n the
direction that most producers see it. What Vachell Lindsay calls
"Splendor" in the movies is an interesting and striking feature of
them--the moving of masses of people amid great architectural
construction--sieges, triumphs, battles, mobs--but all this is akin to
scenery. Its movements are like those of the trees or the surf. One can
not make a play entirely of scenery, though the contrary seems to be the
view of some managers, even on the stage of the regular theatre. So far,
the individual acting and plot construction in the great spectacular
movies has been poor. It was notably so, it seems to me in the Birth of a
Nation and not much better in Cabiria. Judith of Bethulia (after T.B.
Aldrich) is the best acted "splendor" play that I have seen. Masterpieces
are coming not through spending millions on supes, and "real" temples, and
forts; but rather by writing a scenario particularly adapted to
film-production, hiring and training actors that know how to act for the
camera, preferably those without bad stage habits to unlearn, cutting out
all unreal scenery, costume and make-up and keeping everything as simple
and as close to the actual as possible. The best movie play I ever saw was
in a ten-cent theatre in St. Louis. It was a dramatization of Frank
Norris's "McTeague." I have never seen it advertised anywhere, and I never
heard of the actors, before or since. But most of it was fine, sincere
work, and seeing it made me feel that there is a future for the movie
play.

One trouble is that up to date, neither producers nor actors nor the most
intelligent and best educated part of the audience take the movies
seriously. Here is one of the marvels of modern times; something that has
captured the public as it never was captured before. And yet most of us
look at it as a huge joke, or as something intended to entertain the
populace, at which we, too are graciously pleased to be amused. It might
mend matters if we could have every day in some reputable paper a column
of readable serious stuff about the current movie plays--real criticism,
not simply the producer's "blurb."

Possibly, too, a partnership between the legitimate stage and the movie
may be possible and I shall devote to a somewhat wild scheme of this sort
the few pages that remain to me. To begin with, the freedom enjoyed by the
Elizabethan dramatists from the limitations imposed by realistic scenery
has not been sufficiently insisted upon as an element in