With the movie makers

by Myron M. Stearns

That is interesting.

If you have been reading these pages about motion pictures carefully, you have probably by this time been impressed with two things: First, that the movies are tremendously important—enormous, fascinating, influential, popular forces, capable of improving, or injuring, our entire American civilization; and second, that in spite of tremendous advances already made, they are still, in the opinion of those who ought to know, far below what they ought to be.

Taken by and large, motion pictures, while already tremendously powerful, are still amazingly poor.

What are the changes that they will have to undergo, to become really uplifting, instead of perhaps actually degrading, influences in our lives? And what will bring those changes about? What must you and I do, to play our part in bringing about a betterment, and what will that betterment be, when it comes?

The first thing that will make a difference is knowledge. As soon as you and Henry Jones and Dug McSwatty know enough about the movies to avoid going to the picture shows that are not worth seeing—and know how to tell whether or not particular pictures are worth seeing when you see them—the picture makers will give you more of the sort of films you’d really like to see.

That may sound a little like a dog chasing his own tail—but it is not. You and I, and Dug and Henry, in the last analysis, are the bosses of the whole motion-picture industry. The movies are made for us. If we do not like the kind that is shown, the movie people will try to please us by showing another kind.

But with reservations. For there will always be more pictures made than you and Henry and Dug and I—all of us after all representing only one class—can pay for.

There will always be cheap pictures, and poor pictures. They will be made for the fellows—millions of them—who don’t know any better.

That means—since before very much longer you and Dug and Henry and I will pay to see better films, that not so many years from now class pictures will be made.

At present, almost every film is made with a dim hope at the back of the producer’s mind of pleasing everybody. Or at the very least, of pleasing the greatest possible number. Moving pictures cost so much to make that they have to go, each of them, to hundreds and hundreds of thousands—yes, millions of people, to pay back mere expenses, let alone a profit. But just as soon as certain people, who like a certain kind of picture, know where to find that picture when it appears, and go to it, and pay to get it, pictures will be made for them, and for them alone. Adventure stories, perhaps, for you and Henry and Dug and me, and sentimental love stories for Minnie Cooty and her friends, and so on.