Motion Picture Magazine

This small notice appeared on the pages of the March, 1916, issue of MOTION PICTURE MAGAZINE reporting that the overwhelming popularity of the new entertainment medium, and the public’s curiosity with the manner in which they are produced, is beginning to have an impact on the everyday language of the English-speaking world:

When a thing takes hold of a whole people its idiom enters the language; its individual verbiage begins to limber-up the common speech.

So the idiom of active photography has entered the English language, at least wherever the English language is Americanized. The self-conscious valedictorian is told not ‘to look into the camera’. The reporter writing of a street murder terms his description of the underlying cause a ‘cut-back’.

– and most interestingly, one of the most popular elements of Hollywood verbiage is mentioned as having been noticed by the lexicographers: close-up.

The N.Y. TIMES reported that the verb to film was entered into the dictionary in 1914,.

An interview with the silent film actress, Blanche Sweet (1895-1986) who, at that point in her career, had been a photoplayer (ie. an actor) for only six years. Prior to her contract with The Lasky Company, where she was obliged to perform at the time of this interview, she had toiled in the vineyards of such studios as Reliance and Biograph (where she was nick-named, The Biograph Blonde). Unlike her co-swells in that young industry, who liked to read and re-read their recent interviews from Motion Picture Magazine while loitering around the sets, we read that Blanche Sweet was very fond of reading Tennyson, Kipling and the novels of Edward Phillips Oppenheim (1866-1946). During the course of her career she had appeared in well over one hundred films.

Click here to read magazine articles about D.W. Griffith.
Click here to read articles about another Hollywood blonde: Marilyn Monroe.

Attached is a single page cartoon from 1916 that illustrated quite clearly that the relationship between movie fans and their film star magazines have not changed at all during the past ninety years.