John Emerson, a boyhood friend from my own village, had given me the movie job, knowing I would be no good at it. He was a successful man, a moneymaker, and was always planning out schemes for giving me money and leisure. I went often to the movie studios and watched the men and the women at work. Children, playing with dreams—dreams of an heroic kind of desperado cowboy, doing good deeds at the business end of a gun—dreams of an ever-virtuous womanhood walking amid vice—American dreams—Anglo-Saxon dreams. How they wanted to be the things they were always playing, and how impossible it all was!
My father lived in a land and in a time when what one later begins to understand a little as the artist in man could not by any possibility be understood by his fellows. Dreams then were to be expressed in building railroads and factories, in boring gas wells, stringing telegraph poles. There was room for no other dream and since father could not do any of these things he was an outlaw in his community. The community tolerated him. His own sons tolerated him.
As for the movie people I saw, they worked in a strange land of fragments of dreams. The parts they were to play were given them in fragments. Everything was fragmentary and unfinished. A kind of insanity reigned. A “set” having been made, at a certain cost in dollars and cents, half a dozen little bits of the dream they were to enact were gone through—sometimes a dozen times—and the very piece the actors were supposed to play they often did not know. A strange greenish light fell down over them, and when they were not playing, they sat stupidly hour after hour arrayed in their motley, often pawing one another over listlessly with their hands and seeking outside the studios—in drink, in dope, in futile love-making, in trying to carry on an absurd pretense to being ladies and gentlemen of parts—seeking in all these things to compensate themselves for being robbed of their inheritance as artists—the right to pour their emotional energies into their work.
The result of all this perversion of workmanship and of emotional energy in the movie world seemed to me to reduce human beings to a state that most of all suggested to my mind angleworms squirming in a boy’s bait-can; and why any human being, under the conditions in which they must work and with the materials with which they must work, should want to be a movie actor or a writer for the movies is beyond my comprehension.
But to return to my father. At least, there was little of the dull listlessness of the angleworm in him. He created his own, “dope,” inside himself, most of the time.
Once he actually set up as a showman. With a man of our town, named Aldrich, who owned a broken-down horse and a spring wagon he went forth to strut his own little hour upon the boards.
It was winter and there was no work for father to be had in our town and I presume Aldrich also had no work. I remember him as a quiet-looking middle-aged man with a red face. He also was a house-painter, during the summer months, and he and father had by some chance got hold of a secondhand magic-lantern outfit.
They were to show at country schoolhouses in the farming districts of northern Ohio. There was to be a sheet hung across the end of the room, near the place where the teacher’s desk would sit, and on this would be thrown certain pictures Aldrich had got hold of.
Those of you who have lived in the farming sections of mid-America, in the days before the movies, will understand that show. There would be a picture of Niagara Falls—taken in the winter—Niagara Falls frozen into a series of ice bridges and with small black figures of men running over the bridges.
These, you are to understand, however, would not be moving men. They would be frozen still and still—petrified men with legs upraised to take a step, and holding them there—to the end of time—forever.