It takes more brains
than one man possesses to pick good vaudeville talent and bring good
films to the town at the same time. The best motion picture theatres are
built for photoplays alone. But they make one mistake.

Almost every motion picture theatre has its orchestra, pianist, or
mechanical piano. The perfect photoplay gathering-place would have no
sound but the hum of the conversing audience. If this is too ruthless a
theory, let the music be played at the intervals between programmes,
while the advertisements are being flung upon the screen, the lights are
on, and the people coming in.

If there is something more to be done on the part of the producer to make
the film a telling one, let it be a deeper study of the pictorial
arrangement, with the tones more carefully balanced, the sculpture
vitalized. This is certainly better than to have a raw thing bullied
through with a music-programme, furnished to bridge the weak places in
the construction. A picture should not be released till it is completely
thought out. A producer with this goal before him will not have the time
or brains to spare to write music that is as closely and delicately
related to the action as the action is to the background. And unless the
tunes are at one with the scheme they are an intrusion. Perhaps the
moving picture maker has a twin brother almost as able in music, who
possesses the faculty of subordinating his creations to the work of his
more brilliant coadjutor. How are they going to make a practical national
distribution of the accompaniment? In the metropolitan theatres Cabiria
carried its own musicians and programme with a rich if feverish result.
In The Birth of a Nation, music was used that approached imitative sound
devices. Also the orchestra produced a substitute for old-fashioned stage
suspense by long drawn-out syncopations. The finer photoplay values were
thrown askew. Perhaps these two performances could be successfully
vindicated in musical policy. But such a defence proves nothing in regard
to the typical film. Imagine either of these put on in Rochester,
Illinois, population one hundred souls. The reels run through as well as
on Broadway or Michigan Avenue, but the local orchestra cannot play the
music furnished in annotated sheets as skilfully as the local operator
can turn the reel (or watch the motor turn it!).

The big social fact about the moving picture is that it is scattered like
the newspaper. Any normal accomp