Every one in the world is, I suppose, a potential story-teller. I am constantly being asked to read plays written by elevator boys, maid-servants, policemen and taxi drivers, and it is not surprising that when a man finds himself in power over a writer he should at once demand a share of the joy of the creator. But to me play writing is and scenario writing ought to be a definitely understood and carefully studied profession; and the outsider without special knowledge or special talent who undertakes to turn out a masterpiece is in exactly the same position to do good work as the Irishman who had never tried to play the violin but had always thought he could do it.
Even in editorial rooms, where a higher class of intelligence is usually found in authority over the story departments, one notices this instinctive urge to get a finger into the pie and the theater is cursed with it; as the picture business is superlative in all things this very human failing may be found here in its fullest flowering. Just as Tom Sawyer’s young friends all wanted a turn at whitewashing the fence so do the picture executives—supervisors, directors, script-girls, cutters, film-editors, messenger boys, stage-hands and scrub-women—all yearn to make just the least little bit of a change in a story to satisfy some instinctive lech to be an author. I have seen so many plays and screen stories ruined by this enforced collaboration that I honestly look upon it as the major evil that threatens a young writer’s success.
In the first place it’s a silly custom because once the author surrenders the integrity of his story he is helpless to even be a fair judge of the hybrid product that takes its place, and as plays and stories do not succeed on account of their structural perfection but by virtue of their spiritual and inspirational qualities, it is obvious that no man without a creative talent has any right to mess about with them.
Duncan knew the folly of all this and his skill and instinct resulted in a fine and sensitive performance.
Again a play of mine was to have its first performance at a holiday matinée and again, as had happened to me during the first matinée of THROUGH THE BREAKERS, I was to be given the benefit of an honest lay opinion of my talents. We opened in Asbury Park, New Jersey, famous among people of the theater for drawing the prize boob audiences of America. An audience at any seashore resort is a terrible thing, but in Asbury Park for some reason its reactions are amazing. Good plays die and terrible plays are heralded as great, so that the wise author simply sits in suffering silence with cotton in his ears. Personally as I sat with my wife through this first performance of THE DETOUR I had been very happy, so happy in fact that I neglected the cotton, and on my way out of the crowded theater I heard the first critical opinion of this, the first attempt on my part to write of life simply and honestly. “Do you know,” remarked a very pretty young woman as we passed, “I think I could write a better play than this one myself.” In spite, however, of this completely honest expression of opinion THE DETOUR gave me a new standing as a writer of serious plays. Another rusty old saw of the trade is the one about all the great plays resting in closets, trunks and unread in managers’ offices, plays so fine that, were they to be produced, a new drama would spring full grown into being. I have been looking for one of those for twenty years, but so far it has escaped me. In all the hundreds of these neglected manuscripts that it has been my sad fate to have read I found just one real play. When I demanded a hearing for it and got one, it turned out to be just fair. There is a real utility about a great play that sooner or later will bring it to the stage; some one will see it and rave about it and it will get its chance. It isn’t so difficult to tell a really great play when one reads it, or a really bad play, it’s the in-between it is difficult to judge, the degree of badness or of value that means failure or success. Careful reading of these supposed masterpieces will usually prove rather a shock. I’ve read a thousand, and I am not the man I was.
The Great War was over by this time and the changes it had brought about in our moods and our standards was being sharply reflected in the theater. The motion pictures, successful as they had grown to be, had not as yet challenged our right to existence and we had begun to produce something in the nature of an American Drama. Eugene O’Neill had written several fine plays. Arthur Richman’s AMBUSH, Gilbert Emery’s THE HERO and my THE DETOUR and ICEBOUND were at least a step toward a true folk play and the rise of the Theatre Guild and of Arthur Hopkins, who to me has always seemed the great man of the theater in my time, gave fine promise of fine things.
The Great War had disturbed and sobered me. I was about forty-two years old at the time America entered it, fat, near-sighted and cursed with a gouty constitution. Quite obviously I couldn’t fight, and yet, like all men who stood just across the border line from heroic action, I had my moments of longing and resentment; here was a big thing and I couldn’t be part of it. I had been a sort of adventurer all my life and yet when the greatest adventure of all time was going on I must stand on the side lines.
Fate had decided that I was to have no real connection with the war. I was too old, and my two boys were too young. The nearest I came to the feeling of personal participation was when my youngest brother, Colonel, then Major, Robert P. Davis, sailed with his regiment for France. My peace of mind received one slight shock, however, when my oldest son, Donald, then not quite fourteen, slipped away from Yonkers, where we were living at the time, and enlisted in the Navy. Exactly what might have come of that I never will know, for when the young man was marched with a squad of volunteers to the Battery and lined up before the keen eye of an officer, he was rudely yanked out of line and sent home to me with a stern warning which frightened me very much but made no dent at all in the culprit’s armor. He felt no repentance at all but furiously cursed the United States Navy for not knowing a good man when they saw one.
After the war a writer faced a new world. The changes in the form of play writing speak volumes of the change in our mode of thought and our standards. When I had written my first plays in the early nineties, asides were freely spoken. I had frequently written scenes in the old days in which the lovely heroine sat calmly in a chair, violently struggling to pretend not to hear the villain and his fellow conspirators who plotted her undoing in loud voices at a distance of six feet. The soliloquy was also in good usage, that marvelous aid to the clumsy craftsman by which all necessity for a carefully reticent exposition could be laughed aside. I used to start a play, for example, with a lady alone on the stage as the first curtain rose. She would perhaps turn sadly away from the window and looking the audience firmly in its composite eye would exclaim: “Poor John; I wonder if he knows that I have been untrue to him.” This naturally saved a lot of time and had a distinct advantage from the audience’s point of view. They had very little excuse for not knowing what the play was all about.
Deeper, however, than any change in the shifting methods of play writing was the change in the point of view of our audiences. The “Prodigal Son” story, the “Cinderella” story, and the “Magdalen” story seemed to have lost their power; the old one about, “My son shall never marry a daughter of the Hoosis’s” no longer bit very deep, and the poor dramatist had to learn all over again.