The photodrama

by Henry Albert Phillips

The first cinematograph stories were humorous. Most of them were pathetic—which is the case when any but a story teller tries to tell a funny story. The serious story was attempted with even worse results. The arrogance of the trained writer of fiction or of drama and the price of the producer were still beyond conciliation.

The first borrowings may have come in taking excerpts from history to make the modest spectacles that gave a new note to cinematography. Suffice it to say, that soon familiar masterpieces of fiction and dramatic literature began to appear. The moment that the exhaustless stores of literature were opened to the needs of cinematography we may say that the photodrama really had its inception. In the voracious search for a story, borrowing became more general, descending from the greater to the lesser lights. At first, borrowings were looked upon by both authors and publishers almost good-naturedly. Not until the intrinsic commercial value of literary work, from a photodramatic point of view, became obvious was the virtue of the copyright called into effect.

Several successful suits by publishers brought the fear of the copyright into the producers’ hearts. The scenario editor and the photoplaywright became a power from that time on.

All said and done, a large percentage of the photoplaywrights developed in the mechanico-commercial atmosphere of the early days of cinematography were bound to be limited in their range of vision, in their conception of artistic drama and in their ideas of the needs of the ever-widening audiences. From the five-cent show, with its audiences of crude farce- and melodrama-loving people of small or limited education, had sprung the million-dollar theaters, including the rich and poor, the learned and the ignorant, the young and the old in their vast, changing throng of patrons, demanding something always better.

Is it any wonder—with the heads of the companies becoming wealthy magnates by the hour—that many of them gave little thought to anything else but the income end of their wonderful business, forgetting the output almost to the point of killing the goose that laid the golden egg? Many of these men had not the slightest conception what the word drama meant; altho their employees had grown up with the business, yet they knew nothing of those more cultured professions of literature and drama. Drama to them meant only the production of so many feet of “pictures.”

On the other hand, the consummate handlers of plots, the trained writers of fiction and dramatic literature, who had made writing their profession and had given years of their life to demonstrating their ability to make men laugh and cry and wait, by means of dramatic pictures on page or stage—they had stood aloof. The studio-bred photoplaywright smiled indulgently as tho an insuperable barrier separated these literary mastodons from their preserves; the writers scanned the field arrogantly as tho viewing the common herd. Neither was giving the other his due.

It is true, many well-known writers have failed as photoplay technicians; but it is even more true that most photoplaywrights would fail as writers of fiction or stage drama.

Thus we arrive at our point: photoplay writing is a new profession, for the simple reason that the photodrama is a new form of dramatic expression, tho in many ways like, yet in even more ways differing from, either fiction or stage drama.

The studio-bred photoplaywright needs just as much to study and to learn the valued art of choosing, developing and completing the dramatic idea artistically, as the writer of fiction or stage drama needs to master the difficult and effective technique of the photoplay.

The photodrama is more sophisticated than either the writer of other forms of literature, who dabbles with it, or the studio-bred photoplaywright, who struggles with it, at first suspects. Each new test of illusion that is put to it has been met effectively, maintained realistically and completed convincingly—providing it has had the artistic co-operation of director, actors and appropriate scenic effects.