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.