If the talking moving picture becomes a reliable mirror of the human voice and frame, it will be the basis of such a separate art that none of the photoplay precedents will apply.  It will be the phonoplay, not the photoplay.  It will be unpleasant for a long time.  This book is a struggle against the non-humanness of the undisciplined photograph.  Any film is correct, realistic, forceful, many times before it is charming.  The actual physical storage-battery of the actor is many hundred miles away.  As a substitute, the human quality must come in the marks of the presence of the producer.  The entire painting must have his brushwork.  If we compare it to a love-letter it must be in his handwriting rather than worked on a typewriter.  If he puts his autograph into the film, it is after a fierce struggle with the uncanny scientific quality of the camera’s work.  His genius and that of the whole company of actors is exhausted in the task.

The raw phonograph is likewise unmagnetic.  Would you set upon the shoulders of the troupe of actors the additional responsibility of putting an adequate substitute for human magnetism in the phonographic disk?  The voice that does not actually bleed, that contains no heart-beats, fails to meet the emergency.  Few people have wept over a phonographic selection from Tristan and Isolde.  They are moved at the actual performance.  Why?  Look at the opera singer after the last act.  His eyes are burning.  His face is flushed.  His pulse is high.  Reaching his hotel room, he is far more weary than if he had sung the opera alone there.  He has given out of his brain-fire and blood-beat the same magnetism that leads men in battle.  To speak of it in the crassest terms, this resource brings him a hundred times more salary than another man with just as good a voice can command.  The output that leaves him drained at the end of the show cannot be stored in the phonograph machine.  That device is as good in the morning as at noon.  It ticks like a clock.

To perfect the talking moving picture, human magnetism must be put into the mirror-screen and into the clock.  Not only is this imperative, but clock and mirror must be harmonized, one gently subordinated to the other.  Both cannot rule.  In the present talking moving picture the more highly developed photoplay is dragged by the hair in a dead faint, in the wake of the screaming savage phonograph.  No talking machine on the market reproduces conversation clearly unless it be elaborately articulated in unnatural tones with a stiff interval between each question and answer.  Real dialogue goes to ruin.

The talking moving picture came to our town.  We were given for one show a line of minstrels facing the audience, with the interlocutor repeating his immemorial question, and the end-man giving the immemorial answer.  Then came a scene in a blacksmith shop where certain well-differentiated rackets were carried over the footlights.  No one heard the blacksmith, unless he stopped to shout straight at us.