About this time picture producers were beginning to look about the stage for talent. Essanay engaged Bushman to play the leads in some extraordinarily good stories for the time and sent a company to Ithaca, N. Y.
The feature pictures, almost the first in the field, turned out that summer were a success not because of Bushman and Bayne but in spite of them. In fact one of the best of the several features found Francis X. cast in a minor role—wherein hangs a tale which may illustrate the true worth of this actor. When it came time to start work on “The Love Lute of Romany,” Francis got his copy of the script. He read until he found a scene that demanded the hero should climb a tree overhanging a deep cliff and repose amid the branches while the villain chopped away at the trunk until the giant of the forest was about to crash into the gulley below. Francis didn’t read any further. He burned the soles of his shoes locating Director Wharton and began an argument that was intended to prove that this scene was no good. However Bushman did not have the prestige with directors that he later acquired and the scene stayed in the script with the subsequent result that another actor with more nerve and less good looks played the lead in the picture.
After the Essanay engagement at Ithaca came the era of multiple reel features, with the names of the players presented on the titles, the vogue of the fan magazines in which were printed long eulogies of film players and an unprecedented interest in the photoplay.
Bushman and Bayne became famous almost overnight. For a while they shone as brilliantly as any stars of the day but soon the public began to tire of picture after picture that contained no more entertainment value than closeups of the stars and romantic poses that sickened the souls of those who hoped to find drama in the movies.
Then came the Bushman divorce. It was the last straw. The camel’s back had broken. Bushman and Bayne were out in the cold, cruel world and there they have remained until the enterprising Oliver Morrosco decided that he would take a gamble with the play we have mentioned. The show went out and made money. Now comes the final sequence of our story.
Encouraged by the success of the Bushman-Bayne play, Mr. Morrosco has shipped his stars to Los Angeles and is to star them in feature pictures. He evidently has been “sold” the idea that Bushman and Bayne can “come back.” Bushman and Bayne have never doubted it.
Developing Your Plot
PLOT germs have taken up quite a bit of our time in this new series of thoughts on the writing of photoplays. And rightly so. For, unless you know where to look for plots, and how to recognize a possible plot in embryo, how are you going to construct them?