HAL DEANE had already attracted considerable attention. The producers of motion pictures, as well as the press, had applauded his sincere, intelligent efforts to vitalize the plots of the screen pictures. He seemed to recognize that striking individual characterization and humor would revive the lagging interest of a public jaded by commonplace plots. Deane was one of the pioneers in this field.
Men like Bacon, who had gotten their schooling in the second-rate theaters, scoffed at his "radicalism."
Bacon had been a barnstormer; a stock actor in small towns; later, a producer of cheap, tawdry road shows. He had fed the audiences highly colored, sensational melodramas played in an artificial and flamboyant manner. Even when plays had real merit, Bacon managed by his interpretation to destroy in them any semblance of reality. He was convinced that theater audiences liked exaggeration of style in dress, mode of speech, of emotional expression. He carried this idea into the picture business, and it met with the approval of most of the producers who were equally ignorant of audience reactions; only a very few among them had had experience in any branch of the theatrical profession. Characterization of individual rôles was a waste of effort to him. He scorned Deane's insistence that the only hope for the screen lay in individual interpretation of type.
Bacon believed in physical comedy, bald, obvious cartooning which would provoke what he and the men of his school
