With the movie makers

by Myron M. Stearns

Just as among the magazines, you find the so-called “highbrow” magazines and reviews, and the romance magazines and the adventure magazines, and the detective or mystery-story magazines, you will be able to find the movies of the kind you want, under the label that will enable you to recognize them. That will be one of the important things—the label.

Suppose for a moment that all the magazines were published in blank white covers, and when you went to a news-stand to buy reading-matter, you had to pick at random, hoping that after you had bought the magazine “sight unseen” you would find it contained the particular type of story or review you wanted!—That is almost the way it is with motion pictures now—except that, because of the queer existing situation, each movie man tries to put into his picture something for everybody; as though the owners of magazines published in blank white covers should try to please grown-ups and children and boys and college professors and law-students and hoodlums and scientists with a single volume of reading-matter.

As soon as this change comes about—the division of movie audiences into the proper groups or classes—we shall see a big change in the whole industry. Then it will be possible to show such a film as that French peasant story, profitably.

And it will not be long before that change comes; it is on its way already.

Look at Goldwyn, for instance—and Universal, and Metro and Vitagraph.

Universal was one of the first to begin to make distinctly “class” pictures. I don’t believe that they even knew quite what they were doing—consciously, I mean. But they began to make good “cheap” pictures, that were distinctly not for the “exclusive” audiences. Their pictures were for the people who wanted clearly “popular” entertainment, as distinguished from “highbrow stuff.” The result was that, with honesty and sincere effort, they soon came to occupy a place as leaders, producing thrillers of “Western” action, where cowboy heroes would ride up at incredible speed in the final feet of the last reel, and save the lovely heroine with a six-inch gun in each hand. Gunpowder, adventure, excitement, and love—that was the formula, served in large doses for those audiences that were not too particular about the plausibility of their stories, so long as they contained those ingredients.

With Metro and Vitagraph it was more or less the same, with this difference: that they both tried to reach a little higher grade of audiences with their melodramas.

They tried to get on the screen a little more of artistry; the heroine didn’t need to be quite so truly good and beautiful, or the hero quite so noble and brave and quick with each of his guns. But after all there was not so much difference, and in some way Universal, perhaps seeing a little more clearly just what they were doing, had something of an advantage.

Later, Metro tried still harder to please more discriminating audiences—with varying results. “The Four Horsemen” is a film of fine qualities, for audiences with a certain kind of grown-up mind. It tells of how a boy from the Argentine, and his friends and relatives, were drawn into the Great War, and gives a wonderful, complicated picture of human nature, and war, almost as impressive and confusing as life itself. On the other hand, “Turn to the Right,” equally well done, and by the same director (Rex Ingram—the name is worth remembering) is almost childish in the way the story is handled, with the crooks and the innocent hero and the girls and the misunderstandings that go to make it all up.

And with Vitagraph, “Black Beauty,” one of their most pretentious films from an artistic standpoint, mingles the beautifully told horse story with a brand-new tale of utter melodrama, that the horse is supposed to tell. “Black Beauty” was all right as long as he stuck to his own story; but when he came to telling the story of the human beings around him for Vitagraph, I am not so sure whether he really had good horse sense, or not.