Mrs. Davis and I joined the boys on the Coast early in December and we had a very comfortable and happy winter. I made an adaptation of SO THIS IS LONDON for Will Rogers, worked with Sam Behrman and wrote and adapted a number of stories. I like writing for the pictures, or at least I want to like it. It is not at all a difficult form and I can see no mystery in it. It is just story writing; the difference in technique is no more different than the step between farce and drama writing and nowhere near so different as the dramatic form and the modern method of building musical comedy.
The difficulty with picture writing is and always has been to get what one writes past one’s immediate supervisor and unfortunately this depends very little upon the value of what is written. Nowhere on earth are there so many totems, bugaboos and fetishes as there are in a motion picture studio and all argument is strictly forbidden. “Yes” is the only word ever spoken in the presence of the great out there, and an absurdity once perpetrated by executive order becomes a sacred custom and part of a ritual.
As a successful dramatist, I had become accustomed to having my opinion listened to with respect, and my judgment on questions of story construction was almost always final. I have had many differences with managers, but never heard of any dramatist who at least wasn’t given a chance to express his views on the work of his own brain and who was not consulted upon what was to be written into the story which was to bear his name. In Hollywood no author is ever considered to be of any importance at all. He ranks as a clerk to be put at any little job that comes to hand and after he has written a story, he never can by any possibility know what will be done to it before it gets to the screen. This is the outcome of the old days of silent pictures when a director took a company out on location and shot a story that he made up as he went along, very much as children who give shows for pins in a barn invent theirs. The talking picture brought something very like a drama form but the men in power, who had won their positions by using their own method, naturally enough prefer to keep on using it, in the first place because they had been successful with it, and in the second place because they don’t know any other.
In any study of the motion picture business it is always well to remember that it is a very wonderful thing to be able to send a show in a tin can by mail or express to any location in the world, and that the marvel of these talking figures was for a long time so great that only the most exacting worried much about what they talked about. If, however, the writing of picture stories is ever to offer any attraction at all to a writer beyond the very generous salary he is offered, it is quite obvious that some change must be made in the present system. Just now no writer could possibly find any other reason for writing screen stories than the money he makes out of it, and quite as obviously any writer with the skill they sorely need can make plenty of money without going there. Good writers of to-day are well paid and any man or woman of the reputation for success that they demand is very likely to be in a position of financial independence that frees him from any necessity of surrendering his dignity and his integrity. To be sure, plenty of writers are there now and plenty of others are probably anxious to go. But, as the good ones come to realize the absolutely hopeless task that confronts them, they will return to their former tasks, because they must, if they are ever going to write anything worth writing, preserve their originality of thought and style. Once they surrender that they are lost. Then it doesn’t in the least matter whether they go or stay, they won’t be worth anything in any case.
Hollywood is the strangest and the maddest place the world has ever seen. It is beautiful; its sunshine, its flowers, its bold sea coast with the blue Pacific challenging any beauty of Southern France or Italy, are really thrilling. It is a beehive of activity, it is the most cosmopolitan city in the world—and the dullest. For some reason one comes away from Hollywood with that impression stamped firmly in the memory. It’s a bore. Forget this “wild party” stuff. Don’t pay any attention to stories of the glamour and excitement of Hollywood. It’s just a dull place, a grand spot for winter golf, but a wash-out for any mature person who depends in the least upon mental stimulation; there isn’t any. The picture business is the second, or the third, or the first or some such silly number among the world’s industries, which is probably what’s the matter with Hollywood and with the motion pictures. They are standardized, circumscribed, advertised and circumcised to such an extent that all they can do is say “Mamma” when you step on them.
What is easily the best medium by which to gain the ear of the world has gained it under the splendid leadership of extremely clever and tireless business men, and, having gained it, doesn’t say anything worth listening to. The picture business in salesmanship, in organization, in mechanical and technical development, in direction and in photography is amazing, and there they stop. They fall down hard on the basic commodity they are selling; their story product isn’t good enough. They know this, of course, as well as I do, but they do not know the reason or at least those of them who do know the reason won’t tell the truth about it because if they did, it would mean the end of their importance.
They will tell you that their writers fall down on them and that is in fact true. I have been fighting authors’ battles all my life, but I have no defense to offer for the New York writer of big name and bigger salary who goes to Hollywood with a nose turned up in contempt and takes their money and makes wise cracks at their expense. I see their side of the case so clearly that for three years I have been trying to do something to clarify this situation. The barrier between real writers and the studios is, I am convinced, the greatest obstacle to the advance of motion pictures and the real trouble I can sum up in one sentence: “The picture stories are not written by authors, they are written by executives!”
During the winter in Hollywood I was a guest at a dinner given to Frederic Lonsdale, the English dramatist, by Arthur Richman. Around the tables in that room were fifty-four very well-known and very successful dramatists and novelists of New York and London. These men were there because they were successful and important men asked to meet and welcome a distinguished English writer to whom Mr. Richman wished to do honor. These fifty-four men have written many times fifty-four successful plays. They were not dated, worn out, or exhausted old fellows in their dotage, but men in their full swing—Sidney Howard, Louis Bromfield, Max Anderson, Laurence Stallings, A. E. Thomas, John Colton, Martin Flavin, Sam Behrman, and many more of the same importance, three Pulitzer Prize winners, three members of The National Institute; surely here was talent enough to write good stories. These fifty-four men were almost all of them questioned by me at some time during the winter and not one of them who had been writing in Hollywood for over a month could tell me that he had found it possible to do good work or that he could see any hope at all of ever being allowed to write the sort of thing that he had been successful enough in writing to cause the heads of the studios to pay him his large salary.
I heard stories told not in anger but in honest bewilderment that would have amazed me had they not been in line with the mass of information I had been collecting. Thirteen writers of standing had been given the same story to adapt to the screen, the idea being that bits of each would be collected by some inspired executive and formed into a masterpiece. Of course thirteen writers can’t write a story any more than thirteen cooks can bake a cake. One of the finest dramatists of our time had been for six weeks working on an adaptation of a novel and at the end of that time some one discovered that the rights to the novel belonged to another company. A fine novelist and a really distinguished dramatist were making over a dated and absurd old melodrama, while a very famous melodramatic craftsman sat in the next office trying to dramatize a very light and fluffy novel. The best dialogue writer in America, who is famous for his brilliant and sophisticated wit, was writing a Chicago gang war yarn, two very serious men of real literary taste were working together on a slapstick musical show, while two famous musical comedy writers were doing their best with an English drawing-room comedy.
And so it went. These men were well treated as in my experience all writers have been out there, contracts are always kept to the letter and salaries are always paid. The stories these writers were working on will very few of them ever see the screen, and those few will be made over time and time again under the eye of some supervisor. The assistance of trained screen writers will be called for and before any picture results practically nothing written by any one of the fifty-four men at that dinner will be left. Now I am going to admit that out of these fifty-four men it is extremely unlikely that there were five who knew enough about pictures to be able to write a proper “shooting script,” but I am not going to admit that in that room that night there weren’t brains and talent and energy enough to have written ten times more stories and ten times better ones than they ever were allowed to write.