But ordinary horse sense was acquired only slowly by the movies. It is an amazing story of stupidity, reckless expenditure of money, emphasis in the wrong place, exploitation of stars out of their legitimate orbit, appeals to the lowest passions in human nature; of tragic failures and inexplicable, actually laughable, successes, of cities built and abandoned, of fortunes made and lost, of a new, marvellous, mysterious art in the making—this tale of the kinetoscope in search of its kingdom. But it is worth telling for many reasons, not the least of which is that the coming of the screen into its own has had, and is having, a disintegrating effect upon the commercialized stage. What the ultimate outcome of this iconoclastic influence of the movie upon the stage is likely to be is a subject that must be reserved for a later chapter, but it is enlightening, in connection with the foregoing review of what may be called the fly-by-night era of the films, to glance at what has been happening to the American theatre during the years in which the picture palaces have been rising from the slums to the avenues.
Walter Pritchard Eaton in Scribner’s Magazine for November, 1922, says:
As a means of supplying drama to America as a whole our commercialized professional theatre has broken down. The reasons need not concern us here. They are many, no doubt. One, of course, is the rise of the motion pictures, which are cheaper to present and to witness, and which enable the local theatre manager to keep his house open six or seven days in the week. Another reason is the increased cost of transportation. Another reason is the complication of modern life, even in the “provinces,” so that the theatre, having to compete against other attractions (or distractions), no longer appeals so universally, or at any rate no longer finds all the people with the surplus cash to patronize it at the excessive modern scale of prices.
Later on in the essay quoted above its author speaks of himself as one of those “who love the drama and believe the movies a mean and stupefying substitute for its imaginative and intellectual appeal.” If Mr. Eaton’s opinion of the screen, as thus forcibly expressed, is based upon its past, the past of a Prodigal Son utterly unworthy of the fatted calf, it is not, as the reader of what I have thus far written will admit, without reasonable justification. But is not the present of the movies encouraging, is not their future promising? Succeeding chapters of this book will, I hope, go to prove that Mr. Eaton is too hasty in assuming that eventually the screen may not atone for any seeming damage it may have done to the stage.
CHAPTER V
THE MOVIE DEVELOPS A CONSCIENCE
Grows up in the Slums—Used and Abused as a Money-Getter—Goes from Bad to Worse—Will Hays Called to the Rescue—Pulpit, Press and Playwrights Thunder Against it—The Responsibility of the Public—The Light in the Darkness.
CHAPTER V
THE MOVIE DEVELOPS A CONSCIENCE