Photoplay (Jul - Dec 1920)

Mo vies Is Movies A brilliant satire on motion pictures bv the author of 'Pio;s is Pigs. By ELLIS PARKER BUTLER Illustrations by R. F. James It was only necessary to change the old lady heroine into a baby-faced girl, her wheel chair into a freight train, and, — a few little things like that. A FEW days ago a producer bought the motion picture rights of one of my novels — the one called "The Jack Knife Man" — and paid S13.000 for it, all in real money. For this reason I become, in one jump, an important authority on motion pictures, and know all about them, and must be consulted by anyone who wants to know the truth about the motion picture situation. As nearly as I have been able to figure it out. from a lifelong study of the motion picture situation — to which I have given over a week of my time — I can say that the outlook is bright. It is brighter than I have ever known it to be. The producers seem to be buying better material from better authors now than they did a day or two before they bought "The Jack Knife Man."' This desire to procure the very best is a hopeful sign, and shows that some producers are eager to better the quality of the films offered to the public. I may say, here, that if any other producers want to go into the film bettering business I have still a couple of novels to dispose of on or about the same terms, and I believe they will do some of the best bettering on record. While I am not yet the highest possible authority on motion pictures, not yet having applied for a divorce. I do feel competent to state in the strongest possible terms that I see a hopeful tendency in the willingness of the producers to use larger type in announcing the name of the author on the screen. A prominent author said to me the other day: "The motion picture is not yet what it should be. but it is getting better all the time. I was paid twelve thousand dollars more for my last novel than I ever received before. This shows that producers are more artistic than they used to be. In addition to this, in filming my novel, greater care was taken in atlhcring to the eternal verities. In the .Maskan scenes from my no\el I observed only three palm trees and two wads of cactus, and in the close up of my suffering heroine the glycerine tears were only as large as prunes, and not as big as cantaloups, as they have sometimes been. " "Did the producer stick close to the text of your novel?"' I asked. "Very close," he replied. "And that is another sign of improved artistry. The changes made were very slight. Of course, my novel was the story of the love of an old man in the county poor house for an old lady in the Old Ladies" Home, in Cornstalk County, Kansas, and that had to be changed a little. They changed the old pauper here into a young aviator just home from France, and changed the old lady heroine into the daughter of an Alaskan gold digger, but that was of slight consec]uence. I could not object to that. And Alaska does film better than Kansas, especially when it has to be filmed at Los Angeles. The country around Los Angeles is not a bit like Kansas. "Is it like .-Maska?"' I asked. "Except for the palms and cactus, it might be like it. if the resemblance was more apparent, " he replied. BIT how about changing your old lady heroine into a young girl? Wasn't that rather difticult?" I asked. "Xot at all. It was necessan,-. Any fool could see that an old lady could not be sixteen years old and have a baby face and long curls, so it was absolutely necessary to make the change. It was only necessary to change the wheel chair, in which the old lady sat in my novel, into a freight train. Then they put overalls on my heroine and had her father, the brakeman. go down with the Lusitania, which made it necessary for his daughter to take the job of brakeman on the through freight. So. of course, the old poor house lover had to be an a\ialor. and swoop down in an airplane and swoop the girl up frcm the top of the freight car when the villain. Roscoe. was about to brain her with a club — " "I don't remember any villain named Roscoe in your novel,"' I said. 'Well, of course, " said the author, "you wouldn't. He wasn't called Roscoe in the novel: he was a she: she was called Rosabelle. Rosabelle was the cat. Don't you remember how my old lady refused to marry my old man because he did not like cat';, and she refused to give up the cat. and so they separated and lived alone the rest of their lives? "