Writing the Photoplay

by J. Berg Esenwein; Arthur Leeds

Manufacturers have to be careful; they cannot afford to offend anyone. Moreover, the motion picture has come to be looked upon as a great educational factor, and no picture can be truly educational that is not strictly accurate. If you want to write historical photoplays after you have become known to the editors, very well; but be sure that you adhere closely to historical facts. It is far better to spend a week in the reference room of the public library than to have to suffer a rebuke from a manufacturer, even though the director be also to blame for not being familiar with the subject before attempting to make the picture. And the loss of your prestige may prove harder to bear than the rebuke.

5. Write on What Interests You

Next in importance to writing on a subject with which you are familiar is to write about that with which you are in sympathy. You cannot interest your audience unless you yourself are interested in your theme when the story is written. If you would arouse fire in your spectators you must first feel fire within you. To write a story merely because it is timely is not to do yourself justice. Suppose, for instance, it is about time for a new president to go into office. It may occur to you that to send in a script bearing upon that timely subject will be a sure way of "coaxing a check from the editor." You have some slight knowledge of politics and of Washington life, but you are not particularly interested in either. You are, however, anxious to sell a script, so you read up on the subject and work up a photoplay. The chances are that you will continue to own the script, for you did not put the snap into it that you would have done had you been both familiar with your theme and genuinely interested in it.

6. Write on Unusual Themes

Many a writer is deterred from developing an unusual theme for fear that no company will be found to produce it. Enough has been said on this subject to warn the photoplaywright against writing impracticable scenes. But with this limitation in view every effort should be made to strike into untravelled fields. In a day when most of the big manufacturers have two or three, or even more, field-companies operating in different parts of the country, when almost every maker of films has an Eastern and a Western organization, and when several companies have a "globetrotting" troupe working in some distant part of the world, there is very little chance of a thoroughly good and desirable photoplay plot's failing to find acceptance, provided it is intelligently marketed. No matter where you may live, no matter what you may write of, if it is good it will sell—some editor is waiting for it. But you must find that editor.

7. Write Stories Requiring Only Action

In selecting your theme, ask yourself if either dialogue or description may not be really required to bring out the theme satisfactorily. If such is the case, abandon the theme. The comparatively few inserts permitted cannot be relied upon to give much aid—the chief reliance must be pantomime.

For this reason it is inadvisable to write detective stories, unless you have a plot that can be easily and convincingly told in action. The average fictional story of this class depends more upon dialogue and the author's explanation of the sleuth's methods of deduction than upon rapid and gripping action. In a fictional detective story, the crime usually has happened before the story opens. In a film story, this would be impracticable, unless a long explanatory insert were introduced either before or after the first scene or two. But long inserts are not wanted, even in multiple-reel stories. Since events in a photoplay must appear in chronological order, you cannot depict murder without showing the murderer in the act, and that will soon bring you counter to the censors.

Aside from the consideration of the censorship is this point: in a fictional detective story the real murderer is not revealed, in most cases, until the last chapter. In the photoplay, on the other hand, it would be necessary to show the spectator almost at the first who the real murderer is—the other characters in the picture, and not the spectators, being the ones in doubt as the story progressed.

This is a difficult condition to bring about effectively. Still, it can be done, and there is a chance for a writer who can produce logical and interesting detective scripts, as there is always a market for any uncommon theme that is both original and handled with technical correctness.