From The Theatre of Science (New York: Broadway Publishing, 1914), 85–87.1
“You ask me: ‘Do you think the stage and its craft are the best means of productivity for the camera man?’ No, I do not. The stage is a development of centuries, based on certain fixed conditions and within prescribed limits. It is needless to point out what these are. The motion picture, although a growth of only a few years, is boundless in its scope, and endless in its possibilities. The whole world is its stage, and time without end its limitations. In the use of speech alone is it at a disadvantage, but the other advantages of the motion picture over the stage are so numerous and powerful that we can well afford to grant the stage this one point of superiority. The conditions of the two arts being so different, it follows that the requirements are equally dissimilar. Stage craft and stage people are out of place in the intense realism of motion-picture expression, but it may well be that a little motion-picture realism would be of immense advantage to the stage.
“To your second question, ‘After the plays of other days are exhausted, who will supply the needs of thirty thousand theatres?’ I would refer you to the opinion expressed in the foregoing paragraph. The plays of other days are not essential to the motion picture, and I am not sure that they are not proving a positive harm. If motion-picture producers had no access to stage plays, they would be obliged to depend upon their own authors for their material, and, since the picture dramas that would thus result would be composed entirely for picture production, they could not fail to much more nearly reach a perfection of art than could ever be hoped for while writers and directors are trying in vain to twist stage dramas into condition for picture use. When the plays of others days, and of these days are exhausted, as they will be, motion pictures will come into their own. They are valued now only for advertising purposes, and, when a stage play is reproduced in pictures with any success, it is inevitably found that often the plot and always the manner of treatment have been entirely departed from.”
1. This pioneering work is dedicated to David Wark Griffith, “Whose genius in the perfection of that Motion Picture Art contributes significance to this Volume.”