With the movie makers

by Myron M. Stearns

Have you ever played tennis with a man you could always beat? If you did, you found that after a while it wasn’t half so interesting as playing with a man who could give you a rattling good game, and whom, if you were at your very best, you might beat. For some reason there is a great stimulus in progress; we like to play tennis best with people who are so good that to play with them means continually improving our own game.

Nobody would ever think of going to school if the teachers didn’t know more than their pupils. That would be worse than forever playing tennis with a man who could never hope to ever equal your own game.

Do you see what we are getting to? Leadership!

Motion pictures, are, in a certain sense, a part of the great publishing business of the United States. They publish stories in picture form. And in those stories they publish ideas, and ideals, and rules of conduct, and good taste, and good sense,—or the lack of all those things.

It is through the publishing business—the movies as well as books or magazines or newspapers—that we get the information and ideals by which we live. The publishing business is the main channel, aside from schools and conversation and churches, through which we get the information and ideas that enable us to make progress, that enable us to get ahead.

Accordingly, the publishing business—and the movies with the rest—has to have in it the element of leadership.

It’s as though we were going to school when we go to see motion pictures. In a sense, we are. And just as, if we really were not learning anything there, we wouldn’t go to school, so, with motion pictures, if we don’t find anything worth while in them, after a while we get tired of them and lose interest, and stop paying money to watch them.

In one year, when motion pictures got too far below the line of popular appreciation, enough people stopped going to them to drop the total box office receipts in the country more than a hundred million dollars.

So, while for a time there is more money in playing the public down than there is in playing it up (since more people come, at first at least, to see pictures that are too cheap for their taste, than come to see pictures that are a little too good for their taste), in the long run, playing the public up pays best.

In other words, if the leadership element is present at a motion picture, if it is a picture that is thoroughly worth while, and yet is not too good to “get across,” it will both make money and build business, while a cheap sensational picture, though it may make more money than a better film at the time it is released, will in the end lose business for the firm producing it, because in the long run it drives away business instead of bringing it in.