ir erstwhile friends. They flatter
themselves they are being pursued by some reincarnations of Anthony
Comstock. There are several reasons why photoplay corporations are
callous, along with the sufficient one that they are corporations.

First, they are engaged in a financial orgy. Fortunes are being found by
actors and managers faster than they were dug up in 1849 and 1850 in
California. Forty-niner lawlessness of soul prevails. They talk each
other into a lordly state of mind. All is dash and experiment. Look at
the advertisements in the leading moving picture magazines. They are like
the praise of oil stock or Peruna. They bawl about films founded upon
little classics. They howl about plots that are ostensibly from the
soberest of novels, whose authors they blasphemously invoke. They boo and
blow about twisted, callous scenarios that are bad imitations of the
world's most beloved lyrics.

The producers do not realize the mass effect of the output of the
business. It appears to many as a sea of unharnessed photography: sloppy
conceptions set forth with sharp edges and irrelevant realism. The
jumping, twitching, cold-blooded devices, day after day, create the
aforesaid sea-sickness, that has nothing to do with the questionable
subject. When on top of this we come to the picture that is actually
insulting, we are up in arms indeed. It is supplied by a corporation
magnate removed from his audience in location, fortune, interest, and
mood: an absentee landlord. I was trying to convert a talented and noble
friend to the films. The first time we went there was a prize-fight
between a black and a white man, not advertised, used for a filler. I
said it was queer, and would not happen again. The next time my noble
friend was persuaded to go, there was a cock-fight, incidental to a Cuban
romance. The third visit we beheld a lady who was dying for five minutes,
rolling her eyes about in a way that was fearful to see. The convert was
not made.

It is too easy to produce an unprovoked murder, an inexplicable arson,
neither led up to nor followed by the ordinary human history of such
acts, and therefore as arbitrary as the deeds of idiots or the insane. A
villainous hate, an alleged love, a violent death, are flashed at us,
without being in any sort of tableau logic. The public is ceaselessly
played upon by tactless devices. Therefore it howls, just as children in
the nursery do when the awkward governess tries the very thing the