There is the whole trouble with our American pictures: in a single sentence they are willing to sacrifice too much, to “tell a good story.” For with our producers the “good story” means really the entertaining or exciting or pretty story, which is in the last analysis the most popular story instead of the really best story. Roast beef and oatmeal are a better diet, in the long run, than candy. Candy tastes better, perhaps, for the moment, and more people will buy it—but in the end, too much of it makes you sick. Our American motion-picture producers are specializing on candy, because—for the moment—more people want it. But they’re over-doing the thing. If they want to hold the world leadership in movie-making, they must turn out more roast beef. And we must help them, you and I, by demanding something in pictures besides candy, and in learning to like and applaud the really worth-while films that we can turn out, when they come along. [Illustration: _Courtesy Universal Pictures Corporation._ A “WESTERN” ACTOR AND HIS FAVORITE HORSE. Trick horses are always valued by “Western” heroes for cowboy work.] [Illustration: _Courtesy Universal Pictures Corporation._ “WESTERNS” ARE ALWAYS POPULAR. The above scene from a Universal serial of pioneer days helped pave the way for the popularity of such features as “The Covered Wagon.”] CHAPTER X MOVIES OF TO-MORROW What will the movies be like ten or twenty years from now? Recently a very beautiful photoplay, made by a famous French director, was brought to New York. It told of two boys and a girl, a foundling, who grew up together on a French farm. One of the boys was a farmer, and the other became a sculptor, and the story concerned their love for the girl, and which of them should marry her—the artist who made beautiful statues, or the farmer, who tilled the soil and produced the crops without which there would be no artists or any one else. A good many people saw that picture, in private projection-rooms. One New York editor who watched it said it was the most beautiful photoplay he had ever seen. Most of those who saw it were deeply moved by it, and called it “tremendous.” But no motion-picture distributor cared to handle it, or show it to the American public. The man who represented the producers of the picture, himself a prominent artist and musician, explained why such an exceptionally fine film had gone begging around the New York market for months and months, while infinitely poorer pictures were being released every week. “It’s ahead of its time,” he said. “Five years from now, such a film will soon become famous.” That is interesting.