"Or take another case. Producer buys a big story, like, now...."
"Paradise Lost," Lucinda suggested mischievously.
"Who wrote it?"
"John Milton."
"Never heard of him. Make a good picture?"
"I'm afraid it would be difficult. But it's a big story."
"All right. Producer hands this, now, Paradise Lost to his scenario editor. She reads it, turns pale around the gills, sends out an emergency call for the director-general, says to him, says she: 'Listen, sweetheart, this'll be a knock-out if it ever gets on the screen the way it's wrote. The guy what wrote this knew pictures before they was invented.' Director-general says: 'Gosh! that won't never do, or first thing you know we'll have this boob Milton on the lot telling us our business. Stew up the continuity to suit yourself, pet, and leave the rest to me.' Fin'ly Paradise Lost gets on the screen as 'A Cyril de Menthe Production entitled Sex Against Sex, by Queenie Hoozis, featuring Hope Honeybunch with bathroom fixtures by Joseph Urban and telephones hidden by Sherlock Holmes, suggested by a magazine story by J. Milton.' If it gets by, Queenie and Cyril cop the credit. If it falls down they tell the producer they done their best, but he'd ought to of known better, it ain't no use trying to make pictures only from stories framed special for the screen by somebody who cut their eye-teeth on a strip of celluloid—like Queenie. Every time anything like that happens the fillum business takes a long stride forward—towards the end of its rope."
"Still, I don't quite see——"
"It comes down to this, Miss Lee: nothing short of an earthquake's ever going to jar the Queenies and Cyrils loose from their jobs and give brains a chanst to horn in."
"But if you see all this so clearly, Mr. Zinn, why don't you start the indicated reforms yourself?"