In any case, at the present writing the director is king and the writer is nobody. The opinion of the great of Hollywood as to the importance and the dignity of a writer was expressed by the head of one of the large companies who calmly announced during the early spring that he was about to try a new policy. He was going to discharge all his writers and engage new ones selected from men who had never written anything in their lives, to see if he couldn’t get some new ideas.
Aside from the absurdity of sending for a plumber when the baby is sick, the gentleman forgot that if his “new writers who had never written anything” had new ideas they would never in the world be allowed to use them. At present the motion pictures are an imitative and not a creative medium and I very much doubt if the gentleman ever met a new idea in all his life.
This is the present system and if its results are satisfactory to the men who have poured their millions into this industry then I am just another New York writer trying to tell Hollywood how to make pictures. If, however, there is any feeling that better work could be done, should be done, and must be done if this wonderful medium is ever to take the place it ought to take in our national life, if this advance of two hundred million is to be held and satisfied, then there is one way to do it, and only one.
The answer is very simple, so simple as to make it seem silly. Put in every studio a real editor with full authority. There isn’t one in Hollywood, and there never has been. Such a man could save each of the four great studios from half a million to a million a year simply by killing the impossible junk before it goes into production. Such a man knows writers and how to make them write. He knows how to make them earn their salary or how to get rid of them; that’s his business. It’s folly to say that such men can’t be had. Every great newspaper has one; so does every big publishing house; and when they die others are found to take their place. What they don’t know about pictures they could learn. Every editor learns the taste and wants of the public he serves. Bob Davis sat in Munsey’s office and picked the fiction for five different publications with five different classes of readers, and when he couldn’t find the type of story he wanted, he took a writer to lunch and in a month he had it.
That’s just an editor’s job. It is possible that even a fine editor might make some mistakes until he learned the taste of the picture public, but are there no mistakes made now? What percentage of pictures produced to-day is satisfactory, even to the companies who produce them? Think it over! I am one of the few writers who enjoyed writing for the screen, partly because of a habit I have of laughing at silly people, and partly because I love to write anything at all. I am not of the number who couldn’t catch the trick and retired in anger and contempt. When I left Hollywood in June it was because I “had a play,” and I have more offers to return there than one man could by any possibility take advantage of. I am too old a writer and too deeply devoted to my craft to hesitate to set down the result of three years of thought. I have never, in the theater or in Hollywood, sold to any man my right to free speech or freedom of thought and it is rather late for me to change.
It is a curious thing how, in the amusement business, history keeps on repeating itself. In the years I have been a student of conditions in this field, I have seen the rise and fall of many different forms of popular entertainment. The great chain of theaters of the Klaw and Erlanger Syndicate, the Stair and Havlin circuit of cheap theaters, the once highly popular stock houses—the Keith vaudeville, the old Columbia burlesque wheel, the circus, the skating rinks, all of these sprang into popularity under the guidance of shrewd showmanship. Their amazing profits drew big investors who poured their money in, building new theaters, consolidating chains of old ones, enlarging, spreading out. Then, long before the capital engaged could earn any real return, the boom was over and the investing public held the bag. There has never been a year when more money hasn’t been lost in theatrical ventures than has been made. I think the reason is that the men we have called shrewd showmen are in reality only shrewd business men and the enterprises started by their energy and ambition have first languished and then died because these men in every case failed to learn the rules of the game they were playing.
To satisfy and hold the interest of any great percentage of the public is a big job for a catch-penny showman. The reactions of a composite audience might well be studied by scientific minds. Two Topseys and two Lawyer Marks’s couldn’t keep the old UNCLE TOM’S CABIN shows alive. The old minstrel shows died of their own unimaginative elaboration; three-ring circuses only postponed the evil days for the tent shows where perhaps something new in one ring might have saved them. You can’t make a business out of any form of show business that will stand up beyond the point where the brains are in the business and not in the show.
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CHAPTER IX ◆ I’D LIKE TO DO IT AGAIN
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In June my contract was up and for the moment at least I had had enough of Hollywood. Some day I am going back, but not until I get some real assurance of going there as I go into a theater, to practice the trade I have learned. Owen had returned to New York in May to create a part in a new play with Richard Bennett. This play, SOLID SOUTH, was running in Chicago for the spring and summer and was booked to open on Broadway in September.