THE SILVER SCREEN IN A GOLDEN YEAR

Although it has a faintly melancholy milestone significance for me, 1926 does not appear to have been one of history’s really big years. I’m told the wines were undistinguished; the stock market did not crash and Charles Lindbergh was not yet ready to fly to Paris.

Still, it is fascinating to get an occasional glimpse at the ongoing life of 1926. As a birthday remembrance, a friend found and gave me a slim, black-covered bound volume of the 1926 issues of “The Motion Picture,” a publication of what was then called Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America Inc., Will H. Hays, president.

It is an engrossing chronicle of a new industry demonstrating its prosperity, patriotism, usefulness, artistry and fundamental decency, using as many credible witnesses as it could recruit.

From the longer perspective of time, you have no trouble imagining or inferring the offstage noises, as it were, the post-Arbuckle outcries over the town’s sizzling silents and its noisome scandals, the stirrings in Middle America that provoked the moguls to tend to the industry’s image.

In a hard-hitting article headlined “Hollywood Like All American Cities, Says New York Minister,” the Rev. Clinton Wunder of the Baptist Temple in Rochester, N.Y., reported that “the industry is cleaning house. Women who specialize in ‘vamp’ parts are no longer in demand. The dissolute type are losing out in competition with the finer characters.”

Rev. Wunder and his wife spent two weeks in Hollywood, to see if it was as bad as the downside rumors made it out to be. A photograph shows the couple conversing with Wallace Beery, Ricardo Cortez, Bebe Daniels and director William K. Howard.

The article was drawn from two sermons Wunder gave to his congregation of 3,500 when he got back to Rochester.

“I met scores of stars and directors and can honestly say that I found them to be cultured, charming and fine types of manhood and womanhood,” he reported.

The atmosphere was “thrift, energy and lots of business,” he said. Indeed, “the motion picture industry is primarily a business, and those employed by the industry so consider it.”

He remarked, with what the article’s editor called “characteristic bluntness,” that the public is largely to blame if anything is wrong with a picture.

“If the public likes a film, it succeeds,” Wunder said. “If they don’t like the film, it fails.” That hard truth wasn’t meant to let Hollywood off the hook for its sins, I feel reasonably sure. But his perception that the nature of movies responds, sooner or later, to marketplace forces remains up to date 60 years later.

Elsewhere in the volume, James E. West, chief executive of the Boy Scouts, exhorted the movies to give city boys a vision of the good country life. Mrs. L. Grant Baldwin of the Daughters of the American Revolution commended the movies for teaching the glories of American history, and she hoped for more dramas like “The Covered Wagon,” “The Iron Horse” and “The Vanishing American.” John Philip Sousa commended the cinemas for inculcating a love of good music.

April 27, 1926, was a memorable day: the movies’ 30th birthday. The movies were first projected for profit in Koster and Bial’s Music Hall at 34th and Broadway in Manhattan on that evening in 1896.

The first footage was of Annabelle Moore, described as “a serpentine dancer.” There was a quick excerpt from a current Broadway farce called “The Milk White Flag,” a dance by Mae Lucas of “The Gaiety Girls,” then the piece de resistance : pictures of waves breaking over the rocks at Manhattan Beach (N.Y.), a spectacle so vivid that viewers in the front rows ducked to avoid the spray (or so reported an enthusiastic eyewitness).

For the birthday, “The Motion Picture” trotted out some statistics that are impressive to read even now. After only 30 years, there were 20,233 movie theaters, with a seating capacity of more than 18.5 million. Something like 130 million tickets were being bought every week, “The Motion Picture” reported. (The present average is about 20 million tickets a week, and there are fewer cinemas and seats.)

The industry would produce more than 800 photodramas, as the magazine called them, in 1926, and twice that many shorts, requiring in all one and a quarter billion feet of film stock.

Already American films were being shown in 70 foreign countries, with title cards in 34 languages. The industry employed 235,000 people, including 70,000 in production and 110,000 in the theaters. (Some cinemas had 5,000 seats and larger ones were being built, the magazine boasted; let the multiplexes eat their tiny hearts out.)

Statistically speaking, one person in four in St. Louis went to the movies every day, one in six in Omaha, said the magazine. But the most interesting statistic, possibly, was that “More than 750 former newspapermen are now in the motion picture business.” Tired of fame, they wanted money, no doubt.

The current releases featured, among others, Tom Mix, William S. Hart, Jack Holt, Norma Talmadge, Charlie Chase, Our Gang and “The Circus,” a Dinky Doodle animated cartoon by Walter Lantz, who later created Woody Woodpecker and is still among us and lively.

It all seems a long and innocent time ago, but it also is possible to say that the more things change, the more some of them, at least, stay the same.