Page:Once a Clown, Always a Clown.djvu/191

Rh wilted progressively, once the camera began to grind.

The actor in the films is the creature of the director. The director is an important factor in the speaking stage, more so than the spectator often realizes, but in the pictures he dwarfs the players. They are puppets dancing at the ends of strings to his piping, seldom knowing anything of the sequence of the story they are enacting and little of its sense; theirs not to reason why, theirs but to clown or cry when and as a megaphoned voice instructs them to. No more initiative is expected or desired of them than of a squad of soldiers being drilled by a top sergeant in the manual of arms.

Perhaps if "Don Quixote" had fallen under the direction of D. W. Griffith it might have been a mark to date from in pictures, but Griffith's heart and most of his time, as far as I could observe, were going into his spectacle "Intolerance", which he was producing on his own. He did write and direct "The Lamb", Douglas Fairbanks' first picture, and I have been told that when the film was finished he said to the actor, "You'd better take your monkey shines to Sennett; they're more in his line."

No film is shot in the sequence in which it