True that common usage in methods of production, working together with such special circumstances as Lucinda's inexperience and the absence of any fixed plan of plot development other than in the omniscience of Barry Nolan, made it anything but easy to judge the man fairly by the record of his work from day to day.
In the continuity which Nolan concocted to supplant that prepared by Zinn's staff writer—as in every proper continuity—each scene had been placed in its right sequence, where anybody uninstructed in the way of a director with a picture might reasonably look to see it appear in the completed photoplay. But as soon as the typist had transcribed Nolan's dictation, the new continuity was turned over to his assistants to be dismembered and rebuilt with its scenes arranged as they were to be photographed, by groups, without respect to chronological sequence.
Obviously it would be stupid (as Lucinda was quick to appreciate) to take the scenes as laid out in the continuity; for example, to photograph Scene 1 in a studio set, transport the company ten miles to photograph Scene 2 on, say, an ocean beach, and jump back to the studio to take Scene 3 on the same set as used for Scene 1. Consequently all scenes indicated for each particular set were shot seriatim; after which the set would be promptly demolished, to clear the stage for the erection of another.
It resulted from this that only an intelligence comprehending the whole plan and scope of both story and continuity could have kept track of the scenes as photographed and rated each rightly at its proportional value. Even in the ranks of studio veterans, minds of such force and grasp are few and far to seek. The Linda Lee company hadn't been at work two days before Lucinda began to feel in relation to the story like one lost in a fog, helplessly dependent upon the guiding hand of Barry Nolan, and none too well satisfied that he knew his way about as well as he pretended to in that beclouded labyrinth.
Neither was confidence in his infallibility encouraged by a habit to which he, like most directors, proved lamentably prone, of improvising improvements on the story as he went along. All of a sudden, while directing a scene, Nolan was wont to break out in a profuse inspiration, and incontinently some well-remembered bit of business or episode from an old stage success would be interjected into or substituted for incidents really germane to the original plot. That this practice as often as not produced results in conflict with the fundamental mechanics of the story, if it missed throwing them out of kilter entirely, seemed to be a consideration of minor consequence.
Thus Nolan laboured long and passionately to persuade Lucinda it would benefit the story to engraft on it a scene wherein she would figure as a lonely prisoner in a garret, menaced by hordes of hungry rats. This regardless of the fact that there was no garret in the original story, nor any room for one, and no reason why the young person portrayed by Lucinda should be imprisoned in one, but solely because Nolan happened to fancy a resemblance between her and an actress whom he had several years before directed with great success in a garret scene with rats ad lib.
That the rats didn't work their way into the picture eventually, whether Lucinda wanted them or not, was mainly due to Nolan's misfortune in failing to think of them before his star began to show symptoms of what he called the swelled-head; that is to say before, having worked several weeks under his direction, Lucinda began to suspect that Nolan wasn't really sole custodian of the sacred mystery of motion-picture making, and to assert herself modestly as one whose views ought to have some weight with a director whose pay came out of her own pocket.
Nor is she to this day ready to believe that Nolan, left to himself, would not ultimately have overborne all opposition and had his willful way with the rat episode.
But it was neither because of this instance, nor because of other arbitrary changes that Nolan made in the story, that Lucinda first learned to mistrust his ability, but because of the appalling ignorance which he betrayed concerning what she believed should be matters of general knowledge, such as rudimentary principles of social usage.
Since the story they were concerned with had to do with people of fashionable New York transacting the business of life in their homes and public rendezvous, Lucinda thought it important that their manners should conform to approved convention; but Nolan was so little learned in such matters, and his impatience with them was so wholehearted, that she presently abandoned all effort to correct him, and in a fatalistic spirit endeavoured to comfort her misgivings with his customary rejoinder to advice in any form: "Ah, what's it matter? Ninety per cent. of your audiences are solid bone from the neck up, and the rest wouldn't think they'd got their money's worth unless they found something to beef about in a picture. Why worry about little things like that? Life's too short, and we're wasting time!"