Writing the Photoplay

by J. Berg Esenwein; Arthur Leeds

We urge this clear identification of characters so that your spectators may be saved the annoyance of needless speculation, and be able to yield to the play their instant attention and sympathetic interest. Furthermore, this course will enable you to tell your story and develop your plot with much greater ease, since the onlookers, understanding who everybody is, and how they are disposed towards each other, will grasp the points of the plot more quickly. Remember that the motives actuating the different characters are virtually sure to be the very foundations of a photoplay plot.

Almost everyone has sat half through a photoplay which was perfect in all other respects, but far from pleasing because it left the spectators guessing for minutes as to "who's who."

"Keep your first characters on the screen, even though in different scenes, long enough to get everyone familiar with them and their environment in the story before introducing a new and unexpected phase in the tale. To fail in this is faulty construction."[16]

3. Prompt Beginning of the Action

A common mistake among amateur photoplaywrights is to waste far too much time on preliminaries. If a guest is expected from a distant city, all that is necessary, as a rule, is to write in a short letter, which is opened and read by the host- or hostess-to-be, announcing that the guest will arrive at a certain time. But the young writer—to judge from many scripts we have examined—thinks that in such a case it is necessary to show the housemaid preparing the guest-chamber, another scene in which the hostess instructs the chauffeur to be ready at such an hour to meet her guest at the station, and so on. No matter what kind of story you are writing, go straight to the point from the opening—make the wheels of the plot actually commence to revolve in the first scene—plunge into your action, don't wade timidly in inch by inch. To use up two or three scenes in showing trivial incidents which may happen to the characters while they are, so to speak, standing in the wings ready to make their entrances, is as tiresome as it is useless. If the hero of the Western story makes his first appearance by dashing into the scene madly pursued by a band of Indians, the spectator is not interested in finding out what he was doing at the time he first discovered the red men closing in upon him; it is how he will escape them that engages their whole attention. Once get your action started vividly and the interest of the spectators will permit you to give all the really necessary foundation information as you move on with your story.

4. Sequence in the Action

Apply the same rule of directness to the introduction of new characters in the scenes that follow. There is one main theme, one main line of development, in every well constructed story—and only one. See to it that you do not digress from it except as you bring up from the rear other essential parts of the action. There is absolutely no place in the photoplay for side trips.

As simply and as emphatically as we can put it, the most important thing in connection with the writing of the scenario is to have the action progress smoothly, logically, and interestingly from the first to the last scene. Wherever possible, one scene should lead into the next scene, and each scene should appear to be the only one possible—from the standpoint of the action it contains—at that stage of the plot's development. If, even for a moment, a scene appears to have been written in solely for effect, or merely to delay the climax of the story, the picture is open to criticism for padding. Not only should the denouement (the untying, the clearing up of the story at the close) appear to be the only one logically possible, but each successive scene should follow the one preceding it with inevitableness.

To be sure, this does not mean, as we explained in the [chapter on Plot], that the sequence of your scenes must be the simple, straight-forward sequence of everyday life, in which one character is seen to carry out his action without interruption from start to finish. Quite to the contrary, photoplay action must often interrupt the course of one character so as to bring another personage, or set of personages, into the action at the proper time to furnish the surprising interruptions and complications—and their unfoldings—required to make a plot. But all this really is the progressive, logical development of the story in good climacteric style.

Elsewhere in this volume we have spoken of the way in which the action progresses in the twelve- to sixteen-scene comic pictures in the comic supplements to the Sunday newspapers. Take for example the well-known "Bringing Up Father" series of "comics." Commencing with the basic situation, the action moves progressively to a logical conclusion, the climax coming, usually, in the next to the last picture. The last picture is the surprise-denouement—the event which naturally and inevitably follows the climax. There is, of course, a wide contrast between one of these series and a "dramatic" photoplay; but the same principle that governs the evolution of the story in the comic supplement should be applied to the working out of your photoplay story. Cultivate the picturing eye, we repeat, so that by being able to visualize each scene as you plan it in your mind you cannot fail to produce in your scenario a series of scenes whose action is logically connected and essentially natural and unforced.