Writing the Photoplay

E-text prepared by Audrey Longhurst, Linda Cantoni, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net/)
THE HOME CORRESPONDENCE SCHOOL Springfield, Mass. Publishers
Copyright 1913 Copyright 1919 The Home Correspondence School All Rights Reserved
The Lasky Studio of the Famous Players-Lasky Corporation, Hollywood, California

As its title indicates, this book aims to teach the theory and practice of photoplay construction. This we shall attempt by first pointing out its component parts, and then showing how these parts are both constructed and assembled so as to form a strong, well-built, attractive and salable manuscript.
The Photoplay Defined and Differentiated
A photoplay is a story told largely in pantomime by players, whose words are suggested by their actions, assisted by certain descriptive words thrown on the screen, and the whole produced by a moving-picture machine.
True, a genuine photoplay may contain scenes and incidents which would almost seem to justify its being included in one of the foregoing classes. One might ask, for instance, why Selig's film, On the Trail of the Germs, produced about five years ago, was classified as educational, while Edison's The Red Cross Seal and The Awakening of John Bond (both of which were produced at the instance of the National Association for the Study and Prevention of Tuberculosis, and had to do with the fight waged by that society against the disease in the cities), were listed as dramatic films or photoplays. Anyone who saw all three of the films, however, would recognize that the Selig picture, while in every respect a subject of great human interest, was strictly educational, and employed the thread of a story not as a dramatic entertainment, but merely to furnish a connecting link for the scenes which illustrated the methods of curing the disease after a patient is discovered to be infected. The Edison pictures, on the other hand, were real dramas, with well-constructed plots and abundant dramatic interest, even while, as the advertising in the trade papers announced, the principal object of the pictures was to disseminate information as to what becomes of the money that is received from the sale of Red Cross stamps at holiday time. So we see that the distinction lies in the amount of plot or story-thread which each carries, and that a mere series of connected pictures without a plot running through it obviously cannot be called a photoplay any more than a series of tableaus on the stage could be accurately called a play.