Every time, though, that your father, or Dug’s father, or Henry’s father, chances to invest dollars in any motion-picture scheme that turns out better pictures, that pay by being better,—and such investments are now possible every once in a while—the unintelligent dollars in the movies are crowded a little farther along the bench, and the whole industry, and indirectly the whole country, is that much better off.
The time is now close at hand when motion-picture investments will rank much higher than formerly, so that intelligent dollars may come in without losing their self-respect. When the industry is regarded as quite as honorable a field for investment as in the case with, say the newspaper or book-publishing business, we shall have far better pictures.
And finally, the movies are just now on the edge of invading a brand-new field.
When your sons go to college, they will probably watch motion pictures a good deal of the time.
Just as certainly as the books and the magazines and the newspapers followed the invention of the printing-press, educational films will come to replace some of our present methods of study.
Already we have seen the news reel, and the scenic, depicting the scenes where history is being made to-day, or showing more graphically than any printed words could ever describe it, the rush of water at Niagara Falls. Unconsciously, we are learning geography from those scenic reels right now, more often than not. If you have seen the top of Vesuvius, and the scenes about the top, in motion pictures, you know more about that wonderful old volcano right now than any school-book ever taught you.
Slow motion pictures show how the tennis-player serves, how the swimmer makes his crawl strokes, how the wrestler gets his hold. Scientific films have shown the circulation of the blood, with the veins and arteries magnified to a degree that makes them look like brooks, two feet wide, with the pulse-current sending along fresh waves, half a foot high. A camera placed in the best position for observation at a clinic can bring to the screen the most minute detail of a delicate operation performed by the greatest living surgeon—and make that knowledge available for hundreds of thousands of students.
It is through this door, perhaps, this educational door, that the great metamorphosis of the movies will come. For the making of reels that will carry information for students, that will take truth and wisdom to whole generations of scholars, is an honorable and conscientious undertaking. With money profitably invested in motion-picture ventures of this new, and inevitable, kind, the whole motion-picture field will take on a new aspect, and attract the more intelligent dollars, the more honorable dollars, that will in turn gradually lift the character, and the quality, and the products, and the results, of the entire industry.
Well, that brings us to the end of this movie-talk, that you and I have been having together. If you will do your part, and encourage the best films you can find, and try to keep away from poor ones, you’ll help the whole cause of better pictures, that we need so badly, along. I will do mine in trying to make better pictures. Together, you and I and the others who want to see better pictures and the others who want to make better pictures, will get better pictures.
THE END