With the movie makers

by Myron M. Stearns

The answer is that for the most part they were lost, and always have been, both in the movies and in rushing to new gold fields. One picture cost three-quarters of a million dollars to produce. The money was invested by hundreds of little stockholders, to whom the chance of “getting into the movies on the ground floor” seemed too good to lose. But the company went bankrupt, and the assets, including the film, were bought in for $20,000.

Those losses are the things we rarely hear about. It is the successes that are recounted. Mike Maginnity, who took all his sister’s money and started for San Francisco in ’49, turned up again, dead broke, ten years later. He had made one or two little strikes, over a half a dozen years, and used the money to pay off part of the debts he had already run up—perhaps at the Buckeye Saloon. That was all—and we never heard about him.

But we did hear about the big fellows who struck it yellow, and the piles they made. And you may be sure that, as Mr. Kipling says, the tales lost no fat in the telling.

Up to the present time, the producers or “owners” in motion pictures are mostly just the run of little fellows who have happened to land on their feet, and made the most of it.

And, since in making pictures, as in everything else, the final product can be no better than the brains at the top of the organization, we have had to wait for better pictures until, little by little, the movie game assumed greater stability, and began to attract men of larger caliber, with better ideas of just what was really worth while, and what was not.

Don’t imagine for a moment that Bodfish or Isabella was ever run as well, or had as good a school or as good streets, or as good houses, or as much real comfort, as your own home town. The best lawyers, and the best school-teachers, and the best carpenters, and the best road makers, were still in the East. Even the best saloon-keepers, for the most part, had not made the journey. Only the best gamblers, and best prospectors, and some of the best fighters and adventurers, were there.

Just as with the men on the Los Angeles paper, the first writers to leave the comparatively sure living of their chosen branch of work—whether newspaper-reporting or novel-writing, or contributing to magazines—were not the best. Mostly, indeed, far from it. It was the fellow afraid of being squeezed out who was glad of a chance to pick up a few dollars at the new movie game—packing his kit, as it were, and lighting out into the unknown towards the new gold fields.

And as with authors, so with artists.

Photographers were something of an exception, for the motion-picture camera, from the very first, offered more possibilities than did the “still” camera previously used.

Accordingly, photography in the movies has been ahead of all other artistic branches of work; it was the first to reach a comparatively high level. To-day motion picture photography is uniformly good, and often exceptionally fine, while the writing end of the game, and the editing—in fact, nearly all the other essential branches of film story-telling—are still busy “catching up.”