With the movie makers

by Myron M. Stearns

When the World War ended—and though this may seem so exaggerated that it sounds like a joke, it is not—no little degree of America’s influence and predominant position, during the early weeks of the Peace Conference at Paris, was due to the fact that through the preceding decade our pictures had circled the world.

But that is not the end of the story. Since then there has been a big change.

Even Griffith, for that matter, as a leader of American picture-makers, has by no means been universally popular outside this country, although as a whole his pictures have received almost as great acclaim as they have here.

Once, for instance, the popularity of his films induced one of the foreign agents to pay some thousands of dollars for the “Far Eastern” rights on “Intolerance”—including China and Japan. The Chinese did not think much of it, and the distributor lost money. But in Japan the exhibitors were smarter. Having secured the picture “sight unseen” for the Islands, they had to play it to get their money back. But they felt, after seeing it, that possibly their Japanese audiences would not particularly care for it—so they prepared carefully an exploitation campaign worthy of the best advertising brains in this country. “Intolerance,” they said, was at once so artistic that it appealed to the highest intelligence, and so simple that any man of good sense could appreciate it. To fail to be moved by its beauty and artistry would mark anybody as being—well, stupid.

“Intolerance” was a great picture, but it was too long, and too hard to follow, for the average Japanese audience. The Japanese did not really like it any better than the Chinese did, but because of the clever advertising beforehand, each person who was bored by the big foreign film was slow to admit it, because of the fear of labeling himself stupid. Many people praised the picture, whether they liked it or not, to show how wise and clever and cultured and intelligent they were. So “Intolerance” made money in Japan. But then, too many people who had seen it began comparing notes, and found that it really was possible to have what passed for good sense, and yet not like that particular film.

Since nobody likes to be laughed at, there wasn’t any great fuss made about the matter one way or the other, but I am told that the word “Intolerance” has been incorporated into the slang (if we can call it that) of the Japanese language; when a man stretches the truth too far, or tried to “put on too much dog,” as they might say in Arizona, his Japanese companions merely smile and perhaps shrug their shoulders a trifle, and murmur “Intolerance.”

The fact is, American films, from the very start, have lacked the inner value, the idealism, the spiritual vision and far-sightedness that make for real leadership. The result is that at the present time films from half a dozen countries are competing successfully with ours, and to a considerable extent driving them from the foreign field.

In Germany, after the War started, the making of motion pictures developed as plants might in an enclosed garden. Shut off from the rest of the world, and the influence in particular of American motion-picture methods, Germany developed methods of her own. Chief of all these was the tendency to tell the story for the sake of the story itself, with a real story-teller, the dramatic author, in full charge of the production. Of course this has not always been the case, nor has it been particularly evident, but on the whole it has meant a great deal. It meant that the author brains, instead of the glorified director brains, or the irresponsible star brains, have been the predominating influence in the pictures.

Over here it has been Charles Ray or Bill Hart, Lasky or Ince, deMille or Neilan. Only comparatively recently, largely through the Goldwyn organization, have authors—Rex Beach, and Mary Roberts Rinehart, and Rupert Hughes, and so on—come into any particular prominence or influence in picture making.

The result of this has been that our films have been too highly commercialized. The making of movies is of necessity very largely a commercial proposition, but here it has been overdone.