Category: Art

Music for the Pictures in 1911

A professional movie pianist shares his experience playing for the pictures in the South and in the North.

A communication signed “Virginian” says: “Chicago’s letter in the Moving Picture World of July 1st is interesting reading, especially tor those of us who earn our daily bread and cheese by doping out piano music eight hours per day. I have worked North and South in the business and find a vast difference in the audiences. As a rule in the South they demand the best and most appropriate music to tell a picture story, and the life of a fake, noisy pianist is short indeed. The people are by inheritance temperamental and fall to tears and laughter instantly. All classes understand music by instinct and managers are hard to please.

“The accepted ‘correct music’ for any motion picture is only that which helps to unfold the plot or tell a story. It may be a medley of classic, operatic, comic, patriotic, or dramatic, but it must be so threaded together that it carries the audience on with the action of the story until ‘Passed by the National Board of Censors’ is flashed across the screen.

“Five years’ experience proved to my satisfaction that popular stuff can be successfully played into most pictures, but we can’t stand for death, renunciation or the pathetic to the tune of a popular rag or comic song. The Southern audiences won’t stand for it. They feel everything and I believe they were spoiled from the start by the very quality of pianists, really refined and educated men and women who took up the work tempted by the salaries. By degrees the fake pianist edged in, and perhaps he does not have a time making good.

“I lost my job on a try-out in a New York theater because the manager said, ‘You play well, but we want popular stuff so they can sing. Go back and try again.’ I doped out ‘Pony Boy’ and ‘My Wife’s Gone to the Country, Hurrah!’ and all the current songs and made good, but I couldn’t stand ‘My Wife’s Gone to the Country, Hurrah!’ shouted from a few hundred throats while I wanted to rescue the heroine from the burning ship with dramatic stuff. So I tried the Agency next day and found a really swell moving picture house where only continuous improvisations were allowed; absolutely nothing popular or that had ever been in print. Well, most of it would not have been received in the music stores, but the manager knew what his patrons demanded.

“I find that a wide knowledge of musical composition is essential, also a quick imagination and the power to make the audience feel the story. As a manager advised me years ago, ‘make your music tell the story; if it does not, it is all wrong.’ And how is a pianist to do this unless he is able to sink into the picture himself and let go of his imagination? It is sometimes—ofttimes—unappreciated work, but the audience can be led up to appreciation. Americans, as a mass, are only in process of forming a musical taste. They can be made to understand and enjoy a picture by the aid of music and not stop to realize whether it is a rag or comic, and thus forget to knock the music.”

I have heard of the excellent quality of music generally found in the Southern picture theaters. You infer that the Southern audience was “spoiled” in the beginning by its good quality of music. I wish more people were spoiled in the same way.

—“Music for the Picture,” by Clarence E. Sinn, in The Moving Picture World.

Zeuxis Charges Admission

One of the most esteemed painters of ancient Greece caused much shaking of heads by charging admission to see one of his paintings. He would hardly recognize the art world today.

Chap. XII. Of the Picture of Helena drawn by Zeuxis.

Zeuxis the Heracleote having drawn Helena [Helen of Troy], got much money for the Picture; for he admitted not every one that came accidentally, or out of a desire to see it, but made them first pay money before they saw it. Hereupon the Heracleote gaining much money by the Picture, the Grecians of that time called this Helena a Curtezan.

——Aelian, Various History, Book IV, chapter XII, translated by Thomas Stanley.

Smile for the Camera.

This article originally appeared in Dr. Boli’s Celebrated Magazine.

One of Dr. Boli’s frequent complaints about portraits today is that the subjects feel compelled to grin like imbeciles as soon as a camera is trained on them. “Smile for the camera” somehow became more than a tradition: it became a dogma. In fact younger readers may be surprised to learn that the phrase “Smile for the camera” was unknown before the middle of the twentieth century. It simply does not appear in literature. It was assumed that a portrait should show the subject in a dignified manner.

It is comforting, however, to realize that artificial expressions—and even the occasional feigned smile—have been the bane of portraitists for a long time. In 1623, John Webster’s play The Devil’s Law-Case was published, and Webster puts this speech into the mouth of one of his female characters. There is a layer of irony here, of course (as there often is in an English play of the classic period): the character who speaks these lines is herself vain and artificial. It should be noted that “is drawing” means “is being drawn”: in Webster’s time, the progressive form of the verb was not used in the passive.

With what a compell’d face a woman sits
While she is drawing! I have noted divers
Either to feign smiles, or suck in the lips
To have a little mouth; ruffle the cheeks
To have the dimples seen; and so disorder
The face with affectation, at next sitting
It has not been the same: I have known others
Have lost the entire fashion of their face,
In half-an-hour’s sitting.

——John Webster, The Devil’s Law-Case, Act I.

How Will Hays Will Save Motion Pictures

Cartoon by Pittsburgh’s Cy Hungerford, 1922.

In 1922, Will Hays was hired as chairman of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, at a princely salary, with the idea that his political connections would help the movies through the minefield of censorship that was hampering them. Local censorship boards had been set up everywhere, each one full of quirky moralists whose eccentric opinions became law to the industry, so that the same film had to be edited a different way in every jurisdiction. How would Will Hays tackle that intractable difficulty? Since Hays had been Postmaster General and chairman of the Republican National Committee, he was a force to reckon with, and bringing him to the movie business created exactly the right impression: the movies were serious about addressing the problem of clean entertainment, and might be trusted to censor themselves.

We, of course, know how Hays instituted that self-censorship; and, much as movie historians deplore the Hays Code, it had the intended effect. It replaced an impossible hydra of censorship with one uniform standard that made it possible to produce pictures for a national audience. It is interesting, therefore, to see the speculations a movie magazine made at the beginning of Hays’ tenure. At least one of this article’s predictions seems definitely to have come true: “Motion pictures are now wearing their first pair of long pants; in the near future, with the able help of Will Hays, we will not know this infant prodigy in the full maturity of its strength and accomplishment.” When we think of the movies made fifteen or twenty years later under the Hays Code—Citizen Kane, The Philadelphia Story, The Wizard of Oz, The Maltese Falcon, and dozens more you could surely name with a moment’s thought—we must admit that motion pictures had indeed reached the full maturity of their strength and accomplishment.

WILL HAYS?

The motion picture industry passed out of its swaddling clothes by its acquisition of the service of Will Hayes for a period of the next three years.

Mr. Hays, the youthful president maker, and head of the greatest distributing business in the world, Uncle Sam’s mails, brings to the business a capacity for organization that augurs well for the future. His salary will be the tidy sum of $150,000 per annum and while the enemies and self-appointed critics of the industry will make capital of this fact, political and otherwise, by comparison with the salaries of other capable men, it is safe to say that every cent will be earned in this job of coordinating the interests now so widely at variance in a business whose gross turnover per annum is a billion dollars and constitutes the fourth industry in size in the country.

Speculation is rife as to how Mr. Hays will function in his new office; in short, what he will do to improve present deplorable conditions that offer so many opportunities for prejudiced and unfounded attacks on both the people and the products of the industry and how he will do it.

The facts of the situation are that the leading producers and other principals of the business who, in the words of one of them, “have been working at cross purposes and cutting each other’s throats for years” have come together in a friendly arrangement and set up a form of organization similar to that employed by nearly every large industry in existence; namely, a national association which will function like a Chamber of Commerce or National Bankers’ Association. On the larger aspects of the business which effect the weal or woe of all its members, this body with Will Hays as its presiding head will be the court of last resort.

May he find strength to combat and overcome the influence both within and without the industry which today makes [im]possible1 the full realization of the potentialities of the films as a source of clean amusement and a means of popular education.

Motion pictures are now wearing their first pair of long pants; in the near future, with the able help of Will Hays, we will not know this infant prodigy in the full maturity of its strength and accomplishment.

• • •

Legal censorship is already affecting motion pictures in a way that is handicapping the production of good films. Producers throughout the country are buying stories of the most insipid type solely because the cost of screening a comedy or drama even in a most modest way, means the expenditure of many thousands of dollars. With money more than difficult to obtain, no company is able to risk any appreciable sum on pictures which may be utterly ruined by a board of censors whose knowledge is wholly alien to the screen and whose rulings are actuated at times by excessive and almost unbelievable prudery and love of notoriety.

Many standard works have been changed almost beyond recognition simply because producers have feared the result of the censorial imagination and have therefore refrained from presenting scenes vitally necessary to the shadowing of a picture true to life.

It is certain that censorship of this type cannot in any way be conducive to the production of really worthwhile entertainment.

Only by portraying life as it is can the screen hope to progress. If that right is denied the screen cannot survive the mediocrity, banality and artificiality that assails it.

For purposes of self-preservation, the producer is bound to protect himself against loss. Therefore, the public will be the loser. Your favorite theatre will show more and more meaningless stories and your favorite story will come to the silversheet absolutely devoid of the interest it formerly held for you, You can read that same story in print—you can see it on the speaking stage but you can’t spend twenty-five cents at your neighborhood house and see it on the screen.

——Silverscreen, March 30, 1922.

  1. The hurried writer wrote “possible,” but almost certainly meant “impossible.” ↩

What Charles Anthon Looked Like to His Students

An earlier version of this article appeared in Dr. Boli’s Celebrated Magazine.

The great classical scholar Charles Anthon had much to do with the high standards of learning in nineteenth-century American universities. His textbooks on the ancient languages were widely admired, and the proof of their utility may be found in the fact that many professors resented them for making the students’ work too easy. Dr. Anthon is also famous in Mormon lore as the Columbia professor who was shown a transcribed “Egyptian” inscription from the Golden Plates and pronounced it a hoax, which has been interpreted in Mormon history as “authenticating” it.

The most famous portrait of Anthon is the one by Mathew Brady:

But here is a previously unknown original portrait from life of the great Dr. Anthon. It has lain undiscovered for a century and a half among the never-circulated books in a university library, but there is good evidence for its authenticity:

The image was found on the dedication page of The Elements of Greek Grammar, by R. Valpy, with additions by C. Anthon. What is our evidence that this is a portrait from life? The book was donated to the University of California in 1873; before that, it had formed part of the library of Dr. Francis Lieber, Professor of History and Law in Columbia College, New York. Since the volume itself is the 1847 edition of a very-often-reprinted work, and since it is the sort of book one would purchase as a student, but not as a professor of law and history (who presumably has already been through his first year of Greek), we may reasonably assume that it belonged to young Francis Lieber when he was a student at that same college, where he would have seen Dr. Anthon every day. Note his elaborately juvenile signature on the same page. The chain of evidence is strong. This is very probably Charles Anthon as he actually appeared to his students.