The Great Public and Its Theatre

The Sixth Article in a Symposium on the Future of the American Stage

JOHN EMERSON

EDITOR'S NOTE:—In its effort to throw light on the situation created in the American theatre by the competition of the films, and the threat of motion picture control of the spoken drama, John Emerson, President of the Actors' Equity Association, who is familiar with all phases both of the theatre and the motion pictures, was asked by Vanity Fair to contribute his views to a symposium on the general subject of the future of the American theatre. They are worthy of much attention. Mr. Emerson does not mince matters, hedge or qualify. He has a low opinion of public taste, and regards any removal of this taste from the theatre as a blessing to the real drama. He regards the drama, now as always, as an aristocratic art, to be supported by the minority, and needing subsidy. The motion pictures are, he says, compelling us to realize this, and steps are already being taken in many places to support the real theatre above the competition of commerce and the moronic demands of public taste. This is the final article in a series of six written by authorities on various phases of play-producing and film-making. In the October issue of Vanity Fair, WALTER PRICHARD EATON, a reformed dramatic critic, will weigh and summarize the views of the other contributors to this symposium in the concluding article.

HAVE the growth and popularity of the Motion Pictures injured the Spoken Drama?

Financially—yes, decidedly!

Artistically—No—just as decidedly!

What's that? Do you mean to say that the great mass of "bilge" which the Movies have spewed out over our fair land, has not lowered to an alarming degree our national taste for what is fine and beautiful?

Certainly not—for the simple reason that neither now nor at any other time has there ever been any "national taste for what is fine and beautiful". Why charge the poor old Movies with degrading Public Taste, when, as a matter of fact, it is Public Taste which has degraded the Movies. It is Public Taste which, in all times and in all places, degrades any art which it in any sense or to any degree, takes unto itself. For example, consider the matter of house furnishing and decoration. Do we ever sec in the homes of the Great Public anywhere the slightest appreciation of the beauty which the artists of Italy or Spain or France or England, or even early America, managed to get into the articles of everyday use in a home? Certainly not! The Grand Rapids caricatures are much more to the taste of the Great Public than a good reproduction of a charming original, even at the same cost. And so with the Movies. It is not their cheapness alone which has made them popular, but the fact that the great mass of people prefer a claptrap movie to the finest spoken drama, just as they prefer a bad movie to a good one. The bad one they understand—the good one is over their heads. And it is characteristic of the untutored mind to abominate the thing it cannot understand.

And this is equally true of all times and all places. In spite of the glamour which insists on clinging to certain periods in the world's history, and in spite of the mistaken notion that in those periods the appreciation of Art was generally diffused throughout a whole race of people, the fact remains that there never was a time nor a nation in which the production and appreciation and preservation of all things beautiful did not rest in the hands of a comparatively small minority. For example, in the Golden Age of Greece, or in the most fecund period of the Renaissance, it happened that a larger number of artistic geniuses were produced than had been usual in the same length of time in other ages, but the whole artproducing business was in the hands of the few, and the great mass of the people were as totally guiltless of the slightest understanding or appreciation of contemporary Art as is any Kiwaniser or Rotarian in the year of grace, 1926.

So it is not in any way a reflection upon our time or our people that the films which are put forth for their instruction and amusement are much superior to those who look at them, and would be very much better still, if the producers could only do what they would like to do.

A few weeks ago Mr. Jesse Lasky, at a luncheon of the National Board of Review in New York, gave public expression to his grief over the fact that every effort of his firm to produce better and more artistic pictures had met with complete and utter failure. They had made an honest, sincere attempt to give their public a series of really intelligent, worthwhile films of fine artistic content, but in every instance had met with great financial loss. Mr. Lasky concluded his remarks on the subject by saying: "The problem lies, not with the motion picture producers, but with the public itself, and until our audiences are educated to higher standards, I don't know how they are going to get better films."

MR. LASKY, of course, is right. There have been shown in America in the last few years a considerable number of really meritorious films, such as The Blue Bird, Peter Ihhetson, Sentimental Tommy, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Last Laugh, Siegfried, Asta Nilsson's Hamlet and several others, but in every single instance these pictures have been financial failures, from the simple fact that they were far above the intelligence of their audiences.

No firm can go on indefinitely producing financial failures. Docs anyone suppose that Douglas Fairbanks enjoys producing a piece of claptrap like The Mark of Zorro, when he could be making so delightful and charming a fantasy as The Thief of Bagdad? But The Mark of Zorro made Mr. Fairbanks a fortune, and he was extremely lucky if he ever came near getting his investment back from The T hief of Bagdad.

A few years ago Mary Bickford, who is really an extremely fine dramatic artist, got tired of merely being hauled out of ash cans and soused by street-sprinklers, and made up her mind she would do some really good pictures which would give her an opportunity to utilize her talents as an actress. She started out bravely with Stella Maris, undoubtedly the finest thing she has done in her entire career. It was a complete financial failure and Mary was forced by her moron customers to go back to her pigtails and scrub buckets in such inanities as Little Annie Rooney and the like.

All this talk about making better pictures is nonsense, and for a very evident reason. It costs from $200,000 to $500,000 to produce an ordinary motion picture, and in order that the producer may make any profit on such an investment, it is necessary lor some 20,000,000 people in America alone to pay for the privilege of seeing his picture. Now does anyone assume for a moment that there, arc 20,000,000 people of intelligence and good taste in America? One-half of one million would be putting it very high. So it would inevitably follow that a producer of successful pictures must ignore the half million potential patrons who are possessed of intelligence and taste, and make his appeal to the millions of morons whose patronage is necessary to his financial existence.

LET us not assume that congenial nincompoopcry is a monoply of the rural districts, for there are just as many choice boobs per capita in New York, Chicago or Boston as there are in Wavcross, Georgia, or the upper reaches of the Yazoo river. Nor has America a monopoly in morons. The average cheese maker of Rouen is mentally and emotionally as muscle-bound as any soap maker of Pittsburgh, and compared with a Tyrolean yodler, an Arkansas farm-hand is a mental Hercules. Jayhawkery is a practically universal complaint, for which no remedy has ever been found— nor ever will be this side of the millennium.

No one knows this better than tiie Bard of Baltimore, and it will save the uplifters and developers a lot of time and energy if they will only grasp it.

"For thaPs the way they are today,

And thaPs the way they'll be for aye-— You cannot civilize a jay,

Nor from his whiskers pluck the hay,

Alas, alack, alackadayi"

IT seems to me vve should cease mourning the loss of the true theatre to our great moron population, and indulge in a little jubilation instead. F'or the Great Mass never patronized the theatre because they liked it, but only because no other form of amusement was offered them. And they were never of any help to really good drama. For let us not forget, in all this sentimentalizing about the disappearance of the one-night stand, that there never were enough intelligent people in the one-night stands to support good plays. It was always the tawdriest and least worth-while "shows" that caught the fancy of the small town crowd, and the intelligent people of those places waited for their theatre-going until they visited the larger centres, just as they do today.

"But," you will ask, "how is it that the great mass of people should be so undiscerning in theatrical matters, when they show so much intelligence and mental keenness in other directions? "

In what other directions, please!

They still read such masterly publications as the Dearborn Independent; Prohibition is still defended and fought for by a majority in both our legislative halls, not because the law-makers don't know better, but because their constituents (the Great Public) still insist that the Anti-Saloon League is an honest and sincere organization and that those two apostles of light and leading, Henry Ford and William Jennings Bryan, were right in declaring that Science and History are bunk; Mr. E. Y. Clarke, of Atlanta, Georgia, an exleader of that liberal-minded, forward-looking Christ-like organization known as the Ku Klux Klan, lias recently organized a new inquisitorial society called The Supreme Kingdom, the object of which is to banish the teaching of the theory of Evolution from the public schools of America, and to substitute therefor a compulsory belief in the Divine inspiration of the Books of Moses; Senators Borah and Johnson and others of their ilk are still sent to Washington to lead the fight in preventing the richest and most powerful country in the world from performing any part of its duty to the rest of mankind; that obnoxious, uncivilized, egotistical, muscle-bound abomination, "One hundred percent Americanism", still stalks the land; Harold Bell Wright and Ethel M. Dell still rank among the best sellers in England and America; Wayne B. Wheeler, John Roach Straton and Canon Chase are still looked upon as seers and prophets by thousands of our people; and I am reliably informed that other thousands still read and seriously ponder the play reviews published daily it) the New York World.

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And these are but a few among thousands of examples of the congenital and incurable stupidity of the Great Mass.

"For that's the way they are today, And that's the way they'll be for aye, You cannot civilize a jay!"

So why not leave the "Great Public" alone to stew in its own juicer It is quite satisfied with itself, which is, of course, the prime reason for its being what it is. It has taken the "movies" to its heart as its own particular "Xize Baby", and the "movie" producer with any sort of ideals has already capitulated to it, perforce. Fhe real theatre is much better off without it, and should let it go without a qualm, and build a new and better temple in the minds and hearts of the superior minority, the sutures of whose skulls have not prematurelv grown together and thus permanentlv shut off all possibility of mental growth and development.

The loss to the real theatre caused by the defection of the Great Mass is only a financial one. Artisticallv the theatre has gained enormously. No longer having the Great Mass as patrons, the theatrical managers have been obliged to produce plays with an appeal to the select audience—the intelligent minority. And when the managers themselves have failed to see the way, it has been pointed out to them by independent producing groups, such as the Theatre Guild, the Greenwich Village Group, the Actor's Theatre, the Stagers and others in New \ ork and throughout the country. In fact, there are many signs on the horizon of a real Renaissance of the Art of the theatre, which might never have appealed but for the desertion of the great uncivilized majority.

So for this desertion we should give much thanks, and bend our energies toward continuing to give mental, emotional and spiritual nourishment to the intelligent minority who are left to us, and for whom the real theatre exists.

How best to accomplish this might be open to discussion, although it seems to me the first fact we must face is that no theatre which puts the artistic worth of its productions ahead of their commercial appeal can live without endowment of some sort, whether it be in the form of state subsidy, private guarantee by the wealthy, or subscription lists of the moderately well-to-do. Why should we assume that in this commercial age the higher forms of Art should stand on their own feet, when they have never been able to do so, any time or anywhere?

The creative artists of ancient Greece were enabled to live only because of both state and private subsidy; those of the Renaissance would have fared slimly without the help of the Church, in addition to private patronage; the opera houses and repertoire theatres of Europe have always been subsidized by the State; our own opera, symphony orchestras, art schools and galleries would have ceased to exist long ago, but for the financial help of such men as Otto Kahn, Clarence Maekay, J. Pierpont Morgan and other wealthy connoisseurs.

Yet for some inexplicable reason we seem to expect the theatre, the real theatre, the Art Theatre, the forward-looking experimental theatre, to live solely by its own efforts. This simply cannot be done.

It has until recently been a habit in hard-headed America to look upon acting, especially among men, as a profession about on a level with teatasting or the painting of batiks, and among women as simply a toboggan slide to moral degradation and the nether depths of hell.

This quaint idea, however, is rapidly changing, even our Methodist friends having struck from their Book of Discipline the ban against cardplaying, dancing and the theatre, which was making their Sect ridiculous, as very few of their members ever thought of observing so absurd a regulation.

To be sure, there are a few Dr. Stratons left, but they arc almost extinct, and, after all, we must have something in the world to laugh at.

The locally owned and locallv managed theatre, adequately endowed, with its own regular company, alternating, as will be possible under such a scheme, with visiting organizations from Broadway, will, as I see it, bring the theatre back to a position far beyond its former state, inasmuch as its appeal will be only to the intelligent minority, under whose patronage alone is conceivable the higher development of anv of the Arts.