The happenings of the day afford the most convenient material, as they offer the chance for constantly changing programmes and hence the ideal conditions for a novelty seeking public.  No actors are needed; the dramatic interest is furnished by the political and social importance of the events.  In the early days when the great stages for the production of photoplays had not been built, the moving picture industry relied in a much higher degree than today on this supply from the surrounding public life.  But while the material was abundant, it soon became rather insipid to see parades and processions and orators, and even where the immediate interest seemed to give value to the pictures it was for the most part only a local interest and faded away after a time.  The coronation of the king or the inauguration of the president, the earthquake in Sicily, the great Derby, come, after all, too seldom.  Moreover through the strong competition only the first comer gained the profits and only the most sensational dashes of kinematographers with the reporter’s instinct could lead to success in the eyes of the spoiled moving picture audiences.

Certainly the history of these enterprises is full of adventures worthy to rank with the most daring feats in the newspaper world.  We hear that when the investiture of the Prince of Wales was performed at Carnarvon at four o’clock in the afternoon, the public of London at ten o’clock of the same day saw the ceremony on the screen in a moving picture twelve minutes in length.  The distance between the two places is two hundred miles.  The film was seven hundred and fifty feet long.  It had been developed and printed in a special express train made up of long freight cars transformed into dark rooms and fitted with tanks for the developing and washing and with a machine for printing and drying.  Yet on the whole the current events were slowly losing ground even in Europe, while America had never given such a large share of interest to this rival of the newspaper.  It is claimed that the producers in America disliked these topical pictures because the accidental character of the events makes the production irregular and interferes too much with the steady preparation of the photoplays.  Only when the war broke out, the great wave of excitement swept away this apathy.  The pictures from the trenches, the marches of the troops, the life of the prisoners, the movements of the leaders, the busy life behind the front, and the action of the big guns absorbed the popular interest in every corner of the world.  While the picturesque old-time war reporter has almost disappeared, the moving picture man has inherited all his courage, patience, sensationalism, and spirit of adventure.