With the movie makers

by Myron M. Stearns

There is always enough danger in playing “opposite” a lion to make it easy for any actor to “register fear.” Note how the lion is baring his teeth.

There, in a nutshell, is one of the big difficulties that anybody who wants to help along the moving-picture industry, either by making better pictures or by encouraging better pictures, is up against. Between the public on the one side and the big distributors and producers on the other side stand the exhibitors, who must be “sold” on a money-making basis, before any great change can come about.

In the long run, to be sure, audience value counts. In the long run you and Andrew McGinnis and George Lenox and Fuller Westcott have to be satisfied with the pictures you see, or you will quit going to see what your local exhibitor-man has to offer. But remember, that’s in the long run.

Now, with this explanation of what a good picture has to overcome to find its way into the movie palaces, let us see how good it can be, and still “get by.”

First, it must be good enough to make an impression on the distributors who buy it from the producer and sell it to the movie-theater owners who exhibit it. They must think, at least, that it is good. And to make them think that, it has got to have good selling-points such as were suggested a little way back, so that they can brag about it to the exhibitors and make the re-selling or renting of the prints easy.

Second, it must be good enough so that when the exhibitor sees it, he will decide that his audiences will like it—or at least that enough people will like it to more than compensate him for the price he has to pay in rentals.

Third, it must be good enough to satisfy the people who pay to get in to see the show, or they will be apt to stay away next time, so that in the end the exhibitor will lose money unless he shows better films.

And in each one of these cases it mustn’t be too good, or at least too good in a “highbrow” sense.

It must have enough popular appeal, so that, collectively, millions of people will like it, in order to make it profitable for the exhibitor, and the distributor, and the producer.

A picture was made in England from a story by Sir James Barrie, who wrote “Sentimental Tommy” and so many other fine books and plays. It was called “The Will.” It showed an old firm of lawyers in London, and a young couple that came to the office to be married. There was a “Little black spot” in the character of the young groom—a streak of mean selfishness. Throughout the lifetime of that couple it grew and grew, because it wasn’t weeded out, until in the end it made them both very unhappy, and even spoiled all their children’s lives. When he was a very old man, the fellow who was married at the beginning of the picture came back to the old lawyer’s office to make his will, and admitted that he had spoiled his life, and the lives of all those about him, through his failures to weed out “The little black spot” in time.