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

“Several times, of late, I have seen films where the tinkers had improved a good novel out of existence. The beginning, end, and middle of the story had been dexterously amputated or ‘arranges.’ We were not informed of the relationship existing between the various characters; the motives for their acts were utterly obscure. A ‘situation’ would ultimately arise—and then, instead of a dénouement, the film stopped suddenly!

One felt as if one had somehow got into a lunatic asylum.” [via]

Consider also:

  1. “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.'”
  2. “These preposterous people do not understand that they insult the public and make themselves ridiculous in the the bargain when they offer to ‘improve’ Victor Hugo; to bring Dumas ‘up-to-date’; to put ‘punch’ into Ibsen; or to ‘alter’ history a bit in order to give Joan of Arc an earthly lover.”
  3. “SOME months back two wealthy gentlemen where lunching at the Knickerbocker Hotel, in New York, where all movie magnates seem to make a habit of foregathering. They were trying to think of a book to ‘film.’ A pause. One suggested Victor Hugo’s ‘Hunchback of Notre Dame.’ ‘A grand sweet story! Some story! Some Punch! Some pep!’ A longer pause. ‘Say, why, in out film, shouldn’t that hunchback marry the beautiful gipsy chicken?’ ‘But, say, we can’t have that little pippin tied to a hunchback.’ ‘I got it, bo, we’ll get a Johns Hopkins guy to straighten him out on the operating table.’ ‘Say, you’re some artist, Al.'”
  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. “O, purblind crew of miserable men, cannot you see that the only way to succeed in the movies, or in any art, is to get the men who really know how, to create new effects of art, and then to trust them implicitly? The worst author is better, as an author, than the best ‘producer’ or ‘director,’ however highly paid, unless he sticks to his business of visualizing, with sympathy and fidelity, the author’s conceptions and ideals. The only good films, the only popular films, are those by living authors of repute, who have somehow been able to insist upon having their conceptions literally carried out, and not meddled with by a band of misguided and inartistic managers.”