ELIZABETH DREYER
“And a few months later and with much more difficulty persuaded her to become a member of the Davis family.”
LAURETTE TAYLOR
“One of the best soubrettes I ever saw.”
(Photograph by Ira L. Hill. From the Messmore Kendall Collection)
Then one day—and let me call the attention of the rulers of the motion picture business to this—Mr. Woods and I were struck by a great notion. “We will,” we said, “increase this average business of $3,500 by putting out a show so much bigger than any of the others that we can safely count on over-capacity business to pay our increased expense and yield us a greater than average profit.”
No sooner said than done. Nellie, the Beautiful Cloak Model took to the road and played for a year to an average of four thousand dollars a week. What could be more natural than to continue the good work? The next season we put out three more “big shows” and allowed them to cost us about thirty percent more than our old average of expense. By this time our rivals, attracted by the reports of our big business with our “Super-Specials” began to compete for this added revenue and produced a flock of “Super-Specials” which in a season, since all things are comparative, educated the public to expect “big shows.” Thus, the average show now costs a sum of money that could only be drawn by an extraordinary show, and in three years the popular-priced theater business was dead.
Naturally, the advance of the pictures had something to do with our defeat, but neither then nor now can the decline of the theater be fairly laid to the fact that the public prefers the motion picture to the drama. All of the ills of the theater in my time are due directly to the folly, the ignorance and the greed of the theatrical manager. I have many life-long friends among these men; among them are men of fine principle and honest intentions, but the composite manager has always been the stumbling block in the way of our progress. We tried to fight the advancing wave of motion pictures with dirty, ill-lighted theaters, bad-mannered attendants and arrogant box-office men, and we lost, as we deserved to lose.
There is a popular idea that the theatrical manager failed at his job because he allowed his artistic soul to overwhelm his natural business instincts. In my humble opinion he failed because he usually had no artistic soul at all and no business instincts. I know of about five managers of the last decade who were what I would call business men, and I am prepared to offer a silver cup for the names of any others.
The arrogance of the old-time manager, to whom actors and authors were slaves and chattels, has gone, and although I was one of those who fought for their passing I have not as yet become reconciled to their substitutes. The best men of to-day are still the men who were the best of the old order and if some of their old power is gone I can’t help feeling that with it went much of the old glamour and romance of the theater.
This writing rubber stamp stories by formula was the main cause of the collapse of the Stair and Havlyn Circuit and is the only real reason for to-day’s depression in the New York theater. There is always an audience for a good play, but unfortunately there isn’t always a good play for an audience. Just as every good play produced stimulates theatergoing, so does every bad play produced discourage it, and when the bad plays outnumber the good by too great a proportion the public naturally becomes very cautious. We figure of late in the theater that only one play out of seven produced is even moderately successful, which when you come to think of it isn’t so much the public’s lack of interest as it is the playwright’s lack of skill.