With the movie makersStearns, Myron M. (Myron Morris)
General
With the movie makers
Stearns, Myron M. (Myron Morris)
Motion pictures -- Juvenile literature
Just as among the magazines, you find the so-called “highbrow”
magazines and reviews, and the romance magazines and the adventure
magazines, and the detective or mystery-story magazines, you will be
able to find the movies of the kind you want, under the label that
will enable you to recognize them. That will be one of the important
things—the label.
Suppose for a moment that all the magazines were published in blank
white covers, and when you went to a news-stand to buy reading-matter,
you had to pick at random, hoping that after you had bought the
magazine “sight unseen” you would find it contained the particular type
of story or review you wanted!—That is almost the way it is with motion
pictures now—except that, because of the queer existing situation, each
movie man tries to put into his picture something for everybody; as
though the owners of magazines published in blank white covers should
try to please grown-ups and children and boys and college professors
and law-students and hoodlums and scientists with a single volume of
reading-matter.
As soon as this change comes about—the division of movie audiences into
the proper groups or classes—we shall see a big change in the whole
industry. Then it will be possible to show such a film as that French
peasant story, profitably.
And it will not be long before that change comes; it is on its way
already.
Look at Goldwyn, for instance—and Universal, and Metro and Vitagraph.
Universal was one of the first to begin to make distinctly “class”
pictures. I don’t believe that they even knew quite what they were
doing—consciously, I mean. But they began to make good “cheap”
pictures, that were distinctly not for the “exclusive” audiences.
Their pictures were for the people who wanted clearly “popular”
entertainment, as distinguished from “highbrow stuff.” The result was
that, with honesty and sincere effort, they soon came to occupy a place
as leaders, producing thrillers of “Western” action, where cowboy
heroes would ride up at incredible speed in the final feet of the last
reel, and save the lovely heroine with a six-inch gun in each hand.
Gunpowder, adventure, excitement, and love—that was the formula, served
in large doses for those audiences that were not too particular about
the plausibility of their stories, so long as they contained those
ingredients.
With Metro and Vitagraph it was more or less the same, with this
difference: that they both tried to reach a little higher grade of
audiences with their melodramas.
They tried to get on the screen a little more of artistry; the heroine
didn’t need to be quite so truly good and beautiful, or the hero quite
so noble and brave and quick with each of his guns. But after all there
was not so much difference, and in some way Universal, perhaps seeing
a little more clearly just what they were doing, had something of an
advantage.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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