The Theatre and the Motion Pictures

Summarizing Vanity Fair's Symposium on the War Between Stage and Films

WALTER PRICHARD EATON

ROUSED by existing, or threatened conditions in the theatre, Vanity Fair has been printing a scries of articles, by various people, in an effort to determine if possible how much the theatre is menaced by the movies, or in what way, and whither the general drift of the theatrical current is tending. When the series was projected last winter there was no little excitement on Broadway at the news that a famous film producer had acquired more or less control over certain theatrical producers, or was backing their ventures. As one theatrical firm was already entirely financed by a motion picture company, the control of several more seemed to threaten something of an artistic disaster, since it was assumed that the film people would hardly care to back plays unsuited to the screen. The dramatic authors immediately united into a "closed shop", insisting on a contract which forbade the managers to sell a motion picture option on their work to any one film producer, without competitive bidding and the author's consent. This move on the part of the playwrights was, of course, primarily one of pecuniary self protection. But it was successful in uniting all dramatists into a solid front, and they won their demands. Since that victory, less has been heard about the "movie control" of our drama. No doubt a film producer is less likely to back a play if he cannot be sure in advance of the film rights to it.

BUT as Mr. Brock Pemberton, an independent play producer, pointed out in his contribution to Vanity Fair's symposium, an even greater deterrent is the fact that only a small percentage of plays turn out to be good (or popular) screen material. Certainly there is no advantage to the film producer in paying money tostage a failure; there is small advertising value in a failure, and if the manuscript can be made into a good movie, it might just as well be made into one at once, without preliminary stage trial. On the other hand, the movie man, even more than the theatrical producer, is unable to predict what will be successful on the stage. The result is that the film firm which has for some time controlled a play-producing company has probably lost heavily on the venture, and of all the plays mounted during recent seasons (almost every one, of course, for sale to the movies at a price), only a small percentage have reached the screen. In other words, it doesn't appear to be profitable for the film producers to assume any considerable control of play producing, nor likely that they will make any future efforts to do so.

Nevertheless, it is assumed by most all of the writers (even the optimistic Mr. Lee Shubcrt) that the competition of the movies has diverted audiences from the theatre, and that the conditions of play production have been greatly changed and difficult situations created. Mr. Pemberton has pointed out in detail how the elimination of the small town theatres (diverted now to the movies) and the shrinkage of attendance at the spoken drama in large centres have driven the drama in on New York, resulting in a mad scramble for theatres, and consequent high rentals. With small chance of profit from a road tour, the play producer must get into New York and succeed there, or go to the wall. He must guarantee a minimum rental to the New York theatre, even minimum receipts sometimes, or get out. In other words, he must have capital to start with, and a play which can attract a considerable amount of attention. The day of the excellent play which could go along making a living for all concerned on $5,000 or $6,000 a week is over. It has to be a "wow". And the day of the butter and egg man, the theatrical backer, is here as never before. It is a chaotic and pathetically wasteful situation, though excellent for the theatre owners, who collect their minimum rent, come frost or hit.

Mr. Lee Shubert, who not only owns a score of theatres in New York, but owns or controls innumerable others across the entire U.S.A., is solvent and cheerful. He admits the one-night stands are gone; he admits a play has to be a "wow" to get by; but he says business both in New York and on the road is as good as ever, if not better. On the face of the returns he is probably right, too. No doubt his income is larger than it used to be, and even his theatres in St. Louis or Detroit earn more. But he neglects to point out something implicit in Mr. Pemberton's article—that these receipts come from big revues and musical comedies, and in a very few cases only from the finer and subtler spoken dramas. I myself last winter, in a large mid-western city, went over the list of attractions for the season, and their box office takings. Every second or third week a revue or "girl show" came along, and gathered in from $20,000 to $3 5,000. Between shows came plays, many by famous authors, or presented by famous actors, and took in $6,000, or maybe as low as $2,000. At the end of the year the theatre showed a handsome profit—but the producers of those spoken dramas didn't get any of it! It came from a type of entertainment which is, of course, perfectly legitimate —or can be, when it isn't vulgarized into a sexual orgy to attract the boobs—but which is not, after all, the English drama. It is, however, the only type of theatrical entertainment, by and large, now able to compete with the movies for the patronage of the American public.

So when Mr. Shubcrt says business on the road is as profitable as it ever was, and the theatre is as secure as it ever was in public favour, he is not speaking of quite what Vanity Fair (or Mr. Pemberton) means by the theatre. He is leaving out the drama—rather an important item.

MR. RALPH BLOCK, once a dramatic critic but now connected with the Famous Playcrs-Lasky Corporation in the production of motion pictures, took in his article a quite naturally belligerent attitude, and retorted "Is Zat So?" to all those who affirm or imply that the theatre's ills arc due to the debasing influence of the movies. Why, he asked, should the dramatists raise such a howl at the supposed threat of movie control of play producers (except as it might cause their film rights to yield less!) when for years they have hoped and prayed every time they had a play put on that some movie man would buy it from them? Why should they pen denunciations of the movies with their right hands, while stretching out their left for movie money? And who are they, anyhow, to throw the first brick? Whereupon Mr. Block enumerated several excellent and stirring motion pictures, and several concoctions of slush, hokum, smut and flapdoodle labelled spoken dramas, by way of comparison. The movies, he feels, are on the march upward, they arc vital to the lives of millions, and they will be less and less concerned with the spoken stage and its material, more and more with their own technique and peculiar subject matter. At any rate, when the people of the theatre begin hurling stones at the movies, Mr. Block hears the shatter of glass. I'm afraid the sound is at least faintly audible to some of the rest of us.

And I think that Mr. John Emerson, former President of the Actors' Equity, in his amusing and vitriolic paper last month, put his finger on the source of all the trouble—our touching but unjustified belief that appreciation of fine dramatic art was once the possession of all people, but has now been done foully to death by movies, radios and revues. Once the drama was the dominant, if not the only, form of public amusement, and once it was supported very actively by the cultivated minority (to use a rather sickening term, but an inevitable one in this connection) and to a lesser degree (certainly less financially) by the crowd, who even in the "palmy days" really preferred their ten-, twentyand thirty-cent melodramas and burlesque shows. At the present time, however, the movies have taken thousand-, even millions, of people quite away from the theatre, not by vitiating their tastes, but merely by supplying them with entertainment better adapted to their capacities and tastes; and other thousands have been diverted to symphony concerts and the myriad distractions of our modern life. Meanwhile our universal prosperity—which is with us so much a cause for rejoicing, which is even our great national ideal—has enabled untold thousands to pay $5 a seat for The Ziegfeld Follies or the Winter Garden revues, who once-upon-a-time could hardly have sat in the gallery at such a scale of prices. The revues do business across the land because they are the type of music, spectacle and humour the crowd like and understand, and Anna Christie doesn't do business across the country because nowadays only the people go to that who really understand and enjoy fine and serious dramatic art. And there aren't enough of them to make it pay.

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What is the solution? If Mr. Pemberton testifies that the idealistic producer can't survive without backing; and the dramatists insist that movie backing is a menace; and others point out that movie backing isn't likely to continue, anyhow; and even Lee Shubert suggests that if people of the smaller cities want good spoken drama, they've got to take the initiative—then there seems to be pretty good evidence for Mr. Emerson's assertion that the true and serious spoken drama, if it is to survive in our modern America, must be subsidized. It is, he declares, not in reality a democratic, but in the best sense of the word an aristocratic art. Europe has long recognized it as such, and subsidized its production. We have got to do the same.

As a matter of fact, we are already doing it, and this series of articles should not close without pointing that out. In New York, the Theatre Guild, the Neighborhood Playhouse, and now the combined Actors' Theatre and Greenwich Village group, easily our three leading producers of consistently high standards, are subsidized. The subsidy, to be sure, is not from the State or city; in two cases it is largely, and in the GuilS's case entirely, a matter of subscription lists. Fifteen thousand people pledge themselves, as it were, to attend each production the Guild makes, and the Guild Theatre was built by the sale of bonds to its well wishers. This is not subsidy in the sense that the Theatre-Frangais is subsidized; but the effect on the wolf that sniffs at stage doors is the same. If it is necessary even in New York, with its 75 theatres, to work out some such schemes in order to keep the torch burning, how much more necessary is it in cities where no professional companies now visit, or in cities where the great masses support only The Follies and Abie's Irish Rose?

The motion pictures, by making a natural separation of audiences, byclosing up the "legitimate" theatres in the small towns, possibly by somewhat divitalizing the tastes of the new generation, anti even, it may be (this of course is quite incapable of proof on.* way or the other) by subtly tempting dramatists to write with one eye on the screen and hence at something less than their honest best, have no doubt hastened the day when the subsidized theatre became the hope of the drama in America. The constant talk about them, the direct threat they made last winter to take active control of play production, certainly hastened the realization in many minds that the true drama needs organized support and encouragement, and the theatre to house it can no longer be left in the hands of the old time commercial exploiters. Exploiters aren't given to exploiting the unprofitable ! But whether or not this constitutes a "menace" by the movies seems to me (as, I gather, it does to Mr. Emerson) to depend largely on whether or not the true theatre succeeds, as a result, in getting itself subsidized and accepted by the more thoughtful people everywhere as a spiritually necessary as well as a delightful feature of the community.

I think it is going to succeed in being so accepted, and within a generation, too. If that happens, we should be at least as grateful to the movies as we are scornful of them.

And by that time there will also be, in all probability, subsidized movie houses, as well, where such splendid pictures as The Last Laugh are saved from vulgar oblivion.