I'd Like to Do It Again

by Owen Davis

If a ball club was formed of the nine best players in the leagues and that ball club lost every game, the sporting public would say that it was the result of bad handling, as of course it would be. If fifty-four men who have written several hundred good plays can’t write more than ten bad screen stories in six months my opinion is that they have been badly handled, and I see no other sane deduction from the facts.

Let me tell you, quite honestly, the usual experience of a writer who comes to Hollywood for the first time, not my own experience, but that of practically every man and woman with whom I have talked. The writer will be pleasantly and kindly received and a meeting will be arranged with the head of the studio. This gentleman will hand him a play or a novel and he will be asked to read it over, take a few days to think out a novel treatment of it, and hold himself ready to be called to a story conference.

After a day, or two, or three, or a week, or a month or something like that, for the studios are busy places and the executives’ time is valued far above rubies, the author is sent for and enters the presence. He is naturally ready with a carefully thought out method of treatment for the play or story he has been asked to study and eager to make a good first impression. Before he can tell his story, however, the executive will carelessly remark: “Did I tell you the ideas we had for this story?” The author will naturally reply that nobody has told him anything at all since his arrival except that “California is the most wonderful place in the world, and you don’t really mean to tell me that New York is still there.” Then the executive will inform him that “they” have some ideas of treatment of that story and perhaps he had better mention them. It has been decided not to have the scenes laid in China—“there have been too damned many of those Chink operas lately”—and anyway New York background is sure fire; the girl mustn’t be engaged to be married to the Unitarian missionary, she’s got to be the mistress of a side show barker, and earning her living as a high diver. “Will Hays can talk as much as he wants to but everybody knows what’s a proper costume for a high diver.”

Aside from that, and a happy ending, nobody wants to make any real changes in the story. The author, a bit bewildered but still anxious to make good here, makes the first concession that results in absolutely killing any hope of his knowledge and experience being of any value, as by now his creative power has been entirely pushed aside; he has joined the ranks of “picture writers” in five minutes.

Armed with the above-mentioned instructions, the author retires to his office, very probably the first office he ever had in his life, and starts to work. The studio is always generous in the time allowed, generous in fact in every way in their treatment of writers, and nobody rushes our hero who, in the course of time, say, three weeks, during which he has drawn a salary of from four hundred to six or seven times four hundred dollars each week, turns in his completed story.

This story is read and another story conference is called. Here the author meets the director and the supervisor. Every one of course knows what a director is. Some persons, however, and I am one of them, do not know exactly what supervisors are. As Mahomet was the Prophet of God so supervisors are there to add to the power and the glory, and their voices are softly tuned to utterance of the sweet word “yes.” At this first group conference it is stated that the story seems hopeless but stout hearts never despair and ideas begin to be thrown about the room with an ease that amazes the writer who, owing to the comparative poverty of his own powers of invention, is quite unable to keep up.

The results of this meeting are a complete recasting of the story. Now it’s back in China, but with a new set of characters and a different plot. After three weeks of story conferences, the director confides to the author that the trouble with this yarn is the supervisor is all wet and the best way out of it is for the author to come to his house at night and they’ll begin all over again and get a sure-fire knockout.

In two or three more weeks of hard work the story is ready and, owing to the great enthusiasm of the director, is “sold” to the studio executive and his O.K. is put on it. O.K.’s are very important, for without them no picture can be put into production. At last, however, the story is ready and the date of production arrives, the author’s story is actually about to be placed on the screen!—and how! The director, now that the picture is actually in production, is in absolute power, and he calmly throws away the story and strings together an entirely different one that is no more like the script so gravely O.K.’d than it is like the original one written by the author. Mad as this may seem it is actually what is being done in every studio.

Some supervisors are good men; they know better, but standing as they do between the devil and the deep blue sea they drift along. Many directors know a story, even if very few can write one, but the heritage of power is very strong and men who in the days of the silent pictures “shot their story on the cuff” bitterly resent any authority but their own, and write and produce only the sort of thing that they have learned by experience how to handle. The great directors, Frank Borzage, Louis Milestone, Lubitsch, King Vidor and a few others, know story values when they read them and have so much pride in their work that they can, like all strong men, afford to have less vanity. Directors from the theaters, like the De Milles, and others of the men who learned values in the library and the university, know of course the folly of such childish story building, but in the great volume of production their share is small. In spite of this the big man in Hollywood is the director—they are strong men, tireless, and creative.

The ideal screen story will, I think, always be written by the director or directed by the writer, the only difference here is in the words. The man who creates the mood of a story is the author of it, no matter by what name you call him. I have nothing but admiration for the director who can write a story or for the author who can direct one, but at present all directors without exception change and re-write every story they handle and there are one hundred and eight active directors in Hollywood. I think it fairly obvious that there are not and never have been and never will be one hundred and eight constructive story experts alive at any one time.