Hands of Hollywood (1929)

Hands of Hollywood have made and, being human, will continue to make, many mistakes but, after all, they do know how to make pictures: at least, they know more about making them than those loud-talking individuals who have never made a picture and who have no more knowledge of screen problems than that of the outsider or dilettante. Censorship also restricts the producer in making adaptations. Situations which are vital to the coherence, the suspense, and the basic structure of a novel or play, frequently must be eliminated entirely from the screen story because of censorship regulations. Many of these regulations were stupidly conceived and are ignorantly applied by the censors. It would be funny, if it were not so sad, to hear uninformed people launch tirades against the stories of the screen, when the stage, the novel, and the newspaper are allowed such wide latitude. Consider the profanity, often of the most vulgar and obscene gutter type; the risque jokes and the doublemeaning lines; the plainly enacted, and wholly unnecessary, seduction scenes of the stage. Recall the vile and unmistakable lewdness of many of tihe "best sellers;" the livery-stable type of humor in some of the "popular songs;" and the devastating, raw, unvarnished accounts of lurid divorces, abnormal murders, etc., of the newspapers; and then — and then, go hang your head in shame, if you have been raving about the low standard of the screen! READERS Readers may be called the "Separators" of scenario writing. It is their duty to separate the chaff from the wheat. To them comes a vast conglomeration of stories: originals, novels, magazine stories, plays, etc. After reading any one of these, the readers decide whether or not it contains screen material. The absolutely impossible stories are eliminated quickly. If one of these stories is worthy of serious consideration, the reader writes a brief synopsis of it in about five hundred or a thousand words. This synopsis should contain, as far as possible, not [24]