What Kind of Films Do Exhibitors Want ?

Manawatu Times, Volume LV, Issue 7006, 16 November 1932, Page 5

What Kind of Films Do Exhibitors Want ?

ANSWERS OF SHOWMEN PROVE ILLUMINATING.

What type of picture do exhibitors themselves most wish to exhibit? The “Motion Picture Herald,” a loading American trade journal, has set out to answer that question, and the results of its inquiries will be found interesting, states “Everyone’s.”

In the first place, the exhibitors gave sex a complete go-by. They didn’t want it. “Of all. the suggestions,” tho Herald comments, “the ‘sexiest’ is William Shakespeare’s ‘ Hamlet.’ ”In the second place, nearly every, exhibiror who answered the journal’s questions plumped strongly , for sentiment, and “for pictures exploiting tho variety of emotions common to all of us, and experienced in tho normal pursuit of life's great experience.” “In this respect,” the article continues, “the lovo interest restricts itself to its generally-accepted social aspects, at tho same time extending itself to those other manifestations of the emotions which civilisation has given us. Parental and filial love. Friendship. The love of man and woman predominant, of course, but less as the sheer biological urge .that it has come to be in certain schools of,postwar thought.”

This desire for less play on sensational love stories, and more on simpler themes, is not the only phase of the survey, however. There is, as well, an abundant taste for action built around a strong or picturesque character; and more pictures with a musical background would also evidently suit exhibitors’ tastes.

But, primarily, the men who have to show the film tell the men who make the film to give them homespun yarns, and cut out the “dirt,” just as the following typical comments show: “I would be delighted to see the filth cut out of pictures as -was promised by Will Hays—the drunkeness, the bedroom and bath scenes of nude women and the illicit lovo of some other ■men’s wives. There was never a stronger demand than now to clean up the screen. No wonder the small town theatres are going broke" . . .“Cut out the problem plays’’ . . “Give us more romance with plenty of comedy injected into the stories" . . “Less slow yovc dramas and wild-eyed women" .. . "Action without the absurdly impossible; more children pictures, less foreign, gangster and Broadway settings.’’ . . . “Forget cycle pictures." ... So there you have what American exhibitors want.