THE MOVIE GOES TO THE BAD
WHOEVER asserted that “you can’t indict a whole nation” made a sweeping
generalization that was both historically and psychologically accurate.
In what I have said, and am about to say, regarding the evil influences
affecting the early years of the movie, I do not wish to do an injustice
to those early promoters in the new industry who refused to degrade the
screen, or to treat it as an ephemeral, wild-cat speculation. There were
producers, at the very outset of the industry, who builded perhaps
better than they knew, and who, because of their refusal to take the
path of least resistance, are now, after a quarter of a century of film
exploiting, the most successful and influential factors in the industry.
They prevailed where those whose pernicious activities threatened the
rise, perhaps the permanency of the movie, fell by the wayside.
It is regrettable, nevertheless, that the childhood of the movie was so
deeply influenced by various pioneers who could not realize its power
for good nor foresee its future greatness both as an art and as a
moulder of public opinion, morals, and enlightenment. But the screen in
its early years was dominated largely by get-rich-quick exploiters,
adventurers out for the easy money flowing into the coffers of the movie
“palaces,” less admirable in most ways than the hard-boiled
treasure-seekers who flock to newly-discovered gold-fields. There is
something of the romantic and heroic in the Argonauts who developed
California, the South African diamond mines and the Klondike. They
risked their lives in a great game of chance and won or lost in a
dramatic struggle in which the winners had displayed necessarily certain
sturdy, sterling qualities.
The gold-bearing realm of the movies, on the other hand, was invaded at
the outset by a good many speculative fortune-seekers who staked upon
their ventures nothing but their craftiness and their audacity. They
were about as admirable as a bucket-shop gambler who, by expending a
minimum of money and energy, hopes for a movement of the market that
shall make him rich over night. The movie, as an anonymous writer in
Collier’s Weekly says, was, in its early days,
nothing that could justifiably attract a big investor, or a real
novelist, or a good actor. The first movie-actors were for the
most part of the old-time chorus-girl and spear-carrier type;
the great scenario-writers were the shop-girls or office boys
who were told of the sudden need for stories, with no real
training or knowledge of writing—with here and there a newspaper
cub or magazine embryo who stumbled into a new gold vein where
stories written in an hour could be sold for fifteen dollars;
the first investors were the clerks or advertising men or born
gamblers, usually in touch with the cheap end of the theatrical
world, who had a little money to invest in a new scheme,
provided it “looked good” and “wasn’t too big.”
It is a safe bet that the majority of my readers can remember the time
when they looked upon motion pictures with a mingling of contempt and
impatience, realizing vaguely, perhaps, the promise the screen suggested
of better things but disgusted with its seemingly stubborn adherence to
cheap claptrap, crude melodrama, and unspeakably vulgar farce. My
personal experience in connection with the movies is, I imagine, typical
of that which has come to thousands of Americans during the past quarter
of a century. I can still remember the thrill I experienced when I first
gazed upon human beings in motion screened by a camera. What the
photographed puppets did was not, at the moment, of great consequence.
The mere fact that they came and went, walked, ran, danced before my
eyes was startling enough. I was fascinated by a scientific achievement
that was of itself sufficiently interesting to warrant my presence in
that audience of long ago.
But my subsequent activities as a movie fan in embryo were of short
duration. Like thousands of my fellow Americans, I came, I saw, but I
did not conquer—in fact, I was repelled. For years thereafter I avoided
the movie palaces, realizing that I was temperamentally unfitted to
enjoy optical contacts with adultery, murder, theft and sudden death.
Nor was my sense of humor of a kind that found anything to laugh at in
squash-pie farce.
But even the cupidity and stupidity that had their effect upon the
screen in its earlier years could not kill the goose that was destined
eventually to lay something better than golden eggs. Though ignorance,
avarice and vulgarity for many years influenced, to too great an extent,
the movies, they could not destroy its inherent power of regeneration,
nor the cumulative force exercised by the higher type of producers which
eventually made that regeneration possible. How the screen was saved
from becoming the exclusive property of the underworld by the survival
of the fittest, or the most enlightened, of the early promoters, will be
told presently, but it is interesting, at this juncture, to discuss for
a moment the question as to why its earlier career was so deplorably
reprehensible.
Reference has been made to the fact that in the United States, England
and France the first exploiters of motion pictures were under the
delusion that this new form of entertainment was of merely ephemeral
value, that its drawing-power as a theatrical novelty would soon pass
away. Thus it was that in this country small men, of small means,
hastened to “take flyers” in the latest get-rich-quick device, and
throughout the United States was observed a mushroom growth of “picture
palaces,” financed on a shoe-string and designed to collect “easy money”
before it became uneasy. There were those among the pioneer promoters of
motion pictures who had read of the tulip craze in Holland, or of the
Mississippi bubble in France, and imagined that the bottom would some
day suddenly fall out of the “movie boom,” ruining those who had not
“cashed in” in time. They failed to realize that humanity could not
afford to lose an inestimable boon that had come to it, namely, a new
method for the telling of stories.
There had existed, before the movie’s birth, but four media for the
dissemination of narratives—the tongue, the play, the printed story, and
the printed poem. In the childhood of the race, tale-telling was
confined to word of mouth. Later on, the stage came into existence, and
mankind’s craving for stories was partially satisfied by the drama. The
invention of the printing-press gave to a soul-hungry race the book,
with its infinite capacity for telling tales, old and new, to the
grown-up children of the race.
But from Gutenberg’s time to Edison’s Man had found no new medium
through which his eternal craving for stories could be assuaged.
Literature and the drama, despite the impetus vouchsafed to them by the
printing-press, are of aristocratic origin and have failed to adapt
themselves wholeheartedly to the broadening tendencies and demands of
the age. Democracy needed a new approach to the romance of existence, an
approach that the millions could make without too great a sacrifice,
and, lo, the movies blazed the way to it, despite the fact that their
advance guard was for the most part unworthy of the high mission that
chance had thrust upon it. These pioneers had in their hands the fifth
device which Man has found for satisfying his soul’s appetite for
inspiring tales, more universal in its appeal than the tongue, the play,
the novel or the poem, and many of them degraded it, alienating in the
beginning those conservative, constructive forces in the community which
have only recently come to the assistance of the screen.
Wells and Van Loon, each in his own interesting way, have told us
recently the tragi-comic story of Man’s evolution from slime to
Shakespeare. On a large canvas it is the same picture that the movie
presents in miniature from grime to Griffith. The great weakness of the
motion picture industry throughout its formative years, a weakness still
too much in evidence, is at the top and not at the bottom. The movies
for years lost the support of the more enlightened classes of the
community not because camera-men, carpenters, electricians and stage
hands were not competent but because the powers in control of the
completed output, the “bosses” of the new industry, failed to make the
best use of the power that had come to them. Says the producer who
recently made his public confession through the pages of _Collier’s
Weekly_:
The directors were hard to deal with. They reflected the one
greatest fault of the entire industry: they knew not that they
knew not. Without adequate background, for the most part,
without adequate training or knowledge of human character,
without even a rudimentary philosophy or idealism, or sense of
real values, to qualify them for leadership, they were given
money and authority and power and told to make films for the
multitude. Surrounded by minor sycophants, they soon came to
believe themselves almost above criticism. A sincere critic was
more apt than not to be regarded as an enemy.
There is something grimly ludicrous in the fact that for years after the
screen had proved conclusively that the race had finally found an
effective new method of telling stories more widely appealing, more
direct in its methods than the play, the novel or the poem, the courts
of last resort dominating the output of the films were composed largely
of men without sufficient education to appraise the value, or lack of
value, of the scenarios upon which, in the last analysis, depended the
success or failure of their ventures. They seemed to be ignorant of, or
indifferent to, the illuminating generalization to be adduced from the
history of literature that there is nothing too good for the masses,
that that which survives in letters the blue pencil of posterity is the
best, not the mediocre or the worst. Had they found themselves several
centuries ago in the Mermaid Tavern at London, they would have turned
their backs upon Will Shakespeare and Ben Jonson and hurried out to the
inn-yard to hobnob with the stable-boys. And the tragic feature of the
situation lay in the fact that for a long period the autocrats of the
screen failed to realize that a scenario can not rise higher than its
source, that you can’t get blood out of a stone, nor a screen
masterpiece out of a cub office-boy.
But though these powers behind the films were for a long period blindly,
and often disastrously, indifferent to their highest interests in
connection with the sources from which they obtained the stories their
new tale-teller told to the millions, they displayed an enthusiastic
admiration for astronomy. They studied the stars. Would a given matinee
idol “screen well?” Would a certain popular actress endure the searching
ordeal of the camera? If they would, the public would flock to the
movie’s box-office even though the scenario-writers had done their
worst. Followed an era of star-gazing upon the part of the movie fans
and of slow but certain enlightenment upon the part of the directors and
producers. The latter discovered after a time that the fame of an actor
is no safeguard against the destructive influence of a structurally poor
picture-drama. They gradually had glimmerings of a basic truth,
knowledge of which in the past would have saved countless theatrical
managers from bankruptcy, namely, that, as Shakespeare sapiently
remarked, “the play’s the thing!” The telling of a story either on the
stage or on the screen is a justifiable venture, as a very wise and
rather jaded public knows, only if that story possesses certain elements
that make it as a tale worth while. Even Douglas Fairbanks would score a
failure in a dramatization of the multiplication-table.
But ordinary horse sense was acquired only slowly by the movies. It is
an amazing story of stupidity, reckless expenditure of money, emphasis
in the wrong place, exploitation of stars out of their legitimate orbit,
appeals to the lowest passions in human nature; of tragic failures and
inexplicable, actually laughable, successes, of cities built and
abandoned, of fortunes made and lost, of a new, marvellous, mysterious
art in the making—this tale of the kinetoscope in search of its kingdom.
But it is worth telling for many reasons, not the least of which is that
the coming of the screen into its own has had, and is having, a
disintegrating effect upon the commercialized stage. What the ultimate
outcome of this iconoclastic influence of the movie upon the stage is
likely to be is a subject that must be reserved for a later chapter, but
it is enlightening, in connection with the foregoing review of what may
be called the fly-by-night era of the films, to glance at what has been
happening to the American theatre during the years in which the picture
palaces have been rising from the slums to the avenues.
Walter Pritchard Eaton in _Scribner’s Magazine_ for November, 1922,
says:
As a means of supplying drama to America as a whole our
commercialized professional theatre has broken down. The reasons
need not concern us here. They are many, no doubt. One, of
course, is the rise of the motion pictures, which are cheaper to
present and to witness, and which enable the local theatre
manager to keep his house open six or seven days in the week.
Another reason is the increased cost of transportation. Another
reason is the complication of modern life, even in the
“provinces,” so that the theatre, having to compete against
other attractions (or distractions), no longer appeals so
universally, or at any rate no longer finds all the people with
the surplus cash to patronize it at the excessive modern scale
of prices.
Later on in the essay quoted above its author speaks of himself as one
of those “who love the drama and believe the movies a mean and
stupefying substitute for its imaginative and intellectual appeal.” If
Mr. Eaton’s opinion of the screen, as thus forcibly expressed, is based
upon its past, the past of a Prodigal Son utterly unworthy of the fatted
calf, it is not, as the reader of what I have thus far written will
admit, without reasonable justification. But is not the present of the
movies encouraging, is not their future promising? Succeeding chapters
of this book will, I hope, go to prove that Mr. Eaton is too hasty in
assuming that eventually the screen may not atone for any seeming damage
it may have done to the stage.
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