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