The typical stage performance is from two hours and a half upward.  The movie show generally lasts five reels, that is, an hour and forty minutes.  And it should last but three reels, that is, an hour.  Edgar Poe said there was no such thing as a long poem.  There is certainly no such thing as a long moving picture masterpiece.

The stage-production depends most largely upon the power of the actors, the movie show upon the genius of the producer.  The performers and the dumb objects are on equal terms in his paint-buckets.  The star-system is bad for the stage because the minor parts are smothered and the situations distorted to give the favorite an orbit.  It is bad for the motion pictures because it obscures the producer.  While the leading actor is entitled to his glory, as are all the actors, their mannerisms should not overshadow the latest inspirations of the creator of the films.

The display of the name of the corporation is no substitute for giving the glory to the producer.  An artistic photoplay is not the result of a military efficiency system.  It is not a factory-made staple article, but the product of the creative force of one soul, the flowering of a spirit that has the habit of perpetually renewing itself.

Once I saw Mary Fuller in a classic.  It was the life and death of Mary Queen of Scots.  Not only was the tense, fidgety, over-American Mary Fuller transformed into a being who was a poppy and a tiger-lily and a snow-queen and a rose, but she and her company, including Marc Macdermott, radiated the old Scotch patriotism.  They made the picture a memorial.  It reminded one of Maurice Hewlett’s novel The Queen’s Quair.  Evidently all the actors were fused by some noble managerial mood.

There can be no doubt that so able a group have evolved many good films that have escaped me.  But though I did go again and again, never did I see them act with the same deliberation and distinction, and I laid the difference to a change in the state of mind of the producer.  Even baseball players must have managers.  A team cannot pick itself, or it surely would.  And this rule may apply to the stage.  But by comparison to motion picture performers, stage-actors are their own managers, for they have an approximate notion of how they look in the eye of the audience, which is but the human eye.  They can hear and gauge their own voices.  They have the same ears as their listeners.  But the picture producer holds to his eyes the seven-leagued demon spy-glass called the kinetoscope, as the audience will do later.  The actors have not the least notion of their appearance.  Also the words in the motion picture are not things whose force the actor can gauge.  The book under the table is one word, the dog behind the chair is another, the window curtain flying in the breeze is another.