Attached is an article concerning all that play producers had to learn in order to compete for audiences with the very young (and far more exciting) motion picture industry in the early Twentieth Century.
The contest between film and stage was also touched upon three years earlier in the April, 1911 issue of THE MOTION PICTURE STORY MAGAZINE, in which a fellow known as the "Photoplay Philosopher" mused:
"Leaving my house last night at seven-thirty, I saw one motion picture performance from beginning to end, including five plays and two songs, and at nine I was back home. My neighbor in the adjoining hallroom left to go to a theater at seven-thirty and arrived home at eleven-fifteen. He saw one play, I saw five; it cost him $1.50, it cost me ten cents; nearly four hours of his life are gone, only one hour-and-a-half of mine. The moral I draw from this is, that the photoplay is in harmony with modern methods and progressive civilizations. Nearly all of our great inventions and discoveries are directed toward the elimination of distance and reduction of labor, in order that we may save time. We have the four-day ocean liners, the eighty-mile-an-hour trains, automobiles, airships, telephones, wireless telegraphy, and labor-saving machinery of every description; and what are they all for if not to gain time and to save expense?"
Click here to read further comparisons between theater and 1920s film...
Aspects of American Film History Prior to 1920 by Anthony Slide.