Extremists among the pious are railing against the moving pictures as once they railed against novels.  They have no notion that this institution is penetrating to the last backwoods of our civilization, where its presence is as hard to prevent as the rain.  But some of us are destined to a reaction, almost as strong as the obsession.  The religionists will think they lead it.  They will be self-deceived.  Moving picture nausea is already taking hold of numberless people, even when they are in the purely pagan mood.  Forced by their limited purses, their inability to buy a Ford car, and the like, they go in their loneliness to film after film till the whole world seems to turn on a reel.  When they are again at home, they see in the dark an imaginary screen with tremendous pictures, whirling by at a horribly accelerated pace, a photoplay delirium tremens.  Faster and faster the reel turns in the back of their heads.  When the moving picture sea-sickness is upon one, nothing satisfies but the quietest out of doors, the companionship of the gentlest of real people.  The non-movie-life has charms such as one never before conceived.  The worn citizen feels that the cranks and legislators can do what they please to the producers.  He is through with them.

The moving picture business men do not realize that they have to face these nervous conditions in their erstwhile friends.  They flatter themselves they are being pursued by some reincarnations of Anthony Comstock.  There are several reasons why photoplay corporations are callous, along with the sufficient one that they are corporations.

First, they are engaged in a financial orgy.  Fortunes are being found by actors and managers faster than they were dug up in 1849 and 1850 in California.  Forty-niner lawlessness of soul prevails.  They talk each other into a lordly state of mind.  All is dash and experiment.  Look at the advertisements in the leading moving picture magazines.  They are like the praise of oil stock or Peruna.  They bawl about films founded upon little classics.  They howl about plots that are ostensibly from the soberest of novels, whose authors they blasphemously invoke.  They boo and blow about twisted, callous scenarios that are bad imitations of the world’s most beloved lyrics.

The producers do not realize the mass effect of the output of the business.  It appears to many as a sea of unharnessed photography:  sloppy conceptions set forth with sharp edges and irrelevant realism.  The jumping, twitching, cold-blooded devices, day after day, create the aforesaid sea-sickness, that has nothing to do with the questionable subject.  When on top of this we come to the picture that is actually insulting, we are up in arms indeed.  It is supplied by a corporation magnate removed from his audience in location, fortune, interest, and mood:  an absentee landlord.  I was trying to convert a talented and noble friend to the films.  The first time we went there was a prize-fight between a black and a white man, not advertised, used for a filler.  I said it was queer, and would not happen again.  The next time my noble friend was persuaded to go, there was a cock-fight, incidental to a Cuban romance.  The third visit we beheld a lady who was dying for five minutes, rolling her eyes about in a way that was fearful to see.  The convert was not made.