I'd Like to Do It Again

by Owen Davis

“I have always admired Augustus Thomas”
(From the Messmore Kendall Collection)

If then, about fifteen years ago, I wanted to write a higher form of drama it was for no nobler reason than because I had begun to be bored by the sort of work I was doing and because it bored me it had begun to bore my audiences. Several times in my life I have been driven to an advance of this sort and always because of the fact that I found my old occupation gone. As time goes on, I have come to believe that if I could live two or three hundred years I might develop into quite a playwright. In any case I once more threw my box of tricks away and sat down quietly and tried to study out a new method. In this I was helped by the change that had begun to come over the drama. I was influenced as all our writers were at the time by the Russian and Hungarian dramatists who had discarded the artificial form of the “well-made play” and were writing a new form of photographic realism that tempted us all to follow in their footsteps.

As a result I wrote THE DETOUR, which remains in my mind the example of the best work I have done for the theater. Of all my plays the DETOUR, THE GAMBLER OF THE WEST (one of the old melodramas of the Al Woods days) and THE NERVOUS WRECK are my pets. THE DETOUR was produced by Lee Shubert at the Astor Theatre in the early fall of 1921 and, although it was never a money-maker, it gave me what I wanted and made my wife very happy. As she had stuck around by this time for some fifteen years waiting for something like this to happen, it was, to say the least, no more than she deserved.

In the production of THE DETOUR I was fortunate enough to be able to secure Augustin Duncan to play the principal part and to stage the play. He more than justified the confidence I had in him. To me Mr. Duncan is a great artist and by far the most sincere example of the man who puts his art above his pocketbook I have ever met. I suppose more rot has been spilled out by men and women who pose as “devoted to their art” than by any other set of posing hypocrites since the world began. We all of us play the tune we know and to rebuke us for that tune is as silly as it is to praise us for it. To use what talents we may have to earn a decent living for ourselves and those dependent upon us is, to a man of any philosophy, a far finer thing than to sit in a Greenwich Village attic and mouth jealous platitudes about the baseness of commercial art.

This statement of my opinion is neither a defense nor an alibi. I myself, as these confessions of mine are describing to you, have always written for the love of the theater rather than from any art impulse and I am the first to admit that my love of the theater has always been more compelling than my love of the drama, if you follow me in the distinction.

As a practical man, born of a practical line of hard-headed Yanks, I have studied my own small talents and developed them and tried to make up for a lack of the real fires of genius by an honest admission of that lack and a true enthusiasm for the work that at the moment came nearest to expressing my attitude. The true genius, the true artist, is very rare, but Augustin Duncan is distinctly of that number. He is quite as incapable of doing any work that doesn’t seem fine to him as I am of writing anything at all unless I am going to be paid for it, and he is as firm in his refusals as I am. And in my life, during which I have written several million words, I doubt if I have written five thousand without practical reward.

Max Gordon, one of the managers with whom I have been associated, looked at me in troubled amazement one day lately when I had made some mildly humorous comment and said: “That’s the first time I ever heard you say anything funny for less than ten percent.” Max Gordon, like many others of my acquaintance, assumes this attitude of mine to be founded on a desire for money, but as a matter of fact I care very little about money or the things that money stands for. Any man who can make good can always make money, but the fun is in the making good, in the thrill and the sense of power that comes from activities sanely thought out and successfully accomplished. Under Mr. Duncan’s fine direction THE DETOUR was molded into shape and ready for its first performance. Not one word of my original manuscript was changed from the day I wrote it, which fact is most amazingly to his credit rather than to mine. He is so fine a director that he molded his company to my play, rather than my play to his company—the true duty of a director, although few of them have the sense to know it. To the picture director an author’s play is a sort of clover field in which he loves to kick up his heels and romp about at his own sweet will, making any changes at all that his fancy may dictate, most of them being made for the very simple reason that he doesn’t quite grasp the meaning of what is on the written page in front of him. Even in the theater there are few managers who realize the value of one man’s unbroken line of thought. “Plays are not written, they are re-written” is a motto often repeated to writers and in the old days these wise words were proudly framed and hung over the desk of one of our greatest producers. This musty old truism has been used to slaughter plays during all the years since Dion Boucicault first uttered it, and like most other truisms its principal fault lies in the fact that it isn’t true. When I was in Harvard I met Mr. Boucicault in a barroom on Bowdoin Square in Boston and, as I looked at him in awe and homage, I had little thought of ever being bold enough to challenge any of his theories. Dion Boucicault was a great playwright of the eighties, a man of sound knowledge of his craft, but like the best of us there were occasions when he talked nonsense.

Plays are written by their authors. They are good plays or bad plays depending almost wholly upon the degree of talent of the author plus his accident of choice of a subject. This goes for pictures as well as for stage plays. The germ of success is put in only by the original author in spite of Mr. Boucicault and the combined opinion of the Managers’ Association and the motion picture industry. I am stating here an important fact upon which I have a great deal of special information. I doubt if any man alive has ever been called in as a play doctor more frequently than I, and for the good of my soul I am willing to admit that I have very rarely saved a patient. I have often seen plays helped by careful and skillful revision but I have never once seen a play built into a real success unless the germ of that success was firmly planted by the author in his first manuscript.

Frequently I have seen, so frequently as to have learned to be in dread and horror of the practice, sensitive and beautiful plays and picture stories so coarsened and debased by the rough hands of managers, directors, supervisors and other quacks, that all hope of success has been dosed and purged out of them. I am stoutly of the opinion that if no changes at all in original manuscripts were ever made the percentage of success both in plays and pictures would be infinitely higher. This does not in the least mean that I think the author is always right. Of course he isn’t. Play writing is the most difficult form of all the forms of literary expression, and no man ever wrote a perfect play. But I think the trained writer knows more about his business than any one else can hope to know, and I think it is as silly for an outsider to meddle with his work as it would be for a kind neighbor to write a few helpful words in the middle of the prescription you have paid a physician to prescribe for your sick child.