Therefore, in writing this series, we shall start with an old saw—a warning to amateurs to look before they leap. No industry in the world presents so many angles, varying from technical work in the studio, to the complexities of high finance. If you really wish to break into the movies, go to the studios and see for yourself what you are fitted for. Perhaps you think you are an actor, and are really a first rate scenarioist. Perhaps you have an ambition to plan scenery, and instead find that your forte lies in the business office. Men who started as cameramen are now directors. Men who started as directors have ended as highly successful advertising managers. So there you are. You pay your money—and—if you are wise—you take your choice.
CHAPTER II
WHAT THE JOBS ARE
Most people seem to think there are concerned in the making of motion pictures just four classes of people—actors, scenario writers, directors and cameramen. It all seems very simple. The scenario writer sits down in the morning and works out a scene; he wakes up the director, who packs some actors and a cameraman in an automobile, together with a picnic lunch, and goes out to make the picture on some lovely hillside. Then, having finished the photoplay, they take it around to your local theater and exhibit it at twenty-five cents a seat.
As a matter of fact, the movies, now the fifth national industry in the United States, has as many phases, and as many complexities as any other industry in the world.
Broadly speaking, the movies are made up of alliances between producing companies and distributing companies. For example, the Constance Talmadge Corporation produces the photoplays in which Miss Talmadge is starred, and this Company is allied with the First National Exhibitors Circuit which takes the completed film and sells it to theater managers in every part of the world. The Constance Talmadge Corporation's duty is to make a photoplay and deliver it to the First National Exhibitors Circuit; the latter company duplicates the film in hundreds of "prints," advertises it, rents it to exhibitors, and sees to the delivery of the film. In the same way, Nazimova makes comedies and releases them through the Metro Corporation, her distributor.
The great distributing companies employ the salesmen, advertising experts, business men, and so forth. All the technical work concerned with the making of the picture, however, is in the hands of the producing company, and, since we are engaged in such work ourselves, it is about these posts that we must talk.
If we are to take the studio jobs in their natural order, the first to begin work on a picture is, of course, the author. Each studio employs a scenario editor who is on the lookout for good magazine stories or plays or original scripts. He himself is not so much a writer as an analyst, who knows what kind of stories his public wants; generally he is an old newspaperman or an ex-magazine editor. Having bought the story, he turns it over to a scenarioist—the "continuity writer." This type of specialist is much in demand, since no story can survive a badly constructed scenario.
The scenario writer puts the story into picture form exactly as a dramatist may put a novel into play form for the stage. It is the scenarioist or continuity writer who really gives to the story its screen value—hence the very large prices paid for this work when it is well done. Next in line is the director, who takes the scenario and sets out to make the picture.