CHAPTER IV
THE MOVIE GOES TO THE BAD
The Era of Fly-by-Night Speculation—The Mushroom Movie Craze—The Screen’s Youthful Indiscretions—Stupidity and Cupidity as Partners—The Degradation of a New Art-Form—Boy-Made Scenarios—The Stage Versus the Screen—A Future for Both.
CHAPTER IV
THE MOVIE GOES TO THE BAD
Whoever asserted that “you can’t indict a whole nation” made a sweeping generalization that was both historically and psychologically accurate. In what I have said, and am about to say, regarding the evil influences affecting the early years of the movie, I do not wish to do an injustice to those early promoters in the new industry who refused to degrade the screen, or to treat it as an ephemeral, wild-cat speculation. There were producers, at the very outset of the industry, who builded perhaps better than they knew, and who, because of their refusal to take the path of least resistance, are now, after a quarter of a century of film exploiting, the most successful and influential factors in the industry. They prevailed where those whose pernicious activities threatened the rise, perhaps the permanency of the movie, fell by the wayside.
It is regrettable, nevertheless, that the childhood of the movie was so deeply influenced by various pioneers who could not realize its power for good nor foresee its future greatness both as an art and as a moulder of public opinion, morals, and enlightenment. But the screen in its early years was dominated largely by get-rich-quick exploiters, adventurers out for the easy money flowing into the coffers of the movie “palaces,” less admirable in most ways than the hard-boiled treasure-seekers who flock to newly-discovered gold-fields. There is something of the romantic and heroic in the Argonauts who developed California, the South African diamond mines and the Klondike. They risked their lives in a great game of chance and won or lost in a dramatic struggle in which the winners had displayed necessarily certain sturdy, sterling qualities.
The gold-bearing realm of the movies, on the other hand, was invaded at the outset by a good many speculative fortune-seekers who staked upon their ventures nothing but their craftiness and their audacity. They were about as admirable as a bucket-shop gambler who, by expending a minimum of money and energy, hopes for a movement of the market that shall make him rich over night. The movie, as an anonymous writer in Collier’s Weekly says, was, in its early days,
nothing that could justifiably attract a big investor, or a real novelist, or a good actor. The first movie-actors were for the most part of the old-time chorus-girl and spear-carrier type; the great scenario-writers were the shop-girls or office boys who were told of the sudden need for stories, with no real training or knowledge of writing—with here and there a newspaper cub or magazine embryo who stumbled into a new gold vein where stories written in an hour could be sold for fifteen dollars; the first investors were the clerks or advertising men or born gamblers, usually in touch with the cheap end of the theatrical world, who had a little money to invest in a new scheme, provided it “looked good” and “wasn’t too big.”