It is, as a general rule, inadvisable to try historical stories or stories which require elaborate scenes. Battle stories and stories of the Jules Verne or H. G. Wells type are also difficult to place. The great demand to-day is for sane, wholesome stories of modern American life, wherein character is the paramount interest rather than eccentricities of the plot or camera.
Send your story in synopsis form to the scenario editor of the studio which employs the star for whom you think the story is best suited. Send with it a stamped and self-addressed envelope for the return of your script, if it is not suitable for their use. Keep on sending it; don't be discouraged by rejection slips. You may write dozens of stories and then sell the very first one you wrote.
If the studio buys your story it is well to ask for an opportunity to help write the "continuity," or scenario form. This is a highly technical but very well paid task, and one which every screen author should learn. The chance to enter the studio and help work out the scenario of your own story is worth trying for.
Testing Make-Up and Expression.
Every make-up must conform to the part. Here the authors, John Emerson and Anita Loos, are helping their director, Victor Fleming, to make a test of Basil Sydney and May Collins, who played the leading roles in "Wife Insurance." The tests are usually taken in some corner of the studio under the best possible lighting conditions.
Scenarios to-day are more in demand than ever before; but producers are still chary of taking chances on untried amateurs. The amateur author's greatest success is when he sells his first story. The road is comparatively easy after that.
Original plots for five-reel pictures sell from $1,000 to $20,000, depending upon the reputation of the author and the standing of the company which buys them. Of course, some of the smaller companies pay less than this, and two and three reel features sell for less.
Published stories and novels, and plays which have had a run, bring enormous prices. Griffith recently paid $150,000 for the film rights on a play. Fifty and seventy thousand dollars are frequently paid for similar plot material, but that is because of the advertising value in the names of the plays or books, or the reputation of the writers, which assures the producers that the story is almost sure to make a good photoplay.
The highest paid workers in the movies to-day are the continuity writers, who put the stories into scenario form and write the "titles" or written inserts. The income of some of these writers runs into hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. It is extraordinarily interesting work and well worth while learning; but unfortunately the technical training for this sort of thing takes as much time as the training necessary to enter any other profession.