Where Is the Film Industry Going?, Asks Dominion Exhibitors’ Secretary
“The motion picture business is at present in a more critical position than at any time in its history. The introduction of the talkies has been violently revolutionary and, as during violent revolution, the difficulty is for those involved to keep their footing in the rapidly changing conditions.”
So said Mr. J. Robertson, Dominion secretary for the New Zealand Motion Pictures Exhibitors’ Association, who is at present in Auckland. “The making of motion pictures has been revolutionised several times in the past, but the changes have been gradual,” he told The Sun. “Therefore adjustment has been comparatively easy.
“Now, however, the producers with little or no warning have suddenly made a fundamental change in the nature of his product itself, and its effect has also been to work a powerful change in the conditions under which the business is carried on.
“It is small comfort to realise that it will be some time in the future that it will be possible to know for certain what are the mistakes of today. “The picture-goer of today only glimpses now and again the struggle which is going on to maintain footholds on the slippery surface of the cinema world. “There is only one thing certain amid all the uncertainties. It is that the picture-goers, and they only, will finally determine the new form which the business will assume. “Those forms must ultimately depend on the picture-goer’s reactions te . the new conditions and not on the ) wishes or plans of any section of the industry. “Do picture-goers really like talkies? Is the appeal purely one of novelty? Does one class of talkies appeal more than others? Will picturegoers continue to like canned music? “Those and many other questions are all awaiting answers —circumstances which can only be given in the future. And on the answers depend the whole of the motion picture industry.”
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Bibliographic details
Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 852, 21 December 1929, Page 32
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320Where Is the Film Industry Going?, Asks Dominion Exhibitors’ Secretary Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 852, 21 December 1929, Page 32
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