4. Advance in Requirements
The real change has come within the past ten or twelve months. A sort of weeding process has been carried on by the various manufacturers, and as a result they recognize certain writers as being capable of supplying them, at more or less regular intervals, with the kind of scripts they want, quite as certain magazine editors have lists of story-writers to whom they look for the bulk of their fiction. Gradually this list of trained and capable, and consequently successful, writers for the screen is growing larger, for daily some new writer is demonstrating that the freshness, brightness, and ingenuity of his ideas warrant the editor's putting him on the list of those from whom good material may be expected.
5. The Demand for Photoplays
Is there not, therefore, it may be asked, a probability of the field's becoming overcrowded?
Hardly. The best proof of the opportunity that is held out to the capable outside writer, new or old, is that the staff-writers, whose duty it should be to make adaptations of plays and novels and write the scenario, or continuity, for stories bought from free-lance writers in synopsis form, are kept pretty busy writing so-called "original stories" for certain stars, or stories that may be "done" in certain parts of the country at a particular season of the year. If enough thoroughly good stories could be purchased on the outside, staff writers would never be called upon to write stories to order; only what might be called "inspired" stories would be accepted from them. Furthermore, if plenty of good, original stories, written directly for screen presentation, could be purchased by the editors, the practice of making screen adaptations of popular novels and stage plays would be cut down by more than half.
"Suppose that the staff writer suddenly gets the 'flash'—the inspiration needed to write a Western story with a plot that is infinitely bigger and more dramatic than anything that he has done in a great many months. Thinking it over, he gradually becomes brimful of the theme and its plot-possibilities. He wants to feed the paper into his trusty typewriter and start pounding out the scenario before a single bit of the suddenly inspired plot can get away from him. But he cannot; his company does not make Western stories; nor does it permit its staff writers to sell their work to other firms. Even if it did, he is far too busy to give the time to the writing of a story not intended for the use of his own particular studio.
"So the inspired story has to be laid aside, possibly to be worked upon some time in the future, when he has severed his connection with that company and, by choice or of necessity, become a free-lance writer again. Instead of writing that story he sits down and writes another society drama, after cudgeling his brain for some time in an effort to think up a plot that is, at least, different enough from the one he wrote last week to insure its 'getting by' the scenario editor, the director and 'the boss.' And that is just the point: Although many of these plots do 'get by' the powers that be (or the staff writer would not be holding his job), the photoplay-loving public knows only too well that there is a lamentably close relationship between 'A Wall Street Romance,' shown at the Novelty Theatre last night, and 'Love and Business,' produced by the same company and 'featured' at the same theatre three weeks ago. Therefore the constant demand in nine out of every ten studios for good material from outside writers. Since the writer of photoplay plots must write action-stories constantly, and since, as has been said, the staff writers are just as apt to run dry of new plots as are any other writers, it follows that there must be a market at all times for the really original and highly interesting story, no matter by whom written. If the big photoplay producing companies are to remain in business, if their various stars are to be kept working, and their rate of production up to schedule, there must continue to be a fairly steady flow of good, new stories into the scenario department."[2]
No, the field is not overcrowded—with capable writers; nor is it likely to be. With incapable amateurs it undoubtedly is. Every walk of life has contributed its share to the thousands who are trying to write photoplays. Hundreds fail because they are both illiterate and totally unfitted for the work. Hundreds more struggle on without a sufficient knowledge of dramatic values and plot building, not knowing precisely what can and what can not be presented successfully in the silent drama. Lacking this knowledge, it is impossible to succeed. But the great majority of the ones who fail, and who, otherwise, would almost certainly have succeeded sooner or later, owe their failure to their inability to hit upon and develop original, ingenious and dramatic or truly humorous plots and plot-situations. Many a man of brains and of excellent education who in any other calling might easily make his mark, finds himself totally unable to win success in short-story writing and photoplay writing simply because, not having an imaginative or (in the literary sense) creative mind, he neglects the thousand-and-one opportunities to stock that unimaginative mind with ideas furnished wholesale by the life he sees about him every day, or by available books of reference, magazines and daily papers; and, last, but far from least in importance, the pictured stories seen on the screen.