Writing the Photoplay

by J. Berg Esenwein; Arthur Leeds

All is grist that comes to the mill of the writer who keeps a note-book. Almost everything that he reads, sees, or hears, offers some plot-suggestion, or suggests a better way of working out the plot he has already partly developed. But, in taking plot-ideas from the daily papers and writing stories suggested by the anecdotes and the conversation of friends, proceed with great care, lest you make trouble for yourself or for others. In a later chapter we show how many cases of alleged plagiarism are simply the results of two people taking the same idea from the same newspaper paragraph. The point here made is that if you take an idea from a newspaper item there are three courses open to you—one safe course, and two not safe. The unsafe ways are, to recopy the story bodily, using in your story all the facts set forth in the news item; or else to change it only enough to insure its being "the same, yet not the same." If you adopt either of these two foolish and dangerous methods, you are extremely likely to find that you have either been forestalled by someone who wrote a story on the subject before you did, or that your story, following closely the original facts, has given offense to someone who was concerned in the actual case. If you live in a small community, the risk of thus offending is, of course, correspondingly greater.

The one safe way is to use the plot-germ, and only the plot-germ, taken from the item in the paper. If you can take the central idea and remodel it so that the very reporter who wrote the original item would not recognize it, you may legitimately claim to have produced an original story. That is, moreover, what you should do, leaving aside all questions of your script's being accepted, and the possibility of its being refused because of its similarity to one previously purchased from some other writer.

The main incidents of a prominent court trial may supply you with an idea for a strong, original story, but you should not think of following the facts of the case just as they occurred in real life. To copy a story from a newspaper item and to get a story from the same source are two entirely different things. Press clippings, as an author once remarked, "are not first aid to the feeble minded. They are merely sign-posts that point the way to the initiated." And another has said: "It is the art of seeing and appreciating just a line or two in some newspaper item and working it up that makes newspaper study pay."

The really practised writer realizes that the best plot-suggestions are to be found in the shorter news items—the five-to-ten-line fillers—and not in the big sensations of the day. But then, the practised writer can find ideas anywhere.

One thing of which the beginner should beware is the practise of writing stories from plots suggested by friends. As a rule, the young writer, not yet having learned to think for himself, is quick to accept these friendly suggestions. He is told the outline of an unusually good story and straightway turns it into a photoplay. It is accepted, but a short while after it has been released someone recognizes in it a short-story that has appeared in a popular magazine. It is not difficult to imagine the result—before very long the film manufacturing company is compelled, whether by a sense of justice or by law, to make settlement with the magazine company holding the copyright on the original story, and the beginner finds that he is decidedly persona non grata with at least one manufacturer. Should the matter become generally known, he is likely to find himself barred by other companies also, as every editor has an inborn dread of the plagiarist, even though he may have been innocent of any thought of wrong doing.

5. Keeping Well Informed

The best means of avoiding unconscious plagiarism and the use of old material is to keep informed as fully as you possibly can of what is released week by week. You cannot be too well posted on what is going on in the photoplay business-world. Your selling-average will be higher as a result. The editor knows what is old and what is new, and so must you, though doubtless not so perfectly. Every editor's office is stocked with books, reference works, magazines, trade publications, and files of newspaper clippings. These all contain something of practical value in working up the bare ideas bought from contributors or in writing his own story—for editors as well as producers often write photoplays.

You can hardly go too far in making a study of the various motion-picture trade journals, because, quite apart from the material furnished by the different studio publicity departments—which material, for a certain week, may be practically the same in all the publicity mediums—each periodical may be depended upon to have at frequent intervals if not in every issue some good special article that will either help to instruct the writer or furnish a "tip" as to the immediate needs of a certain company. While we make special mention of The Moving Picture World because of the fact that it has had Mr. Sargent's department as a regular feature for over eight years, we also recommend the student to keep regularly in touch with what is published in the Motion Picture News (New York), the New York Dramatic Mirror, Motography (Chicago), and—for the sake of their critical reviews—any other trade periodicals he may be able to procure. Apart from the trade journals, you can always be sure of finding well-written special articles or regular departments of interest to photoplaywrights in such monthly and semi-monthly magazines as Photoplay (Chicago), Motion Picture Magazine and Motion Picture Classic (Brooklyn, N.Y.), Picture-play Magazine (New York), and Moving Picture Stories (New York). Many popular magazines also print excellent photoplay material frequently and such craft-periodicals as The Writer's Monthly (Springfield, Mass.) are always especially helpful to authors. All such tools of the writer's trade you should get as regularly as you can—and use them.

So long as you get your plot-ideas honestly, where you get them is altogether your own matter. But get them you must, for, as A. Van Buren Powell has said: "Everyone will grant that in photoplay writing 'The Idea's the thing.' The script of the beginner, carrying a brand-new idea, will find acceptance where the most technical technique in the world, disguising a revamped story, will fail to coax the coy check from its lair."

So, let your ideas be original. Get your inspiration, your plot-germ, from any source, but be sure that, before you claim the story for your own, you have so changed and reconstructed the original that it is absolutely yours.