I'd Like to Do It Again

by Owen Davis

I know, as a sane man of middle age, that the lives around me are not always dull, drab, base or unhappy. I was acquainted with a mother, she was in fact a member of my own household, who had given up a career for her children and who was neither heartbroken nor neurotic; her children weren’t idiots, ungrateful brats or headed either for the gallows or an early grave. I had seen her make sacrifices for them that were well made and well worth the making. On the whole in this world I have seen men and women reap what they have sown, and I have looked closely at life with a trained eye for a great many years and found it good.

I wanted to say something like this in a natural, true and unsentimental way and I couldn’t do it. I don’t in the least know why it can’t be done, but so far it hasn’t been. I don’t propose to take all the blame for this. I’ll admit that NELLIE, THE BEAUTIFUL CLOAK MODEL said that virtue always won out in the end, but before Nellie’s time that statement had been made in platitude.

It may be that the sugar-coated play has killed the possibility of optimistic play writing, but I didn’t want to write about life’s being worth living just to trick a happy ending. I simply wanted to say that life was worth living because that is the way I have found it. I have lived fifty-six years very happily. I have been fortunate in having the sort of wife and the sort of children that have added very greatly to that happiness. I love my work and as a result I have never had any trouble in making all the money necessary for comfort and decency. I am strong and well and those I love are well—why should I write of a sorrowful world? Yet for some reason every time I tried to write a true play the note of futility crept into it.

I floundered about for the next year or two, turning out a few plays, most of which I would have described in the far-off days when I had worked for the Kentucky Coal Company as “run of the mine.” LAZYBONES had some good points, THE DONOVAN AFFAIR made money, but always I was trying for that real play that wouldn’t come.

The best work I did at this time was a dramatization of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel THE GREAT GATSBY. The character of Gatsby made a strong appeal to me, and here was another chance to do a play with Mr. Brady, who seemed anxious for me to come in with him once more. The play was really good, and moderately successful, but here was another time when the truth was bitter and cruel and hard for the public to take.

Naturally I knew perfectly well when I read this novel that Mr. Fitzgerald’s ending absolutely killed any hope of real success, but I have my own theories about dramatizing a novel, and one of them is that the dramatist is in honor bound not to cheapen or coarsen the original author’s story. Gatsby was a great lover; for the sake of the girl he loved he raised himself from nothing to wealth and power. To do this he became a thief. She was unworthy of so great a love and he died by one of those absurd ironic chances that saved him from ever knowing her complete unworthiness. Mr. Fitzgerald knew that for Gatsby death was a merciful friend, and I felt that I had no right to manufacture a conclusion that would satisfy a sentimental audience.

As a matter of fact, I do not enjoy working on another writer’s story, but when I make up my mind to do it I deliberately put myself into that writer’s place and absorb his mind and style so that I write, as far as I am able, as he would write rather than as I would write a scene myself. In the case of F. Scott Fitzgerald that was difficult, not only because I had never seen him, but because he was so much younger than I that his whole mode of thought and all his reactions to life were absurdly different from my own. But a faithful dramatist of an author’s work should, I think, assume that author’s personality and should force himself into the completely receptive attitude of the believer who, with his fingers on a ouija board, lets the pencil go where the spirits direct. The result of this collaboration was a good play, but not a real success. I have always known that, if I had cared to do it, I could have made from this material a great box-office hit, but as I have said before, I think that when one takes another writer’s work, there is an implied obligation not to alter the mood of it.

This feeling is the reason, I think, why I have never cared to work on a play with another author, and why I object so strongly to the “story conference” and the group writing of Hollywood. To me a play is so essentially a mood and it is so impossible for two human beings to enter into the same exact mood that all such collaboration is started under a very real handicap. I can understand being in full agreement with another writer upon details of plot and even upon shades of character but the mood that would compel certain reactions from the characters, that must of necessity propel them along the narrative line in a certain way, could not dominate two writers at the same moment.

I have had little experience in collaboration but in the writing of screen stories I do know that no matter how many writers are working on the same job, only one of them is really doing anything, and, as there is no established technical form to screen story writing, all that happens at one of these famous story conferences is that the man with the most authority writes the story and the others sit around and talk about whatever subject, if any, interests them at the moment. I can see how two dramatists might work together to advantage if one were a highly imaginative writer and the other an expert in form and construction, one to dream out the play and the other to build it. In fact I know of several cases where this method has been highly successful but to me all the joy of creating would be gone if I was forced to share it. Good or bad, I want my play to be mine, and the thrill that has come to me on the few occasions when I have been able to look at a play and say: “It is good, and I did it,” has been a rich return for all the hard work I have ever done.

At about this time Mr. Winthrop Ames, as Chairman of a Committee of the Theatrical Managers, offered me the position of political head of their association, the same sort of job as Judge Landis holds in baseball or Will Hays in the motion picture field. I had a feeling that my wide experience in all the branches of the theater gave me some of the qualifications necessary for this work, and for some time I seriously considered it. The actors, through Mr. Frank Gilmour, and the Authors’ League expressed a desire that I should try my luck, but in the end I refused. Mr. Ames promised me full authority, but I could see no way by which this authority could be enforced. I know the managers very well, thank you, and any time I ride hard on those birds I want a big club and the only gun in the outfit. Also I had a strong feeling that the time hadn’t quite come. A little later some better man will take that job and save the day.