It’s safer, though, from a money standpoint, to have pictures a little _below_ than a little _above_ the line that marks the limit of popular appreciation. At least, for a while. There we have the whole problem of how to get better pictures: daring to keep right on the border line of popular taste, without trying to play too safe by sagging away down below it, in an effort to appeal to greater numbers of people. There’s a curious thing about this problem. Great numbers of people will keep away from pictures that seem to them too “highbrow” to be interesting. But on the other hand, unless pictures are good enough to keep people feeling that they are getting something worth-while, after a while they will stop going to that kind, also. Have you ever played tennis with a man you could always beat? If you did, you found that after a while it wasn’t half so interesting as playing with a man who could give you a rattling good game, and whom, if you were at your very best, you _might_ beat. For some reason there is a great stimulus in progress; we like to play tennis best with people who are so good that to play with them means continually improving our own game. Nobody would ever think of going to school if the teachers didn’t know more than their pupils. That would be worse than forever playing tennis with a man who could never hope to ever equal your own game. Do you see what we are getting to? _Leadership!_ Motion pictures, are, in a certain sense, a part of the great publishing business of the United States. They publish stories in picture form. And in those stories they publish ideas, and ideals, and rules of conduct, and good taste, and good sense,—or the lack of all those things. It is through the publishing business—the movies as well as books or magazines or newspapers—that we get the information and ideals by which we live. The publishing business is the main channel, aside from schools and conversation and churches, through which we get the information and ideas that enable us to make progress, that enable us to get ahead. Accordingly, the publishing business—and the movies with the rest—has to have in it the element of _leadership_. It’s as though we were going to school when we go to see motion pictures. In a sense, we are. And just as, if we really were not learning anything there, we wouldn’t go to school, so, with motion pictures, if we don’t find anything worth while in them, after a while we get tired of them and lose interest, and stop paying money to watch them. In one year, when motion pictures got too far below the line of popular appreciation, enough people stopped going to them to drop the total box office receipts in the country more than a hundred million dollars.