4. When reading novels and short-stories, copy any names that particularly strike you. Use only the first or the last name in every case, of course, and do the same when selecting names from the directory or from signs in the street. You would not name your hero Richard Mansfield, nor his uncle John Wanamaker, but you might wish to call the uncle Richard Wanamaker and make John Mansfield the hero.
5. Select from regular theatre programs names that please you, but transpose the first and last names as recommended above. If you choose a French Christian name from one of Henri Bernstein's plays, do not take the surname of another character in the same cast to go with it. Rather take it from another French play, or from a French story in a magazine.
You do not wish to find, when the time does come for your cast of characters to be thrown upon the screen, that the director has found it necessary to change half of your names. Make them so good and so appropriate that there will be absolutely no excuse for altering them.
One thing to be remembered, however, is that the picture spectators of today have been gradually educated up to expecting and approving many things which the spectators of a few years ago would have looked upon as too "highbrow." This is due in no small degree to the many screen adaptations of literary classics and fictional successes generally which have been made, as well as to the large number of stage plays that have been transferred to the screen, for, of course, the authors, publishers and dramatic producers have always stipulated that the casts be kept as they originally were made out—except that occasionally certain characters who in the stage-production of a certain play were merely spoken about and described have been, in the photoplay form, actually introduced, and thus added to the cast. But the point is that there is no longer the frantic striving to keep everything as "short and simple as possible" that once existed, and this applies to everything in the nature of inserts quite as much as to the names used for characters in the picture. Little by little "art" in motion picture production is becoming a reality instead of being merely a high-sounding word used occasionally by the press-agents.
8. Describing the Characters
Since there is no restriction placed upon the way in which a cast of characters is made out, the writer may choose between the simple statement-form, when giving the names of his characters, and that in which the appearance and dominant traits of the character are set forth. You can say:
Silas Gregory, a miser,
or you can draw a picture of the man himself in the very way you describe him, thus:
Silas Gregory, an extremely wealthy and eccentric miser; a bachelor and a man who both by his appearance and his nature repels the friendship of his fellow men; inclined to practice petty cruelty on children and animals; suspicious of and seeming to hate everybody except his old body-servant, Daniels, to whom he is strangely attached.
While the foregoing is a rather long description of a character to be included as part of the cast-outline, and while some of the points in connection with Gregory's nature could be more forcibly demonstrated by having him do little things in the action that would make them apparent, the point is that you are supplying these items of information for the benefit of the editor and the director, and that, as must be apparent, the fuller their understanding of your meaning in everything you write, the better will be their interpretation and production of your story.