Extremists among the pious are railing against the moving pictures as
once they railed against novels. They have no notion that this
institution is penetrating to the last backwoods of our civilization,
where its presence is as hard to prevent as the rain. But some of us are
destined to a reaction, almost as strong as the obsession. The
religionists will think they lead it. They will be self-deceived. Moving
picture nausea is already taking hold of numberless people, even when
they are in the purely pagan mood. Forced by their limited purses, their
inability to buy a Ford car, and the like, they go in their loneliness to
film after film till the whole world seems to turn on a reel. When they
are again at home, they see in the dark an imaginary screen with
tremendous pictures, whirling by at a horribly accelerated pace, a
photoplay delirium tremens. Faster and faster the reel turns in the back
of their heads. When the moving picture sea-sickness is upon one, nothing
satisfies but the quietest out of doors, the companionship of the
gentlest of real people. The non-movie-life has charms such as one never
before conceived. The worn citizen feels that the cranks and legislators
can do what they please to the producers. He is through with them.
The moving picture business men do not realize that they have to face
these nervous conditions in their erstwhile friends. They flatter
themselves they are being pursued by some reincarnations of Anthony
Comstock. There are several reasons why photoplay corporations are
callous, along with the sufficient one that they are corporations.
First, they are engaged in a financial orgy. Fortunes are being found by
actors and managers faster than they were dug up in 1849 and 1850 in
California. Forty-niner lawlessness of soul prevails. They talk each
other into a lordly state of mind. All is dash and experiment. Look at
the advertisements in the leading moving picture magazines. They are like
the praise of oil stock or Peruna. They bawl about films founded upon
little classics. They howl about plots that are ostensibly from the
soberest of novels, whose authors they blasphemously invoke. They boo and
blow about twisted, callous scenarios that are bad imitations of the
world's most beloved lyrics.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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