THE PLOT OF THE PHOTODRAMA
A photoplay Plot is the unpolished material for a COMPLETE decisive action; it is composed of cumulative and interesting incidents rising to a dramatic climax, and terminating in a manner calculated to gratify and warrant the interest roused in its beginning.
CHAPTER I
What Plot Material Is[A]
THE PLOT GERM; THE PREMISE ADVANCED; ANCIENT THEME AND ORIGINAL TREATMENT.
TO the producer a plot is material capable of being dramatized thru visualized action into a life-like story. To the playwright a plot is suggestive material capable of being developed into the nucleus of a story.
[A] “The Plot of the Short Story—an Exhaustive Study, Both Synthetical and Analytical, with Copious Examples, Making the Work a Practical Treatise,” is recommended to students desiring to study this important subject exhaustively.
The average plot builder makes the mistake of looking upon plot material as ready-made plots. He thus confuses plot germ (or material) with complete plot. Plot germs lie about us by the score; complete plots are hidden in the most evasive creases of our imaginative genius. The plot germ is merely an item of suggestive plot material, which may be lost sight of entirely in the search for the logical incidents to complete the plot that is eventually led up to. Plot germs, then, are ready-made; but complete plots are made-to-order.
The source, manifestation and aim of all plots is Man (or humanity), his desires (or passions) and his emotional relationships with his God and his fellow-man. A plot germ is an isolated incident, phase, deed, relationship, fragment, or moment, vitally connected with and suggestive of man’s emotional life. A plot germ is seldom used exactly in the form in which it originally presents itself. It is valuable principally as suggestive material. Like other germs, it must be pregnant with a life of its own that will vitally affect any other mass upon which its energies are concentrated. Carrying the simile further, we find that plot germs, too, often so change the nature of the ideas they fasten upon, that they lose their own identity in the master idea.