CHAPTER VIII
THE MOVIE AND THE CONTINUITY WRITER
The Screen Demands the Inevitable—Movie Audiences no Longer Easily Fooled—They can Tell a Hawk from a Hernshaw—The Value of the Screen as a Mirror of Life—Man’s First Universal Means to Self-Knowledge.
CHAPTER VIII
THE MOVIE AND THE CONTINUITY WRITER
Was it Brander Matthews, Henry Van Dyke, Richard Burton or Clayton Hamilton who asserted that any given novel must be placed in the category of either the Impossible, the Improbable or the Inevitable? Whoever it was, he helped to clarify the thinking of any writer who may find himself dealing with the topic of screen tales and tale-tellers, of the movie drama and the continuity writer. Every art has its own special sins of omission and commission. The poet who tells a story in verse may take liberties denied to the novelist relating the same story. The continuity writer who places this tale upon the screen enjoys certain prerogatives denied to either the poet or the novelist, but he is also bound by limitations and restrictions inherent in the medium through which he is working as a raconteur.
It is not easy to fool a movie audience in regard to the Inevitable. Jove may nod now and then when he is engaged upon an epic poem or a romantic or realistic novel but he must remain wide awake when he is writing scenarios for the screen. Scott, Bulwer-Lytton, Charles Read, Dumas, Victor Hugo, Thackeray may “get away,” to use a slang phrase, with a lapse of memory, an injected anachronism, even the reintroduction of a character who has been killed off in an earlier chapter. The impressive flow of their narrative, their charm of style, and the tendency of a reader to forget minor details in what he has already read of a tale, have enabled the great story-tellers to commit strange, almost unbelievable, blunders in the unfolding of their narratives without seriously marring the value of their work. But when a tale-teller is employing the movie screen he can not afford to take liberties with the basic proposition that seeing is not believing unless there is the logic of the Inevitable in the sequence of the events portrayed.
The above is asserted under a full realization of the fact that for years the story-telling films tried to the breaking-point the patience of their more enlightened supporters by frequently sacrificing the Inevitable to the Expedient, allowing the logic of events to go to the bow-wows because a reel must be cut, or a movie star exploited, or a scene over-emphasized for the sake of its advertising value. Lincoln asserted that you can’t fool all the people all the time, but at one period it seemed as if the screen were stubbornly endeavoring to perform this miracle. A picture-play, whatsoever might have been its origin, succumbed, as a rule, to a tendency to underrate the general intelligence, the power of memory, and the knowledge of life and human nature possessed by the average movie audience.
But times have changed. Continuity—that is, the spinal-column of a picture-play,—manages, for the most part, to keep the cervical, dorsal and lumbar vertebræ of the narrative in a normal juxtaposition, with the result that dramatic monstrosities are gradually disappearing from the screen. It is still possible to fool some of the people all the time, but it no longer pays, so far as movie audiences are concerned, to throw common-sense into the discard when the screen essays to tell a dramatic story. Recently in a small city within a hundred miles of New York the proprietor of a motion-picture theatre spoke to me of a great change that he had observed of late in the attitude of his audiences toward the silent drama.
They won’t stand for many things they overlooked a short time ago. They demand both logic and accuracy in our pictures. South Sea scenes must be taken in the South Seas and African wild beasts must be filmed in their native habitat or our patrons revolt. At the present rate of progress, the next generation, through the aid of the screen, will become so worldly-wise that even county fairs will be made safe for the farmer.