"The Movies and Me"
by Mary MacLane
Photoplay Magazine
Janyary 1918


Any time I write my opinions and impressions of this moving picture thing in its varied phases and components, it is not in the least as a critic who carps, but purely as an ardent film fan who eats up the whole game relishingly from soup to nuts.

Everybody knows it is not the critic who keep that multi-colored ball rolling, but "us fans" who pay our fifteen cents and go in at the front door prepared to like every possible thing we see that's likeable and eat up every possible morsel of romance that slides Lillian-Gishfully across the screen.

Many a critic, if we are to credit their interesting dope sheets, has come away from a picture show sickened, nauseated to his hard heart's core by the tragic want of art, logic, continuity and all those juggled-up things to be found in the whole film idea as is.

But nothing like that ever happens to me. In the first place, I don't attend picture shows in order to get nauseated. And in the second place, I usually grow so delightfully fussed up with charm, thrill, appreciation and the general sense of human emotion and color that the demon art seems quite all out of it.

It is one of my theories that the true expression of the human equation never can be pure art, and pure logic and pure continuity. Human beings are not formed to that end - not while kaisers and cabarets still go on and beds continue to sag in the middle. And since - which is another of my theories - the cinematograph really does mirror human life as it really does daily happen, it can't possibly be pure art and pure logic and still be good moving picture stuff.

Charlie Chaplin is, in my opinion, the nearest thing to a perfect artist in the long gamut of film stars, and he is by that token a case in point: Charlie Chaplin does not in any way express any form of human life as it is lived in this present state of civilization.

He falls down flights of stairs nine times with the utmost abandon and runs around tables with surprising velocity and precision, but, strictly speaking, those things are unlikely to happen in most average households. The cook would leave too often, and besides it would wear out the rugs, and prove otherwise inconvenient. No, the nonchalant Charles, though I hand it to him as an artist and a very good one, is not a favorite of mine. Nor is Mister Fairbanks, remarkable though he is for his ready mirth and his ability to jump over things. For, again, the following reasons: though indubitably great stuff it is not true to life. I have not yet known the host in any menage I've been in to go from room to room in leaps and bounds. It's all very intriguing to those who relish the bizarre and the highly improbable in pictures.

But for myself, I am the tamest, the least fiery, the most equable type of film fan. I like dramas where young people marry with lacy clothes, and a mob in the last few feet; romances where I can sit open-eyed and pensive, forgetful of passing time; and everydayish stories where I can watch Alice Brady walk and Robert Warwick frown and Valeska Suratt's back and Louise Glaum look balefully at her leading man.

Sometimes the mere look of a country hillside with the sunshine sparkling upon it, and leaves and grasses and wild flowers blowing in the breeze, to a gaze too long inured to farthest Butte or darkest Chicago, is plaisance and paradise enow.

Since nineteen-eleven when most of the stars who now bloom madly in electric lights were not even names and were in fact working humbly and anonymously for Biograph, the picture theater has been my main stand-by in moods of relaxation.

I spotted the lyric-looking Blanche Sweet as a coming star when I was totally unable to discover her name, so reticent was the screen in those days. And the famous Pickford was known but by her curls. And the artistic Walthall peered at the camera merely as a hard-working lead. And "legits" shied like frightened steeds at the mere mention of the films. And Theda Bara in her sleek darkling pride existed not.

I have trailed stars from their dawn to their be-limousined present. I have paid fifteen cents on several thousand afternoons in the far wilds of my native Butte in order to translate me frorn the somber colors of myself to the passionful prisms of life as presented by Mister Selig, Mister Fox, Mister World, Mister Essanay, Mister Blue Bird, Mister Paramount, Mister Triangle, et al. And I have never been disappointed.

There has always been something in every picture I have ever seen, though it might be but the single expression of some warmly-sexed lips or eyes, that registered at rather more than fifteen cents' value. I maintain there is more of sheer beauty - world beauty, life beauty, human beauty - in moving pictures than in any other popular expression of everyday life. If there's much that is crude in it all as yet, there is much more that is lovely.

And speaking of Mister Essanay reminds me of the most astonishing thing that ever happened to me. Without effort, without volition, without, in short, wanting to, I - I have become a "film star.

Such is fame.

Nay, more, a vampire. I had thought that it required a devilish lot of energy and pep and punch and stunningness to become one of those things. But not so. It requires languor and clothes and ease and loads of astonishingly yellow make-up. And a kindofa, sortofa vampish way with men. I have thought of myself, when it came to self-expression, purely and simply as a lit-ry woman.

But being gently induced to play the lead in a picturization of some of my own stuff I found I had all the requisites of the little old screen vampire.

I shall have a lot to write about the making of my picture when it is all over. But just at present my days are a wild maze of directors, camera men, extra people, heroes, sets, props, electricians, luncheon hours and rumblings out of bed at six o'clock in the morning.

And they tell me I have a screen personality. Still I remain in my own accounting not a film actor, but a lit-ry lady. I am still deeply unused to grease paint. I may look like a vampire, but I continue to feel singularly unlike one. I am a fan and not a critic, and my secret hankering is to be an extra person, ad-lib-ing in a mob. Voila.



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"The Movies and Me"
"The Movies and Me"
by Mary MacLane
Photoplay Magazine
Janyary 1918


Any time I write my opinions and impressions of this moving picture thing in its varied phases and components, it is not in the least as a critic who carps, but purely as an ardent film fan who eats up the whole game relishingly from soup to nuts.

Everybody knows it is not the critic who keep that multi-colored ball rolling, but "us fans" who pay our fifteen cents and go in at the front door prepared to like every possible thing we see that's likeable and eat up every possible morsel of romance that slides Lillian-Gishfully across the screen.

Many a critic, if we are to credit their interesting dope sheets, has come away from a picture show sickened, nauseated to his hard heart's core by the tragic want of art, logic, continuity and all those juggled-up things to be found in the whole film idea as is.

But nothing like that ever happens to me. In the first place, I don't attend picture shows in order to get nauseated. And in the second place, I usually grow so delightfully fussed up with charm, thrill, appreciation and the general sense of human emotion and color that the demon art seems quite all out of it.

It is one of my theories that the true expression of the human equation never can be pure art, and pure logic and pure continuity. Human beings are not formed to that end - not while kaisers and cabarets still go on and beds continue to sag in the middle. And since - which is another of my theories - the cinematograph really does mirror human life as it really does daily happen, it can't possibly be pure art and pure logic and still be good moving picture stuff.

Charlie Chaplin is, in my opinion, the nearest thing to a perfect artist in the long gamut of film stars, and he is by that token a case in point: Charlie Chaplin does not in any way express any form of human life as it is lived in this present state of civilization.

He falls down flights of stairs nine times with the utmost abandon and runs around tables with surprising velocity and precision, but, strictly speaking, those things are unlikely to happen in most average households. The cook would leave too often, and besides it would wear out the rugs, and prove otherwise inconvenient. No, the nonchalant Charles, though I hand it to him as an artist and a very good one, is not a favorite of mine. Nor is Mister Fairbanks, remarkable though he is for his ready mirth and his ability to jump over things. For, again, the following reasons: though indubitably great stuff it is not true to life. I have not yet known the host in any menage I've been in to go from room to room in leaps and bounds. It's all very intriguing to those who relish the bizarre and the highly improbable in pictures.

But for myself, I am the tamest, the least fiery, the most equable type of film fan. I like dramas where young people marry with lacy clothes, and a mob in the last few feet; romances where I can sit open-eyed and pensive, forgetful of passing time; and everydayish stories where I can watch Alice Brady walk and Robert Warwick frown and Valeska Suratt's back and Louise Glaum look balefully at her leading man.

Sometimes the mere look of a country hillside with the sunshine sparkling upon it, and leaves and grasses and wild flowers blowing in the breeze, to a gaze too long inured to farthest Butte or darkest Chicago, is plaisance and paradise enow.

Since nineteen-eleven when most of the stars who now bloom madly in electric lights were not even names and were in fact working humbly and anonymously for Biograph, the picture theater has been my main stand-by in moods of relaxation.

I spotted the lyric-looking Blanche Sweet as a coming star when I was totally unable to discover her name, so reticent was the screen in those days. And the famous Pickford was known but by her curls. And the artistic Walthall peered at the camera merely as a hard-working lead. And "legits" shied like frightened steeds at the mere mention of the films. And Theda Bara in her sleek darkling pride existed not.

I have trailed stars from their dawn to their be-limousined present. I have paid fifteen cents on several thousand afternoons in the far wilds of my native Butte in order to translate me frorn the somber colors of myself to the passionful prisms of life as presented by Mister Selig, Mister Fox, Mister World, Mister Essanay, Mister Blue Bird, Mister Paramount, Mister Triangle, et al. And I have never been disappointed.

There has always been something in every picture I have ever seen, though it might be but the single expression of some warmly-sexed lips or eyes, that registered at rather more than fifteen cents' value. I maintain there is more of sheer beauty - world beauty, life beauty, human beauty - in moving pictures than in any other popular expression of everyday life. If there's much that is crude in it all as yet, there is much more that is lovely.

And speaking of Mister Essanay reminds me of the most astonishing thing that ever happened to me. Without effort, without volition, without, in short, wanting to, I - I have become a "film star.

Such is fame.

Nay, more, a vampire. I had thought that it required a devilish lot of energy and pep and punch and stunningness to become one of those things. But not so. It requires languor and clothes and ease and loads of astonishingly yellow make-up. And a kindofa, sortofa vampish way with men. I have thought of myself, when it came to self-expression, purely and simply as a lit-ry woman.

But being gently induced to play the lead in a picturization of some of my own stuff I found I had all the requisites of the little old screen vampire.

I shall have a lot to write about the making of my picture when it is all over. But just at present my days are a wild maze of directors, camera men, extra people, heroes, sets, props, electricians, luncheon hours and rumblings out of bed at six o'clock in the morning.

And they tell me I have a screen personality. Still I remain in my own accounting not a film actor, but a lit-ry lady. I am still deeply unused to grease paint. I may look like a vampire, but I continue to feel singularly unlike one. I am a fan and not a critic, and my secret hankering is to be an extra person, ad-lib-ing in a mob. Voila.



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maclane index
domain index