Silent Movie History – Page 3 – Old Magazine Articles

Stage Productions Must Compete With Movies (Harper’s Weekly, 1915)

A thoughtful look at all that stage productions have had to learn while competing for audiences with the early (and exciting) Hollywood film industry:

There is no doubt that the moving picture was responsible for the disappearance of the second-class theatre devoted to traveling companies, giving lurid melodramas and plays of obvious sentiment [but] instead of taking a lesson from the history of this form of amusement, which it helped to kill, the moving picture theatre imitated one of it’s very worst features.

WINGS: Directed by William Wellman (Life Magazine, 1927)

Appearing in an issue of [the old] Life Magazine, that was almost entirely devoted to the 1927 American Legion convention in Paris, was this Robert Sherwood review of the blockbuster silent film Wings. Directed by an American Air Corps veteran, William Wellman (1896 – 1975), Wings was the only silent film to win an Academy Award for Best Picture (at that time the category was titled Most Outstanding Production).

European Praise for American Silent Comedies (Photoplay Magazine, 1931)

Written at a time when it was widely recognized that the silent film era had finally run it’s course and talking pictures were here to stay, the film critic for the Sunday Express (London) stepped up to the plate and heaped praise on the Hollywood film colony for having produced such an abundance of sorely-needed comedies which allowed Europe to get through some difficult times:

While German films were steeped in menacing morbidity and Russian films wallowed in psychopathic horrors; while Swedish film producers turned to Calvinistic frigidities, and Britain floundered in apologetic ineptitude…Hollywood’s unfailing stream of fun and high spirits has kept the lamp of optimism burning in Europe.

‘Let’s Go to the Moving Photograph Show!” (Motion Picture Magazine, 1915)

Attached is the reminiscence of a movie-goer named Homer Dunne who recalled his feelings upon first attending a moving photograph show during the closing days of the Nineteenth Century. He described well the appearance of the rented shop-front, the swanky ticket-taker, the unimpressed audience and has a laugh on himself for failing to understand the significance of the medium.

Silent Films and the Lexicographers (Motion Picture Magazine, 1916)

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,.

1919: United Artists is Formed (Film Cavalcade, 1939)

A printable history of United Artists spanning the years 1919 through 1939 which also outlines why the organization was so original:

[United Artists] introduced a new method into the industry. Heretofore producers and distributors had been the employers, paying salaries and sometimes a share of the profits to the stars. Under the United Artists system, the stars became their own employers. They had to do their own financing, but they received the producer profits that had formerly gone to their employers and each received his share of the profits of the distributing organization.

Fearing German Filmmakers (Current Opinion, 1921)

Teutonic film producers must have gotten a good guffaw upon reading the attached article that announced how insecure Hollywood producers felt when faced with the filmmakers of Germany. These intimidated studio heads and distributors believed that the Germans had a leg-up on Hollywood due to the high quantity of well-trained actors, crew and writers who had benefited from the traditions set forth generations earlier in German theater – so much so that they beseeched the law givers in Washington to protect them from these Germans…

The Scenario Formula EXPOSED (Photplay Magazine, 1920)

Cartoonist Ralph Barton and funny man Howard Dietz put together this nifty six-panel comic strip in order to ridicule the Hollywood screen writers and expose that crowd to be the tiresome dullards that they were (they’ve since reformed) and they also had the odd vision that the gag would be posted on a web page some eighty-six years in the future.

Converted Film Haters (Photoplay Magazine, 1920)

Tin Pan Alley songster (and later Hollywood musical composer) Howard Dietz (1896-1983) penned this verse for Vanity Fair in celebration of the persuasive charm of film:

We used to sneer at movies; they were vulgar

To our aesthetic, cultured sort of mind;

Amusement for the lowbrows or people who had no brows…

Click here to read magazine articles about D.W. Griffith.

The Rebellion of Theda Bara (Vanity Fair, 1919)

Disgusted with being remembered for only playing the role of vampires, Theda Bara wrote this piece where she listed several sound reasons as to why she would never play such a roll again:

To me, there is nothing so quaintly naive as this inability of the moving picture public to disassociate the screen personality of a star from his or her own personality. I wonder what they think a Mack Sennett bathing girl must be like around the house.