This book is a struggle
against the non-humanness of the undisciplined photograph. Any film is
correct, realistic, forceful, many times before it is charming. The
actual physical storage-battery of the actor is many hundred miles away.
As a substitute, the human quality must come in the marks of the presence
of the producer. The entire painting must have his brushwork. If we
compare it to a love-letter it must be in his handwriting rather than
worked on a typewriter. If he puts his autograph into the film, it is
after a fierce struggle with the uncanny scientific quality of the
camera's work. His genius and that of the whole company of actors is
exhausted in the task.

The raw phonograph is likewise unmagnetic. Would you set upon the
shoulders of the troupe of actors the additional responsibility of
putting an adequate substitute for human magnetism in the phonographic
disk? The voice that does not actually bleed, that contains no
heart-beats, fails to meet the emergency. Few people have wept over a
phonographic selection from Tristan and Isolde. They are moved at the
actual performance. Why? Look at the opera singer after the last act. His
eyes are burning. His face is flushed. His pulse is high. Reaching his
hotel room, he is far more weary than if he had sung the opera alone
there. He has given out of his brain-fire and blood-beat the same
magnetism that leads men in battle. To speak of it in the crassest terms,
this resource brings him a hundred times more salary than another man
with just as good a voice can command. The output that leaves him
drained at the end of the show cannot be stored in the phonograph
machine. That device is as good in the morning as at noon. It ticks like
a clock.

To perfect the talking moving picture, human magnetism must be put into
the mirror-screen and into the clock. Not only is this imperative, but
clock and mirror must be harmonized, one gently subordinated to the
other. Both cannot rule. In the present talking moving picture the more
highly developed photoplay is dragged by the hair in a dead faint, in the
wake of the screaming savage phonograph. No talking machine on the market
reproduces conversation clearly unless it be elaborately articulated in
unnatural tones with a stiff interval between each question and answer.
Real dialogue goes to ruin.

The talking moving picture came to our town. We were given for one show a
line of minstrels facing the audience, with the interlocu