(EXAMPLE 84.) In “The Coming of the Real Prince,” the first reel ends with the climacteric situation showing our heroine really won heart and soul by the unprincipled villain. But the story cannot end here; common sense and instinct tell us that that is not the culmination of the plot. And sure enough, just as the audience thought the villain was going to be caught and thrashed perhaps, by the hero—the heroine elopes with the villain! Thus we have the constructive foundation for another reel, that demands an entirely different course of action.
The studios themselves are usually responsible for the thrilling or gorgeous spectacles displaying a wonderful array of scenery, setting, hordes of actors, marvelous mechanism and a hundred other entertaining, and possibly pleasing, features that bear only a distant relationship to bona fide drama. If the manufacturer has a menagerie, a railroad, a thousand pounds of dynamite, a wild west outfit or a military equipment on his hands he naturally desires to make use of it. It is then that the photoplay hack is called upon to write one or more stories “around” it—and they usually are considerably around it and seldom inside of it.
The play offered in the following chapter is an unpretentious example, falling short of perfection in more than one particular, tho equal to the occasion of modestly exemplifying most of the rules and principles set forth in the present work.
An Example can but show you what to do and what not to do; it cannot teach you how or why to do a thing; the more perfect it be the less mechanics it will reveal; it is not a lesson to you in Technique, but the result of Technique by another.
CHAPTER II
A Specimen Photoplay
THE EFFECTIVENESS OF TYPOGRAPHY; “THE SALT OF VENGEANCE,”—A SHORT PLAY DRAMA.
TYPOGRAPHICAL display in preparing manuscript will effect its immediate understandability. A careless and unintelligent display will require extra time and patience on the part of the reader to fathom its full significance. A careful and intelligent arrangement will enable the reader to grasp the full meaning of every detail on sight. The special features of the arrangement and display of type adhered to in the following play are: (1) Single-spacing body of Synopsis; (2) Underlining setting, or location, above the text of scene action; (3) Indenting scene text, single-spacing it and making it stand out as by putting double space before and after it; (4) All Captions and dialog typed in capital letters; (5) Using the red ribbon for all matter that is to appear intact on the screen; (6) Numbering Scenes and Captions in Arabic numerals and Inserts in Roman; (7) Indenting Close-Views double the distance of Scene indentation; (8) In case of more than one reel, numbering the scenes consecutively (1 to 100, etc.) but, after the first reel, putting in parenthesis the number of scenes it represents in current reel, as: Scene 48 (13), always referring back to the serial number on its reappearance. (The foregoing remarks are necessary since print-type gives only the effect without following the rules identically.)
HENRY ALBERT PHILLIPS,
New York City .... N. Y.
THE SALT OF VENGEANCE.