CHAPTER VIII
HOW GOOD CAN A PICTURE BE?
Sofar we have been concerned mostly with the production of motion pictures—how they are made, and where they are made, and who makes them, and how they happen to be made the way they are. But that is only one part of the business.
There are two other parts of the motion picture industry, just as big, and just as important, as production.
One of them is selling or renting the films to the theater-owners who project them on the screens of their movie-palaces the world over. This is known as thedistributingend of the business. There are great nation-wide organizations, sometimes embracing a number of associated producing companies, that are formed for the purpose of carrying it on. Each of the dozen or so of these organizationsthat together dominate the distributing market spends twenty thousand dollars or so a week in overhead expenses alone; some of them more than double that.
Then there is theexhibitingend of the business. That concerns the individual theater-owners who show pictures to us in their theaters, night after night, for ten or twenty cents admission, or maybe fifty cents, or even a dollar.
These two great branches of the industry are neither of them nearly as interesting as the producing end, any more than the book-keeping connected with a big railroad is as interesting as running a train, or even riding on one. But they are so important that together they pretty much dominate the industry, and to a very large extent determine the kind and quality, as well as the quantity, of the pictures that we see.
Accordingly, we shall do well to learn at least enough about them to understand how they work, and how they exert this tremendous influence on the movies, that in turn exert so much influence on us.
It is through learning something about the distributing and exhibiting angles of the motion picture business that we can find out why picturescan’tbe so very much better than they are to-day, under present conditions.
Let us take up the exhibiting end first. In some ways it is the easier to understand.
Suppose you were running a motion-picture theater. How would you buy your films? And if ten or a dozen times as many pictures were available as you could use in your theater, how would youselectthe ones you wanted to use?
There are fifteen thousand or so motion picture exhibitors in this country, and the way in which they answer those two questions has much to do with determining how good the pictures that we see in their theaters can be.
If you were running a motion picture theatre a first necessity, naturally, would be to make money. You would at least have to support yourself. You would of course want to do more than that, to get ahead, and lay aside something for a rainy day, and make your fortune. So it would be of no use for you to runpictures unless people came to see them, and paid their admissions to get in. If you showed pictures that only a few people in the community liked, you would soon be playing to an empty house, and be driven out of business. While if you got pictures that were popular, you would have a chance to make money. The more people liked the pictures you showed, the more money you would get.
Courtesy Universal Pictures Corporation.Carrying an Elephant to a “Location.”Transportation is an item of expense that appears so frequently in motion-picture accounts as to puzzle the uninitiated. This picture gives an idea of the almost inconceivable need for unusual items of transportation when all the varied paraphernalia of a picture company has to be carried miles and miles, day after day.
Courtesy Universal Pictures Corporation.
Carrying an Elephant to a “Location.”
Transportation is an item of expense that appears so frequently in motion-picture accounts as to puzzle the uninitiated. This picture gives an idea of the almost inconceivable need for unusual items of transportation when all the varied paraphernalia of a picture company has to be carried miles and miles, day after day.
Courtesy Goldwyn Pictures Corporation.An Auto Load of Horses.When horses are used on distant locations, in motion pictures, they’re usually hauled to the scene in a motor truck, so that they will be fresh when needed.
Courtesy Goldwyn Pictures Corporation.
An Auto Load of Horses.
When horses are used on distant locations, in motion pictures, they’re usually hauled to the scene in a motor truck, so that they will be fresh when needed.
So here would be your first trouble:How would you tell which pictures would please your audiences most?
Maybe your own taste would run to outdoor adventure stories—stories of the Texas border, and range riders, and tales of the Northwest Mounted Police. But if your theater happened to be, let us say, in a factory town where the majority of your patrons were mill-hands, it might be that you would find they did not like “Westerns” half as well as what are usually called “Society” films, which showed millionaires’ homes, and Wally-haired heroes who did their best work driving sport-model automobiles. Moreover, you might find that, because your customers actually knew so littleabout the home life of American millionaires that they liked to watch, utterly inaccurate “Society dramas” with a strong melodramatic flavor, possibly of the kind known as “Heart interest” would “get across” better, and draw bigger audiences, and make more money for you, than more accurate pictures with less melodramatic “pep” in them. What would you do then?
The average movie exhibitor buys (or more properly rents) his films through what is called a local “Exchange.” It gets its name from the fact that films are continually exchanged there—the old ones that have already been run for the new ones that have been rented for the next night or next week.
There may be several different exchanges in the town where the exhibitor goes to do his movie shopping. Indeed, there usually are, for each big distributing company has its own local office or “branch exchange” in every important center throughout the United States—the larger exchanges, covering perhaps a territory of several States, supplying their own smaller branch exchanges in that territory,and these in turn supplying the still smaller local exchanges, and these supplying the exhibitors direct. Then, in addition to the big distributing companies, there are usually small or “independent” concerns also offering films to the exhibitors—usually of the poorer and cheaper variety.
So, when you came to do your film shopping you would have perhaps a dozen different places to go to, and each of these places would have a whole lot of films for you to choose from.
That is where advertising has come to play such an important part in the film business to-day. An exhibitor, who gets very likely a good deal of his advance information about films from the trade journal that he has to subscribe to to keep posted about what’s what, reads that “Precious Polly” is one of the funnest films that has ever been made. Or that “Saved by an Inch” is sure to make a big hit with any audience. Or that “The Fatal Hour” played to capacity business in a big New York or Chicago theater. In each case he is reading an advertisement—but it influenceshim nevertheless. He can’t look atallthe films that are available at the different exchanges; it would be a physical impossibility. So, naturally, he decides to look at the one he has read about, rather than another that he has never heard of. Wouldn’t you? And in the end he probably decided to take, even if it isn’t very good and doesn’t in the least come up to what he had expected from the advertisement—until he had learned to discount everything he read in film advertisements—the film that he has spent an hour looking at, rather than go on hunting, on the slim chance that he might find a better one if he looked long enough. Just as you would in his place.
What is the result? The distributors pay a great deal of money for advertising to sell their films to the exhibitors. Again and again they claim that the new films they are distributing are the best that have ever been made. And a poor film, or possibly a very cheap film, with say a hundred thousand dollars worth of advertising behind it, will do more business, and make more money for the distributor, than abetter film that has only five thousand dollars worth of advertising.
Suppose a picture costs a hundred thousand dollars to produce. The additional prints that have to be made and sent to the different exchanges to supply all the theaters that want to use the picture cost perhaps $20,000 more. Fifty thousand more is spent in a big advertising campaign. For the service of distribution, the distributing company takes thirty-five or forty per cent. of the receipts that come in. The picture has to take in, from exhibitors,three times what it costs to make it, before there is a cent of profit for the producer.
Another thing: besides advertising, the distributing companies can reach exhibitors throughsalesmen.
In the small town, or the big city, where you have your theater, we will say, a movie salesman visits you. He is a persuasive talker, and convinces you that if you run the latest film of his company, you will “make a clean-up.” So you sign up for it, and pay perhaps a third of the rental in advance.
Naturally, each distributing company tries to get the best salesmen it can, even if it has to pay salaries of hundreds of dollars a week for them. Because a good salesman, selling even a poor picture, may get a lot more money for it for his distributing company than a poor salesman would be able to get for a better picture.
Now let us see how these things work out.
A dozen or more big distributing companies, blanketing the whole country, each trying to sell the pictures it is handling to the greatest possible number of the fifteen thousand exhibitors for the best possible price. Not to theaudiences, mind you; that is the exhibitors’ look-out; the distributors are not trying to sell pictures to the people who sit in rows and look at them—at least, not directly. They are selling them toexhibitors.
Along comes a picture producer who has made, perhaps, an excellent picture of ordinary, everyday people just like you and me. Along comes another producer who has made a picture that isn’t half so good or as true to life—but it cost more money to make, or it hassome spectacular sets in it, or it is based on some novel that had a big sale, or it has a catchy title, or a well-known star, or is made from a popular play. The distributor takes it andturns the better picture down, because it will be easier to sell the picture with the “talking points” to the exhibitors! Audiences may not like it as well as they would the other, better picture—but it will be easier to make the exhibitor “bite” on it! See?
Courtesy Assoc. First Nat’l Exhibitors, Inc.A Tête-à-Tête With a Lion.Note that the lioness is looking not at the actress opposite her, but at the motion-picture camera that annoys her with its clicking.
Courtesy Assoc. First Nat’l Exhibitors, Inc.
A Tête-à-Tête With a Lion.
Note that the lioness is looking not at the actress opposite her, but at the motion-picture camera that annoys her with its clicking.
Courtesy Assoc. First Nat’l Exhibitors, Inc.Acting With a “Tame” Lion.There is always enough danger in playing “opposite” a lion to make it easy for any actor to “register fear.” Note how the lion is baring his teeth.
Courtesy Assoc. First Nat’l Exhibitors, Inc.
Acting With a “Tame” Lion.
There is always enough danger in playing “opposite” a lion to make it easy for any actor to “register fear.” Note how the lion is baring his teeth.
There, in a nutshell, is one of the big difficulties that anybody who wants to help along the moving-picture industry, either by making better pictures or by encouraging better pictures, is up against. Between the public on the one side and the big distributors and producers on the other side stand the exhibitors, who must be “sold” on a money-making basis, before any great change can come about.
In the long run, to be sure, audience value counts. In the long run you and Andrew McGinnis and George Lenox and Fuller Westcott have to be satisfied with the pictures you see, or you will quit going to see what your localexhibitor-man has to offer. But remember, that’sin the long run.
Now, with this explanation of what a good picture has to overcome to find its way into the movie palaces, let us see how good it can be, and still “get by.”
First, it must be good enough to make an impression on the distributors who buy it from the producer and sell it to the movie-theater owners who exhibit it. They mustthink, at least, that it is good. And to make them think that, it has got to have good selling-points such as were suggested a little way back, so that they can brag about it to the exhibitors and make the re-selling or renting of the prints easy.
Second, it must be good enough so that when the exhibitor sees it, he will decide that his audiences will like it—or at least that enough people will like it to more than compensate him for the price he has to pay in rentals.
Third, it must be good enough to satisfy the people who pay to get in to see the show, or they will be apt to stay away next time, sothat in the end the exhibitor will lose money unless he shows better films.
And in each one of these cases it mustn’t betoogood, or at least too good in a “highbrow” sense.
It must have enough popular appeal, so that, collectively, millions of people will like it, in order to make it profitable for the exhibitor, and the distributor, and the producer.
A picture was made in England from a story by Sir James Barrie, who wrote “Sentimental Tommy” and so many other fine books and plays. It was called “The Will.” It showed an old firm of lawyers in London, and a young couple that came to the office to be married. There was a “Little black spot” in the character of the young groom—a streak of mean selfishness. Throughout the lifetime of that couple it grew and grew, because it wasn’t weeded out, until in the end it made them both very unhappy, and even spoiled all their children’s lives. When he was a very old man, the fellow who was married at the beginning of the picture came back to the old lawyer’s officeto make his will, and admitted that he had spoiled his life, and the lives of all those about him, through his failures to weed out “The little black spot” in time.
You can see how different that picture is from most of those that you see, month after month, at your nearest movie-house. For one thing, it didn’t have any particular love-story, which more people like to see than anything else. For another thing, it has a sort of unhappy ending, which, in this country, relatively few people like to see. So, although the picture was beautifully produced, and although it was interesting as it went along and pointed a big moral quite without being “preachy,” no one bought it for this country. It was sent back to England. The distributors, who could have bought it for a song compared to what they have to pay for even the poorest pictures that are made here in America, were afraid of it, because they felt it would be hard to sell to exhibitors, who wouldn’t think enough people in their audiences would like it to make it profitable.
Think a moment. Wouldyouhave liked it,just because it was a worth-while story, beautifully produced? Would you have liked it even though it had no particular love-story, and no thrilling adventure, and no particularly unusual scenes, and did have an unhappy ending? You would haveadmiredit, undoubtedly, if you had seen it, and admitted it was good; but you wouldn’t havelikedit particularly.
Courtesy Universal Pictures Corporation.An Elephant on a Rampage.When animal pictures are being taken there is always a chance for things to go wrong. Animals almost always seem to be irritated by the clicking of the camera.
Courtesy Universal Pictures Corporation.
An Elephant on a Rampage.
When animal pictures are being taken there is always a chance for things to go wrong. Animals almost always seem to be irritated by the clicking of the camera.
Courtesy Universal Pictures Corporation.Human Brains Against Brute Strength.Whenever possible, scenes that “go wrong” are turned to account. This entire episode was photographed and eventually used in a “nature” film.
Courtesy Universal Pictures Corporation.
Human Brains Against Brute Strength.
Whenever possible, scenes that “go wrong” are turned to account. This entire episode was photographed and eventually used in a “nature” film.
It wastoo gooda picture for the American market, at this stage.
On the other hand, if a picture has certain fundamental points of popular appeal, a romantic love-story or a thrilling climax or a wonderful setting of unusual beauty or charm, and good selling-points as well, such as a famous author or a great star, it can be just as good as anybody is able to make it. Under those circumstances it cannot be too good. Look at the best Griffith pictures, or the best Rex Ingram pictures, or the best pictures that Douglas Fairbanks has made, like “Robin Hood,” or the best that Mary Pickford has made, or Charles Chaplin, or Harold Lloyd.
So far, there has been one great stumbling-block in the way of better pictures. It haseven affected such great producers as Griffith and Ingram. They have been afraid of doing the very best they were capable of, for fear of being “too good.” They were afraid of being “over the heads” of too many people in the audience. They were afraid of not having enough “popular appeal.”
That is why, in “Way Down East” Griffith stooped to cheap “slap-stick” comedy that was really beneath, and incidentally really less funny than, what he might have done. It was why Rex Ingram, in “Turn to the Right” made a picture that was about down to the level of an eight-year-old child, in spite of its beautiful production. It was why such pictures as Universal’s “Merry-go-’Round” drop to cheap and overdrawn sentimentality in places, instead of sticking to the real thing.
The danger with distributors and exhibitors as well as producers, is that they are afraid of losing money on pictures that are “too good.”
What they are afraid of is a real danger: it is true that pictures may be “too good.” That is, not interesting enough in a popular sense, in spite of their artistic excellence.
If only producers and distributors and exhibitors could all get pictures that were just as good as they could possibly be without being “too good,” we’d be all right.
It’s safer, though, from a money standpoint, to have pictures a littlebelowthan a littleabovethe line that marks the limit of popular appreciation. At least, for a while.
There we have the whole problem of how to get better pictures: daring to keep right on the border line of popular taste, without trying to play too safe by sagging away down below it, in an effort to appeal to greater numbers of people.
There’s a curious thing about this problem. Great numbers of people will keep away from pictures that seem to them too “highbrow” to be interesting. But on the other hand, unless pictures are good enough to keep people feeling that they are getting something worth-while, after a while they will stop going to that kind, also.
Have you ever played tennis with a man you could always beat? If you did, you found that after a while it wasn’t half so interesting asplaying with a man who could give you a rattling good game, and whom, if you were at your very best, youmightbeat. For some reason there is a great stimulus in progress; we like to play tennis best with people who are so good that to play with them means continually improving our own game.
Nobody would ever think of going to school if the teachers didn’t know more than their pupils. That would be worse than forever playing tennis with a man who could never hope to ever equal your own game.
Do you see what we are getting to?Leadership!
Motion pictures, are, in a certain sense, a part of the great publishing business of the United States. They publish stories in picture form. And in those stories they publish ideas, and ideals, and rules of conduct, and good taste, and good sense,—or the lack of all those things.
It is through the publishing business—the movies as well as books or magazines or newspapers—that we get the information and idealsby which we live. The publishing business is the main channel, aside from schools and conversation and churches, through which we get the information and ideas that enable us to make progress, that enable us to get ahead.
Accordingly, the publishing business—and the movies with the rest—has to have in it the element ofleadership.
It’s as though we were going to school when we go to see motion pictures. In a sense, we are. And just as, if we really were not learning anything there, we wouldn’t go to school, so, with motion pictures, if we don’t find anything worth while in them, after a while we get tired of them and lose interest, and stop paying money to watch them.
In one year, when motion pictures got too far below the line of popular appreciation, enough people stopped going to them to drop the total box office receipts in the country more than a hundred million dollars.
So, whilefor a timethere is more money in playing the publicdownthan there is in playing itup(since more people come, at first atleast, to see pictures that are too cheap for their taste, than come to see pictures that are a little too good for their taste),in the long run, playing the publicuppays best.
In other words, if the leadership element is present at a motion picture, if it is a picture that is thoroughly worth while, and yet is not too good to “get across,” it will both make money and build business, while a cheap sensational picture, though it may make more money than a better film at the time it is released, will in the end lose business for the firm producing it, becausein the long runit drives away business instead of bringing it in.
When you go to see pictures, look for something worth while. If you find it, particularly in a picture that you like very well, don’t be afraid to let the local exhibitor or theater manager in charge of the movie-palace where you saw the show know that you liked it and thought it was good.
That will help him just that much in deciding what kind of pictures his audience likes.
Remember; while a picture must be financially profitable for the producer, and so can’tbe above popular appreciation, it still must be good enough to be right at the upper edge of that popular appreciation, and trying to push it always a little bit higher.
Courtesy United Artists Corporation.One of the Big Scenes in “Robin Hood.”While it usually costs an enormous amount to film the so-called big “mob” scenes in elaborate productions, they are often very effective. Notice how well trained the “extras” are here.
Courtesy United Artists Corporation.
One of the Big Scenes in “Robin Hood.”
While it usually costs an enormous amount to film the so-called big “mob” scenes in elaborate productions, they are often very effective. Notice how well trained the “extras” are here.
Courtesy Assoc. First Nat’l Exhibitors, Inc.Spending Money on a “Spectacle.”It used to be thought that “great” pictures could be made by unlimited expenditure in “mob” scenes and “big sets.” This scene, however, is from one of the films that helped disprove it; costing nearly half a million, it proved to be a comparative failure.
Courtesy Assoc. First Nat’l Exhibitors, Inc.
Spending Money on a “Spectacle.”
It used to be thought that “great” pictures could be made by unlimited expenditure in “mob” scenes and “big sets.” This scene, however, is from one of the films that helped disprove it; costing nearly half a million, it proved to be a comparative failure.