Page:Once a Clown, Always a Clown.djvu/207

Rh or suburban, city or small town, all are shooting at the same public, because they have found by experience that it is the only large group that can be depended upon to attend day in and out. This audience may want Mae Murray in "Purple Passion" one day, Tom Mix in a Western the next and custard-pie comedy on a third, but it demands all of them in the same intellectual key and artistic pitch.

I have no more fear of the motion picture eventually displacing the stage than I have of the Japanese beetle destroying the Washington Monument or of jazz wiping out the American home. The theater is on the eve of a revival, and the movie will continue to flourish. For one cause or another it has captured a certain audience that the stage may never recover, but its bulwark is the vast new audience it has created. The throngs in the picture houses to-night are, most of them, persons who did not attend a theater once a year, if ever, and a certain proportion of these will graduate into the public of the speaking stage if the stage presents them with the opportunity.

And there's the rub. The theater really doesn't care much to-day how Memphis, Dallas, Wichita and Lexington spend their evenings.