Arizona republican., 1917-01-14
BIC IDEAS NECESSARY IN q CLASSIC PICTURE
 n U N-.ff,4b
By U w. 0rif1itn

When I first started work on my new spectacle Intolerance. many of my friends urged me to produce anoth- CT sDoctacle such as my first one. The Birth of a Nation" only using diff ferent story That was also my own sober judgment but the big underlying idea of thS intolerance of man and the havoc that it has wrought to all ages of the worlds history was in me and ] had to give it expression. l have tried to show by means of this picture that intolerance is one of the weak spots of civilization. have taken this theme asd shown it throughout the development and growth of humanity, using the four great periods in the worlds history. the wonders of the Babylonian era. the days of the Nag arene in Palestine, the wicked rule of Catherine de Medici in France and the every day problems of our modern life. Each story is entirely different but all are correlated because the dominating theme in each is the saJme.
 l have endeavored to make the in
 cidents which I have shown on the screen of such q nature that the audi ence on viewing the picture conceives and elaborates the story in it's own
 mind. In other words. the greatest value of the picture is in it's sugges- tive value to the audience in the man.
 ner in which it will force 1t to create and work out the idea that am trying to get over. 1 have made little or no attempt to tell story but I have
 made an attempt to suggest a story
 and to my mind it is q highly big , picture.
 Not long ago I had a conversation
 with pr. David Starr Jordan. pres-
 dent of the Leland Stanford Univers-
 ity in which he said that irrespective i of all that he had read of history of all that his professors had been able to tell him. he received clearer con ception of the actual manners and GUS toms of the people in the short time in i which he viewed this picture than all the reading and studying that he had done throughout his life.
 He illustrated this by calling my at tention to catapult saying that he always had a hay idea of what a cataput was, but 1t was not until he saw one in actual operation, as shown on the screen that it became crystallizeo in his mind. And so it is with every phase of the historical pie ture; it presents manners customs and costumes 80 vividly before the eye that they cannot help but be comprehended. | The historical picture must be like the historical novel. It will do more good and be q greater agent of in- i struction If if is put together with the sugar coating of romance. It Is abso- lutely necessary that the romance car
 ries the facts and not the facts the romance.
 hope that this new picture will be the means of pointing the way to an
 enlargement of the scope and field of
 the moving pictures, that it will ef
 fectively show that the picture is not
 limited in it's development to the mar
 row confines of the legitimate stage. It's growth during the past has been confined almost entirely to these lines hut the moving picture is bigger than
 the stage and l believe that the time : has arrived for it to throw off the rIarrow Limitations that have bound and hedged it about during it's life so