In Germany, after the War started, the making of motion pictures developed as plants might in an enclosed garden. Shut off from the rest of the world, and the influence in particular of American motion-picture methods, Germany developed methods of her own. Chief of all these was the tendency to tell the story for the sake of the story itself, with a real story-teller, the dramatic author, in full charge of the production. Of course this has not always been the case, nor has it been particularly evident, but on the whole it has meant a great deal. It meant that the author brains, instead of the glorified director brains, or the irresponsible star brains, have been the predominating influence in the pictures. Over here it has been Charles Ray or Bill Hart, Lasky or Ince, deMille or Neilan. Only comparatively recently, largely through the Goldwyn organization, have authors—Rex Beach, and Mary Roberts Rinehart, and Rupert Hughes, and so on—come into any particular prominence or influence in picture making. The result of this has been that our films have been too highly commercialized. The making of movies is of necessity very largely a commercial proposition, but here it has been overdone. Since the very first, Griffith has remained almost the only one of our real story-telling producer-directors who has put individuality and authorship above the box-office returns. Even he doesn’t do it consciously; he tries, I suppose, to make pictures, as all the rest do, that will attract the largest audiences. But he has ideas and prejudices and opinions of his own—the things that make for individuality and leadership—and he would rather lose every dollar he has ever made than give them up. While abroad the work is commercialized, too, just as ours is, there is a little more vision in it, and in some ways the films are better. “Gypsy Blood,” “Deception,” “The Golem,” the “Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,” “Our Mutual Friend,” “Carnival,” “I Accuse,” “Theodora,” “Hamlet,” “Peter the Great,” and a good many more have made tremendous records for themselves in this country. German, Norwegian, French, Italian, English. Almost as if in reply, Douglas Fairbanks and Griffith made respectively “Robin Hood” and “Orphans of the Storm.” They gave us a good chance to compare our best home product with the foreign-made article. The Fairbanks and Griffith pictures show that we can at least equal the German and other foreign films, if we try. Both these American pictures have a pictorial beauty that no foreign picture has ever equaled. The Fairbanks film has a suspense, and the Griffith picture both feeling and excitement, that no picture made outside of this country has ever shown.