The Kindergarten and Cinematography (1911)

from The Moving Picture News February 18, 1911

“Kindergarten” in this country has come to mean little besides a school for the tiny tots who are just setting their baby feet on the lowest step of the ladder of learning. But in the broader sense, all life is really, or ought to be, a kindergarten, for humanity is composed of children and the world a garden.
To some extent every exhibitor can be of use in the kindergarten of learning, and without much effort on
his part either.
The moving picture operator of the future will be a man of resourcefulness, ready at all times to make new uses of old ideas, and new ideas too. If he does this rightly, he is helping on the educational movement and advertising his show at the same time.
Take an example : In the lower grades of school work clay modeling takes some part. Now and again exhibitions of the children’s work are held at the schools. If you want a bit of cheap and good boosting,
Mr. Exhibitor, get up to one of these work displays, make half a dozen kodak pictures of the show and give the children a free admission Saturday afternoons.
Don’t stop at that. Get out your kodak prints for the poster easels of your front, and make lantern slides of them also, with, where possible, the names of the youngsters shown.
“But,” you say, “I haven’t a kodak.” Then you have no right to be in the business. Go right away and buy one, any price, from the $2.00 Brownie up, and if you are a novice, don’t overlook the No. 2 Bull’s
Eye. It will be the best advertising money you ever spent.
“Then,” you say again, “I don’t know how to make a lantern slide.”
You don’t have to, but it’s a shameful admission, especially if you get the Moving Picture News regularly.
If you haven’t time, get your local photo supply house to do the work for you. The point is, if you make use of your opportunities, you will create a desire for these little educational localisms, and it doesn’t take many dimes to pay for a dozen slides.
There are scores of other things the little hands are doing in the schools whilst you are hanging around the box office in the morning, wasting your time in talking to deadheads who value your time as they do
their own as a negative quantitv.
Get in the kindergarten of this picture work yourself, and KEEP IN IT. It pays.
You cannot value these local and topical slides too highly. If you’ll put a litttle brain work on them, you
will make more out of them than out’ of advertising slides.
And you’ll very soon be surprised to find how your own mind will evolve new uses for the old idea.
That is the indisputable proof that pictures are educative in that they “lead out” of a hardened old picture theater man a desire for more knowledge of everything”.
And don’t forget that IT PAYS.

Notes

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