In the matter of casting characters, no character can properly be cast a villain unless his actions comprehend a conscious knowledge of guilt. Our hero oftentimes commits a crime or misdemeanor unwittingly, or in that stage of his character development before the elements of the story itself change him from weak to strong. The thoroly bad character must remain bad, just as he would in life; the good character may be bad temporarily and become bettered, but we must make him suffer from his misdeeds. In other words, our characters become living people who are endowed with human traits of which their every action is the natural outcome.
Good taste in the selection and treatment of theme brings us back again to the same admonition of exercising the simple quality of being well-bred. Just as we would not think of startling a drawing-room assembly by forcing our personal bias upon it, so we must select our dramatic matter in a serious, humane and delicate manner. There are potent commercial reasons, as well as the dogma of good taste, for not caricaturing races, ridiculing creeds, satirizing politics and making fun of physical deformities and mental infirmities.
Occasion, occupation and environment each has it own propriety and convention that must carefully be observed by the photoplaywright. This is not a matter of delicacy so much as it is one of producing conviction thru naturalness.
(EXAMPLE 40.) The seashore is an occasion for women wearing extremely abbreviated costumes that would be improper in the street; the occupation of the doctor is one that permits women to enter his quarters alone with propriety; the environment of the Orient makes it a convention for women to smoke and guests to sit on the floor.
In summing up this most important phase of the photodrama, we may say briefly: Let your sympathies ever be found with the purest, best and noblest there is in life; make your story show your condemnation of the low and evil. But don’t be a prude or a preacher! Do not permit yourself to be accused of trying to teach better things, but let your work inspire them!
Technique is the Training School of all organised knowledge; Art is its Life: Technique is a matter of Rules and a space of study; Art is one of principles and eternity.
CHAPTER VIII
Rules of the Game
DURATION AND NUMBER OF SCENES; PERPETUAL MOTION; THE “NOW” ELEMENT; EFFECTIVE FORM; NATURAL LAWS; SCENE PRINCIPLE.
IN no literary effort is technique more important or essential than in the construction of the photoplay. There are arbitrary rules that must be followed and conventions that cannot be ignored. We must cater to the manufacturer’s possibilities; we must conform to fixed mechanical limitations; we interpret our art thru “business”; we must gather the world-wide vision within the narrow focus of the camera’s eye. Our play-form and technique must be sufficiently potent, suggestive and revealing to enable competent co-operators to discern, interpret and manufacture an effective concrete and vividly alive reproduction of our abstract vision, so that it may be readily recognized and emotionally realized by independent audiences the world over.