“I don’t believe in spectacles. As I conceive a spectacle, it is a cataclysmic jumble of men, exploding bombs, fire, death and destruction without a definite or with a very slim objective. In other words, the means are out of all proportion to the end. If you take the same elements and use them carrying along the story; if you take a great body of men, equip them with arms and have them do something other than rush here and there; place before them a destination and a task and have them reach the destination and perform the task, then you have all that a spectacle could give with the immeasurable addition of the dramatic and the intelligible.” — James Colin Campbell (1859-1928)
“I believe in geography where you can get the geography. It’s just as important as psychology. Make the two harmonize. Don’t have a ship known to be in the Pacific Coast trade pictured in a New York harbor scene. That is bad geography.” — James Colin Campbell
“Pictures tell a story more vividly, more compactly, with the characters more naturally assembled, with the situations more accurately proportioned and with the dramatic points driven home more powerfully than either a book or the stage. There is no trouble about the future of pictures and the past needn’t bother us, if we are willing to forget a good deal of it.” — James Colin Campbell
Photo: Campbell talks to Tom Santschi and Bessie Eyton on the set of The Crisis (1916).
Director James Colin Campbell’s residence in 1916. The address is 124 N. Corondelet Street, Los Angeles.
