made the
latter's projected kinetoscope impracticable, and
celluloid had become the "Open Sesame" to that
wonderland in which the movie fans of to-day delight
to wander.

THE MOVIE'S FIRST STEPS 37

Like the telephone which was, in its early days,
looked upon as an interesting scientific toy not
destined to play an important part in the daily lives
of the people at large, Edison's kinetoscope was not
taken seriously by the crowds who found it but one of
many novel features combining to make the Chicago
World Fair of 1893 a success. They flocked to see it,
marvelled at its ingenuity, but failed, as did Edison
himself, to realize that the world had been enriched
by not merely a new plaything but by a novel
medium for influencing the destinies of the race, the
ultimate stupendous significance of which we, even
thirty years later, can only vaguely estimate. It is
amazing but true that, so little did Edison appreciate
the fact that he had invented not an ephemeral toy
but the only universal language yet vouchsafed to
the race, he neglected to obtain patents for his kineto-
scope outside of the United States. His oversight in
this connection had far-reaching results, the most
important of which historically gave to England
instead of the United States the honor of throwing
upon a screen the first "movie," as that word is
understood to-day.

That a Yankee notion should fail to realize its own
possibilities and be forced eventually to thank an
Englishman for placing it upon the heights from
which it was to win world-dominion is not an agree-

38 THAT MARVEL THE MOVIE

able reflection to the ultra-patriotic American, but
our story of the evolution of the movie must now
take us across the Atlantic and introduce to us Mr.
Robert W. Paul, electrical engineer and manufacturer
of scientific apparatus, whose workshops were located
in Hatton Garden, London. Reversing the process
of the "star of empire" it was Eastward that the
movie, in its search for development, had taken its
way. Cradled in California, it had learned to walk
in Menlo Park, New Jersey, and Rochester, New
York, and was now to realize its youthful possibilities
in the British metropolis.

Two peripatetic Athenians, one of them a toy-
maker, had seen, admired and coveted the Edison
kinetoscope at the Chicago World's Fair. They had
the European market in mind for the new plaything
and acted at once without looking into the question
of patents. To Paul, at Hatton Garden, London,
came the Athenians with a kinetoscope they had
obtained in the United States, urging him to manu-
facture duplicates with which they might supply the
English, and possibly the Continental, market.
Paul, however, had read his Virgil and heeded the old
poet's warning against Greeks bearing gifts. Sup-
posing, of course, that Edison had protected his
invention by English patents, Paul rejected the
proposition of the Greeks. Later, however, he

THE MOVIE'S FIRST STEPS 39

discovered that, so far as the English Patent Office
was concerned, he was free to manufacture kineto-
scopes for the European market and presently went
at it with a will and with considerable success.

But Paul was a live wire with a vision, as, years
ago, I clairvoyantly called Will H. Hays. He
realized that the kinetoscope was, like our dead
selves, but a stepping-stone to higher things. It
furnished a motion picture to only one observer at a
time. What Paul wanted, and what the world has
proved that it craved, was a device whereby thou-
sands of spectators could gaze at a movie at one and
the same moment. Muybridge had solved the first
problem in motion photography, Edison the second,
Eastman the third, and Paul was confronted by the
fourth, perhaps the most difficult of the quartet.

How this resourceful Englishman managed to
render the peep-hole of a kinetoscope obsolete and
replace it by a screen upon which countless eyes
might gaze is a matter of technical and scientific
interest, out of place in the story we are telling.
Suffice it to say that what he achieved in overcoming
the obstacles confronting him has given him a high
place on the list of inventors who, one by one, and in
widely separated corners of the planet, made possible,
during a half century of effort, the motion picture
of to-day.

40 THAT MARVEL THE MOVIE

We get from Frederick A. Talbot a side-light on an
historic episode in London that was the turning-point
in the career of Robert W. Paul, and of even greater
importance to the human race than any but a few
far-seeing movie enthusiasts have yet realized. Says
Talbot:

About three o'clock one morning, in the early months
of 1895, the quietness of Hatton Garden was disturbed
by loud and prolonged shouts. The police rushed
hurriedly to the building whence the cries proceeded, and
found Paul and his colleagues in their workshop, giving
vent to whole-hearted exuberance of triumph. They had
just succeeded in throwing the first perfect animated
pictures upon a screen. To compensate the police for
their fruitless investigation, the film, which was forty
feet in length, and produced a picture seven feet square,
was run through the special lantern for their edification.
They regarded the strange spectacle as ample compen-
sation, and had the satisfaction of being the first members
of the public to see moving pictures thrown upon the
screen.

Unfortunately the law-abiding fervor that
animates the soul of the London "Bobby" did not get
into the camera on that epoch-making night. Had it
done so, the early career of the motion picture might
have been less objectionable to the guardians of
morals on both sides of the Atlantic. But that's
another story to be told in a later chapter. It is
only just to say here> however, that it was not the

THE MOVIE'S FIRST STEPS 41

fault of Robert W. Paul that in their early years the
movies went, more or less, to the bow-wows.

Of Paul and his sensational achievement as the
father, or, rather, the step-father, of the movie
there is much interesting data extant, the leading
features of which are destined to hold a permanent
place in the history of the newest of the arts
developed by Man's genius. How, in partnership
with Sir Augustus and Lady Harris, he made of the
Olympia Theatre in London the first picture palace
in the world, catching the popular fancy with what
he called his "theatograph"; how he was eventually
in control of eight London theatres showing motion
pictures; how his contract with the Alhambra
Theatre for two weeks of pictures in March, 1896,
was stretched eventually to cover four years are part
of the early records of the screen and account for the
name "Daddy Paul" by which this ingenious and
daring Englishman is known in movie circles across
the water.

But even Paul's early successes with motion pic-
tures in the London music halls did not open his eyes,
or the eyes of his colleagues, to the possibilities and
permanency of the new form of entertainment they
had given to the world. Both Paul and Sir Augustus
Harris believed that the fickle public would soon tire
of what seemed to be to them merely an ephemeral

42 THAT MARVEL THE MOVIE

novelty, to be soon relegated, as had been countless
vaudeville innovations, to the over-flowing theatrical
lumber-room. One of the strangest features of the
history of the motion pictures during the period of
their early youth is that hardly one of their scientific
or commercial exploiters, from Edison down, had
anything like a full appreciation of the future that
awaited the screen, of the marvellous power for
growth that lay in the germ from which the toy
kinetoscope had sprung.

There are those who assert that the ultimate sal-
vation of modern civilization will be accomplished
by a triple alliance established by the United States,
England and France. Those who make this predic-
tion have in mind, of course, a trio of fighting nations
who, by force of arms, will eventually compel an
unruly world to come to order and accept the point of
view cherished by the conquerors. But is it not
possible that America, England and France, having
worked together as a triple alliance to perfect the
motion picture, have given to the race a medium for
enlightenment that may make another world war in
defence of civilization unnecessary? Is it not, at
least, conceivable that these three nations, whose
inventive and progressive genius made, through
Daguerre, Edison and Paul, the motion picture
possible may find, in time to save humanity from a

THE MOVIE'S FIRST STEPS 43

hideous cataclysm, that the screen, in a democratic
world, may so strengthen the influence of peace-mak-
ing diplomacy as to render eventually armies and
navies practically obsolete?

And in this connection it is interesting to note
that the claim of France to a high place in that triple
alliance which made the movies a tremendous power
for both good and evil in a perturbed world does not
rest wholly upon Daguerre and his invention of the
daguerreotype. No account of the evolution of the
motion picture would be complete without reference
to the impetus given to the new industry in "Daddy"
PauPs halcyon days by the Messrs. Lumiere and
Sons, of Paris, France, manufacturers of photo-
graphic apparatus, dry plates, etc. The Edison
kinetoscope had come within their purview in 1893
and they had realized at once, as had Paul, that a
motion picture that could have but one observer at
a time was merely a butterfly in the chrysalis. The
Messrs. Lumiere solved ingeniously, and in their own
way, the problem that had confronted Paul and are
entitled to a part of the glory that goes to those who
changed the kinetoscope from a peep-show for one to
a screen display for hundreds,

It was the French machine that brought Edison's
one-eyed toy back to the country of its birth raised to
the dignity of an amusement for adults. Through

44 THAT MARVEL THE MOVIE

the energy and far-sightedness of Richard G. Holla-
man, head of the Eden Musee, of New York, the
Lumiere apparatus, in the Fall of 1896, created
something of a sensation in the American metropolis,
To the Eden Musee, known to fame for its
presentation of historic personages of the past,
belongs the honor of making the path to glory easy
to the celebrities of to-day. Fame was now to
discard stuffed effigies as a reward for greatness to
use the screen to bring the exalted of the earth down
to the masses. The movie had been finally launched
upon a career that was to lead it toward heights from
which to-day it can see a future that, unless the
human race wantonly commits hari-kari, will be
unimaginably glorious.

CHAPTER IV
THE MOVIE GOES TO THE BAD

The Era of Fly-by-Night Speculation The Mushroom
Movie Craze The Screen's Youthful Indiscretions
Stupidity and Cupidity as Partners The Degradation of a
New Art Form Boy-Made Scenarios The Stage Versus
the Screen A Future for Both.

45

CHAPTER IV

THE MOVIE GOES TO THE BAD

WHOEVER asserted that "you can't indict a whole
nation" made a sweeping generalization that was
both historically and psychologically accurate. In
what I have said, and am about to say, regarding
the evil influences affecting the early years of the
movie I do not wish to do an injustice to those early
promoters in the new industry who refused to degrade
the screen, or to treat it as an ephemeral, wild-cat
speculation. There were producers, at the very
outset of the industry, who builded perhaps better
than they knew, and who, because of their refusal to
take the path of least resistance, are now, after a
quarter of a century of film exploiting, the most
successful and influential factors in the industry.
They prevailed where those whose pernicious activi-
ties threatened the rise, perhaps the permanency of
the movie, fell by the wayside.

It is regrettable, nevertheless, that the childhood
of the movie was so deeply influenced by various

47

48 THAT MARVEL THE MOVIE

pioneers who could not realize its power for good nor
foresee its future greatness both as an art and as a
moulder of public opinion, morals and enlightenment.
But the screen in its early years was dominated
largely by get-rich-quick exploiters, adventurers out
for the easy money flowing into the coffers of the
movie "palaces/' less admirable in most ways than
the hard-boiled treasure-seekers who flock to newly-
discovered gold-fields. There is something of the
romantic and heroic in the Argonauts who developed
California, the South African diamond mines and the
Klondike. They risked their lives in a great game of
chance and won or lost in a dramatic struggle in
which the winners had displayed necessarily certain
sturdy, sterling qualities.

The gold-bearing realm of the movies, on the other
hand, was invaded at the outset by a good many
speculative fortune-seekers who staked upon their
ventures nothing but their craftiness and their
audacity. They were about as admirable as a
bucket-shop gambler who, by expending a minimum
of money and energy, hopes for a movement of the
market that shall make him rich over night. The
movie, as an anonymous writer in Collier's Weekly
says, was, in its early days,

nothing that could justifiably attract a big investor, or a
real novelist, or a good actor. The first movie-actors

THE MOVIE GOES TO THE BAD 49

were for the most part of the old-time chorus-girl and
spear-carrier type; the great scenario-writers were the
shop-girls or office boys who were told of the sudden need
for stories, with no real training or knowledge of writing
with here and there a newspaper cub or magazine
embryo who stumbled into a new gold vein where stories
written in an hour could be sold for fifteen dollars; the
first investors were the clerks or advertising men or born
gamblers, usually in touch with the cheap end of the
theatrical world, who had a little money to invest in a
new scheme, provided it "looked good*' and "wasn't
too big."

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. I can still remember the thrill I experi-
enced when I first gazed upon human beings in
motion screened by a camera. What the photo-
graphed puppets did was not, at the moment, of
great consequence. The mere fact that they came
and went, walked, ran, danced before my eyes was
startling enough. I was fascinated by a scientific

50 THAT MARVEL THE MOVIE

achievement that was of itself sufficiently interesting
to warrant my presence in that audience of long ago.

But my subsequent activities as a movie fan in
embryo were of short duration. Like thousands of
my fellow Americans I came, I saw, but I did not
conquer in fact, I was repelled. For years there-
after I avoided the movie palaces, realizing that I
was temperamentally unfitted to enjoy optical
contacts with adultery, murder, theft and sudden
death. Nor was my sense of humor of a kind that
found anything to laugh at in squash-pie farce.

But even the cupidity and stupidity that had their
effect upon the screen in its earlier years could not kill
the goose that was destined eventually to lay some-
thing better than golden eggs. Though ignorance,
avarice and vulgarity for many years influenced, to
too great an extent, the movies, they could not
destroy its inherent power of regeneration, nor the
cumulative force exercised by the higher type of
producers which eventually made that regeneration
possible. How the screen was saved from becoming
the exclusive property of the underworld by the
survival of the fittest, or the most enlightened, of the
early promoters, will be told presently, but it is
interesting, at this juncture, to discuss for a moment
the question as to why its earlier career was so
deplorably reprehensible.

THE MOVIE GOES TO THE BAD 51

Reference has been made to the fact that in the
United States, England and France the first exploit-
ers of motion pictures were under the delusion that
this new form of entertainment was of merely
ephemeral value, that its drawing-power as a theatri-
cal novelty would soon pass away. Thus it was that
in this country small men, of small means, hastened
to "take flyers" in the latest get-rich-quick device,
and throughout the United States was observed
a mushroom growth of "picture palaces," financed
on a shoe-string and designed to collect "easy
money" before it became uneasy. There were
those among the pioneer promoters of motion
pictures who had read of the tulip craze in Holland,
or of the Mississippi bubble in France, and imagined
that the bottom would some day suddenly fall out of
the "movie boom," ruining those who had not
"cashed in" in time. They failed to realize that
humanity could not afford to lose an inestimable
boon that had come to it, namely, a new method for
the telling of stories.

There had existed, before the movie's birth, but
four media for the dissemination of narratives the
tongue, the play, the printed story, and the printed
poem. In the childhood of the race, tale-telling was
confined to word of mouth. Later on, the stage came
into existence, and mankind's craving for stories was

52 THAT MARVEL THE MOVIE

partially satisfied by the drama. The invention of
the printing-press gave to a soul-hungry race the
book, with its infinite capacity for telling tales, old
and new, to the grown-up children of the race.

But from Guttenberg's time to Edison's Man had
found no new medium through which his eternal
craving for stories could be assuaged. Literature
and the drama, despite the impetus vouchsafed to
them by the printing-press, are of aristocratic origin
and have failed to adapt themselves whole-heartedly
to the broadening tendencies and demands of the age.
Democracy needed a new approach to the romance of
existence, an approach that the millions could make
without too great a sacrifice, and, lo, the movies
blazed the way to it, despite the fact that their
advance guard was for the most part unworthy of the
high mission that chance had thrust upon it. These
pioneers had in their hands the fifth device which
Man has found for satisfying his soul's appetite for
inspiring tales, more universal in its appeal than the
tongue, the play, the novel or the poem, and many of
them degraded it, alienating in the beginning those
conservative, constructive forces in the community
which have only recently come to the assistance of
the screen.

' Wells and Van Loon, each in his own interesting
way, have told us recently the tragi-comic story of

THE MOVIE GOES TO THE BAD 53

Man's evolution from slime to Shakespeare. 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/) Says the producer who
recently made his public confession through the
pages of Collier's Weekly:

The directors were hard to deal with. They reflected
the one greatest fault of the entire industry: they knew
not that they knew not. Without adequate background,
for the most part, without adequate training or knowledge
of human character, without even a rudimentary philos-
ophy or idealism, or sense of real values, to qualify them
for leadership, they were given money and authority and
power and told to make films for the multitude. Sur-
rounded by minor sycophants, they soon came to believe
themselves almost above criticism. A sincere critic
was more apt than not to be regarded as an enemy.

There is something grimly ludicrous in the fact
that for years after the screen had proved con-

54 THAT MARVEL THE MOVIE

clusively that the race had finally found an effective
new method of telling stories more widely appealing,
more direct in its methods than the play, the novel or
the poem, the courts of last resort dominating the
output of the films were composed largely of men
without sufficient education to appraise the value, or
lack of value, of the scenarios upon which, in the last
analysis, depended the success or failure of their
ventures. They seemed to be ignorant of, or
indifferent to, the illuminating generalization to be
adduced from the history of literature that there is
nothing too good for the masses, that that which
survives in letters the blue pencil of posterity is the
best, not the mediocre or the worst. Had they found
themselves several centuries ago in the Mermaid
Tavern at London, they would have turned their
backs upon Will Shakespeare and Ben Jonson and
hurried out to the inn-yard to hobnob with the
stable-boys. And the tragic feature of the situation
lay in the fact that for a long period the autocrats
of the screen failed to realize that a scenario can not
rise higher than its source, that you can't get blood
out of a stone, nor a screen masterpiece out of a cub
office-boy.

But though these powers behind the films were for
a long period blindly, and often disastrously, in-
different to their highest interests in connection with

THE MOVIE GOES TO THE BAD 55

the sources from which they obtained the stories their
new tale-teller told to the millions, they displayed an
enthusiastic admiration for astronomy. They
studied the stars. Would a given matinee-idol
"screen well? 5 ' Would a certain popular actress
endure the searching ordeal of the camera? If they
would, the public would flock to the movie's box-
office even though the scenario writers had done their
worst. Followed an era of star-gazing upon the part
of the movie fans and of slow but certain enlighten-
ment upon the part of the directors and producers.
The latter discovered after a time that the fame
of an actor is no safeguard against the destructive
influence of a structurally poor picture-drama.
They gradually had glimmerings of a basic truth,
knowledge of which in the past would have saved
countless theatrical managers from bankruptcy,
namely, that, as Shakespeare sapiently remarked,
" the play's the thing ! " The telling of a story either
on the stage or on the screen is a justifiable venture,
as a very wise and rather jaded public knows, only if
that story possesses certain elements that make It as
a tale worth while. Even Douglas Fairbanks would
score a failure in a dramatization of the multipli-
cation-table.

But ordinary horse sense was acquired only slowly
by the movies. It is an amazing story of stupidity,

56 THAT MARVEL THE MOVIE

reckless expenditure of money, emphasis in the wrong
place, exploitation of stars out of their legitimate
orbit, appeals to the lowest passions in human nature;
of tragic failures and inexplicable, actually laughable,
successes, of cities built and abandoned, of fortunes
made and lost, of a new, marvellous, mysterious art
in the making this tale of the kinetoscope in search
of its kingdom. But it is worth telling for many
reasons, not the least of which is that the coming of
the screen into its own has had, and is having, a
disintegrating effect upon the commercialized stage.
What the ultimate outcome of this iconoclastic
influence of the movie upon the stage is likely to be is
a subject that must be reserved for a later chapter,
but it is enlightening, in connection with the fore-
going review of what may be called the fly-by-night
era of the films, to glance at what has been happening
to the American theatre during the years in which the
picture palaces have been rising from the slums to the
avenues.

Walter Pritchard Eaton in Scribner's Magazine
for November, 1922, says:

As a means of supplying drama to America as a whole
our commercialized professional theatre has broken down.
The reasons need not concern us here. They are many,
no doubt. One, of course, is the rise of the motion
pictures, which are cheaper to present and to witness,

THE MOVIE GOES TO THE BAD 57

and which enable the local theatre manager to keep his
house open six or seven days in the week. Another
reason is the increased cost of transportation. Another
reason is the complication of modern life, even in the
"provinces/ 5 so that the theatre, having to compete
against other attractions (or distractions), no longer
appeals so universally, or at any rate no longer finds all
the people with the surplus cash to patronize it at the
excessive modern scale of prices.

Later on in the essay quoted above its author
speaks of himself as one of those "who love the drama
and believe the movies a mean and stupefying sub-
stitute for its imaginative and intellectual appeal/'
If Mr. Eaton's opinion of the screen, as thus forcibly
expressed, is based upon its past, the past of a
Prodigal Son utterly unworthy of the fatted calf, it is
not, as the reader of what I have thus far written will
admit, without reasonable justification. But is not
the present of the movies encouraging, is not their
future promising? Succeeding chapters of this book
will, I hope, go to prove that Mr. Eaton is too hasty
in assuming that eventually the screen may not atone
for any seeming damage it may have done to the
stage.

CHAPTER V
THE MOVIE DEVELOPS A CONSCIENCE

Grows up in the Slums Used and Abused as a Money-
Getter Goes from Bad to Worse Will Hays Called to the
Rescue Pulpit, Press and Playwrights Thunder Against
it The Responsibility of the Public The Light in the
Darkness.

59

CHAPTER V

THE MOVIE DEVELOPS A CONSCIENCE

NOT long ago the good people of Stratf ord-on-Avon,
England, arose in their might, held a great mass
meeting, and decreed that Shakespeare's birthplace
should not be desecrated by the movies. Lacking suf-
ficient clairvoyance to realize that possibly the motion
picture of the near future, with its natural colors and
its synchronization of movement with the tones of the
human voice, may be destined to give Shakespeare a
new lease of life and a larger public than he has hither-
to possessed, the Stratford-on-Avonites were not
without justification for the protest they registered
against the more or less disreputable pictures that
threatened to invade a shrine hitherto dedicated to
the loftiest achievement the realm of the drama
can boast. But Shakespeare's birthplace will see the
day when its inhabitants will repent of the narrow-
mindedness they have shown as regards the movies.

It is not for us Americans, however, to jeer at
Stratford-on-Avon for its aggressive conservatism.

61

62 THAT MARVEL THE MOVIE

Our immediate ancestors blocked the wheels of
progress in many mischievous, if not laughable, ways.
The School Board of Lancaster, Ohio, adopted in
1826 the following resolution: "Such things as
railroads are impossibilities and rank infidelity. If
God had designed that His intelligent creatures
should travel at the frightful speed of fifteen miles
per hour by steam., He would clearly have foretold it
through His holy prophets." The advent of the
bath-tub, destined to be one of the crowning glories
of America, was denounced by our medical men as a
menace to the public health. Philadelphia, Pa., in
1843, endeavored by ordinance to prohibit all bath-
ing between the months of November and March.
Boston, Mass., in 1845, made bathing, except when
prescribed by a physician, unlawful, and, at about
the same time, Virginia put a tax of thirty dollars a
year upon every bath-tub in a commonwealth that
can claim to be the cradle of American liberty!

Whatsoever is new under the sun must fight for its
place in the sun. For centuries the printing-press
had to struggle for freedom against powerful restric-
tive influences that looked upon it as "an agent of the
Devil." The telegraph, telephone, bicycle, auto-
mobile and wireless have all had their bigoted
opponents, who feared that the broadening of human-
ity's contacts would become an increasing menace to

THE MOVIE DEVELOPS A CONSCIENCE 63

their own narrow beliefs and habits. Is it strange,
then, that the movie, a new form of art qualified to
make an instant appeal to both the good and the bad
in human nature, should have had, at the outset of
its career, a hard struggle to justify itself to the more
conservative elements of the community? Bad boy
that he was in his earlier years, the movie made it
difficult for a public largely puritanical in its origins
and tendencies to believe that the youngster could be
reformed, that he had in him untried and unmeasur-
able powers for upward progress, that he was a
prodigal son of Art and Science fated to exercise a
controlling influence upon the destinies of the
race.

However, there is an element in the make-up of
the American people that leads it, even at the
eleventh hour, to institute reforms whenever an
institution seemingly worth saving must either be
heroically treated or permitted to go completely to
the dogs. There came a time when negro slavery
must be destroyed if our Federal Constitution was to
survive. At an enormous cost of life and treasure,
the blacks were freed and the Union preserved. It
became apparent recently to the American public
that there were destructive influences at work within
our three most popular forms of amusement, that our
stage, our base-ball diamond and our movie-screen

64 THAT MARVEL THE MOVIE

were in jeopardy from internal perils, as were our
governmental institutions in the early sixties.

What Judge Landis is endeavoring to do for our
national game and Augustus Thomas for our stage
is, in a general way, what Will H. Hays has been
called upon to effect in the field of the motion picture.
For a quarter of a century the movies in America, if
not going from bad to worse had shown no marked
signs of repentance for their early indiscretions.
Cut-throat competition had long exercised its evil
influence upon the industry and the law of the jungle
had prevailed in its financial affairs. How this new
commercial activity, despite its unbusinesslike
methods, its apparent disregard of the economic laws
that are said to underlie all competitive industries^
and its seemingly happy-go-lucky indifference to the
multiplication-table actually forged its way upward
until it placed itself high on the list of the business
enterprises of this country is a marvel and a mystery
that only financial wizards could explain.

When Will H. Hays resigned as Postmaster
General of the United States to enter, in a position of
commanding influence, the motion-picture field he
became an important factor in an industry whose
growth has been one of the marvels of the world's
commercial history. It was no longer a peripatetic
gambler, out-at-heels one day and affluent the next,

THE MOVIE DEVELOPS A CONSCIENCE 65

but a vast business enterprise sufficiently prosperous
to afford the luxury of a general house-cleaning. It
is easier for the well-to-do to be respectable than for
the down-and-outs, and the movies had reached a
point financially when, without disastrous monetary
sacrifice, they could essay the task of shortening their
list of sins of omission and commission.

Going to the root recently of the new influences at
work in the motion picture realm, and of his official
connection with them, Hays said:

There has been some query as to just what this effort
which the industry is making at this time is all about. 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 associ-
ation 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 entertain-
ment value of the motion picture."

Later on in this book, we shall have occasion to
refer in detail to what Hays and his colleagues have
accomplished in their efforts to improve the tone of
the movies. But just here it is well to direct the
course of our narrative into the two channels referred

66 THAT MARVEL THE MOVIE

to in the clause of the producers' agreement above
quoted, following the flood of movies devoted to
mere amusement for awhile with searching eyes, and
later on making a survey of the rapidly broadening
stream of pictures designed for educational purposes.
From the latter, perhaps, it may be expedient for us
to go forward with some confidence toward a more
minute consideration of the dynamics lurking in the
screen for the furtherance of a method of world-wide
enlightenment that may eventually save civiliza-
tion from the disintegrating forces by which, both
externally and internally, it is menaced.

"The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world"
is a sweeping generalization intended by the poet to
be a compliment to motherhood. Whether it is a
compliment or a condemnation depends wholly upon
one's point of view regarding the world. If the world
is worth saving, the hand that rocks the cradle is
worthy of all honor; if it isn't, then motherhood has
been unjustifiably glorified. Believing, personally,
that the human race is not without many reasonable
claims to salvation, we turn curiously to the movies
in their capacity as a public amusement to see
whether, leaving their educational function for
further consideration, they display as a pastime
anything that looks like a gleam of hope for the
regeneration of the race.

THE MOVIE DEVELOPS A CONSCIENCE 67

Have we, in fact, cause for optimism regarding
the future of the amusement screen? We find to-day
the press, the pulpit and the playwrights denouncing
the shortcomings of the movies, chastising their
secret faults and their open transgressions; editors,
preachers, dramatists posing as Savonarolas at a
spiritual crisis in the career of a young but alarmingly
potent world-power. These are portents in the sky
that promise well for the future of the screen. If our
leading thinkers, writers and publicists, yes, and
picture producers, were indifferent to the sins of
omission and commission attributable for a quarter of
a century to the movie its case would be hopeless.
But it is worth saving, as the best minds in our
country well know, and the criticism that it is always
undergoing is a most encouraging phenomenon.

The regeneration of the movies must be both
through external and internal sources. A producer
who recently relieved his over-burdened soul in
Collier's Weekly puts the whole matter in a nut-shell
when he says:

We must have better pictures. And to get them we
need these two things: inside the industry, the higher
standards and leadership that can only come in with
intelligent capital; and outside the industry, the support
and encouragement of such good pictures as are already
made. We of the motion-picture industry who stand for
more intelligent pictures can only provide them if you on

68 THAT MARVEL THE MOVIE

the outside, in addition to criticising in no uncertain
terms the stupid films that offend you, will take the
trouble to hunt up, and go to see, and boost, the photo-
plays that are good enough to merit your interest. When
you do that we can have better movies.

CHAPTER VI
THE MOVIE AND THE LIBRARY

Its Rise from Mush to Masterpieces Its Debt to D. W.
Griffith "The Birth of a Nation" A New Way to Tell
Old Tales "The Three Musketeers" 'The Count of
Monte Cristo""The Four Horsemen 9 ' How Book-
Worms May Renew their Youth.

69

CHAPTER VI

THE MOVIE AND THE LIBBABY

DR. JEKYLL has begun belatedly to make his ele-
vating influence felt in the movies. Press, pulpit,
producers, are backing him in his fight against Mr.
Hyde. But the latter seems to be a psychological
cat with nine lives. The power which he has exer-
cised for evil in the realm of the photoplay for a
quarter of a century he refuses to relinquish without
a fight, and an immediate and complete victory
for Dr. Jekyll only the most optimistic dare to
predict.

Look at a list of movie titles recently compiled by a
somewhat cynical observer desirous of proving his
proposition that for one photoplay worthy of
approval the screen shows a score whose appeal is
only to either the depraved or the unintelligent:
"Only a Shop-girl," "The Lure of Broadway,"
"More to be Pitied than Scorned," "The Darling of
the Rich," "Deserted at the Altar," "The Woman
Gives," "Thorns and Orange Blossoms," "The

71

72 THAT MARVEL-THE MOVIE

Curse of Drink/ 5 "How Women Love," "From Rags
to Riches." Month after month, year after year, the
type of mind that considers Laura Jean Libbey's
novels admirable dominates too large a percentage of
the output of the movie studios. The dime-novelish
taint that was placed upon the screen at the outset
of its career has been until recently only a shade
lighter than it was in the beginning.

An old fight is being waged upon a new battle-
ground. Generation after generation the so-called
"elevation of the stage" has been a project dear to
the hearts of many worthy men and women. The
scope of the age-long engagement between the powers
of darkness and the powers of light to dominate the
drama has been vastly enlarged, and while the adher-
ents of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are still in conflict
for possession of the stage, their multiplied cohorts
are also fighting tooth and nail to put good or evil,
God or the Devil, progress or retrogression, civiliz-
ation or its opposite, in control of the screen. In
other words, both the stage and the photoplay are
outward and visible signs of an inward and spiritual
combat the outcome of which is to determine the
question whether mankind's future course is to be
upward or downward. For this reason the screen,
appealing to a larger clientele than is influenced by
the stage, and one more in need of the uplift that may

THE MOVIE AND THE LIBRARY 73

save humanity from a return to barbarism, becomes
logically an object worthy of the most earnest
consideration and study by all those of us who believe
that Man does not live by bread alone, that the soul
of the race can be saved if the various media for
impressing it are purged of their evil influences. If
it is true that there are sermons in stones, it follows,
as the night the day, that there may lurk within the
dynamics of the screen the possibility of divine reve-
lations. For be it said right here, the first universal
language will be capable ultimately of a saving grace
to the race only if it finds a message to deliver to
humanity that is not of the earth earthy. ItVtte
man behind the gun who wins battles. It will be
the prophet and seer and poet behind the screen who
may eventually bring about the triumph of mankind
over the powers of darknes^ But when? That is
the question. If those in control of the screen to-day
should see a group of seers, prophets and poets
invading their stronghold there would be something
doing most detrimental to the dignity of the inter-
lopers.^ The camera might, in fact, catch a film, to
be subsequently entitled "High-brows Bounced from
a Studio," that would tickle the eyes of millions of
groundlings. In short, the real power and glory of
the screen are still concealed in the womb of Tine.
But their advent and their triumph are inevitable.

74 THAT MARVEL THE MOVIE

Otherwise, a polyglot world would be doomed to go
eventually to the dogs a racial cataclysm too
horrible to be contemplated.

Let us look more in detail into the data which
furnish reason for the hope expressed above that the
screen may eventually fulfill its loftiest mission to
mankind. What is there in the phenomena at
present manifested in the realm of the movies that
justifies our optimism? Suppose we turn first to
D. W. Griffith's "The Birth of a Nation/' recently
dubbed by a noted critic "a celluloid Peter Pan
which will never grow old." Year after year this
early and revolutionary achievement of a far-sighted
producer finds a new and enthusiastic public, open-
ing the eyes, as it did at the outset, of despondent
doubters to the possibilities of the screen as a digni-
fied and uplifting interpreter of significant crises in
the history of a peopl$. Griffith's "Birth of a
Nation" was also the birth of a new era for the
screen.

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. I am

THE MOVIE AND THE LIBRARY 75

sure that I shall speak of an experience that came
to a large number of Americans, who had given up
the movies as hopeless, when I say that "The Birth
of a Nation" revived in me the conviction that the
screen has before it a great future, a splendid mission,
a message to deliver to humanity that may atone
eventually for its juvenile sins of omission and
commission. For the first time, so far as I was
concerned, this Griffith picture revealed to me a fact,
of which I had long been vaguely conscious, that the
screen was not inherently a medium for pandering
to the grossest passions in human nature, for visualiz-
ing merely the social phenomena that years ago gave
to the Jack Harkaway stories and the Police Gazette
their vogue. D. W. Griffith had put into concrete
form a conception of the movies as a vehicle of
combined entertainment and enlightenment that had,
for the first time, made all things worth while possible
to the screen. In that corner of the Temple of Fame
dedicated to the real benefactors of the latest, and
probably the last, method of telling great stories to a
tale-loving race, to the names of Muybridge, Edison,
Eastman and Paul must, in all justice, be added the
name of Griffith. And there are other producers
worthy of mention in this connection. Rex Ingram,
who gave us "The Four Horsemen ** and "The
Prisoner of Zenda"; William de Mille, whom we

76 THAT MARVEL THE MOVIE

have to thank for " Clarence " and " Grumpy "; Fred
Niblo, who screened ** The Famous Mrs. Fair " and
"Blood and Sand," come to mind as among those
who have seen, as has Griffith, the higher possi-
bilities of the movie.

Of course, we have with us always the carper and
the skeptic, the pessimist who argues that one
swallow doesn't make a summer, and that Will H.
Hays, capable of organizing victory for the Republi-
can Party and of improving our Postal Service, is
essaying an impossible task when he endeavors to
widen and make permanent the loftier scope that
Griffith and other praiseworthy producers have given
to the screen. But these atrabilious knockers,
short-sighted, narrow-minded, and unimaginative,
have failed to take a bird's-eye view of the varied
influences and enterprises now in action with the
avowed purpose of perpetuating the impetus given
to the better type of photoplay by the permanent
success of "The Birth of a Nation," X

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

THE MOVIE AND THE LIBRARY 77

lias been an upward trend of the movies that is not
merely encouraging but intoxicating? There may
be, here and there, of course, a man of letters, not
sufficiently broadened by his wide reading, who
considers the screening of an immortal novel by
Dumas, Dickens, Victor Hugo, or other wonder-
worker in narrative literature, a kind of sacrilege
which he will always refuse to countenance. To him
the Robin Hood of song and story is a revered per-
sonage upon whom Douglas Fairbanks has cast of
late something of a slight. Let Alfred Noyes write
musical verse about the picturesque bandits of
Sherwood Forest, but, in the name of the Great God
of Letters, don't allow the new art that the screen has
made possible lay profane hands upon a hero whcm
Literature adopted long ago !

Little good will it do to their ridiculous cause, of
course, for lettered reactionaries at this late day to
attempt to protect the library from the scenario-
writer. The screen has an insatiable maw for
dramatic tales, old and new, and more and more, as
time passes, will the telling of tales in the universal
language of the eye become a factor in race-enlight-
enment.

Nor is the screen really committing sacrilege in
making use of the literary achievements of master
tale-tellers. Since the movies first began to present

78 THAT MARVEL THE MOVIE

photoplays based upon the world's great novels,
there has been a constantly increasing demand at our
circulating libraries for the works of worth-while
authors possessing the narrative gift. The telephone
actually increased the vogue of the telegraph. The
wireless is enlarging the working-field of the tele-
phone. By the same token, the screen is not
narrowing but broadening the realm of letters. 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. Is it disloyalty to my
degree of Doctor of Humane Letters to confess that
within the year my youth has been temporarily
renewed for a few hours as I watched the screen
telling rne in a new way Dumas's stories of "The
Three Musketeers" and "The Count of Monte
Cristo"? Would I not be a hopeless literary snob
if I refused to admit that I derived pure and un-

THE MOVIE AND THE LIBRARY 79

adulterated joy from the unfolding before my eyes
of half-forgotten tales which had been among the
keenest delights of my romance-loving boyhood?
If this be treason, at all events it's honesty. 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.

While on this phase of my general subject, I find
that I can go conscientiously further than I have
above and assert that the screen may, in certain
instances, present an author's narrative with even
greater impressiveness than his printed book was
able to compass. "The Four Horsemen of the
Apocalypse" was, to the minds of many -competent
critics, a much overrated novel. It displayed not
only the merits of Ibanez as a story-teller but also his
grave defects. His tale was rather clumsily de-
veloped, and its interest was not cumulative. It is
hardly going too far to say that the author narrowly
avoided handicapping his achievement by an anti-
climax.

But the screen presentation of "The Four Horse-
men" was absolutely free from the shortcomings
above ascribed to the novel. Not only was it
marvellously effective in its appeal to the eye, but
the logical and dramatic unfolding of the basic story

80 THAT MARVEL THE MOVIE

was a striking revelation of the valuable service
that an expert scenario-writer may render, now and
then, to the professional writer of novels. For the
many outrages that fictionists have received at the
hands of the film-makers some atonement is offered
at times, and "The Four Horsemen" as a photo-
play proves that the pot may sometimes be unjust in
calling the kettle black.

The proof of the pudding is in the eating. 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. By turning your haughty
back upon a photoplay made from some famous
novel, you may conceivably lose an opportunity for
drinking again from that Fountain of Eternal Youth
which you, more fortunate than Ponce de Leon,
discovered one day in a library when you were still
a boy.

CHAPTER VII
THE MOVIE'S APPETITE FOR PLOTS

Ravenous for Screen-Food A Ghoul Exhausting the
Grave-Yards Contemporary Novelists Fail to Supply the
Demand A New Art, a New Technique and a New
Possibility Scenario-Writing To-Day and To-Morrow
Will tKe Screen Beget its own Hugos and Barries ?

81

CHAPTER VII

THE MOVIE'S APPETITE FOB PLOTS

THE need of motion-picture producers for new raw
material for the screen grows apace, and is con-
stantly harder to satisfy. Otherwise, the camera
would not at present be endeavoring to make pic-
tures of Einstein's Theory of Relativity. It is
rumored that Bergson, Freud and Coue have been
approached by hard-pressed producers on the subject
of their movie picture rights. The dilemma con-
fronting the photoplay promoters is more serious
than that which for generations past has worried the
theatrical managers. The appeal of the dramatist is
to tens of thousands of people, that of the scenario-
writer to millions. It doesn't require much of a"
head for mathematics to realize that the food-supply
of the screen is much more quickly exhausted
than that of the stage.

In so far as the libraries are concerned, the movies
have begun to exhaust the resources vouchsafed to
them by the writers of the past. Their fate is like

84 THAT MARVEL THE MOVIE

that which menaces our nation in connection with our
forests. For many years we have been cutting down
our trees without taking thought for the morrow by
providing for a new growth of forest where our
improvident axe has had its wanton way. The
screen has recklessly leveled both its giant sequoias
and its scrub-oaks and finds itself in sore straits for
timber that will stand the strain it puts upon it.

The younger generation of fiction- writers are not
furnishing the studios with material with which to
repair the gaps made as the romances of the past are,
one by one, fed to the capacious maw of the hungry
screen. Mark Twain asserted that there were only
seven original stories in existence or was it thirty?
and inferred that the latest novel by the most
original of contemporary writers must be, of neces-
city, a variation upon one of these ancient, basic
yarns. There still exists the suspicion that our
greatest humorist was "spoofing us/ 5 as an English-
man would say. But the output of fiction to-day,
both in America and Europe, leads to the conclusion
that our imaginative writers were not born to the
purple as master plot-makers. They repeatedly
shock us, sometimes disgust us, often interest and
amuse us, constantly furnish us with food for re-
flection and apprehension, and once in awhile startle
us by their brilliancy but, for the most part, their

THE MOVIE'S APPETITE FOR PLOTS 85

novels do not "screen well." They lack, as a class,
the absorbing narrative interest that makes tales
like "Monte Cristo," "Les Miserables," "Lorna
Doone," "A Tale of Two Cities/' and many other
masterpieces of the older generation of romancers,
effective on the screen. They seem to be influenced
by the fear that Mark Twain was right in his depress-
ing generalization, and that it is better to put forth a
novel with little or no plot than to be accused of
employing modern methods for telling an ancient tale.
From these modern fictionists the screen asks for
bread and they give it a stone sometimes a precious
or semi-precious stone, but not what the newest and
hungriest of the arts needs for its continued susten-
ance. This is the more remarkable because of the
fact that we are living in an age more stimulating to
the imaginative mind than any of its predecessors.
We are called upon to rebuild a shattered world, to
salvage what was of value in a dethroned civilization
and to reconstruct the affairs of mankind upon new
bases.

It is no figure of speech [remarks President Harding,
in his recent message to Congress], to say that we have
come to the test of our civilization. The world has
been passing is to-day passing through a great crisis.
The conduct of war itself is not more difficult than
the solution of the problems which necessarily follow.

86 THAT MARVEL THE MOVIE

In other words, the human race since 1914 has
been going through unprecedented experiences which
of necessity furnish material for the teller of romances,
the builder of plots, the novelist, the dramatist, the
scenario-writer, richer, more varied, more illumin-
ating than has been hitherto vouchsafed to
imaginative genius. But, as Virgil once grumbled,
"the mountains were in labor and brought forth a
little mouse." Science is going forward to-day from
one startling triumph to another, the creative
imaginations of its greatest minds rising to adequate
control of the new and splendid opportunities recent
progress has brought to them. But Art, especially
that field of it reserved to the origination of dramatic
tales, seems to be suffering under a blight that forces
it to give birth either to monstrosities or to weak-
lings, and to clothe its worthless offspring in garments
fashioned to delude the weak-minded into believing
that what is offensive to common-sense and good
taste is necessarily a child of genius. The screen,
with fame and fortune to bestow upon the teller of
tales, is forced to become a ghoul haunting old grave-
yards at night because the living are unworthy of a
great opportunity, because the fictionist of to-day
goes far afield in quest of strange gods instead of
worshipping at the eternal and inspiring altars which
gave inspiration to the master-romancers of the past.

THE MOVIE'S APPETITE FOR PLOTS 87

The situation confronting the photoplay producer
at this moment, as outlined above, bids fair to become
worse rather than better, unless some radical solution
of the problem dealing with the constant renewal of
worthy dramatic material for the screen can be found.
The most disreputable type of movie-drama has
fallen into a permanent condition of innocuous
desuetude, in so far, at least, as the vast majority of
picture-theatres are concerned. It has been re-
placed by photoplays of a much higher order, until
to-day the screen is engaged in giving to the pub-
lic splendid presentations of great masterpieces of
fiction and drama entitling it to approval and
sympathetic encouragement. But you can't eat
your cake and have it too. You can't feed an audi-
ence of several millions daily with the cream of the
world's imaginative literature without shortly resort-
ing to skimmed milk and eventually coming to the
end of your lacteal resources.

The point toward which we have been driving is
this: The movie, with its stupendous resources of
capital, its enterprising and ambitious personnel, its
right to believe, through its experiences of a quarter
of a century, that no obstacle can check its trium-
phant progress, is like an army that can conquer the
world only on the condition that its commissariat
solves the problem of food-supply. It is possible, of

88 THAT MARVEL THE MOVIE

course, that when the screen has fully mastered the
technique involved in color reproduction and the
synchronization of voice and action the photoplays
now attracting the movie public may receive a new
lease of life. We who have enjoyed, for example,
"The Count of Monte Cristo" on the screen, despite
the fact that neither color, sound nor perspective as-
sisted the development of Dumas's absorbing story,
would be inclined to give it our attention again
when Edmond Dantes is no longer clad in black-and-
white and has found his voice. But it is best to let
the marvels of the future take care of themselves.
For the present, we must confine ourselves to the
screen as it is, and as it seems likely to remain for
an indefinite time to come.

However, there must come a crisis in the future,
under present conditions, when the movie pro-
ducers will be hampered by a lack of screen ma-
terial unless they have been far-sighted enough
to provide against this contingency. There are
among them forward-looking exploiters of the lat-
est story-telling medium who have formulated, in
rather a vague and general way, a possible solu-
tion 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

THE MOVIE'S APPETITE FOR PLOTS 89

rather than indirect use of the screen. In other
words, the movie displays a growing tendency to
demand from creative minds its own special require-
ments; to turn, so to speak, away from the libraries
to the librettists. Eventually, it is safe to assert,
there will come a day when scenario-writers will not
spend a large part of their time listening to echoes
for inspiration but will beget screen plays from
internal instead of external impulses. In a not dis-
tant future, it is reasonable to predict, the movie
will, of dire necessity, develop its own type of
dramatic story-tellers whose fecundity may make
Mark Twain's assertion, quoted above, seem more
than ever humorous rather than accurate. The
movie must do this or run out eventually of screen
material, for the dead tale-tellers have little more
to offer it, and contemporary novelists have not,
from the picture producers* standpoint, risen to a
great opportunity.

Of course, the future of the movie, no matter
how glorious it may be, must be, of necessity, cir-
cumscribed, as are fiction and the drama, by the
basic limitations applying to human passions. Love,
hatred, loyalty, jealousy, ambition, generosity,
cupidity, philanthropy, selfishness, and the other
dominating motives impelling men and women to
beget the raw material of drama will not be increased

90 THAT MARVEL THE MOVIE

in number because the screen has developed a new
method for telling tales to a story-loving race. While
the widely-accepted generalization that human
nature never changes may not be true, it can not
be questioned that the scenario-writer of the future
will be forced to deal with the same manifestations
of Man's psychic make-up which engaged the atten-
tion of JEschylus, Sophocles, Moliere, Shakespeare,
and the lesser dramatists. But as the nations to-day
are striving to find a new way to pay old debts, so is
the screen seeking a new way to present the eternal
dramatic clash of old passions. As the kinetoscope
thirty years ago begot a novel form of amusement,
so is its successor, the movie screen, bringing into
being a new type of dramatic technique. The
scenario-writer is something besides a combination
of story-teller and playwright. He is experimenting
in a youthful artistic medium, whose resources and
possibilities are as yet only partially revealed, and he
has become a pioneer in a realm that belongs to a
kind of specialist bearing resemblance to both the
novelist and dramatist but differing from them in
ways peculiarly his own.

The future welfare of the screen, in so far as it is
confined to the amusement field, depends largely
upon how stimulating to men and women possessing
creative imagination this new method of tale-telling,

THE MOVIE'S APPETITE FOR PLOTS 91

rapidly developing its own technique, may prove to
be. Will the movie produce its own Hugos, Sardous,
Stevensons, Barries, perhaps, its Shakespeare
who, fascinated by the most democratic method yet
devised for genius to appeal to the masses, shall
eschew the old methods for telling new tales and
reach immortality by means of the photoplay
scenario? If you who have read the preceding
chapters of this book, believe, as does the writer, that
the only universal language yet devised by Man is
the most important contribution to the spiritual re-
sources of the race that has been made for centuries,
you will be inclined to hope that scenario- writing for
the screen may become an occupation worthy, in
succeeding generations, of the exclusive devotion of
many imaginative creators.

CHAPTER VIII
THE MOVIE AND THE CONTINUITY WRITEB

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.

CHAPTER VIII

THE MOVIE AND THE CONTINUITY WRITER

WAS it Brander Matthews, Henry Van Dyke,
Richard Burton or Clayton Hamilton who asserted
that any given novel must be placed in the category
of either the Impossible, the Improbable or the
Inevitable? Whoever it was, he helped to clarify the
thinking of any writer who may find himself dealing
with the topic of screen tales and tale-tellers, of the
movie drama and the continuity writer. Every art
has its own special sins of omission and commission.
The poet who tells a story in verse may take liberties
denied to the novelist relating the same story. The
continuity writer who places this tale upon the screen
enjoys certain prerogatives denied to either the poet
or the novelist, but he is also bound by limitations
and restrictions inherent in the medium through
which he is working as a raconteur.

It is not easy to fool a movie audience in regard
to the Inevitable. Jove may nod now and then
when he is engaged upon an epic poem or a romantic

95

96 THAT MARVEL THE MOVIE

or realistic novel but he must remain wide awake
when lie is writing scenarios for the screen. Scott,
Bulwer-Lytton, Charles Read, Dumas, Victor Hugo,
Thackeray may "get away/' to use a slang phrase,
with a lapse of memory, an injected anachronism,
even the reintroduction of a character who has been
killed off in an earlier chapter. The impressive flow
of their narrative, their charm of style, and the
tendency of a reader to forget minor details in what
he has already read of a tale, have enabled the great
story-tellers to commit strange, almost unbelievable,
blunders in the unfolding of their narratives without
seriously marring the value of their work. But when
a tale-teller is employing the movie screen he can
not afford to take liberties with the basic proposition
that seeing is not believing unless there is the logic
of the Inevitable in the sequence of the events
portrayed,

The above is asserted under a full realization of the
fact that for years the story-telling films tried to the
breaking-point the patience of their more enlightened
supporters by frequently sacrificing the Inevitable
to the Expedient, allowing the logic of events to go
to the bow-wows because a reel must be cut, or a
movie star exploited, or a scene over-emphasized for
the sake of its advertising value. Lincoln asserted
that you can't fool all the people all the time, but

MOVIE AND CONTINUITY WRITER 97

at one period it seemed as if the screen were stub-
bornly 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.

But times have changed. Continuity that is,
the spinal-column of a picture play, manages, for
the most part, to keep the cervical, dorsal and lumbar
vertebrae of the narrative in a normal juxtaposition,
with the result that dramatic monstrosities are
gradually disappearing from the screen. It is still
possible to fool some of the people all the time, but it
no longer pays, so far as movie audiences are con-
cerned, to throw common-sense into the discard
when the screen essays to tell a dramatic story.
Recently in a small city within a hundred miles of
New York the proprietor of a motion-picture theatre
spoke to me of a great change that he had observed
of late in the attitude of his audiences toward the
silent drama.

They won't stand for many things they overlooked a
short time ago. They demand both logic and accuracy
in our pictures. South Sea scenes must be taken in the
South Seas and African wild beasts must be filmed in
their native habitat or our patrons revolt. At the present

98 THAT MARVEL THE MOVIE

rate of progress, the next generation, through the aid
of the screen, will become so worldy-wise that even
county fairs will be made safe for the farmer.

There is much that is worth serious consideration
in the above quoted opinion of one whose professional
welfare depends upon the keenness of his judgment
regarding the trend of public opinion in connection
with the screen. Somewhat quaintly he gives
expression to the conviction that the movie and its
clientele react upon each other and that the general
tendency of this mutual action and reaction has been
toward the elevation of the screen and the enlighten-
ment of its patrons. In this elevation of the screen
the continuity writer has, of course, played a leading
part. The time has gone by when he could recklessly
substitute the Impossible or the Improbable for the
Inevitable and retain his professional standing. That
he has been guilty of sins of omission and commission,
has shown at times a lack of imagination, and has
frequently failed to conform to the axiom that a
story, no matter through what medium it is told,
must, to be effective, preserve to the end the element
of suspense is undoubtedly true. The fact is that
the ideal continuity writer is, as is the poet, born
not made. The technique of scenario writing can be
acquired by anybody with average intelligence but to
employ it for the highest possible purposes of the

MOVIE AND CONTINUITY WHITER 99

screen is to show the possession of something akin to
genius. Such being the case, the law of the survival
of the fittest, working out in the studios, has decreed
that though many are called to continuity work
but few are chosen in the end to lead the film drama
toward the heights to which it is destined to attain.

Suspense! Ah, there's the rub! To tell a drama-
tic 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, main-
tained 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.

That such a large percentage of picture plays
have failed to satisfy the demand of audiences for
drama that stresses the Inevitable, conforms to the
logic underlying real life, and preserves to the final
screen-curtain the suspense that it is the mission of
dramaturgic art to beget is not strange, therefore,
when we take into consideration the natural and
acquired powers demanded of the ideal continuity
writer. Furthermore, it must be borne in mind that
the scenario-maker has been, and will continue to be,

100 THAT MARVEL THE MOVIE

blamed for shortcomings of the screen that cannot be
justly laid at his door. He is more or less at the
mercy of the director and the film-cutter, a victim
frequently of exigencies against which his devotion
to the underlying principles of dramatic exposition
cannot prevail. A picture play that may be
effectively complete when presented in a metro-
politan theatre may be so eviscerated for provincial
use that the continuity writer, lauded in the cities,
is often forced to undergo unjustified suburban
censure. But, as is suggested in another chapter, the
comparatively new art of the continuity writer is
bound eventually to overcome its earlier handicaps
and, in its bestowal upon the race of a novel medium
through which creative genius can manifest itself,
will beget a type of super-scenario-maker to which
the screen's future splendid achievements must be,
of necessity, largely due.

The meaning of life Man doesn't know. Art is,
and always has been, Man's testimony to the fact
that he believes that life has a meaning and that
his quest for that meaning is not destined to be for-
ever futile. Recently the race came into possession
of what seemed to be at first a new toy, not to be
taken too seriously, but worthy, as it presently
appeared, of development as a most fascinating
addition to our recreational resources. But of late

MOVIE AND CONTINUITY WHITER 101

the public has begun to realize vaguely that the
screen is becoming something of more vital impor-
tance to mankind than merely a plaything that serves
only as a time-killer. The fact to which the pro-
vincial manager above quoted called my attention,
namely, that movie audiences are constantly em-
phasizing their demand for the truth, the whole
truth, and nothing but the truth possesses a signifi-
cance that is entitled to the most earnest
consideration. Is it possible that Man has come
finally into possession of an art-form enabling him
to come nearer to solving the riddle of the Sphinx
we call Life than has been hitherto possible?

There will be those among my readers, I fully
realize, who will feel that my inclination all through
this book has been to take the screen too seriously, to
overrate its psychical dynamics and to underrate its
gross materialism, to prophesy for it a future that
could be made possible only if producers became
archangels and movie patrons pilgrims to a shrine
where the soul of the race became no longer of the
earth earthy. Well, so be it. Perhaps, as regards
the subject in hand, I am allowing my naturally
optimistic liver to dominate my habitually pessi-
mistic brain. But neither I nor my critics will live
long enough to know which of us was in the right.
A conviction, nevertheless, has come to me of late

102 THAT MARVEL THE MOVIE

out of which I am sure that I shall never be shaken
namely, that when Man recently found a way to stop
living, now and then, that he might look at life, he
took the greatest step forward that he has ever taken
toward becoming a philosopher. He pauses periodi-
cally in these days before a screen and sees, as he
never did before, what manner of creature he is.
By so doing, he must eventually attain to a self-
knowledge such as he has hitherto craved but has not
known how to acquire.

CHAPTER IX
THE MOVIE IMPROVES ITS MORALS

War and Love Degraded The Crook and the Vampire
Pursuers and Pursued The Box-Office Finally Vindicates
Dr. JeTcyll The Photoplay's Marvellous Future Booths
and Barrymores Pass, Shakespeare Remains Survey of
the Screen as an Amusement Concluded.

108

CHAPTER IX

THE MOVIE IMPROVES ITS MORALS

FOR ages the interest of the individual in dramatic
episodes in real life was in direct ratio to his pro-
pinquity to the locality in which these episodes
occurred. Until recently, a civil war in China
seemed to be of less significance to the average New
Yorker than a Tong outbreak in Chinatown, just as
to his ancestors Aaron Burr's treasonable schemes
were of greater moment than Napoleon's efforts
at world-dominion. But the New Yorker has learned,
since 1914, that what happens in Pekin or Canton
may affect him more vitally than anything which
may occur in Mott or Pell Street. Against his own
volition he has become, perforce, a citizen of the
world and is compelled to subscribe to Terence's
dictum, sensationally delivered to the Romans
centuries ago: "Homo sum, humani nihil a me
alienumputo."

This change in the mental attitude of the average
American toward what may be called the real

105

106 THAT MARVEL THE MOVIE

perspective of current events, a change that has had
an effect upon the screen as a peripatetic journalist
by making it constantly more cosmopolitan, has not
as yet revolutionized its activities in its earlier and
more important r61e as a photoplay producer. 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 photo-
play 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. Why this deplorable situation continues
to exist it is worth our while to consider.

There are those among the erudite who assert that
the oldest of the arts is Poetry. Like Lord Byron,
mankind "lisped in numbers, for the numbers came."
Homer and his brother bards, Latin, Teutonic,
Norse, twanged their lyres, harshly or majestically,
as the case might be, in glorification of only two
themes, namely, War and Love. And so was it
later on with the troubadours and minnesingers,
they harped and sang the splendors and the mysteries
of combat and of passion. Long ago was Man's
belligerency set to word-music and the martial hero
owes to the poets the false and misleading radiance

THE MOVIE IMPROVES ITS MORALS 107

that throughout the ages has surrounded his name
and deeds. And when they sang of love it was the
love of a Lochinvar for a maiden not of a Lincoln for
a people.

The youngest of the arts, like the oldest, has con-
fined itself practically to war and love. But the
screen drama has been more reprehensible than
poetry in that, in its youth, it has chosen to glorify
the kind of warfare that is least worthy of public
exploitation, namely, the eternal conflict that goes
on between the lawless and the law-abiding, between
the crook and the constable, between the underworld
and the upper. Realizing that the scenario-writer,
like the playwright, must base a dramatic story upon
some kind of clash or combat, our photoplay pro-
ducers for nearly a quarter of a century have
permitted the screen to concern itself too often with a
crude type of melodrama that was untrue to life and
offensive to good taste, obtaining the clash essential
to its being by the same methods employed by the
dime-novelists of fifty years ago.

And as the screen depicted, in its quest for drama,
a type of ignoble, petty warfare, so did it indulge
in a debasing use of the passion of love in its early
efforts to make financial hay while the camera clicked.
The rake and the vampire, the seducer and the siren,
the vicious and their victims defied in the movies

108 THAT MARVEL THE MOVIE

official sociological statistics and gradually led a large
percentage of the public toward the belief, sub-
conscious, perhaps, that the respectable element
in our communities is wholly negligible, that the
world is made up almost entirely of the pursuers and
the pursued, with illicit love as the motive force.
The Eighteenth Amendment to our Federal Con-
stitution informed an amazed generation that we
Americans are strongly influenced by an inherited
puritanical strain; but while, as a nation, we were
adopting Prohibition, we were flocking daily by the
millions to gaze at photoplays sufficiently shocking
to draw our forefathers protesting from their graves.
Consistency is not a jewel possessed, as has been
repeatedly proved since Cromwellian days, by the
Puritan. When, in our beloved country, he gave up
winking at the bar-tender he betook himself to the
movies and winked at the bar-sinister. But his
conscience troubled him, and presently he began to
talk to his fellow-Roundheads about the shortcom-
ings of the screen. The Puritans had triumphed
recently over the saloon. Would it not be possible
for them, they asked each other, to eliminate pres-
ently from the movie the debasing features that
have disgraced its youth?

But where does liberty end and license begin?
At what point does free speech change into unlawful

THE MOVIE IMPROVES ITS MORALS 109

utterances? How many, and how drastic, should be
our sumptuary laws? "Where lies the golden mean
between ultra-socialistic paternalism and that ex-
treme of individualism for which the anarchists
strive? These queries, all of which exercise a dis-
quieting influence upon our national life, are of the
same class to which the problem now confronting the
producers of photoplays belongs. That the screen
must repent and reform, must see to it that its matur-
ity is less censurable than its youth, is a proposition
accepted by both the producers and the public. But
where shall the scenario-writer draw the line in his
effort to make the second quarter-century of the
movie less reprehensible than its first? It is a ques-
tion hard to answer, but there is one illuminating
fact that is gradually having its influence upon the
output of the studios, namely, that a clean and
decent photoplay is more likely to become a financial
success than one which appeals to the baser passions
of the public.

In this regard, history is but repeating itself. The
most successful American plays, from the box-office
standpoint, have been, for several generations past,
those which eschewed the licentious and the immoral.
And, by the same token, it is safe to predict that the
movie fans of this country will continue to prefer
Douglas Fairbanks in "Robin Hood" to Nazimova

110 THAT MARVEL THE MOVIE

in Oscar Wilde's "Salome." Leaving ethics wholly
out of the discussion, and placing the problem strictly
upon a business and financial basis, there seems to be
overwhelming evidence to the effect that an invest-
ment in clean pictures is safer than in soiled.

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. Until recently,
the producers, as a class, underrated the intelligence
of that head and the responsiveness of that heart to
the highest that is in mankind's complicated make-up.
One of them said to me recently that that cross-
section of our American civilization represented by
the young men drafted for the World War had proved,
as statistics showed, that the percentage of illiteracy
in this country is so great that a movie-manager who
produced a really high order of photoplays was
surely destined to "go broke." That his rivals in
the screen drama have successfully controverted his

THE MOVIE IMPROVES ITS MORALS 111

proposition by replacing, to their own advantage, the
old salacious and nonsensical picture plays by screen
dramas of a much higher type he would not acknowl-
edge. His mind is of that pessimistic kind that
despairs of the republic and of civilization as a
whole because Tom, Dick and Harry, Fritz, Tony
and Ivanovitch for a whole generation patronized
unprotestingly the sort of mixed sentimental slush
and moron-made melodrama which he, and his kind,
served out to them. He failed wholly to realize that,
despite the high percentage of illiteracy in the United
States nay, on account of it it was his sacred duty
to endeavor to raise the average of intelligence in our
country instead of sending out photoplays that
dragged it down to a lower level.

And "the play's the thing!'* as Shakespeare
remarked long ago. The screen idol, like the old
matinee idol, has been exploited and advertised and
flattered, foisted upon an easily-misguided public, at
the expense of the drama itself; and more than one
short-sighted producer has lived to regret the day
when he hitched his wagon, containing all his worldly
goods, to a movie star instead of trusting his welfare
to his scenario-writers. That there is light in the
darkness a close observer of the present tendencies
of the screen, so far as drama is concerned, must
admit, but it will be a long time before photoplay

112 THAT MARVEL THE MOVIE

producers as a class grasp the underlying and im-
mensely illuminating fact, broadly applicable to both
the screen and ,the stage, that, while Booths and
Barrymores corne and go, Shakespeare goes on for-
ever. In the last analysis, the screen and the stage
are media for the telling of dramatic stories and their
well-being, in the long run, depends not upon shoot-
ing-stars but upon planetary playwrights.

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. It has seemed
best to postpone their consideration until later on,
when we turn from the studios to the labora-
tories, from the scenario- writer to the surgeon, from
the movie hero to the captain of industry in our ef-
fort to visualize the wide and growing field that the
screen is conquering for its own. And the realm of
movie endeavor into which we are now about to enter

THE MOVIE IMPROVES ITS MORALS 113

is, to my mind, of greater interest and significance
than that which we have been hitherto investigating.
Mankind's toys do not possess for us the fundamental
importance of our tools and our test-tubes.

CHAPTER X

THE MOVIE MAKETH WHAT E3ND OF A MAN?

Pictures that Combine Instruction and Amusement
"Nanook of the North" Passing Phases of Life Preserved
for Posterity African Big Game Screened for our Descend-
ants President Harding on the Movie 9 s Possibilities
Visualization Civilization's One Best Bet.

115

CHAPTER X

THE MOVIE MAKETH WHAT KIND OF A MAN?

BEFOEE 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. "Nanook of the
North," depicting, as it does, the primitive but
heroic existence of an Eskimo endeavoring to find
shelter and sustenance for his family in the Arctic
regions is an outstanding achievement in this bi-
functional form of screen-picture. If, as Stefansson
asserts, the far North is destined eventually to lure
to its cold but stimulating embrace a much higher
civilization than has hitherto existed near the Pole,
Nanook and his kind are fated to succumb, despite
the sterling qualities they have displayed in over-

117

118 THAT MARVEL THE MOVIE

coining the handicaps of their cruel environment, to
adventurous pioneers from the South, bringing with
them a greater menace to the Eskimos than that
with which old Boreas has vainly threatened them
for ages.

Belatedly, but with thrilling efficiency, the camera
is giving to us and to our descendants pictures of
savage and half -savage life against which the irresis-
tible power of the regnant races of the earth has issued
a decree of annihilation. The polar seas, the islands
of the Pacific, the deserts, mountain-tops, jungles,
are shown to us on the screen as they are to-day, as
if this generation were frantically endeavoring to
assure itself that this romantic planet of ours is not
really doomed to become eventually as prosaic and
uninteresting as Main Street.

In illustration of the above, permit me to quote
here from an article of mine in a recent number of
The Independent:

The call of the wild and the rattle of a Ford car are
strangely incongruous sounds, but they have been dram-
atically brought together of late. Adventurous dare-
devils in various parts of the world are using the camera
to rescue from oblivion the vanishing fauna of the out-
lands. The defiant jungle surrenders unconditionally to
the tin Lizzie. I recently spent an enjoyable and enlight-
ening evening watching H. A. Snow hunting big game
in Africa with his gun and his photographic apparatus

WHAT KIND OF A MAN? 119

and repeatedly looking death in the face that posterity
might possess a picture of the animal life under the
equator that is destined presently to become obsolete.
The lion, rhinoceros, elephant, giraffe, zebra, hippo-
potamus, wild buck, ostrich, baboon, camel, gnu were
ours for a time to study at close range, revealed to us in
their native habitat without the necessity upon our part
of spending months in constant peril from heat, snakes,
carnivora, fever, and other enemies which war against
the white man in African wilds.

As I watched the screen that evening, ray memory
went back nearly half a century. It brought to my mind
the picture of a boy curled up in a library chair and ab-
sorbed in the pages of Paul du Chaillu's book "Under
the Equator/' a book whose revelations of wild life in
Africa subjected the author to a period during which he
was suspected of being a Baron Munchausen, or, as we
would say to-day, a Dr. Cook. There were skeptics who
bluntly asserted that the French explorer had evolved
the gorilla out of his own inner consciousness.

Eventually, of course, du Chaillu's veracity was estab-
lished; but, victim as he was of the limitations of his
generation, he could not at first furnish to the public
convincing proof that his tales of adventure and dis-
covery in the African jungle were founded upon fact.
To-day the explorer, arctic or tropical, returns to civili-
zation as to Missouri prepared to show all scoffers that
their incredulity is ridiculous. Defiantly he has turned
a crank while sudden death from a polar bear or a jungle
elephant is close at hand; and eventually the imminence
of the peril, the suspense of a tragic moment, are within
the power of the screen to transmit to wide-eyed audi-
ences safely seated twenty thousand miles away from the
scene of the thrilling episode I

120 THAT MARVEL THE MOVIE

As the camera is more thorough and convincing in its
revelations of the drama of the jungle than is the pen
so is it more extravagant in its use of the material that
makes the wild life of the outlands interesting to the
untravelled public. There may remain untamed animals
in Africa that the Snows have not effectively screened,
but a fair acquaintance with equatorial fauna leads me
to the conclusion that the camera can afford now to rest
upon its laurels in so far as the creatures of the jungle
are concerned.

Omnivorous, insatiable, the screen is sending out its
camera-men to all the corners of the known and the
unknown earth, to the end that you and I may learn
eventually every secret that our planet has hitherto
concealed. The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but
the truth that's why Man, who has become a peri-
patetic photographer, is venturing to lands afar. And
the public is glad to confer applause, and more material
rewards, upon those who mirror for us some dramatic
phase of life upon earth today especially if, as is the
case with the big game of Africa, it bids fair to pass
presently forever out of existence.

President Harding, whose present exalted position
gives him unequalled facilities for observing the
potential tendencies of the day, has become an
enthusiastic believer in the uplifting possibilities that
the screen has begun to manifest. Much of what we
study in our youth, says the President, might be

made dramatically interesting if we could see it. Next
in value to studying history by the procedure of living
through its epochs, its eras and its periods, would be to

WHAT KIND OF A MAN? 121

see its actors and evolutions presented before our eyes.
If we are to understand the present and attempt to con-
jecture the future, we need to know a good deal about
the backgrounds of the past. The Europe of the later
middle ages, of the period just before and at the begin-
ning of the Renaissance, could be wonderfully portrayed
in a series of pictures dramatizing "The Cloister and the
Hearth." I do not know whether anybody reads "The
Cloister and the Hearth'* any more, but I am sure that
one family with which I am pretty well acquainted would
be glad to patronize a combination of picture serials and
really intelligent talks with this story as the basis and
with the purpose of giving a real conception and under-
standing of the Europe of that epoch.

Mr. Harding has grasped fully the significance of
the motion picture in connection with the past, pres-
ent, and future of the race. He has suggested the
screening of Wells's "Outline of History" and of
Van Loon's "Story of Mankind/' and has called
attention to the possibility that, under the direction
of the Federal Bureau of Standards, films might be
taken illustrating the fundamental principles of the
science of geology. Realizing, as he does, that igno-
rance is the enemy democracy, in order to survive,
must overcome, and that the surest safeguard to
our institutions is enlightenment, President Hard-
ing has thrown himself wholeheartedly into that
growing movement which is destined eventually,
if Fate is kind to us, to make the motion picture

122 THAT MARVEL THE MOVIE

worthy in its achievements of the splendid possibili-
ties that are within its grasp.

That potent, pushing, perverse offspring of the
printing-press, the newspaper, has begun to realize
that it can be no longer exclusively typographical
but must become in part photographical. It is fol-
lowing in the footsteps of the screen in making use
of the only universal language the ingenuity of Man
has yet devised. A recent editorial in the New York
Tribune says:

The Tribune was the first newspaper to adapt for
journalistic purposes the printing of the half-tone photo-
graph. The innovation started the rising flood of news-
in-pictures which is so distinctive a feature of the Amer-
ican press of 1923. . . . Some of the events of the day's
news can be visualized for the reader simply by the
printed word. Others need the aid of a picture. Others
still find presentation possible in a picture alone. . . .
The universal appeal of pictures can be taken advantage
of for sound informative and educational purposes, in-
stead of for scandal and filth. Indeed, it should be so
used, as the London Times and other conservative news-
papers have realized through their daily pages of pictures.

"The universal appeal of pictures!" Mankind
from the days when our ancestors sketched reindeer
upon the walls of their caves has felt their appeal,
but only recently has its universality become of
crucial significance to the race. The printing-press,

WHAT KIND OP A MAN? 123

as we realized despairingly in 1914, has failed to save
civilization from its recurrent attempts at suicide.
Men read and talked, and, then, as had their illiterate
progenitors, grasped their weapons and went to
fighting. Neither from books nor from debates has
mankind in the mass grasped that enlightenment
which often comes to individuals but which is not
sufficiently wide-spread and compelling to defend
the race from constant reversions to brutish
manifestations.

And now comes visualization in movie theatres,
in newspapers, in schools, colleges, churches to
mould, for good or evil, the plastic soul of Man. What
will the harvest be? Who can say? Francis Bacon
asserted that "reading maketh a full man, conference
a ready man, and writing an exact man." Something
more, as the centuries have proved, is necessary to
make the human race what it should be. Is it not
barely possible that some Bacon of the future will
exultingly exclaim: "The screen maketh a civilized
man!"?

CHAPTER XI

THE MOVIE AND THE COMMITTEE ON PUBLIC
RELATIONS

The Screen Wins Powerful Friends Societies Repre-
senting Sixty Million Americans Endorse it Its Power for
Good Recognized by Altruists The Movie's Allies Mobi-
lized The New Art is Backed by Old Philanthropies.

125

CHAPTER XI

THE MOVIE AND THE COMMITTEE ON PUBLIC RELATIONS

THE conviction expressed at the end of the preced-
ing chapter that in the screen civilization has finally
found a medium through which Man's loftiest ideals,
hopes, dreams, visions and good resolutions may find
a way to fulfillment has been vouchsafed a new
mison d'etre of late, the importance of which can
not be overrated. The existing reasons for the belief
that the movie is to be a weapon wielded in the cause
of righteousness against the powers of darkness were
greatly increased in number and force when represen-
tatives of sixty national civic, educational, social and
religious organizations functioning in this country
met, at the invitation of Will H. Hays, in June of
1922, to discuss with him the problems of the motion
picture industry and to devise ways and means for
bringing about a better situation therein. The out-
come of this gathering was the formation of the
Committee on Public Relations, for "the establish-
ment of a channel of intercoTnTnuiucatioa between

128 THAT MARVEL THE MOVIE

the agencies Instrumental in form ing and interpreting
public opinion and the motion picture industry."
This committee, cooperating with the organization
known as the Motion Picture Producers and Distribu-
tors of America, Inc., is wielding the influence
begotten of a combined membership of 60,000,000
people, scattered throughout the whole country, in
behalf of

the increased use of motion pictures as a force for good
citizenship and a factor in social benefit; for the develop-
ment of more intelligent cooperation between the public
and the motion picture industry; to aid the cooperative
movement instituted between the National Education
Association and the motion picture producers for the
making of pedagogic films and employing them effec-
tively in schools; to encourage the effort to advance the
usefulness of motion pictures as an instrument of inter-
national amity by correctly portraying American life,
ideals and opportunities in pictures sent abroad and by
properly depicting foreigners and foreign scenes in pic-
tures presented here; to further, in general, all con-
structive methods for bringing about a sympathetic
interest in the attainment and maintenance of high
standards of art, entertainment, education and morals
in motion pictures.

Not the least important of the appendices to be
found at the end of this book is that which gives a
list of the national organizations composing this
Committee on Public Relations. It is in effect a

COMMITTEE ON PUBLIC RELATIONS 129

record of a great mobilization of the uplifting agen-
cies of the nation on the side of righteousness and
progress in a struggle between good and evil for
control of the newest and most powerful of the
vehicles at man's disposal for influencing his fellow-
man. As has been demonstrated in another chap-
ter, the screen has become the most effective and
wide-reaching of all the media yet devised by human
ingenuity for influencing the heart, mind and soul
of the race. Realizing this, the organizations referred
to above (listed with approximate fullness in the
appendix), representing more than half the entire
population of the United States, have thrown the
weight of their enormous influence upon the side of
those builders of a better civilization who are striving
to make the motion picture more worthy of the
important place it has so recently assumed in the
life of the world. Never before in the history of the
race has such a unification of effort by the great
altruistic organizations of a nation been made in
times of peace, and for the purposes of peace, as that
which was begun a year and a half ago by the Com-
mittee on Public Relations. What the screen could
do to improve the social order was recognized at the
very moment it was seen what the social order could
do to improve the screen and, lo, there came about
an alliance that, to those who grasped its full signi-

130 THAT MARVEL THE MOVIE

ficance, stood revealed as one of the greatest forward
steps civilization has ever taken. The organized
powers of uplift and enlightenment had seen that
a new, untried, undisciplined force, pregnant of both
good and evil, had come into the world and they had
rallied to its assistance at the psychological moment,
to the end that the future of the screen, and therefore
of the human race itself, might present a more satis-
factory aspect than it has hitherto exhibited.

Says Mr. Jason S. Joy, Executive Secretary of the
Committee on Public Relations:

I am often asked the following three progressive ques-
tions First, why are the organizations affiliated with
the Committee on Public Relations interested in the
motion picture? Second, why are they working with the
motion picture people rather than against them? Third,
why do they cooperate with the so-called "old-line"
companies rather than exclusively with independent
companies?

I am able to answer these questions to my own satis-
faction. Admitting that motion pictures exercise a power-
ful influence for good or evil, it is to the selfish interests
of these organizations to make motion pictures an in-
fluence for good. As to the second query, let me say that
constructive cooperation is capable of greater results
than destructive criticism, particularly when it is accom-
panied by a willingness to privately but fearlessly con-
demn evil practices when they are found to exist. It
seems to me wholly foolish and futile to cry out against
any practice unless at the same time you are able to

COMMITTEE ON PUBLIC RELATIONS 131

suggest a solution or at least an attempt at a solution
of the problem. I am convinced that one of the most
harmful habits of our day is the one which has been
adopted by certain amateur and professional reformers
who with half truths loudly condemn the motion picture
industry and everybody connected with it. My answer
to the third query is this: The Committee on Public
Relations is working with the so-called old line com-
panies because these companies have demonstrated their
ability to make the kind of pictures the public has
hitherto demanded and have, therefore, manifested their
knowledge of the technique and business methods of
making pictures; because, also, they have demonstrated
and expressed their desire to attain the ends for which
the Committee is working, and because they have asked
the Committee to cooperate with them, and are cooper-
ating with the CommitteeJ Within parenthesis, let me
say, that there pass by me at the cross-roads where I
sit no end of Sir Galahads rushing forth to conquer the
worJd. These persons are usually well-equipped with
ideals and enthusiasm and often with money, but because
they lack the technical ability which results from long
experience they come back with little to show for their
efforts except a trail of broken promises, unpaid debts,
and lost ideals. Our best and only hope for the future
lies with the well established companies who have proved
their ability in their profession.

The human race moves forward and upward
through the efforts of those who know how to per-
form the miracle of hitching their wagon to a star
while, at the same time, they keep their feet upon the
earth. Taking at random a few of the sixty organiza-

132 THAT MARVEL THE MOVIE

tions comprising the Committee on Public Relations
we come upon such sharply contrasted bodies as the
Society of Colonial Dames and the General Federa-
tion of Women's Clubs; the Academy of Political
Science and the Salvation Army; the Girls Friendly
Society and the Associated Advertising Clubs of the
World; The National Council of Catholic Women
and the Young Men's Hebrew Association; the
American Federation of Labor and the Boy Scouts
of America, etc. Now all these societies, fraternities,
sororities, or whatsoever they may be, helping by
their membership to make up the 60,000,000 Ameri-
cans who have come officially to the support of the
motion picture industry, have, each and every one
of them, reached a position of power and success by
wasting no time in endeavoring f utilely to put salt on
the tail of the millennium but by combining loyalty
to high ideals with practical efficiency in dealing with
this world as it manifests itself to the worker who
dreams and the dreamer who works. In other words,
our great altruistic organizations discovered at the
outset of their respective careers that the ideal and
the practical are necessary to each other but, to
produce results, must plan how to make constant
compromises with each other for the sake of actual
progress.
The motion picture producers have gone through,

COMMITTEE ON PUBLIC RELATIONS 133

as an organization, the same experience that has
come to the Colonial Dames, the Salvation Army,
the Boy Scouts, or any one of the organizations hold-
ing membership on the Committee of Public Rela-
tions. They have learned by experiment that prog-
ress is made possible only through a working adjust-
ment between idealism and realism. If idealism is
allowed to become rainbow-chasing, or realism to
become revolting, the balance that assures a steady
movement in the right direction is destroyed and
disaster results. Every earthly institution that sur-
vives has been forced to fight its way to permanency
against the disintegrating influence of its own extrem-
ists, its ultra-conservatives and ultra-radicals. In
the long run, it is the middle of the road that leads
nations and institutions into safe environments.

The great question at issue in connection with the
motion picture industry, as it is with any given line
of human endeavor, is this: Is its course upward or
downward, will its future be free from the short-
comings of its past? Let me say here, very frankly,
that had I not felt months ago that an affirmative
answer to these queries was not merely justified but
had been made imperative by facts and figures this
book would never have been written. But as the
work has progressed, and I have been obliged to look
at the motion picture field through both a telescope

134 THAT MARVEL THE MOVIE

and a microscope, I have been convinced by an over-
whelming mass of evidence that the general trend of
the newest of the arts is, in spite of all that I have
said about its youthful indiscretions, in the right
direction.

It can never attain perfection nothing that is
man-made can hope to do that. But the movie,
whatever may be said against it by its detractors, is
constantly making progress toward a commanding
position where, it is conceivable, it may eventually
confer upon mankind the inestimable boon of which
the author, as stated in the first chapter of this book,
has had the audacity to dream. And be it said just
here that if the full dynamics of the screen as a world-
civilizer are completely developed, eventually both
producers and public will owe a great debt of grati-
tude to the Committee on Public Relations.

CHAPTER XII

THE MOVIE AS A PEDAGOGUE

The Entertainer Becomes an Instructor Schools and
Colleges make the Screen a Professor Visual Instruction
more Effective than Text-Books Educational Films as
Teachers of History The Screen an Ally to Historical
Accuracy Can it Save the Race from a Threatened
Cataclysm ?

135

CHAPTER XII

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 enter-
prises that make for the betterment of the race.
Modern scientists, philanthropists, statesmen, edu-
cators, sociologists, uplifters of all kinds, may
appropriately paraphrase Robert Burns by exclaim-
ing "a screen's amang ye takin* notes/'

Visual education that is, intellectual stimulus
through motion pictures has made amazing prog-
ress in our schools and colleges during the past
few years. It has been proved by statistics, based
upon the results of examinations, that students
instructed by screen-pictures obtain higher marks
than those who have been seeking knowledge on a
given subject only through text-books.

137

138 THAT MARVEL THE MOVIE

Evidence upon this point has become of late
cumulative and conclusive. Data to show that the
Esperanto of the Eye is a more efficient instructor
than either the spoken or the printed word is ours in
abundance, but only one or two striking proofs of
the proposition will suffice for our present purposes.
Two years ago Professor Joseph J. Weber, of the
University of Kansas, conducted a series of enlight-
ening tests in Public School No. 62, New York City,
with the following results:

Four hundred and eighty-five pupils in the school
were examined as to their knowledge of geography.
It was found that their average rating as a class was
only 31.8. Oral teaching, without the aid of correlated
motion picture films, raised this average presently
to 45.5, a gain of 13.7. The films were then used
after the oral lessons and an average of 49.9 was
obtained, a gain of 18.1. By the employment of the
films before instead of after the oral instructions the
average percentage was increased to 52.7, a gain
of 20.9.

At about the same time, Professor J. W. Sheppard,
of the University of Oklahoma, made an experiment
in visual education at a high-school in Madison, Wis.
Abstract and concrete subjects were taught to a
group of pupils of ordinary intelligence by means of
the films only, to a second group by a superior in-

THE MOVIE AS A PEDAGOGUE 139

structor only, and to a third group by an average
instructor only. In a searching examination subse-
quently the pupils taught by the films scored an
average of 74.5, those taught by the superior in-
structor an average of 66.9, and those by the inferior
instructor an average of 61.3. In this game of
twenty questions the screen had won the pot by a
safe margin.

The significance of the above is revealed in its
entirety when we realize that even the movie as a
purveyor of amusement has not wholly neglected its
obligations as a pedagogue. The millions of Ameri-
cans who daily watch the screen in quest of recrea-
tion are, willy nilly, obliged to absorb something in
the way of added knowledge. Geography, history
both ancient and contemporary, botany, astron-
omy, physics, ethnology, archaeology and other edu-
cational sources are tapped, even in the least pre-
tentious movie theatres, to stir the imaginations and
enlarge the general knowledge of their patrons. It
is safe to say that the American people, even though
our schools and colleges had not welcomed the film
as an aid to education, would have vastly increased
their information regarding our planet and the his-
tory and achievements of the human race merely
through the homage that the amusement screen has
paid, perforce, to erudition.

140 THAT MARVEL THE MOVIE

But what the recreational screen has done casually
and inadequately for the dissemination of general
knowledge, is, of course, negligible compared with
the influence that has been exerted by the educa-
tional films whose use in the class-rooms of our
schools and colleges has been for some years past
constantly on the increase. The growing impor-
tance of the film as an adjunct to instruction is
shown by the fact that its progress has not been left
to chance, as was the evolution of the recreational
movie. The realm of visual education has been taken
over by men and organizations whose qualifications
for the task they have assumed assure to the screen
in the class-room a great and splendid future. Con-
cerning this matter, Will H. Hays recently said:

The Society of Visual Education contains thirteen
presidents of colleges, six of normal schools, three rep-
resentatives of large foundations, seventy-six professors
and instructors in colleges and universities, nine state
superintendents of public instruction and seventy-one
city superintendents of schools. There are other groups
of educators in the motion picture field notably the
National Academy of Visual Instruction and the Visual
Instruction Association of America. An incomplete list
shows twenty-eight colleges and universities which have
organized departments for the distribution of films. At
least seventeen of our largest educational institutions
are giving courses to their students on the use of the
motion picture for visual instruction. Columbia has

THE MOVIE AS A PEDAGOGUE

courses which teach photoplay writing and the mechanics
of production. The University of Nebraska has erected
a film studio on its campus, and the Universities of Yale,
Chicago, Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan, Oklahoma, Illi-
nois and Utah have started the production of their own
motion pictures.

Let us confine ourselves for the moment to what
the educational films are doing in the realm of his-
tory, leaving their achievements as pictorial aids to
the study of astronomy, physics, ethnology, palaeon-
tology, geology, and other sciences, for later consid-
eration. If the Esperanto of the Eye is to be instru-
mental in giving to this and coming generations an
accurate picture of our race's past, it is essential that
our films dealing with history should be accurate in
detail. A falsehood exploited by the screen can do
more damage than a misrepresentation imbedded in
a text-book. It is encouraging, therefore, to those of
us who believe that educational films are destined
eventually to exercise an influence for good upon
mankind that may save it from a return to barbarism
to realize that the screen as an adjunct to the teach-
ing of history is receiving valuable assistance from
our most eminent professors in this field of study*

There is much data at our disposal to prove that
the Olympian heights of erudition are deeply im-
pressed by the obligations which the enlightened gods
owe to films fashioned to instruct lesser and more

142 THAT MARVEL THE MOVIE

ignorant mortals. It will suffice for our present pur-
pose, however, to prove tlie existence of a general
and praiseworthy trend in visual instruction by giv-
ing, in some detail, an account of an enterprise,
sponsored by the Department of History of Yale
University, that is of importance in itself, but,
more than that, significant in the promise it gives of
a splendid future for the educational film.

In a despatch from Chicago, HI., under date of
Tuesday, August 1, 1922, a correspondent of the
New York Evening Post says:

History was rewritten here to-day, shorn of its ro-
mance and amplified by facts, by the Yale University
Press. To do this, mediaeval sailors, dressed in gayly
colored tights and jerkins, with huge knives in their
belts, clambered through the rigging of the Santa Maria
off Jackson Park, and Christopher Columbus leaned over
the rail, crucifix in hand, and gazed at the receding shores,
while two camera men kept grinding away at their
machines. All this was done that the popular idea of
history might be revised and the school children of Amer-
ica might have accurate information, uncontaminated
by the legends and myths which have grown around
the discovery of America during the last 400 years. . . .
The Yale University Press is making a series of historical
pictures for school use which the History Department
of the University asserts will be as accurate as research
and study can make them. On board the Santa Maria
there were mutinies and troublesome times. Martin
Alonzo Pinzon, a Spanish gentleman who owned the

THE MOVIE AS A PEDAGOGUE 143

Santa Maria, commanded the Pinta, and furnished the
cash for the expedition. Much more is made of Pinzon
in the film than of Queen Isabella, the Professors of
History at Yale being inclined to doubt the legend that
Her Majesty ever patronized a pawn-shop to give assist-
ance to the dare-deviltry of Columbus.

What visual instruction in history is to become
presently is a fascinating subject in dwelling upon
which the imaginative optimist, reading the signs of
the times, can not but take keen delight. The past
is to be to the student no longer a graveyard, in
which he rambles confusedly, reading riduculous
epitaphs upon monuments whose comparative im-
pressiveness is misleading, but a series of dramatic
performances, appealing to the senses, the mind and
the soul, in which the dramatis persona will present
history as a serial-play in which the latest act is one
in which he himself is taking a minor part.

Never before, in the history of the race, has man-
kind taken so deep and wide-spread an interest in
the past of mankind as it exhibits to-day. There
appears to be a world-wide feeling that, unless the
race can learn the lessons that the great catastrophes
that have repeatedly overtaken civilization teach, the
outlook for the future is appallingly dark. On New
Year's Day, 1923, a body of prominent American
educators issued an appeal to the public in which the
following striking sentences occur:

144 THAT MARVEL THE MOVIE

The present situation in international affairs, involving
as it does the imminent peril of war, must give concern
to every thoughtful observer. After a devastating con-
flict which has cost millions of lives, created immeasur-
able hatred and piled up a debt of $50 for every minute
of time since Christ was born, the nations of the earth,
apparently having learned nothing and forgotten noth-
ing, are once more playing the old game of competitive
imperialism and competitive armament.

The above, startling but unanswerable as it is,
has a direct bearing upon the subject we have just
had under discussion, namely, the teaching of history
through visual instruction. The advantages of this
method for schools and colleges, conclusively proven
though it has been, will be of no permanent and
uplifting value to coming generations unless the
screen as a pedagogue finds a way to give to a race
that is constantly repeating old and fatal errors a
message and a warning that shall influence the young
men and women who are to mould the world's future
to avoid the disastrous errors of their progenitors.
From this point of view it becomes apparent that to
those into whose hands has been placed the dissemi-
nation of educational films has been vouchsafed a
great opportunity to benefit a race that is in sore need
of guidance, of some impetus that shall make its
future less deplorable than its blood-stained past.

CHAPTER XIII

THE MOVIE INTERPRETING THE PAST

Philip Kerr vs. H. 6. Wells Is the Race Doomed to
Commit Hari-Kari? The Failures of Diplomacy The
Screen Revealing Man to Himself History the Best Bet
of a Warworn Race Teaching the Young Idea How Not to
Shoot Peace Via the Film.

145

CHAPTER XIII

THE MOVIE INTERPRETING THE PAST

WHETHER the first antidote the race has discovered
against polyglot poison can save civilization before
it is blown to pieces by high explosive shells is a
problem that assumes new significance daily, as
diplomacy continues to commit, in its blind and
fatuous egotism, its historic blunders. The head-
lines in the newspapers furnish a sad commentary
upon the present status of the collective wisdom
of mankind. The average intelligence of the race
as it is manifested in international affairs is be-
low the standard set by a day-nursery, where a
singed child, it is confidently assumed, will avoid the
fire. The high cost of war in life and treasure has
been demonstrated to the race in recent years by a
world-wide conflict that threatened the very founda-
tions of civilization with destruction. Did mankind
learn the lesson taught by this titanic struggle? If
it did not, if it continues to provide itself with new
and deadlier weapons for the waging of unimaginably
awful combats, what can be done at the last moment,

147

148 THAT MARVEL THE MOVIE

as this may prove to be, to save civilization from ruin
as it totters upon the very edge of a fatal precipice?

The tragic importance of this query may seem,
at first sight, to throw into comparative insignifi-
cance the topic we have under discussion, namely, the
teaching of history in our schools and colleges
through visual instruction. But our pointed question
and our general theme are, as will presently appear,
closely related to one another.

Philip Kerr, for five years confidential adviser and
secretary to Lloyd George, is among those who hold
that we who indulge the hope that the screen may
eventually act as a poultice to heal the blows deliv-
ered by diplomacy against the peace of the world
are but chasing another rainbow that has at its end
not a pot of ointment but a gigantic pile of dynamite.
At Williamstown, Mass., last summer, Mr. Kerr
said, to an audience of scholars and statesmen of
international prominence:

If we look back through history we shall see that what
has happened in the last eight years is not a unique nor
isolated phenomenon. For example, there was a world
war for the first fifteen years of the last century, ending
with the battle of Waterloo. We can trace back through
the ages an ever-recurring procession of devastating wars
engulfing the whole of the civilized world, followed by
peaces of exhaustion, which in turn gave way to new eras
of war. The question I have been asking myself for the

INTERPRETING THE PAST 149

last two or three years has been this: Have we as the
result of the terrible experiences of the late war, and of
the victory of the Allies, any real security against a
repetition of a world war. To this question I have to
answer, No.

To this deplorable and hopeless conclusion Mr.
Kerr comes because he finds that mankind does its
thinking not in terms of humanity, but of states;
that the world, in so far as international problems
are concerned, is as parochial as it was a generation
or a century ago. "Life," remarked a flippant
pessimist, "is just one damned thing after another."
To Mr. Kerr's despondent eyes history seems to be
just one devastating war after another, with no end
to the infernal succession now in sight. But is it
not barely possible that history, gaining from the
screen a new method of exposition, a new way of ap-
proach to the soul of Man, may eventually convince
the human race that there is a more sensible solution
to international problems than through bloodshed?

It is through the study of history alone that Man
can, in the opinion of H. G. Wells, find his way toward
higher planes of existence out of the mire in which
he is now stuck. In his book "The Undying Fire,"
Wells, speaking through the hero of his story, says,
in explanation of his plan for the improvement of
society:

150 THAT MARVEL THE MOVIE

I want this world better taught, so that wherever the
flame of God can be lit it may be lit. Let us suppose
everyone to be educated. By educated, to be explicit,
I mean possessing a knowledge and understanding of
history. Salvation can be attained by history. Suppose
that instead of a myriad of tongues and dialects all men
could read the same books and talk together in the same
speech think what a difference there would be in such
a world from the conditions prevailing to-day. . . .
This is a world where folly and hate can bawl sanity out
of hearing. Only the determination of schoolmasters and
teachers offers hope for a change in all this.

Philip Kerr and H. G. Wells examining, as they
do, the same historical data, shocked, as they both
are, by mankind's constant repetition of ancient and
easily avoidable errors, reach, from the same premises,
diametrically opposite conclusions. Kerr denies that
our race can obtain from a study of its past any
hope for its future. Wells, on the other hand, holds
that history can be made the handmaiden of progress
and that those who teach it can become, if they are
worthy of their sacred mission, the saviors of an
imperilled race.

At the present moment, of course, it is impossible
to determine whether the pessimism of Kerr or the
optimism of Wells is entitled to the verdict of the
court. The evidence is not all in, and, from present
appearances, the case seems destined to a long and
tedious life, going down on appeal, as it must, from

INTERPRETING THE PAST 151

one generation to another. But would it not be a
hopelessly mad world which, on the issue involved
in this contention, backed Kerr against Wells?
Imagine the race abandoning itself to despair, ad-
mitting that it can find within itself no safeguard
against its impending doom of hari-kari, turning
heart-sick and hopeless from futile peace-conferences
and gazing in sullen silence at the mobilization of
new armies under old catch-words in various parts
of a blood-soaked planet! Even if Wells shall prove
to be in the end a dreamer of dreams and chaser of
rainbows, defeated in his effort to put salt on the
tail of the millennium, is it not more reasonable to
take a gambling chance on his possible victory as
an idealist than to give abject surrender with Kerr
to the evil influences that for countless ages have
made of our planet a recurrent shambles?

Common-sense, then, forces us to the conclusion
that, in the perturbed world in which we at present
find ourselves there is no feature of our complicated
modern life more entitled to earnest consideration
than the screen as historian. In schools, colleges and
movie theatres, with films depicting significant epi-
sodes in Man's past or illuminating events of to-day,
a mirror is vouchsafed to this generation in which it
can see both itself and its progenitors in a light that
now for the first time clarifies our sight. The regen-

152 THAT MARVEL THE MOVIE

eration of the individual through religious influences
is effected in large part by means of a self -revelation
that begets repentance and reform. To employ a
bit of slang to illustrate the point, all sinners come
from Missouri and refuse to be rescued blindly. They
must be shown. The wicked, war-soiled, wantonly
selfish nations of the world have never had, so far
as the masses of the people are concerned, the truths
of history visualized to their startled eyes. Is it not
possible that when the errors, the tragedies, the
cumulative horrors of the past are revealed to them,
when the majority of men and women turn to the
evidence of their senses rather than to gossip, rumor
and hearsay for historical enlightenment, Mankind,
horrified at his scowling face and bloody hands, as
he sees them for the first time in a mirror, will take
an oath to remove the brand of Cain from his brow,
the blush from his cheeks as the screen shows him
what man's inhumanity to man really means?

The late Viscount Bryce, just before his regrettable
death, delivered eight lectures in the United States
on "the large subject covered by the term Inter-
national Relations/' "It is History," says Bryce,
"which, recording the events and explaining the
influences that have moulded the minds of men, shows
us how the world of international politics has come
to be what it is. History is the best indeed the

INTERPRETING THE PAST 153

only guide to a comprehension of the facts as they
stand, and to a sound judgment of the various means
that have been suggested for replacing suspicions
and enmities by the co-operation of States in many
things and by their good will in all." But Bryce,
than whom no publicist of our times has held higher
place as a seer and prophet, speaks not in an opti-
mistic vein in his last published utterances.

The great lesson of the war, that the ambitions and
hatreds which cause war must be removed, has not been
learned, and if this war has failed to impress the lesson
upon most of the peoples, what else can teach them?
This is why thoughtful men are despondent, and why
some comfort must now be sought for, some remedy
devised at once against a recurrence of the calamities
we have suffered.

Bryce is in agreement with the leading minds of
to-day striving for a solution of international prob-
lems. They see no way out of the difficulties and
perils confronting the race unless some new and
hitherto unknown method be found to prevent man-
kind from repeating the scarlet sins that have dis-
graced and incarnadined the past. Arbitration, con-
ciliation, alliances, treaties, congresses, leagues, peace
palaces and palaver what have they accomplished
that can be cited to confute the pessimism of Philip
Kerr or to suggest the remedy the necessity for which

154 THAT MARVEL THE MOVIE

James Bryce, with the clairvoyance of a dying man,
acutely realized? What the race needs at this critical
hour is both a message and a medium, a warning and
a way, a revelation and a road, with a light from the
past shining on the pathway just ahead.

And Man has at his command this way, this
medium, this road, upon which gleams a radiance
that might easily save the race from destruction, if
he had sufficient sense to learn from his past just
a few elementary lessons in common-sense, just a
few basic truths that, once grasped, would change
history from a record of recurrent crimes to an epic
tale of Man's triumph over himself.

History as told by the screen in the class-room
is it not possible that the destiny of mankind is thus
to be decided? The plastic minds of the young in-
trigued by the story of Man's rise from protoplasm
to poet, from amoeba to aeronaut, from cave-man to
lord of creation may be so impressed, within the
next few generations, by the tragic absurdity of
civilized man's periodical reversions to savagery that
some divine day the enlightened youth of the world
will go out on a universal strike against old idiocies
and cruelties, and to the screen that taught history
will be given the glory of bringing mankind at one
bound within striking distance of the millennium.

CHAPTER XIV

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.

155

CHAPTER XIV

THE MOVIE TAKES ON NEW FUNCTIONS

HAS a race harassed, well-nigh hopeless, forever
committing old errors under new incitements, found
in the screen both a pedagogue and a peacemaker,
potent for rescue if its possibilities are grasped in
time? The query may seem fantastic, the hope it
suggests quixotic, the promise at which it hints pre-
mature. But the question is, perhaps, the most
important before the world to-day and upon its
answer may depend the future of the race.

In an address before the National Civic Federation
at Washington, D. C., on January 17, 1923, Elihu
Boot said:

The manifest purpose of the great body of voters in
democratic countries to control directly the agents who
are carrying on the foreign affairs of their countries
involves a terrible danger as well as a great step in
human progress a great step in progress if the democ-
racy is informed, a terrible danger if the democracy is
ignorant. An ignorant democracy controlling foreign
affairs leads directly to war and the destruction of

157

158 THAT MARVEL THE MOVIE

civilization. An informed democracy insures peace and
the progress of civilization.

At this crisis in the career of humanity there is
but one medium by which the democracies of the
world can be given the information necessary, in the
opinion of Mr. Root, to avert the cataclysm threat-
ening humanity, and that is the motion picture
screen. That this medium is becoming, by leaps and
bounds, better equipped for its gigantic task of world-
salvation is apparent to even the most careless
observer. During the short time that has elapsed
since the author wrote the first sentence of this little
book, the movie has enlarged its scope, possibilities
and actual achievements in a startling and bewilder-
ing way. To illustrate this point, which is of crucial
significance in connection with the topic now under
discussion, let me quote a few head-lines culled at
random from the metropolitan press of recent date.

"Revolutionary Talking Movies Widespread Changes
Predicted if New Invention is a Success/' "* Color
Film Great,' says C. D. Gibson. Artist at Private Exhibi-
tion Finds Effects Wonderfully Reproduced." " Ditmar's
Film Gives Life to the Prehistoric. Zoo Curator Presents
Real Live Monsters." " Talking Movie Hailed in Berlin
by Scientists as Great Success." "New Method Gives
Perfect Color to Motion Pictures. First Film a Riot of
Color but Not at Expense of Reality." "Stereoscopic
Film Indicating Depth Shown Here." "Scientist Brings

NEW FUNCTIONS 159

Talking Film. Prof, de Forest Here with Device Whereby
Even Operas May Be Produced on Screen. 55 "Modern
Wizards Bewilder Edison. Watches Voice Filmed."
"Einstein's Relativity Theory in Pictures. Fascinating,
Ingenious and Revolutionary."

The above list might be greatly prolonged, but it
serves the purpose we have in hand as it stands. It
means that the possibilities of the screen are being
realized at an amazing rate of progress, that the
Esperanto of the Eye, which found its alphabet when
Edison invented the kinetoscope, has now become a
universal method of expression fitted to reveal even-
tually all human knowledge to the race in such a
manner that it can be sensed, if not comprehended,
by even illiterates and morons. There are, of course,
technical problems connected with color, depth and
the synchronization of voice and movement which it
may be impossible for the ingenuity of man to solve,
but the year 1923 will appeal to the future historian
of the movie as a period in which the screen entered
a domain possessing hitherto undreamed of facilities
for intensifying the potency of the playwright, actor,
scientist, educator, statesman, philanthropist and
salesman.

The last-mentioned beneficiary of the screen, com-
monly called "drummer," is worthy of a moment's
attention just here as helping to prove our general

160 THAT MARVEL THE MOVIE

proposition that there is no field of human activity
that has not been, or that will not be, influenced and
perhaps greatly changed by the growing vogue of
the movie. A recently-published editorial in the
New York Herald says:

The power of the screen to divert trade from one coun-
try to another is a subject that has been hitherto little
discussed. An article in Commerce Reports, the weekly
survey of foreign trade issued by the United States
Department of Commerce, however, declares that the
motion pictures displayed in foreign countries influence
the consuming public in the choice of markets. In fact,
so great has been the influence of the motion picture in
diverting commerce to the United States that foreign
newspapers have already cautioned their film producers
not to ignore the opportunities for commercial expansion
that are inherent in the drama shown on the screen.

As Terence remarked long ago, so might the movie
remark to-day: "Nothing that is of interest to man-
kind is outside of my sphere of endeavor/* In an
address delivered last year at the University of
Pennsylvania, Sir Auckland Geddes, British Ambas-
sador to the United States, said:

It Is hard to find ground upon which our civilization
can certainly and safely stand in the future. As one
looks around the world to-day and sees in country after
country the power, the direction of force, passing from
the hands of the people who have long held that power,

NEW FUNCTIONS 161

sees wealth being destroyed, sees all the surplus margin
of wealth disappear, one realizes not immediately but
looking forward into the future that we have cause to
take steps to spread the appreciation of research, so
that no shift of political power can possibly take place
that will not keep it in the hands of those who under-
stand the importance of research.

Eesearch! From generation to generation, mankind
has been engaged in making investigations and dis-
coveries that have constantly enriched and enlarged
the treasure-house of human knowledge. But re-
search, by which, as the British Ambassador asserts,
civilization may save itself from destruction, has been
hitherto an affair of specialists, not of the multitude,
an activity carried oil in laboratories or in desert
solitudes or on lonely mountain-tops, and its results
have been made manifest only to the erudite few.
But, lo, through the screen the movie-theatre becomes
at one moment a laboratory, at another a desert
solitude, at another a lonely mountain-top. Audi-
ences of millions become experimenters in all realms
of research, temporary astronomers, physicists, chem-
ists, travellers, hunters, entomologists, ornitholo-
gists, archseologists what you will. Erudition is fed
to the masses in small quantities, and the more they
eat of it the more they crave. "Know thyself!"
cried the old Greek Philosopher to the individual
man. "Know thyself!" exclaims the screen to the

162 THAT MARVEL THE MOVIE

race at large, and proceeds to show to mankind the
way to that universal self knowledge that, if it comes to
man in time, may protect his future from the blunders,
crimes and tragedies that have disgraced his past.
The screen may well be represented to our mind's
eye as a modern Hamlet who says to a blood-stained
Mother Earth:

Look here upon this picture and upon this! I show
you to yourself as you have been and to yourself as
you may be. Look here at the horrors and devastation,
the cruelties and crimes of yesterday and to-day. Then
turn your eyes upon the world of to-morrow as I shall
reveal it to you in its splendid possibilities a new
world, peaceful, industrious, contented, going forward
from one great triumph in progressive civilization to
another, differing from the earth that was and is as
light from darkness, as day from night ! I show you the
way, I reveal to you the decision that you must make.
If yours be the baser choice, if you continue to repeat,
generation after generation, the old blunders, the old
crimes, I shall not be to blame. I, the screen, show you
two roads, the one leading upward, the other downward.
You may, by seeing your racial soul in the mirror I hold
up to you, go to Heaven or to Hades. Your journey's
end depends not upon me but upon you.

What does Man crave what has he always
craved? Freedom. Freedom from what? From
avoidable ills preventable diseases, unnecessary
poverty, unjustifiable wars, preventable accidents,

NEW FUNCTIONS 163

every ill, in short, that not only darkens his life
but offends his intelligence.

The history of mankind [says Louis Berman, M. D.]
is a long research into the nature of the machinery of
freedom. All recorded history, indeed, is but the docu-
mentation of that research. Viewed thus, customs, laws,
institutions, sciences, arts, codes of morality and honor,
systems of life, become inventions, come upon, tried out,
standardized, established until scrapped in everlasting
search for more and more perfect means of freeing body
and soul from their congenital thralldom to a host of
innumerable masters. Indeed, the history of all life,
vegetable and animal, of bacillus, elephant, orchid,
gorilla, as well as of man is the history of a searching for
freedom.

At last, through his own astounding but too-often
misdirected ingenuity, Man has found that which
alone could remove from his limbs the shackles that
have held him captive throughout the centuries. He
has discovered a universal language that may con-
ceivably bring about the brotherhood of the race
and the reduction to a minimum of the ills that flesh
is heir to. But with the coming of the Esperanto of
the Eye the salvation of the race is not assured.
While the screen may minimize eventually the evils
that spring from a world-wide confusion of tongues,
it can permanently eradicate those evils only by the
dissemination of a message that shall exert an uplift-
ing influence upon the perturbed soul of humanity.

CHAPTER XV

THE MOVIE AS A WORLD POWER

Its Enormous Audiences It Speaks to all Men What
Message Does it Carry? The Race at the Parting of the
Ways Have International Marplots Won Control of the
Screen? The Fate of Civilization in the Balance.

165

CHAPTER XV

THE MOVIE AS A WORLD POWER

IN a very important particular the title first chosen
for this little book was a misnomer, a fact that grows
more apparent to the author as he approaches the end
of the task he has essayed. "A Biography of the
Movie/' the name I had selected for my projected
volume, implies, at this period of the evolution of the
picture screen, either too much or too little too
much if it suggests a comprehensive history of a life
that has but recently begun, too little if it fails to
show that the facts and figures available regarding
the development of the motion picture demonstrate
the dynamics of the screen as a medium for racial
intercommunication. There came, of course, to the
writer the temptation to dwell in detail upon the
romantic story of me rise of the movie from insignif-
icance to world-dominion,Nrom poverty to affluence,
from a plaything to a power,) to mention names made
famous by the screen, to maintain, in short, the
same attitude of mind toward the cinema and all its

167

168 THAT MARVEL THE MOVIE

works that impelled Merton of tlie Movies to idealize
the new art and industry whether he looked at them
through a telescope or a microscope. 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. But had I
succumbed to the inclination to give what may be
called the lure that lies in gossip to this little volume,
I should have taken merely the path of least resist-
ance and have left wholly undone the real task I
have essayed, namely, that of getting an idea, a
prophecy, a promise, a possibility whatsoever you
may be pleased to call it into the minds of my
readers, to the end that the project referred to in the
first chapter of this book may receive eventually the
consideration to which I, with all due modesty,
believe it is entitled.

In other words, I have been endeavoring to explain
briefly how the toy kinetoscope of a quarter of a
century ago by becoming a universal medium of ex-
pression has made what men and nations say to each
other in this new world-language of crucial signifi-
cance to the future of civilization.

Now just here we come face to .face with the most
significant, the most tragically important, feature of

THE MOVIE AS A WORLD POWER 169

the tremendous subject with which we are dealing.
Is Man, triumphant at last over the evils that befell
him at the Tower of Babel, possessing for the first
time in his racial career a universal language, actually
in possession of soul-stirring truths that, reaching the
race at large, shall overcome the powers of darkness
menacing our modern civilization? Let me repeat
the concluding sentence of the preceding chapter:
"While the screen may minimize eventually the
evils springing from a world-wide confusion of
tongues, it can permanently eradicate those evils
only by the dissemination of a message that shall
exert an uplifting influence upon the perturbed soul
of humanity/*

Shall Christ or Csesar, idealism or materialism,
altruism or animosities, progress or reaction domi-
nate the screen? The importance of the answer that
the future makes to this query can not be conceiv-
ably over-estimated. To repeat an assertion I made
in a preceding chapter, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
are struggling for domination over the soul of the
screen and the issue of the conflict is still in abeyance.

A timely truth finding lodgment in the perturbed
souls of men might conceivably save the race from
destruction. By means of a modern invention an
idea, opportunely dropped from the clouds by heroic
airmen behind the German lines, destroyed the

170 THAT MARVEL THE MOVIE

morale of the cohorts of reaction and brought victory
to the Allied arms. Two things were here essential
to success the message itself and the medium for its
dissemination. Of the two, the message is, of course,
infinitely the more important. But Wilson's words,
at that special crisis, would have been futile had
they not been given wings by Wright.

Civilization stands in sore need of a message of a
unifying and peace-begetting nature. The screen
offers it a medium whereby such a message could be
carried to the ends of the earth, to be known of all
mankind through the Esperanto of the Eye. But
whence shall this message come? By what au-
thority, by what sanction, shall it force itself upon
the minds and hearts and souls of all men? If the
screen falls eventually wholly into the control of
demagogues, a medium for enlightenment that might
save the race from the threatening evils of the future
will not merely fail to fulfill its highest mission but
will become the most powerful weapon of those who
would undermine and presently destroy existing
civilization.

As an uplifting, educational, civilizing force, the
movie appears to be approaching the parting of the
ways. As has been shown in preceding chapters, it
has vastly enlarged its scope and possibilities as an
influence, direct or indirect, upon the daily lives of

THE MOVIE AS A WORLD POWER 171

millions of human beings. It has of late solved
the major mechanical problems that confronted it.
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. It
has taken possession of a polyglot world and is
speaking daily to the human race in a tongue that
is understood as readily on the Congo as at Cam-
bridge. But what is it saying? "Ah, there's the rub ! "
Is the screen merely a mirror in which Man looks
upon his own face and turns away heedless of what
his countenance might have taught him? Has the
race finally found a way to that self-knowledge which
might mean its eventual salvation only to misuse,
as its wont has been, its newest medium for advance-
ment? Can nothing be learned from the screen by
the restless, harassed, apprehensive millions of the
earth that shall make this first universal method of
communication worthy of the possibilities for world-
wide uplift that it possesses?

The answer to these queries depends largely upon

172 THAT MARVEL THE MOVIE

your personal point of view, upon the philosophy of
life which dominates your mental processes. If you
are influenced by that widely-accepted generaliza-
tion to the effect that "human nature never changes'*
you will not be inclined to take seriously our con-
tention that by forcing Man to observe and study,
by means of the screen, the blunders, idiocies, crimes
and tragedies of his past he may be forced eventually
to repent and reform, to make of his future something
less reprehensible than his past has been. But human
nature is not fixed it is fluid. It has changed, and
it is always in the process of changing. In fact, the
time may not be far distant when not only the
individual but the race at large, hitherto at the mercy
of endocrinal glands, will find in the laboratory
methods whereby thyroids and pituitaries and ad-
renals and the other chemical arbiters of the fate of
men and nations may be so dominated by science
that human nature will not merely change with
heartbreaking slowness for the better but will spring
at a bound into its supermanhood.

The above fantastic possibility is not, at this stage
of the new biology, to be taken very seriously, but
the suggestion thrown out serves, at least, to call
attention to the fact that never before in the history
of the race has Man been more concerned in his des-
tiny than he is to-day, more inclined to turn away

THE MOVIE AS A WORLD POWER 173

from old methods of solving the riddle of his being,
methods that have long played him false, and to turn
hopefully to new teachers, new sciences, new hopes,
new horizons. And, lo, at this great moment, when,
as never before, Man craves all knowledge that he
may know himself, chance if such there be has
vouchsafed to him the one thing needful for a racial
self-revelation, namely, a universal language.

As I wrote the above, this morning's newspapers
were making the following announcement to their
readers :

Plans for carrying on the work toward international
peace by the Carnegie Endowment in Europe, Inc.,
became known yesterday when Justice Guy of the New
York Supreme Court approved an application for the
incorporation of that organization. Among the objects
to be attained by the corporation are: To advance the
cause of peace among nations, to hasten the abolition of
international war, and to encourage and promote peace-
ful settlement of international differences. In particular
to promote a thorough and scientific investigation and
study of the causes of war and of the practical methods
to prevent and avoid it. To diffuse information and to
educate public opinion regarding the causes, nature and
effect of war, and means for its prevention and avoidance.
To cultivate friendly feelings between the inhabitants of
the different countries and to increase the knowledge and
understanding of each other by the several nations, etc.

Praiseworthily lofty and noble as the projects out-
lined above may be, it is no disparagement of their

174 THAT MARVEL THE MOVIE

promoters to assert that there is nothing startlingly
new in the design they have at heart. In all genera-
tions there have been altruists who envisaged a world
freed from war, but always has it happened that
they have been aroused from dreams by the thunder
of the guns. From one point of view at least, the
saddest of countless sad sights in Europe after
August 2, 1914, was the Peace Palace at the
Hague.

But if there is nothing especially novel in what we
may call the Carnegie creed as above worded, there
is this to be said for the peace promoters of to-day
that they have one great advantage over all their
predecessors, even over those of ten years ago. A
new medium for preventing Man from repeating his
former errors and crimes is, by leaps and bounds,
reaching a marvellous state of development. There
is every reason to believe that the message above
referred to, which a blood-stained race sorely needs,
is that which the Carnegie Foundation is desirous of
bringing to the minds and souls of men. But have
the powers of evil and unrest, the promoters of
international jealousies and hatreds, selfish dema-
gogues craving always more power that they may
make the worse appear the better reason, out-
generaled the forces of righteousness and placed the
screen in bondage to their pernicious designs? If

THU MOVIE AS A WORLD POWER 175

they have, and the Esperanto of the Eye is to speak
for Mr. Hyde instead of Dr. Jekyll, then has another
great calamity befallen a race that had no need
of more.

CHAPTER XVI
THE MOVIE AND THE CENSOR

The Movie Ran Wild for Years Not Threatened with
Censorship Until too Old to Need it What Christ Thought
of Pharisees History and Common-Sense Against Censor-
ship Rev. Newell Dwight Hillis Denounces it Tories
vs. Freemen, Yesterday and To-Day American Consti-
tution Doomed if Censorship Prevails.

177

CHAPTER XVI

THE MOVIE AND THE CENSOK

WE Americans are forever boasting of our sense
of humor, but we have a deplorable way of exhibiting
a complete lack thereof at certain crises when its
saving grace alone could rescue us from ludicrous
inconsistency. When in the early life of the movie
it most needed supervision and restraint it was
allowed to run wild at its own free will, and at once
became a naughty, mischievous boy, covered with
mud. As it grew in years and achievement, develop-
ing gradually new and higher ideals, its need for
parental discipline automatically decreased, and it
exhibited internally those guiding, corrective powers
that have made it constantly more worthy of the
sympathy and support of the best element in our
civilization. And then came to pass a manifestation
of belated Pharisaism upon the part of certain
narrow-minded influences in our community that
would have been laughable had it not been fraught
with serious consequences to a novel art-form strug-

179

180 THAT MARVEL THE MOVIE

gling to find its appointed place in the life of the
world. Where was America's boasted sense of humor
when the demand for movie censorship waxed loud
for minorities always make a great noise long after
any reasonable excuse for such a censorship, if such
excuse there could be, had forever passed away?
What would be said of a father who had allowed his
son to indulge in every kind of youthful indiscretion
until the latter had almost reached his majority and
then, when the boy had shown signs of repentance,
reform, regeneration, confined him forcibly to his
room and fed him physically upon bread and water
and mentally upon the old Blue Laws of Connecticut?
Neither the heart nor the brain of such a father
would appear to us as sound.

In the eleventh chapter of the Gospel according to
St. Luke, Christ is quoted in ringing, uncompromis-
ing denunciation of that reactionary, tyrannical exer-
cise of usurped authority which, through varied
methods and media, has checked the progress of the
human spirit toward enlightened freedom throughout
all the centuries:

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for
ye are as graves which appear not, and the men that
walk over them are not aware of them.

And again he cries:

THE MOVIE AND THE CENSOR 181

Woe unto you also, ye lawyers! for ye lade men with,
burdens grievous to be borne, and ye yourselves touch
not the burdens with one of your fingers. . . . Woe unto
you, lawyers ! for ye have taken away the key of knowl-
edge: ye entered not in yourselves, and them that were
entering in ye hindered.

"Ye have taken away the key of knowledge!"
The crime of crimes, the unforgiveable sin! In this
indictment that He brings against professional hair-
splitters and obstructionists, selfishly standing in the
way of human progress, the Christ gives divine sanc-
tion to Man's efforts to satisfy the irresistible craving
in Ms soul for light, ever more light, in the darkness
through which he gropes. The fruit of the Tree of
Knowledge is not, as in the old Eden legend, accursed,
but is proclaimed by the Savior as food essential to
that spiritual growth without which there could be
no hope for our race.

The late Andrew D. White, in his great book deal-
ing with the obstacles against which Science has had
to struggle in its effort to enlarge the diameter of
Man's knowledge, paints a vivid picture of the tragic
effects wrought by various forms of censorship upon
the pathetic, heroic, Christ-sanctioned efforts of the
human race to employ freely the key of knowledge
to the end that we may always use "our dead selves
as stepping-stones to higher things." Prison, the

182 THAT MARVEL THE MOVEE

stake, massacre, war what weapon has not been
used by the foes of enlightenment that they might
check mankind in its rise toward heights upon which
the ancient, unhallowed prerogatives of a few reac-
tionaries could not survive? And always, in some
form or other, censorship has been the most service-
able weapon, both in times of war and times of peace,
by which relentless unprogressives could break the
spirit of those who strove to loosen the shackles of
ignorance from the human spirit. The marvel is not
that Man knows so much to-day as the fact that he has
won what he knows against almost insuperable odds.
There came to New York from somewhere in the
West a year or so ago a loquacious fanatic who loudly
asserted that the earth is flat. The metropolis refused
to take this peripatetic crank seriously, gave him a
passing glance and laugh, and went on its busy way,
momentarily astonished, perhaps, at the amazing
stubbornness displayed by outworn errors in refusing
to remain dead and buried. It is seldom, of course,
that the call of the past, the .urge to ignorance and
reaction, is so blatantly and audaciously sounded,
but Dowie of Zion City differed only in degree and
not in kind from those frequently well-intentioned
but always misguided busybodies who believe that
the screen can be kept decent not by public opinion
and commercial common-sense, but only by groups

THE MOVIE AND THE CENSOR 183

of three, or five, or seven individuals wielding the
arbitrary power of censorship.

The advocacy of official censorship of the movies
is based upon a fallacy. Where the misguided men
and women urging censorship make their chief error is
in their attitude toward the rank and file of motion
picture patrons. They base their demand for censor-
ship upon the sweeping generalization that the major-
ity of the millions of Americans who daily attend the
movies crave salacious pictures and must be forcibly
prevented from getting what they crave. This shows
not merely ignorance of the psychology of the Amer-
ican people, but is an exhibition of indifference to the
teachings of our national history that would be
ridiculous if it were not so pernicious in its practical
results. Furthermore, it is in essence the astounding
proposition that there are millions of our countrymen
who flock daily to the support of an institution that
is openly undermining our most cherished ideals,
brazenly attacking the home and poisoning the minds
of our youth by the inculcation of ideas subversive
of our existing civilization. Can not the fanatics
who are demanding censorship realize that if the
motion picture producers did not understand the
American people, and our inherent and inherited in-
clination for cleanliness and decency, better than do
the censor advocates the movie industry would have

184 THAT MARVEL THE MOVIE

gone to financial smash long ago? Furthermore, if
the American public is not to be trusted to choose its
own amusements, and to automatically censor them
at the box-office or the park gate, is it competent to
mate its own laws, elect its own executives, in short,
to carry the American experiment in government by
the people to the splendid success that awaits it?
This query is searching and fundamental. Advocacy
of censorship in any form for the people of this
country is a manifestation of un-Americanism that is
as surely foredoomed to failure as was George Ill's
attempt to enforce a tax upon our ancestor's tea.
In truth, censorship, both fundamentally and histori-
cally, springs from power usurped and not from an
altruistic regard for the moral welfare of a com-
munity. Its beneficiaries centuries ago learned how
to camouflage their love of tyranny behind an as-
sumed regard for the welfare of the public. But the
people of the United States, as becomes daily more
apparent, are too well informed, too sensitive to the
unceasing efforts of old tyrannies to gain new vic-
tories, too jealous of the heritage of freedom that
was won for them on hard-fought battlefields, to
surrender their priceless liberty of thought and
speech and educational and recreational choice to an
outworn and discredited form of supervision.
The significance of a recent election held in one of

THE MOVIE AND THE CENSOR 185

our historic cradles of liberty, the State that can
boast of Concord, Lexington and Bunker Hill, in
connection with the subject under discussion can
hardly be overestimated. In 1921 the legislature of
Massachusetts was induced to pass a censorship law.
By petition it became a matter for referendum, and
on November 7, 1922, the electorate of the Bay
State voted upon the question whether or not they
desired a censorship of the motion picture. The
people defeated the measure by a vote of 553,173
to 208,252, a majority of 344,921 against censorship.
Again had Massachusetts given an outward and vis-
ible sign of her inward and spiritual detestation of
Toryism not essentially different in kind from that
which she displayed when "a snuffy old drone from
a German hive" was endeavoring, by force of arms,
to hold her in leading-strings. What intrigues, if it
does not startle and perplex, a thoughtful historian
in connection with the above is that to-day in this
country there is a clash, affecting the lives of every
one of us, between the ideals which a century and a
half ago placed George of England and George of
Virginia in opposite and warring camps upon certain
basic propositions connected with the subject of
human liberty. But it is inconceivable, of course,
that the spirit of George the Thirdism can have any-
thing but a temporary influence in the United States

186 THAT MARVEL THE MOVIE

in the twentieth century, despite the noise now made
by short-sighted, misguided or actually unprincipled
champions of movie censorship a censorship that,
were there nothing else to urge against it, is an
unnecessary and expensive luxury in light of the fact
that the States and cities of our nation are adequately
provided with laws and ordinances protecting the
amusement-seeking public from indecent and im-
moral exhibitions.

The Rev. Dr. Newell Dwight Hillis, of Plymouth
Church, Brooklyn, N. Y., one of the ablest, most
eloquent, scholarly and influential divines in this
country, referring in a recent sermon to matters
touched upon in this chapter, said:

The descendants of the Puritans and the Dutchmen,
whose fathers rebelled against the censors of the James I
era, dictating to them what creed and government they
must accept, find it hard, after three hundred years of
freedom of press and speech, to go back to the very
thing from which their ancestors fled. Long ago the his-
torians said that the American Republic was the vision
of John Milton in his plea for the liberty of the print-
ing press, set up in code and constitution. The genius
of our Republic is personal responsibility, individual
excellence. A father and mother must rise up early
and sit up late to teach their boy and girl to think for
themselves, using their intellect; to weigh for them-
selves, using their judgment; to decide for themselves,
using their own conscience and will.

THE MOVEE AND THE CENSOR 187

"Hell is paved with good intentions." The tragedy
that we call human history is made more under-
standable by these depressing, revelatory words. The
fussy, the futile, those whose hearts are kindly but
whose brains are weak, whose motives are praise-
worthy but whose methods are inept and inadequate,
have, from the beginning of time, made life harder
than it need be for their fellow-men. When these
well-intentioned but badly-balanced busybodies com-
bine with stronger characters whose motives are
reprehensibly selfish to mould men in the mass to
their own narrow pattern, denying to the individual
that freedom of choice regarding his own affairs that
is one of the essential bulwarks of Anglo-Saxon civili-
zation, an internal menace has come to American
institutions more threatening than any external peril
now within our purview.

But censorship of the movies will be, in all prob-
ability, only a passing and more or less localized
phase of our national tendency to indulge in mis-
chievous experimental legislation. If not, however,
if censorship should ever become both national and
permanent, then would be sounded the doom of those
emancipatory institutions which have made of our
American experiment in self-government the one
great hope, the one burning beacon-light, for an
over-governed, over-burdened, over-censored world.

CHAPTER XVII

THE MOVIE AS A WORLD LANGUAGE

The Esperanto of the Tongue Its Rapidly Increasing
Vogue All Countries Taking It Up Its Inferiority to the
Esperanto oj the Eye Together They May Save the World
"The Covered Wagon" Its Success as a Picture
Rheims Cathedral and a Prairie Schooner Symbols of Man's
Balanced Fate Will the Race Choose to Construct or to
Destroy?

189

CHAPTER XVII

THE MOVIE AS A WORLD LANGUAGE

IT would be inexpedient, I believe, for me to bring
this inadequate, but, I hope, more or less illuminating,
investigation of the origin, present status and future
possibilities of the screen to an end without going
more into detail regarding what I have called the
Esperanto of the Eye. That many of the ills to which
flesh is heir, especially those springing from mis-
understandings between races and nations, might be
avoided, in great part, at least, by means of a
universal language is far from being a recent idea.
Like most seemingly modern generalizations, such
as the theory of evolution, the law of the conservation
of energy, and other apparently recent forward steps,
the possibility of a tongue that should be understood
of all men had come within the purview of the Greek
and Roman writers of the classic period. But the
intervention of the so-called Dark Ages, delaying
Man's upward progress by a thousand years, extin-
guished many a light which "the glory that was

191

192 THAT MARVEL THE MOVIE

Greece" had given to the world, and it was not until
comparatively recent times that any effort of a
practical and promising nature had been made to
provide the race with a poultice for healing the blows
inflicted upon it at the Tower of Babel.

To-day, however, the universal language known as
Esperanto, a survival of the fittest from several
tongues designed in recent years for general use, is
making real progress in various parts of the world.
The report of the General Secretariat of the League
of Nations for 1922 says : "Language is a great force,
and the League of Nations has every reason to watch
with particular interest the progress of the Esperanto
movement, which should become more widespread
and may one day lead to great results from the point
of view of the moral unity of the world."

The astonishing progress of Esperanto in its con-
quest of a polyglot globe is dealt with by John K.
Mumford in a recent most readable article in the
New York Herald, in which he says:

Since 1920 on an average a new book in Esperanto has
appeared every other day. Text books and dictionaries
exist in French, English, Arabic, Armenian, Czech,
Bulgarian, Danish, Esthonian, Finnish, German, Greek,
Welsh, Hebrew, Spanish, Dutch, Hungarian, Icelandic,
Italian, Japanese, Georgian, Catalonian, Chinese, Croat,
Latin, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Portuguese, Ru-
manian, Russian, Ruthe&iaft, Ukrainian, Serbian, Slov-

THE MOVIE AS A WORLD LANGUAGE 193

akian, Slovenian, Turkish and Visayan (Philippine
Islands). Many millions of these books have been
distributed.

Whatever may be one's attitude toward the
League of Nations, the advocacy of "the moral unity
of the world" by that organization must meet with
approval by the vast majority of right-thinking men.
Through moral unification only can the human race
reach that plane of civilization upon which freedom
from the major ills which now afflict it can be at-
tained. And that the Esperanto of the Tongue, a
universal language that is rapidly enlarging the scope
of its influence, can perform a mighty service in the
cause of peace and progress can not be doubted.
But compared to the Esperanto of the Eye, the
universal language sprung from the screen, its con-
quest of the earth is painfully slow, and its final
complete triumph would still leave the world-lan-
guage of the eye more potent in many ways than the
world-language of the tongue.

To illustrate the above, let me quote again from
Mr. Mumford, who, in discussing the benefits
bestowed by Esperanto upon commerce, says: "In
Esperanto a business concern can get out a circular
setting forth the merits of a washing machine or a
face lotion so that even an Eskimo woman can read
it, provided she has taken six months lessons in the

194 THAT MARVEL THE MOVIE

universal language." But in the twinkling of an eye
this Eskimo woman could learn from the screen what
it might take her half a year to glean from the adver-
tising circular. Furthermore, for many years to come,
the Eskimos, not to speak of the more highly civ-
ilized races, are more likely to be in constant touch
with the Esperanto of the Screen than with the
Esperanto of the Printing-Press.

Of course, what men or nations say to each other
is essentially more important than the vehicle which
they use for saying it. Neither the Esperanto of the
Tongue nor of the Eye can be of great service to the
cause of civilization unless they disseminate enlight-
enment rather than confusion, good rather than evil,
love rather than hatred, unless they tighten rather
than loosen the bonds that hold the nations together
in times of peace.

But what Man may do ultimately with his new
media for world-wide intercommunication can be, at
this juncture, only a matter for vague, though, per-
haps, hopeful, conjecture. There is one fact, how-
ever, that stands out in startling significance as we
contemplate the progress which mankind is making
toward the final removal of all barriers toward racial
self-knowledge namely, that humanity seems, for
the first time in its career, to feel that the Sphinx
whose other name is History is presently to reveal

THE MOVIE AS A WORLD LANGUAGE 195

the secret which, throughout all the ages, it has man-
aged to conceal. The disappearance of the last
frontier, the solving of Earth's ancient mysteries, the
coming of the wireless and the Esperanto of the
Tongue and of the Eye seem to presage some new
revelation to the soul of Man that shall remove
forever from the entrance to the Garden of Eden
that angel with the flaming sword.

Strange, is it not, that close study of the movie and
all its works, both good and bad, should intensify the
optimism of one who only a few short years ago had
abandoned all hope that civilization could ever again
be given the opportunity to regain its higher self and
fulfill the promise it had once vouchsafed to the race?
One foggy morning in the Autumn of 1917 I found
myself, in company with a fellow newspaper-corre-
spondent, representing an English daily, on the French
front, in the shell-torn square in front of the grand
old cathedral at Bheims. That very morning high
explosives from the German lines had done further
damage to this ancient glory of Gothic architecture,
and torn and shattered, defaced and despoiled, it
limped toward Heaven, sadly crippled but forever
sublime. As I stood gazing, awe-stricken and de-
pressed at the desecrated fagade, the outward and
visible sign of Man's inhumanity to God, my English
companion approached me, stuck his monocle into

196 THAT MARVEL THE MOVIE

his eye, gazed at the ruin before us, and drawled,
"My word, but it has been knocked about a bit,
hasn't it?"

Yes and so has our modern civilization been
knocked about a bit, to state the case with typically
British reserve. As with Rheims cathedral, so with
the social structure Man has patiently and painfully
erected through recent centuries; it must be repaired,
strengthened, and, above all, defended from the
iconoclasm that may menace it in the future. And
for this renaissance of civilization, and its protection
from the internal and external foes by which it was
recently so nearly destroyed and by which it is still
threatened, the cinematograph can, if God is will-
ing and Man is wise, be of greater service than the
majority of people yet fully realize.

Not a day has gone by recently when I have not
come upon some new proof that the pessimism which
overwhelmed me as I gazed in 1917 at the outraged
fagade of Rheims is not unreasonably to be replaced
by an optimism begotten of the movie. I saw Man
in those dark days on the French front in his icono-
clastic mood, wantonly destroying the proudest
relics of the creative genius of his forebears. To-day
I find the screen achieving wonders in conserving, for
the sake of posterity, the memory of epic, epoch-
making deeds of derring-do that not only glorify our

THE MOVIE AS A WORLD LANGUAGE 197

past but inspire us with hope and courage and
ambition for the future.

In illustration of this, let me say something of a
recent motion-picture destined to win new friends
for an art-form which has only of late been recog-
nized by the more conservative of our intelligenzia as
worthy of their interest and regard. The screening of
Emerson Hough's historical romance "The Covered
Wagon/' which deals with the heroic achievements
of the pioneers who blazed a trail, in their quest of
California gold, across the prairies and the Rockies,
thus conferring a priceless boon upon a nation in the
making, is one of the most important milestones in
the progress of the movie upward toward its highest
plane of endeavor. Says Jesse L. Lasky, of the
Famous Players-Lasky Corporation, speaking of his
organization's splendid contribution not merely to
movie fans but to those who believe that by the visual
study of his past Man may find both warnings and
inspirations for his future:

We did our utmost to make this the picture of a
decade a living, moving, historical spectacle which
would be of great worth to the world. For the reason
that we feel that our efforts have been successful we are
therefore going to offer prints to the Smithsonian In-
stitution for preservation in the archives of that insti-
tution. Probably never again will a real buffalo hunt be
staged, and it is doubtful if any producers will again

198 THAT MARVEL THE MOVIE

undertake the immense task involved in "The Covered

Wagon."

Before the actual screening of the story was begun,
scouting in search of an appropriate site for the
project was carried on in the states of California,
Utah, Nevada, Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana,
New Mexico and Arizona. A location was finally
chosen in Utah, ninety miles from the nearest town
and railroad station. As the instant popular success,
combined with the historical importance of "The
Covered Wagon," have a direct bearing upon the
prophecy and suggestion which I made in the open-
ing chapter of this book, I shall quote at some
length from Mr. James Cruze, to whose energy,
enthusiasm and skill as a director the triumphant
screening of Mr. Hough's stimulating novel is largely
due. Says Mr. Cruze:

Did you ever sit on the edge of a volcano expecting
an eruption any instant? That was my position. Our
camp was not patterned after Fifth Avenue, and I never
knew when something might not break loose. One of the
difficult problems was the rehearsing of the Indians for
the attack on the wagon train. This had to be well timed,
so that nobody would be hurt. But the Indians got so
excited, whether or not the cameras were grinding, that
we could hardly restrain them.

The breaking of the steers to yoke was another exciting
job. Quite a number of the cowboys with us would not

THE MOVIE AS A WORLD LANGUAGE 199

tacHe that work, so we had to get special men. They
finally accomplished this by yoking the steers together
and leaving them for twenty-four hours, and then they
were usually willing to stand.

Then that buffalo hunt on Antelope Island, in Great
Salt Lake! I shall never forget that. It was thrilling,
too; at least Karl Brown, the camera man, thought so.
He wanted a close-up of a charging bull buffalo. He had
photographed such gems as a hippopotamus, a rhinoceros
and several other animals, even an elephant; but he
found that a bull buffalo bears a distinct aversion to
the camera, or something of the sort.

We had a stockade built to protect the camera men,
but Brown had to get outside for this particular shot.
He got it, but only a narrow shave prevented the buffalo
from getting him. One of the cowboys fired in time and
we had buffalo steak that night. Some people told me
that Brown felt a little delicacy in the matter and
would not eat any.

We forded the Kaw River with our wagon train and
our horses and cattle. We yes, we got them across.
It was a frightful scramble, and all I know is that we
reached the other side. In the end I was thankful, as
any one can imagine, when the picture was finished. They
tell me it's good. It ought to be.

What can not Man learn eventually through the
Esperanto of the Eye? History is the tale of his
conflict between two elements in his nature, the con-
structive and the destructive. The picture whose
evolution is presented in detail above preserves for
posterity a thrilling record of our forebears in their

200 THAT MARVEL THE MOVIE

Herculean task of winning a continent from savagery
for civilization. It is a representation of Man under
the influence of his eternal constructive impetus.
Were I drawing an illustration for this chapter, I
should depict Rheims cathedral shattered by high
explosives beside a prairie schooner drawn by oxen
and ask my readers to judge between them, to say
which sketch gave us the higher opinion of humanity.
Is our race to permit eventually its constructive or
its destructive inclinations to dominate its fate? This
is the crucial question agitating mankind to-day, and
upon the answer given to it the future of all things
worth while in the world depends. Who dare assert
that that answer is not more likely to be what it
should be because the movie is constantly displaying
a fuller appreciation of the lofty mission upon earth
that has been assigned to it?

CHAPTER XVIII

THE MOVIE AS THE HOPE OF CIVILIZATION

Buried Civilizations They Perished from Lack of
Intercommunication Civilization now World-Wide Its
Salvation Depends on Mutual Understanding The Screen
the Only Universal Tongue How it can be Made to
Rescue the Race A Dream that Should Come True.

201

CHAPTER XVIII

THE MOVIE AS THE HOPE OF CIVILIZATION

No conscientious writer begins the final chapter of
a book that has engaged his energies for a consider-
able period of time without a feeling of mingled
regret and apprehension. He lays aside reluctantly
a piece of work which, at its inception, seemed worth
doing, and whose doing has given him real pleasure;
and, at the same time, he is haunted by the fear
that for the attainment of the purpose which he has
had in view he has left something of vital importance
unsaid, has failed to marshal his facts, figures, sug-
gestions and arguments to the best advantage, and
may have allowed at times his own enthusiasm for
the subject he has had in hand to repel his less
sympathetic readers. This latter possibility is espe-
cially disquieting to a writer who has endeavored to
stress the significance of the movie, in its constantly
multiplying manifestations, as a new but possibly
determining factor in the struggle of modern civiliza-
tion to save itself from the many foes besetting it*

203

304 THAT MARVEL THE MOVIE

It is hard for "the man on the street/' a clear-headed
but rather unimaginative being, for whom, among
others, this book is written, to admit that what has
seemed to him for years past to be but a more or
less interesting form of amusement, too much given
to errors of taste and judgment, has become, of late,
through an amazingly rapid process of evolution, a
world power, the influence of which upon the lives
of individuals and of nations can not easily be over-
estimated. But the business, politics and inter-
national affairs of the world are dominated for the
most part by this same man on the street, and it is
imperative, for the sake of his own ultimate welfare,
as well as for the good of the race at large, that he be
made to realize that the screen as an entertainer,
educator, drummer, possessing a monopoly of the
race's only universal language, is worthy of his most
earnest attention.

In a letter recently written by President Harding
to President Sills of Bowdoin College is to be found
the following interesting prophecy:

We shall from this time forward have a much more
adequate conception of the essential unity of the whole
story of mankind, and a keener realization of the fact
that all its factors must be weighed and appraised if any
of them are to be accurately estimated and understood.
I feel strongly that such a broader view of history, if it
can be implanted in the community's mind in the future

THE HOPE OF CIVILIZATION 205

through the efforts of educators and writers, will contrib-
ute greatly to uphold the hands and strengthen the
efforts of those who will have to deal with the great
problem of human destiny, particularly with that of
preserving peace and outlawing war.

This recently accepted broader view of history
which, as President Harding says, is an influence
making for peace, a new ally to the world forces
struggling for a higher and better civilization, can
not be implanted in the minds of the public, as I have
demonstrated in the first chapter of this book,
through educators and writers employing only the
old media for the dissemination of their teachings.
Neither the book, the rostrum, the pulpit, the
printed word, nor all of them combined, have made,
nor can they make, that kind of impress upon the
much-too-illiterate public which will compel the race
to cease committing its habitual crimes and blunders.

But, strangely enough, at the very moment when
the enlightened minds of all nations, through the
words of contemporary statesmen, scholars and
writers, have become convinced of the "essential
unity" of human history there has been granted' to
mankind a medium for the universal dissemination of
new ideas, discoveries, facts and generalizations that
has in it the power to perform for the race a service
the necessity for which President Harding has elo-

206 THAT MARVEL THE MOVIE

quently demonstrated. Scientists and historians have
of late served as continuity writers for the great pic-
ture drama of man's past, and, lo, the story of the
race reveals itself not as scattered, unrelated inci-
dents but as a majestic, coordinated tale, but partially
told, whose denouement may be more splendid than
we have hitherto dared to hope it could be.

No student of world affairs can fail to be impressed,
despite the cataclysm that overtook the race in 1914,
by the pathetic but hopeful and inspiring fact that
mankind, by a reasonable and not too difficult con-
finement of his energies to civilized, peaceful, con-
structive activities, could raise itself to a much higher
plane of civilization in a comparatively short time
from the slough of despondency in which it now finds
itself. All that is necessary to give Man the buoy-
ancy, courage and incentive necessary to overcome
the evils that beset the world is the assurance that
the iconoclasm that periodically destroys his own
handiwork, the destructive mischievousness of an
evil spirit that he has not as yet exorcised, shall never
again be allowed to function, that widespread wars
shall be permanently relegated to the bloody, accusa-
tory past. The osteopaths assert that a slight mal-
adjustment of even a small bone in a man's skeleton
may doom him to death from some fatal malady
seemingly unrelated to the framework of his body-

THE HOPE OF CIVILIZATION 207

Whatsoever may be the truth in this assertion, it
serves to illustrate the point I am making, namely,
that the cause of war any war, small or great,
appears to be almost always ludicrously insignificant
compared to the damage it does. We are always face
to face with the hideous fact that any slight disloca-
tion of the bony structure of modern civilization
might, as was shown by the recent war of wars,
bring about its complete annihilation. Surely it is
incumbent upon us, if we are not, as a race, madmen
or morons, to take full advantage of any new medium
or method that presents itself for the safeguarding of
peace on earth, for the furtherance of good will to
men.

Since that red day in June, 1914, when the assassin
Gavrilo Prinzip fired the shot that not only echoed
around the world but almost overturned the very
pillars of civilization's temple, two antagonistic ten-
dencies upon the part of mankind have displayed
themselves with unprecedented impressiveness.
Man's destructiveness has been raised to the nth
power, while his constructive ingenuity has been
exhibited in an amazing and encouraging way. The
laboratories of the world to-day are solving problems
the solution of which places the human race abso-
lutely in control of its own destiny. It may, if it so
chooses, commit suicide through high explosives or

208 THAT MARVEL THE MOVIE

poison gas, or it may devote itself successfully to the
overthrow and annihilation of the Four Horsemen
of the Apocalypse, War, Famine, Poverty and
Disease.

Now what bearing has all this upon the subject-
matter of this book, what has a biography of the
movie got to do with the choice mankind must
presently make between a higher civilization and a
return to savagery, between the call of the millennium
and the lure of the jungle, between science making
earth a paradise and science making earth a hell? If
my preceding chapters have not supplied a convinc-
ing answer to this query, let me, even though I repeat
myself, endeavor, before I bring this labor of love
to a close, to formulate a concise, but comprehensive
and convincing, answer to a question that future gen-
erations may consider the most important that the
soul of Man ever asked of the physical universe. Is it
not conceivable that posterity will laud us of to-day
for inventing the Esperanto of the Eye and marvel
at us because we failed to make full use of it to attain
that enlightenment which is the sine qua non of our
race's salvation? May not our descendants revere us
for inventing the screen, while, at the same time,
they mock at us for our delay in taking advantage
of its highest possibilities as an ally to progress, as a
defense against racial deterioration?

THE HOPE OF CIVILIZATION 209

In various parts of the world of late, in the Arctic
regions, in South and Central America, in Mexico
and New Mexico, in South Africa and Egypt, in
Asia Minor and elsewhere, archaeologists have,
through excavations and allied activities, brought to
light the remains of prehistoric civilizations so remote
in time and so high in character that a new aspect
has been given to various periods in the progress of
the race from the cave and jungle to Paris and New
York. It is unquestionable that Man during the
countless ages that have passed has attained at times
in various localities a condition of cultured enlight-
enment that appears admirable from our modern
point of view only to lose it again either through
internal or external foes, or through both combined.
The outstanding and highly significant fact is this,
that the human race, no matter how splendid a
development it might display sporadically and local-
ly, could make no general and permanent progress
until the nations had devised some method of wide-
spread intercommunication. The earth is a grave-
yard of great cities and great peoples who were
forced to pass into oblivion without revealing to the
outer barbarians of their time the secret of their
greatness. Nor was a highly civilized people in one
part of the world able to form ties with some equally
advanced people far afield and so, though they both

210 THAT MARVEL THE MOVIE

possessed the key to the higher knowledge, they were
ignorant of each other and both were doomed even-
tually to perish.

To-day civilization, so far as its surface manifes-
tations are concerned, is not a localized but a world-
wide phenomenon. It can not be completely buried,
as have been so many of its miniature predecessors.
The Congo has its telephones and the Arctic region
its wireless. But in so far as modern civilization is
more comprehensive than the Babylonian or the
Egyptian, is not provincial but cosmopolitan, so
would its downfall be more tragically appalling than
any catastrophe that has yet afflicted the human
race. And from all parts of the world come to us the
voices of observant men and women who, alive to the
warnings vouchsafed to us by the recent war of wars,
are imploring humanity to look not with passion but
with reason at the situation of the world to-day and
to take measures at once that shall drag us back
from the edge of the precipice we have reached.

Has the Esperanto of the Eye, the only medium
the race has ever devised for universal intercom-
munication, come too late to rescue mankind from
impending doom? Not if rulers, law-makers, teachers,
preachers, diplomatists, statesmen, all men and
women who influence the heart, mind and conscience
of human groups, small or great, realize in time that

THE HOPE OP CIVILIZATION 211

in the screen the race has found a medium which,
rightly used, could mould for it a future infinitely
superior to its deplorable past.

There will be, I fully realize, those who will jeer
at the basic idea underlying the contention that I
have made in this little book, ridicule me for believing
that, although a man cannot raise himself by his
boot-straps, mankind at large can elevate itself by
means of the regenerated, ever-increasingly-potent
movie. Nevertheless, as I have been describing in
some detail the evolutionary steps that have raised
the screen from a toy to a world power, have broad-
ened its scope from a plaything to a sleepless influence
affecting the destinies of men and nations, I have
been constantly more convinced that the suggestion
regarding a great world centre for the enlightenment
of mankind through visual instruction, made in my
first chapter, becomes every month more feasible, as
it also, as the days pass and the world appears to go
from bad to worse, grows more imperatively neces-
sary. The screen is a mirror in which the race can
see itself as it has been and as it is, and a tongue,
comprehended of all men, that might, if it rises to
its great mission, bring salvation to the world.

"A lighthouse of the past, a university of uni-
versities, a fountain of all revealed knowledge, incul-
cated through a medium understood of all men, a

THAT MARVEL THE MOVIE

Mecca for the pilgrims of progress from all corners
of the earth/ 5 that is my dream, and, for having
dreamed it, I know that I am a better man. By the
same token, the human race would become a better
race if it possessed the foresight and common-sense
to make my dream come true!

APPENDICES

213

APPENDIX A

STATISTICS SHOWING THE SCOPE OF THE MOTION PICTUEE
INDUSTRY

Motion picture theatres in the United

States 15,000

Seating capacity (one show) 7,605,000

Average weekly attendance at picture
theatres 50,000,000

Admissions paid annually $520,000,000

The average number of reels used for one
performance 8

Average number of seats in picture
theatres 507

Number of persons employed in picture
theatres 105,000

Persons employed in picture production. 50,000

Permanent employees in all branches of
picture industry 300,000

Investment in motion picture industry. . $1,250,000,000

Approximate cost of pictures produced
annually $200,000,000

Salaries and wages paid annually at stu-
dios in production $75,000,000

Cost of costumes, scenery, and other ma-
terials and supplies used in production
annually $50,000,000

215

216 APPENDICES

Average number of feature films pro-
duced annually 700

Average number of short reel subjects,

excluding news reels, annually 1,500

Taxable motion picture property in the

United States $720,000,000

Percentage of pictures made in California

(1922) 84%

Percentage of pictures made in New York

(1922) 12%

Percentage of pictures made elsewhere

in United States (1922) 4%

Foreign made pictures sent here for sale

(1922) 425

Foreign made pictures sold and released

for exhibition 6

Theatres running six to seven days per

week 9,000

Theatres running four to five days per

week 1,500

Theatres running one to three days per

week 4,500

Lineal feet of film exported in 1921 140,000,000

Lineal feet of film exported in 1913 32,000,000

Percentage of American films used in for-
eign countries 90

Film footage used each week by news reels 1,400,000

Combined circulation of news reels

weekly 40,000,000

Number of theatres using news reels

weekly 11,000

Amount spent annually by producers and

exhibitors in newspaper and magazine

advertising $5,000,000

APPENDICES 217

Amount spent annually by producers in
photos, cuts, slides, and other acces-
sories $2,000,000

Amount spent annually by producers in

lithographs $2,000,000

Amount spent annually by producers in
printing and engraving $3,000,000

Hospitals and charitable institutions in
U. S. equipped for showing motion pic-
tures, Jan. 1, 1923 7,000

The number of schools and churches in
U. S. equipped for showing motion pic-
tures, Jan. 1, 1923, almost equals the
number of theatres.

Practically every State and Federal Peni-
tentiary, Penal Institution and House
of Detention in the U. S. shows motion
pictures regularly to their inmates.

APPENDIX B

THE SCREEN AS A NEW LIFE GIVER TO LITERARY CLASSICS

The following quotations are culled from recent reports
made by librarians in various parts of the United States:

"The filming of books always causes a great demand
for them. A call comes immediately after the advertise-
ment appears in local newspapers and lasts months,
and, in cases where pictures are extraordinarily good,
years after the film has been shown. Before the exhibi-
tion of the pictures, 'Peter Ibbetson' stood on the shelf.
Dumas was read by few, and interest in *The Four
Horsemen of the Apocalypse' lagged. Since the films
have been shown here, these books are circulating con-
stantly.

"Not only do the films increase the demand for a
particular book, but interest is aroused in the time and
setting of the story. For instance, after *The Three
Musketeers' was shown, calls came for the life of Riche-
lieu and the history of the reign of Charles First. Dumas
is now in great demand. 'Orphans of the Storm* brought
calls for the life of Danton and the history of the French
Revolution. 'Passion' overwhelmed us with demands
for the life of Dubarry and the life of Louis XIV."

Walnut Hills Librarian, Cincinnati* Ohio.

"I can say, most emphatically, that the filming of
literary classics does have a very noticeable effect upon

218

APPENDICES 219

the reading of the books filmed. The increase in the
demand and use of these books is noticeable from the
very moment they are announced. c Robin Hood' is on
here now, and long before it first appeared, every scrap
of our information on Robin Hood was out in use.
Recently this was true of "The Prisoner of Zenda/ a
subject which has been dead for quite some time in
library circulation and all at once it was revived with a
tremendous demand. Not long ago we had a sudden
call from many parts of the city for material about
'Panchon the Cricket' and later learned that the film
had been running in an obscure community moving
picture house."

Charles E. Rusk, Librarian, Indianapolis, Ind.

"In some cases there is a demand for the books in

foreign languages such as Italian and Hungarian, and

the showing of 'The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse'

brought requests for the book in the original Spanish."

Librarian of Public Library, Cleveland, Ohio.

"Very often not only the story filmed is called for,
but others by the same author. In the case of 'Monte
Cristo,' it has led to a great demand for all the works
of Dumas. *A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's
Court' has revived the interest in others of Mark
Twain's works."

Report by a New England Librarian.

"The screen creates a new demand on the part of
those who have not themselves seen the picture. A
middlewestern librarian tells me that many of their calls
for the book come from those who have seen the adver-
tising of the picture, or who have heard their friends

220 APPENDICES

talk about it, or who assume that a book which has found
its way into motion pictures must be out of the ordinary.
By way of anticipating and satisfying this demand, that
librarian has kept a display rack of books in constant
circulation by placing the sign above them: 'These
Books Have Appeared in the Movies.' "

Ralph Hayes.

APPENDIX C

WHAT MASSACHUSETTS THINKS OF MOTION PICTURE
CENSORSHIP

In 1921, the legislature of Massachusetts was induced
to pass a censorship law. By petition it became a referen-
dum matter and on November 7, 1922, the public of
Massachusetts voted upon the question of whether or
not the people desired a censorship of the motion
picture. The people defeated the measure by a vote
of 553,173 to 208,252, a majority of 344,921 against
censorship.

It was the first time the public of any State had ever
been given the opportunity to register its opinion on
this important subject. Massachusetts is a conservative
State. Its people are conservative people. They rejected
censorship by a vote greater than that given to any can-
didate on the ticket or to any issue. Their voice at the
polls was based upon a thorough understanding and
consideration of this issue. In this work of enlighten-
ment, the newspapers of Massachusetts performed a
tremendous service to the motion picture. Ninety-two
per cent of them stood staunchly upon the principle that
freedom of expression upon the screen is just as es-
sential to its further development as freedom of the
press is essential to the continued enlightenment of
mankind.

APPENDIX D

SIGNIFICANT DATES IN THE EVOLUTION OF THE MOTION

PICTURE

Daguerre, Louis Jacques Mand6, of Fran,ce, inventor of

photography, born 1789, died 1851.
Desvignes, of France, devised apparatus for animated

photography, 1860.
Du Mont, of France, formulated scheme of chronopho-

tography, 1861.
Muybridge, an Englishman, photographs a trotting horse

in motion, California, 1872.
Jansen's photographic revolver for recording the transit

of Venus, 1874.
Dr. E. J. Marey's photographic gun for studying the

flight of birds, 1882.
Stern filed patent in Great Britain for chronophoto-

graphic apparatus, 1889.
Roller photography invented by Eastman and Walker,

1885.

Eastman, an American, invents celluloid film, 1889.
Edison, an American, exhibits his Kineto>scope at

Chicago World's Fair, 1893.
Robert W. Paul, an Englishman, throws first movie

picture on screen at his studio in Hatton Garden,

London, early in 1895.
Paul shows movies at the Royal Institution, London,

Feb. 28, 1896.

APPENDICES 223

Paul and Sir Augustus Harris win success at the Olympia
Theatre, London, with the "Theatograph," 1896.

Richard G. Hollaman, an American, exhibits the cine-
matograph at his New York Eden Musee, 1896.

Charles Urban installs his new projector at the Eden
Musee, 1897.

First topical film the English Derby of 1896 was
shown by Paul at the Alhambra, London, 1896.

APPENDIX E

WHAT THE MOVIE HAS DONE FOR A GREAT RAILROAD

A little over two years ago, the loss and damage bill
of the Illinois Central Railroad, on carload and less-than-
carload shipments, averaged more than $,500,000 for a
single year.

Seven months after motion pictures were adopted to
educate employees in proper methods of freight handling,
in connection with a vigorous campaign to improve the
record, that expense was reduced a cool million dollars!
The reduction has averaged approximately fifty per cent
for the year. Best of all, the bill is still on the down-grade.

In addition to reels on "Loss and Damage," the Illinois
Central Railroad has produced other films on methods of
engineering and switching. Its "visual education depart-
ment" boasts a collection of 6000 slides, in addition to
nearly half a million negatives of still photographs.

There are likewise motion pictures made expressly to
educate farmers along the road's right of way in modern
scientific methods of poultry raising, soil treatment,
dairying, potato culture, and packing produce for ship-
ment. A force of industrial agents maintained by the
railroad holds farmers' meetings at which talks and films
are the order of the day, and conducts field days and
other get-together affairs where "the movies" constitute
an always dependable attraction.

Visual Education, March,
224

APPENDIX F

FACTS AND FIGURES SHOWING THAT THE SCREEN HAS
BECOME THE FIRST WORLD CONQUEROR

Buenos Aires, Argentina, has 18 motion-picture
theatres, with ,50,000 paid admissions per month.

Montreal, Canada, supports over sixty motion-
picture theatres.

Santiago, Chile, has twenty-three motion-picture
theatres, and a new one is now in process of construction
which will seat ,500 people.

American films depicting exciting serial dramas and
boisterous comedies are popular in China. Shanghai has
motion-picture theatres; Canton 15; Hongkong 8,
Peking, Tientsin and Hankow 7 each.

The first motion-picture drama produced in China
with a native cast was screened July 1, 1921, at the
Olympic Theatre, Shanghai, by the Chinese Motion
Picture Society.

In Greece there are about 40 motion-picture houses,
9 of which are in Athens.

In India, Burma and Ceylon there are about 168
motion picture houses, 16 of which are in Calcutta.

In Java there are 50 motion-picture theatres. Amer-
ican films are the most popular. One of the largest
theatres seats 2,000 Europeans and ,500 natives.

In Japan there are about 600 motion-picture theatres

226 APPENDICES

giving regular performances and about 2,000 more giving
occasional performances. Tokyo has about 50 houses,
Osaka 30, Kobe 15, and Kyoto 10. These theatres seat
between 500 and 1,500 people.

There are in the Netherlands 170 licensed film theatres,
with more than 50 other theatres, town halls and society
rooms where films are occasionally shown.

Bergen, Norway, a city of 100,000 inhabitants, has
seven motion-picture theatres, with a combined seating
capacity of 4,000. Seventy-five per cent of the films
shown are American.

Lisbon, Portugal, has 3 motion-picture theatres with
a seating capacity of 800 persons each, and thirteen
smaller houses seating about 400 each. There are about
120 motion-picture theatres in all Portugal. American
picture films are rapidly increasing in popularity.

The largest motion picture theatre in Bucharest,
Rumania, has a seating capacity of 1,200.

Sweden is better supplied with motion picture theatres
than any country in the world. With a population of
6,000,000 it has over 600 cinema houses. Stockholm,
with a population of 500,000, has 75 picture theatres.

Great Britain has about 4,000 motion-picture thea-
tres. The largest and best appointed cinema theatres
in the United Kingdom are found in the provincial
towns of England such as Manchester, Bradford, Leeds
and Liverpool.

France has about 2000 picture theatres, Denmark 250,
Belgium about 800.

APPENDIX G

MEMBERS OF THE COMMITTEE ON PUBLIC RELATIONS
COOPERATING WITH MOTION PICTURE PRODUCERS
AND DISTRIBUTORS OF AMERICA, INC.

The Nat'l Society of the Sons of the American Kevolution

National Society Colonial Dames of America

National Health Council

Boys' Club Federation

American Historical Association

The American Sunday School Union

Chautauqua Institution

National Safety Council

American Home Economics Assn.

The Nat'l Community Center Assn.

Community Service

American City Bureau

Central Conference of American Rabbis

Safety Institute of America

Child Welfare League of America

Playground and Recreation Association of America

Commonwealth Club

Actors' Equity Association

The Woodcraft League of America

American Federation of Labor

Jewish Welfare Board

237

228 APPENDICES

Girl Reserve Department of the Y. W. C. A.

Russell Sage Foundation

Camp Fire Girls

The Council of Jewish Women

National Committee for the Prevention of Blindness

Nat'l Assn. of Civic Secretaries

Cooper Union

National Congress of Mothers and Parent-Teacher

Associations

Associated Advertising Clubs of the World
Girl Scouts

American Country Life Assn.
Nat'l Tuberculosis Association
American Child Health Assn.
National Education Association
Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America
General Federation of Women's Clubs
The Academy of Political Science
National Child Labor Committee
American Civic Association
International Federation of Catholic Alumnse
Nat'l Catholic Welfare Council
War Dept. Civilian Advisory Board
Young Women's Hebrew Association
The Girls' Friendly Society in America
The Nat'l Assn. of Book Publishers
The Nat'l Security League
Daughters of the American Revolution
The International Committee of Y. M. C. A.
N. Y. Child Welfare Committee
Daughters of the American Revolution
The Salvation Army
Young Men's Hebrew Association
Nat'l Council of Catholic Women

APPENDICES 229

Girl Scouts

American Museum of Natural History
National Council of Catholic Men
Dairymen's League Co-operative Assn.
National Board of the Young Women's Christian Asso-
ciations

International Federation of Catholic Alumnse
American Library Association
National Civic Federation
Boy Scouts of America

122194