Commenting on the local situation, he continued that present arrangements include a_ picture house in every city or town that can support it, and this will be an easy matter, for prices will be brought to the level which the inland centres can afford, because a broad educational policy will raise the standard of the inhabitants to a base which ultimately must prove a good business proposition. China will be ahead of the rest of the world in one respect—every picture house built by the Peacock Film Company is to have a patent screen which will enable the performance to be given with all lights turned on, or even in the summer months with the roof off and the sun shining in. The secret of the new screen is based on the principles of deflexion and reflexion to the light from minute corrugations la the silk and gelatin curtain, and it is said that the picture resembles the stereopoticon on such a surface in many ways. An added advantage is that there is no distorted image, regardless of the position from which the spectator views it. Despite the fact that the company has as yet been barely organized, it is their plan to have within the next three years a circuit of not less than 2,000 show places throughout China.
The company's Shanghai office is at 116 Sinza Road and there it 1s building, in addition to the business office, a complete miniature theatre, to be used as a reviewing laboratory. At the same address there will be a school at which the Chinese will be taught the processes of assembling and dissembling the projecting machine, the care of the film in the projection }room, and the subtle tricks in the artistic manipulation of the reels to bring out the strong features of a picture. As an instructor in this branch of the industry, the company has obtained Mr. Cecil. R. Wood, who was was in charge of the machine at the first run of "The Birth of a Nation" in New York, and who, prior to his acceptance of the China position, was the chief projector in the Capital Theatre, New York.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.