The Photodramatist (May 1921-Apr 1922)

CI. B 4 9 :i :{ 4 .} WAN \ \ l92* ^fflOTOORAMATIST ^?A MAGAZINE FOR PHOTOrLAY WRITERS.^o Issued Monthly by the Department of Education o£ c7fte palmer photoplay Corporation 124WEST Fourth Street^dLos Angeles^ California^ (Yearly Subscription $2SP ^^ Single Copies 1$$ j Contents Copyrighted, 1921 VOL. III. MAY, 1921 NO. 1 What Was Clytemnestra but a Stage Vampire! By RUPERT HUGHES IT IS OUR little-appreciated privilege to assist at the birth of as new, as great and as lasting an art as the drama, for there is little risk in a prophecy that the moving picture has come to stay as long as mankind stays here. The writers for the movies today are in the position that the first playwrights of Greece were in when Aeschylos nourished, with Euripides, Sophocles, Aristophanes and the other gods of the theater. This will provoke ribald laughter from those who cannot imagine the classics as once new and whose ignorance conceals from them what the classics had to endure in their own day. Was not Aeschylos driven from the theater by an outraged audience and put on trial for sacrilege? Sophocles was refused a production once, was accused of base commercialism, and his greatest work, the Oedipos, was considered inferior to a play by an obscure author. Aeschylos and Sophocles wrote each about a hundred plays and won prizes for only one in six. Tf URIPIDES and Aristophanes are among the most solemnly regarded names in literature, yet the most ferocious critic of the movies never said anything worse of the worst movie than Aristophanes said of Euripides, whom he accused of every banality, sensationalism and plagiarism, and of the immediate death of whose trash he was certain. And no slapstick movie ever presented has contained any coarser, cheaper, staler horseplay than the antics that fill Aristophanes' comedies, to say nothing of the indecencies that astound even the least puritanical readers. Aristophanes' characters tossed figs and nuts into the audience to please the groundlings, and once he asked the bald-headed men to vote for his play because the author was bald, too! The plays of the Greek masters were full of melodrama, coincidence, happy endings, missing wills, mistaken identities, murder, poison, sex appeal and all the ingredients. Some critics consider Oedipos the greatest of ancient tragedies, but what a scenario it makes ! And how the agony is piled on ! Oedipos, having learned that he was doomed to kill his father and marry his mother, flees from his supposed father, who had merely adopted him. Then he fulfills the oracle, and a plague falls on the city that has made him king because he guessed the riddle of the Sphinx. Seeking to run down the criminal whose blood guilt has brought on the plague, he denounces the villain, only to learn that he himself is the man. Whereupon his wife, learning that she is also his mother, hangs herself, and Oedipos, tearing off her golden brooches, scratches his own eyes out and bewails the fate of his poor children, daughters of their own grandmother. What the censors would do to such a moving picture would be a caution, but how can we accuse the movies of sensational plots when we consider those of the great tragedies ? HP HE movie vampire has become a joke, yet what else was Clytemnestra or Helen of Troy but a vampire? Movie plots are often mechanical in their solutions, but the greatest Greeks did not