What’s Wrong with the Movies? by Aleister Crowley in Vanity Fair, Jul 1917.

“MILLIONS of dollars have already been lost in the movies by the many errors indicated above; and it may be well to point out that the public recognizes that the business is everywhere approaching a grave crisis. You, gentlemen, who are still making money, take heed: you are going to lose it in another few months unless you learn a little something about good taste in matters of art.” [via]

Consider also:

  1. “SUPPOSE that I make up my mind that one of Charles Condor’s painted women on a fan lacks distinctness? Do I call in Zuloaga to put a new head on her? Zuloaga will paint me in a fine head, no doubt; but he is certain to throw out the rest of Condor’s picture. In the realm of painting I much prefer Gaugain to John Lavery, but I should not ask the former to pain a Samoan head on the shoulders of the portrait of ‘Lady Platagenet-Tudor’ by the latter. Consider the diffident reverence with which a great artist like Sir A. Quiller-Couch finished a novel by Stevenson–and always from the master’s notes.”
  2. “ANOTHER point is the question of ‘new stuff.’ One enterprising movie manager did actually go so far as to engage a set of competent artists–at $150 per diem, all told–to get out new ideas for him: original costumes, lights, scenery, and all the rest of it. They produced new ideas. ‘Fine! Fine!’ cried he. Then a horrid doubt seized him. ‘But this isn’t a bit like what we’ve been used to!’ he stammered. ‘No,’ they said, ‘it’s new. You said ‘new,’ you know!’ ‘That’s right, I did,’ he cried, ‘but, say, the public wouldn’t stand for this, it’s too new.'”
  3. “Tinker with the whole, bring in one inharmonious element and the entire conception goes by the board. A Zulu chief is a magnificent object–but you must not exchange his gum-ring for Charlie Chaplin’s derby hat.”
  4. “In the first place, the wretches in power, when they get a perfectly competent author–say a novelist of great repute–will not trust him at all. The great writer’s story has always been a ‘movie’–on the screen of the author’s mind. It was complete in every picture before he ever put pen to paper. But the producing wretches do not know that. They do not realize that he has done the thing right. They do not even realize this in the case of a famous novel–or play–where a long success has proved it.”
  5. “But his successors have not his willpower. To-day every inartistic man in a movie production must needs have a finger in the artistic pie. Some of their suggestions may possibly be good, some bad; but the unity and coherence of the author’s conceptions are lost, and the outcome is a muddle. Ne sutor ultra crepidam. Too many cooks spoil the broth.”