Behind the Motion-Picture Screen

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ALWAYS will the actor occupy first place in the minds and hearts of the screen audience. It is unavoidable. For. after all, it is the leading player or star and his or her supporting players who appear before the audience and public. They arc the photoplay. In the pioneer photoplays the actors were...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ALWAYS will the actor occupy first place in the minds and hearts of the screen audience. It is unavoidable. For. after all, it is the leading player or star and his or her supporting players who appear before the audience and public. They arc the photoplay. In the pioneer photoplays the actors were generally hired for each picture at so much per day or per week ? a sum which, in most instances, would hardly be acceptable to an extra today. Players came and went from one picture to the next; and in consequence the screen public never became acquainted with individual players. Those were the days when films were known by their trade marks and not by their players. Then, with better direction and an all-round improvement in the photoplay art, certain accomplished players soon forged ahead to the very forefront of the screen. The public began to take notice. Questions were asked, few at first, but more numerous and persistent as time went on. Everyone wanted to know who was the little blonde in a certain brand of pictures; and who was the tall, slender man in such and such a picture; and who played the rle of a Confederate Colonel in a certain Civil War photoplay, and so on. The more progressive producers did not hesitate to give all the information asked for. Here and there certain producers obstinately refused to do so, assuming the attitude that it was none of the public's business in the first place, and in the second it might lead to making certain players famous and hence attractive to other producers. At about this time the first of the so-called fan'' magazines. or periodicals appealing to the motion-picture devotees, began to appear for the purpose of bringing t he screen audience into more intimate contact with the screen players. So it came about tha...