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Show UR BRIDES' OPENS AT Willi TOMORROW TOMOR-ROW FOR 4 DAYS One day a visitor at the atudlc where Herbert Brenon was dlrectinc tho production of "War Brides" for tho Selznlck pictures, asked, "Do you believe in giving the public what it wants, or tenching It to want some thing better than it knows?" "It is impossible to crive tho public something it doesn't want," Mr. Brenon Bren-on replied, "much less selling it thai something. But this does not mean that it Is necessary to travel in the old, deeply worn ruts in photodramas as in all other nrts. there are certain fundamental things that appeal to th public universally. The primal passions pas-sions and amnions that are the basis of poetry' and painting cannot fail to attract the public, because they are deep-rooted in the human consciousness conscious-ness The photo drama is simply the modern form of expression. Therefore, so long as the artist deals with truth he Is bound to give the public what it wants, always has wanted and always al-ways will want. "Usually, however, when you speak of eiving the public what it wants, you refer to the superficial and cheap form of motion picture, because that is what the public has seemed to want. At a matter of fact, this is not true. The majority of moving pictures have been bad, when judged by anv standard stan-dard of the other arts, just as the majority ma-jority of the locomotives built fifty years ago are bad when judged by the standards of modern mechanics. Each new art must evolve its own standards, and everyone knows that most of the worst motion pictures of today are better than most of the best ones of five years ago. "What I am always trying to do. therefore, is to reach the new standard stan-dard which does not yet exist, and if I do reach that, then I strike out again for a still higher point. This is, in the best sense, giving the public what it wants. Because the public reads a lot of trashy fiction, it does not follow that this trash holds a higher place in the public esteem than the works of Victor Hugo and Dickens. It is in greater evidence, that is all. But whenever a modern -writer even approximates ap-proximates the deep humanity of those two novelists, he wins instantaneous recognition. There is not enough good literature to satisfy the public demand for reading matter. "So there is not enough good photo-;lrama photo-;lrama to fill the demand, and so the public takes the next best, because if in IStS upon seeing pictures, just as it insists upon reading. But the success suc-cess ot the companies which have made a definite effort to bring their productions up an artistic point shows that the public has not set ideas ol what it wants, or at least that those ideas cannot be measured by the perpetual per-petual success of unworthy productions." |