To the stage illusions that depend on costume and make-up, the screen is particularly unfriendly.  Especially in the “close-ups” the effect is similar to that which one would have if he were standing close to the actor looking directly into his face.  It is useless to depend on ordinary make-up under these circumstances.  Either it should be of the description used by Sherlock Holmes and other celebrated detectives (we rely on hearsay) which deceives the very elect at close quarters, or else the producer must choose for his characters those that naturally “look the parts.”  In particular, the lady who, although long past forty, continues to play ingenue parts and “gets away with it” on the stage, must get away from it, when it comes to the screen.  The “close up” tells the sad story at once.  The part of a sixteen-year-old girl must be played by a real one.  Another concession to realism, you see.  And what is true of persons is true of their environment.  I have already registered my disapproval of the “Universal City” type of production.  It is almost as easy for the expert to pick out the fake Russian village or the pasteboard Virginia court-house as it is for him to spot the wrinkles in the countenance of the school girl who left school in 1892.  Next to a fake environment the patchwork scene enrages one—­the railway that is double-track with 90-pound rails in one scene and single-track with streaks of rust in the next; the train that is hauled in quick succession by locomotives of the Mogul type, the Atlantic and the wood-burning vintage of 1868.  There is here an impudent assumption in the producer, of a lack of intelligence in his audience, that is quite maddening.  The same lack of correspondence appears between different parts of the same street, and between the outside and inside of houses.  I am told by friends that I am quite unreasonable in the extent to which I carry my demands for realism in the movies.  “What would you have?” they ask.  I would have a producing company that should advertise, “We have no studio” and use only real backgrounds—­the actual localities represented.  “Do you mean to tell me,” my friend goes on, “that you would carry your company to Spain whenever the scene of their play is laid in that country?  The expense would be prohibitive.”  I most certainly should not, and this because of the very realism that I am advocating.  Plays laid in Spain should be acted not only in Spain but by Spaniards.  The most objectionable kind of fake is that in which Americans are made to do duty for Spaniards, Hindus or Japanese when their appearance, action and bearing clearly indicate that they were born and brought up in Skowhegan, Maine or Crawfordsville, Indiana.  I have seen Mary Pickford in “Madame Butterfly”, and I testify sadly that not even she can succeed here.  No; if we want Spanish plays let us use those made on Spanish soil.  Let us have free interchange of films between all film-producing countries.  All