How does public opinion grip the journalist?  The editor has a constant report from his constituency.  A popular scoop sells an extra at once.  An attack on the wrong idol cancels fifty subscriptions.  People come to the office to do it, and say why.  If there is a piece of real news on the second page, and fifty letters come in about it that night, next month when that character of news reappears it gets the front page.  Some human peculiarities are not mentioned, some phrases not used.  The total attribute of the blue-pencil man is diplomacy.  But while the motion pictures come out every day, they get their discipline months afterwards in the legislation that insists on everything but tact.  A tentative substitute for the letters that come to the editor, the personal call and cancelled subscription, and the rest, is the system of balloting on the picture, especially the answer to the question, “What picture seen here this month, or this week, shall we bring back?” Experience will teach how to put the queries.  By the same system the public might dictate its own cut-outs.  Let us have a democracy and a photoplay business working in daily rhythm.

CHAPTER XV

THE SUBSTITUTE FOR THE SALOON

This is a special commentary on chapter five, The Picture of Crowd Splendor.  It refers as well to every other type of moving picture that gets into the slum.  But the masses have an extraordinary affinity for the Crowd Photoplay.  As has been said before, the mob comes nightly to behold its natural face in the glass.  Politicians on the platform have swayed the mass below them.  But now, to speak in an Irish way, the crowd takes the platform, and looking down, sees itself swaying.  The slums are an astonishing assembly of cave-men crawling out of their shelters to exhibit for the first time in history a common interest on a tremendous scale in an art form.  Below the cliff caves were bar rooms in endless lines.  There are almost as many bar rooms to-day, yet this new thing breaks the lines as nothing else ever did.  Often when a moving picture house is set up, the saloon on the right hand or the left declares bankruptcy.

Why do men prefer the photoplay to the drinking place?  For no pious reason, surely.  Now they have fire pouring into their eyes instead of into their bellies.  Blood is drawn from the guts to the brain.  Though the picture be the veriest mess, the light and movement cause the beholder to do a little reptilian thinking.  After a day’s work a street-sweeper enters the place, heavy as King Log.  A ditch-digger goes in, sick and surly.  It is the state of the body when many men drink themselves into insensibility.  But here the light is as strong in the eye as whiskey in the throat.  Along with the flare, shadow, and mystery, they face the existence of people, places, costumes, utterly novel.  Immigrants are prodded by these swords of darkness and light to guess at the meaning of the catch-phrases and headlines that punctuate the play.  They strain to hear their neighbors whisper or spell them out.