The photoplaywright is the only literary craftsman who does not carve, model and perfect with his own handiwork the actual presentment of his creation offered to the public. And, greatest obstacle of all—our photoplaywright must accomplish his eloquent task by remaining technically silent! We come to the inevitable conclusion that construction and technique are equal in importance—if not superior—to idea or conception of the writer.
The matter of bare photoplay form is but the slightest move in the direction of perfect effect. It is the subject of effective photoplay form and how to produce the effects that really count.
We may set down as one of the first principles of photodrama, that the playwright must make his rule of construction: People go to the theater to see a deed and not to read or hear about it. There are several ways of construing a breach of this principle. The first is that of telling the story indirectly by means of captions and inserts, instead of directly thru consecutive action. This is the method of the poor plotter and shallow artificer who sticks in a caption or insert whenever he encounters an obstacle, oftentimes skipping the climacteric situations and showing the trifling details.
(EXAMPLE 41.) AFTER THE RIOT JOE KEPT IN BED WITH BROKEN ARM .... Audiences simply will not accept that broken arm as convincing unless their reasons can vouch for the violence that led to it. But riots are more easily skipped than successfully delineated. All climacteric scenes must be shown and not merely referred to. We always take the commonplace for granted; but never the extraordinary.
Next we deal with an offending heritage from short story fiction, the story within a story or, as we shall here call it, a story within a play. It should never be resorted to; it need never be done. It breaks the thread of one story to insert another that in nearly every case is stronger than the original, forming an anti-climax instead of contributing to one. Its use means that the play has not been carefully plotted, that it has not been begun early enough, or in the right place, and that it is trying laboriously to explain something that would not stand by itself.
(EXAMPLE 42.) In the Vitagraph’s “A Million Bid,” the quasi-hero is picked up again after having been absent for more than a reel, and sets in to tell what has happened to him while he has been away! Most of it was entirely “another story,” but much of it might have been effectually interwoven with the progressing action of the play. As it was, it was most difficult to grasp the fact that we had been hauled months back in point of time. In the mental melée we lost sight of the main theme altogether, and most of us never quite got back to it. All of us were befuddled to some extent. It was intended, no doubt, that the audience should not know the identity of the narrator until the heroine herself found it out, which would have made it worse in thus having an entire stranger break into our story and consume nearly one-third of the entire play!
The most common form of a story within a play is the one in which the hunter, or the veteran, or the old person blighted in love, or some such character sits down, with a younger person usually, and in the end there is a laborious effort to make the experience of the older person play a part in the younger’s career. There may be exceptions to a hard-and-fast rule of avoiding these devices, but usually it will be found that there is a remedy in the principles of the photodrama itself that say begin your action back at the very beginning and always go forward.
The third pitfall, is that of trying to record speeches—dramatic tho they be—by supposedly visualizing what the speaker is referring to; of trying to tell the story of a crime, for instance, thru the trial of the culprit, rather than by showing the events preceding and causing the trial in their chronological order. Here, as in the former instance, the vision is resorted to. The vision is apt to be employed in dramatizing the detective story that is primed with a surprise in the climax in which the method of its revealment is disclosed by going back and showing the steps. Let it be a rare exception that makes you ever turn backward; for neither time nor drama can do it without violating a natural law.
To be explicit, the photoplay is a now play! The now may be a thousand years ago, but it must be relived again, now. All of which should warn us to avoid long lapses of time, occurring especially in the one-part play.
Nothing quite emphasizes the “now” quality of the photodrama as the invariable practice of employing nothing but the present tense in writing the photoplay. Synopsis and scenario are seemingly conscious of the things they are engaged in doing now. Past deeds and future prophecies—employing their respective tenses—frequently occur in captions and inserts, however.