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The Cine-Tourist
Shadowland, May 1922, pp. 47 and 57:

‘The Public and the Photoplay’ by Frederick James Smith

David Wark Griffith is a keen student of that great mass of humanity called the public. The fact that Mr. Griffith has for years been making motion pictures, the favourite entertainment of the largely inarticulate mass, and that he has held the film leadership thru all the years, seems to prove that he knows something tangible about the matter in question.

When Mr. Griffith told us, a year or so ago, that the public had the mind of a nine-year-old child, he aroused a great deal of discussion. Mr. Griffith made the point at the time that motion pictures, to be successful, must be made to fit this mighty child of nine.

Now Mr. Griffith goes even further in his conclusions. He says, in fact, that the motion picture play cannot go further because public taste cannot advance. ‘The public is always the same’, Mr. Griffith told us. ‘A certain per cent. of theatergoers move ahead mentally, but this per cent. is overcome by the incoming horde of new film votaries. I am firmly of the belief that the public average has been, is, and always will be the same.

‘Aside from all this, America is now suffering from a wave of Puritanism. It is, somehow or other, an aftermath of the world war. War has never gained a single thing for humanity and the present vogue of prudery is one of its odd after effects. Such things come in the wake of death and destruction.

‘Whatever may come of this Puritanism, one thing seems more or less certain. The screen can never – at least for generations – attain the breadth permitted literature or the stage. Bear in mind that both the play and the novel belong to arts centuries old. Long eras of travail have given them such breadth of expression as they now possess.

‘But the screen is a new means of expression. Here things are told in a new form. Thus many find shocks in motion pictures where the same thing – told behind the footlights or within the protective covers of a book – escape arousing the slightest attention. I foresee no possibility of venturing into themes showing a closer view of reality for a long time to come. The public itself will not have it.

‘As for uplifting the artistry of the photoplay, as critics are wont to express it, we are rather at a standstill. After all, to exist we must give the world what it wants. Many exhibitors and a great mass of the public have not yet forgiven me my venture into doing a silent play as I wanted to do it in ‘Broken Blossoms.’ I fear that we must go on sugar-coating life, idealizing our celluloid characters and falling back upon the absurdly palpable demand for crêpe-paper comedy, such as you found in ‘Way Down East’ and ‘Orphans of the Storm’. And Mr. Griffith smiled.

We once heard an interesting tale of Mr. Griffith’s formula for screen success, a rather striking sidelight upon his view of what the public wants. ‘A gun and a girl’, ran his recipe for film popularity. And, when one comes to consider the matter, probably the director is right.

‘After all, when you stop to think about it, do you realize what a tiny field there is for fine things on the stage. A finely imaginative entertainment like Nikita Balieff’s Moscow Russians can find an audience for a time in New York and perhaps in one or two other big cities – and that is all. Outside of this territory the ‘Lilioms,’ the ‘John Fergusons’ and the ‘Beyond the Horizons’s’ starve to death.’

We asked Mr. Griffith for his opinion of the curious way American newspapers have been scandal-mongering recently among the film players. Mr. Griffith smiles rather sadly but tolerantly. ‘Call it over-worship of screen idols if you wish’, he said, ‘but I put it – in a plain psychological sense – to suppressed desires. America is so hemmed in by official donts, laws and legislative restrictions that a seething mental disturbance is going on silently within our border. Today we find everything being curbed, from the shop-girl’s bobbed hair and crêpe de chine waist to the society débutante’s cigarette and jazz dance. Everything is in danger of being “regulate” by some would-be reformer.

‘Prevented from any vent – any real expression of itself – we find this odd demand for scandal appearing and being appeased by the sensational newspapers. Hence you hear scandal being discussed on every side, in every walk of life. One or two social infractions have brought filmland within the path of this nation-wide scandal quest. To this same thing may also be credited the curious success of certain magazines pandering to the slightly salacious.’

Turning back to the motion pictures, Mr. Griffith believes that the photoplay of the next year or so will lead away from the spectacle to the shorter silent play. On an average, business conditions do not warrant the making of spectacles for presentation at a high scale of prices. Except for the really big and unusual, the public will not be able to afford the luxury.

So Mr. Griffith foresees shorter screen plays. He believes that Americans want American themes. He thinks  that the vogue of the romantic costume piece will have exhausted itself within the year. The country as a whole, he believes, wants close to the soil themes of its own life. All of which seems to be an exceedingly healthy condition, despite mass complexes, distorted public psychology and  the other things that the avalanche of legislative prudery may bring us.

(My deep thanks to James Prochnik, who tracked down this issue of Shadowland in his collection and scanned the article for me.)