CHAPTER IV
The Moving Pictures
An assignment once given my class called for a story based on this simple germ: “A servant kills his master.” To my great astonishment I found that fully seventy-five per cent. of the class had decided, as if by agreement, that the servant must be either a Japanese or a Chinaman. Why? The students themselves could not explain it, but I could. I had observed this unison of plot conception many times before. They had all drawn their inspiration from the same inexhaustible source—the moving pictures. In all probability not a single student had ever employed or seen his or her friends employ a Japanese or Chinese servant. If they had ever employed a servant at all, it was most likely some negro girl, and yet their fancy had taken them to the Asiatics. For every one has surely noticed that in the moving pictures the lowly individual who carries the master’s suitcase is always an Asiatic valet. It is fashionable and ethical. The laborer, the servant, is nearly always a foreigner, the American is the “boss,” the domineering chap who wears the full-dress suit and faces the camera with a compelling, clean-shaven chin. The drowsy members of our A. F. of L. and the weak-eyed bookkeepers and typists filling the galleries of our motion-picture houses must feel highly flattered as they applaud the shadows of their dreams projected on the screen. What has plausibility to do with the “Eighth Art”? And who is naïve enough to expect to find it there?
Yet to the student of the modern American short story, and novel as well, the moving pictures must come in for a great share of consideration. This institution exerts a tremendous influence on the trend of our fiction, determining both its form and substance. It is no longer a secret that most of our prominent fiction-writers who still are unattached to some studio are writing stories for the magazines with a view to their ultimate adaptation for the screen. A number of magazine publishers maintain brokerage departments where the stories appearing in their publications are sold to film manufacturers and the profits thus realized divided with the authors or quietly deposited to their own accounts. The editors of these magazines are instructed to keep an eye on moving-picture possibilities of manuscripts submitted to them. The remuneration involved is so alluring that even the best writers with high literary traditions behind them are fast succumbing. But whereas these old writers for the most part have already done their best work and have spent themselves, so that their loss to American letters is not very serious, the effect of the moving-pictures urge upon the young author is truly disastrous.
To write for the screen as it is at present managed requires neither art nor knowledge. Writers with any literary compunctions cannot hope to succeed in a field which demands a complete distortion of all values. What is required is the ability to supply some acrobatically inclined matinée idols and curly-haired ingénues with fast-moving vehicles to display their “stunts.” It presupposes an intimate acquaintance with the peculiar talents of each star. If a star can swim and dive and ride horse-back and jump off a running train and dance gracefully opportunities must be provided in the scenario for the parading of these talents. If another can wear pretty clothes daintily or has pretty dimples on her knees or looks particularly charming in the uniform of a maid or a governess the scenario writer must be governed accordingly in constructing his story. It is precisely because no one outside of a studio can have such an intimate knowledge of the abilities of the various stars featured by a producing company that staffs are employed to rewrite and prepare for production every script purchased from an outsider.
The moving-picture industry is almost entirely dominated by investors who are as far from literature as the average would-be story writer is from being featured in the pages of the Cosmopolitan. Their concern is solely with the box-office. They will purvey anything that will yield the desired dividends. Manifestly to apply the word “art” to an industry with such mercenaries at its helm is to cover the word with mud, unless we stretch the term to include the art of making money. As Channing Pollock, in a “Plain Talk About the Movies,”[12] once said: “One of the troubles with the regular theatre is its conviction that the possession of a hundred thousand dollars turns a laundryman into a littérateur.” The remark is still more pungently apposite to the cinema theatre. The ignorance of the rich investors controlling the destinies of the moving-picture industry is truly stupendous. An anecdote current among scenario editors and vouched for by one of them as an actual happening throws a pitiless light on this prevailing trait. When several years ago the craze of adapting Dickens’ novels for the screen was on, the president of a large film corporation one day stormed into his scenario editor’s office and demanded to know why Dickens’ work had been permitted to go to a rival company. The editor defended himself by saying that some of Dickens’ work could still be got. “See to it, then,” the great man ordered. “Wire Mr. Dickens that hereafter we want his entire output!”
And these intellectual giants are influencing the output of our Dickenses! The singularly few exceptions in the industry are powerless to change the state of affairs. They are either smothered by the great ones or are tolerated because they are so insignificant. And these great ones have decreed that adaptations of stage successes, old classics, best sellers, and magazine stories are more desirable wares than original stories written especially for the screen. The governing factor, of course, is the previous advertising that these adapted stories have had without cost to the film producers. Story values are the least consideration. Our public is so amusement-hungry and so well-trained that it will consume anything. Besides, the star is ninety per cent. of the show anyhow—people go to see the celebrated So-and-so rather than the vehicle in which So-and-so appears—otherwise the magnates would not pay five hundred dollars for a story and fifty thousand dollars for a star’s performance in it.
The fact, however, that moving-picture producers are not purchasing original scenarios does not deter the numerous literary schools of the country from offering instruction in photoplay writing. The advertising matter of these schools is as optimistic as ever. “Makes $50,000 a year by writing for the screen,” reads one headline. “Moving-picture stories in demand everywhere!” reads another. Then the information is generously volunteered that a certain scenario writer in a California studio is earning fifty thousand dollars a year; another twenty-five thousand; and countless others between five and ten thousand. Convincing proof is presented that no education or previous experience is necessary; that one farmer in the backwoods of Washington or Oregon or on the prairies of Illinois has sold a scenario for eighteen hundred and fifty dollars; that one woman who was never graduated from a public school has written a masterpiece in her spare time between cooking her victuals and tending to her seven children and an invalid husband, and that as a result of her exploit she has now paid off the mortgage on her house and is experimenting with the mechanism of a Dodge car.
This alluring prospect of becoming affluent via a course in photoplay writing is held out not only by the average correspondence school but also by not a few of our dignified institutions of learning. There is no excuse for offering any instruction in an art that is on such a low plane of development, except, perhaps, that of elevating it, which is not an aim avowed by any of these institutions; and, besides, mere honesty alone ought to compel even the most enterprising trustee or administrator to reach the simple conclusion that since the demand for original photoplays is practically non-existent, as far as the novice is concerned, it is useless to manufacture photoplaywrights. The refusal to accept such a logical conclusion results in disappointments and heartaches and the upsetting of normal useful careers. A glimpse at the record of original scenarios purchased by some of our leading producers even as far back as 1918, when the policy of using adaptations only was not yet rigidly adhered to, proves conclusively the extent of the market. The American Film Company purchased only fifteen scenarios during the entire year. The National Studios—twelve. William S. Hart—eight. The Fairbanks Studio—six. The Dorothy Gish Company—four. Mary Pickford—one. The Chaplin Studio—one.[13]
When it is considered that some of our ablest fictionists and dramatists have been writing photoplays and that some of these accepted scenarios were written for particular stars and often sent direct to them or to their directors, the chances of the obscure novice, even the most meritorious one, are far from glorious indeed. And since 1918 the policy of adaptations only has been enforced more stringently—almost to the complete exclusion of the original script submitted by the outsider. A few producing companies have frankly admitted, in the various writers’ magazines, that they do not even read manuscripts submitted by unknown outsiders.
But while the great mass of aspirants may not be aware of the true state of conditions our more or less successful writers know it full well. The Authors’ League and the Pen Women’s League and the various Writers’ Clubs throughout the country have all discussed and analyzed the moving-pictures market, and their members are taking means to meet its eccentric exactions. Why write a story in photoplay continuity or even detailed synopsis form only to have it returned from the Coast most likely unread, when the same material can be written up in a short story or a novelette, its serial rights sold to a magazine and its photoplay rights reserved and offered to a film company which is then sure to accord it a friendly reading? As a matter of record the price paid for photoplay rights to a magazine story is usually twice and sometimes tenfold the price paid for an original story written especially for the screen. Part of this extra compensation is probably for the advertising value of the story, and part for the judgment of the magazine editor which the film magnates are more inclined to accept than that of their own hired editors.