WHY NOT BETTER PICTURES?

Dominion, Volume 16, Issue 171, 7 April 1923, Page 17

WHY NOT BETTER PICTURES?

ONE ANSWER TO AN INSISTENT QUESTION. In “Collier’s,” Mr. W. W. Hodkin■on tells the public that they are not getting better pictures “because the present loaders of the motion-picture industry — most __ of them —don’t want you to.” He writes: “If you knew the personnel of the motion-picture industry as well as I do, you’d understand this better. You’d realise that the leaders are simply average business men for the most part, submerged in the commercial attitude that has made the movies from the first a get-rich-quick business. “Because the industry has grown Continuously and made a lot of money, they take it for granted that the profits are due to the methods under which the business has developed. Instead of that, the business has, in fact, grown and prospered because the motion picture, as an institution, has so great an appeal that it makes money for its esponsors, at least for a while, in spite of themselves. . . “They believe they can get quicker action on their money by appealing to the illiterate, by ' stressing shoddy melodrama and generally playing to the cheaper audiences. Moreover, as long <ls you let them get away with it. they’ll cont aue to do it —give you shoddy, dime-novel films for a big, quick profit, and ignore the larger issues of public need and public ser-

vice. • • ... “The production of motion pictures to-day is largely in the hands of' half-a-dozen tremendous organisations, turning out movies on a factory basis. These concerns, distribute their own wares and dominate the field completely. Independent concerns, attempting with new capital to make superior motion pictures, are practically at their mercy, as they have to bring their finished product to the big producer-dis-tributors in the end. What, chance has a superior outside film, against the organisation-made product in which the salesman is himself directly interested? —particularly where the producer-dis-tributors go further and buy up theatres to permit them to foist their wares on you.”