Picture Play Magazine (Sep 1921 - Feb 1922)

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To any one who is skeptical as to the Facts and future of motion-picture production and _,. the natural need of countless stories — r^lgures ^he story being the basis of every photo play — some statistics, culled from the Literary Digest and at random, will prove disconcerting. A recent canvass of moving-picture playhouses in the United States by the George Loane Tucker Company showed 19,966 film theaters. The Literary Digest says there are approximately 17,500 theaters of all kinds in the rest of the world. ^ Theaters in this country have a seating capacity of more than 5,400,000, and most of them hold from four to six shows a day. The records of the commissioner of internal revenue for the ^fiscal year ended June 30, 1920, show a ten-per-cent admission tax amounting to $76,733,647, which would indicate that last year's box-office receipts must have totaled over 767 millions of dollars. After all American demands had been filled, more than 47,000 miles of film were exported in 1920 ; counted in footage, the 1920 export figure totals 175 million, a gain of 18 million over 1919. The total import in 1920 amounted to 106 million feet of film, or about 60 per cent of the export. Surely, the Yankee screen writer has nothing to feel perturbed or alarmed over. A Hot Shot A well-known scenario editor, who has asked me to withhold his name lest some simple scribe in the back country or the corn belt fall upon him with sharpened pen and burning ink, has threatened future "wholesome love stories about Jasper and Sarah Ann and the buttercups" with the studio incinerator. He vows that a story, to be wholesome, does not need to hail from the hinterland. He believes "Main Street" has proven the case against "hick idealism." He swore by the beards of sundry prophets that he had met as many "fine, wholesome people" in the mazes of the metropoli as he had ever encountered in the R. F. D. districts. After that galvanic outburst, he inbreathed a few billion powerful molecules, and at the risk of stirring the choler of such philanthropists as Baron Rothschild and the war profiteers, defies another scenario to elude his vigilance and escape to the luminous square which deals with a poor girl who preserves her virtue and is rewarded by rolling out of the final flickers of the fifth reel in a Poils-Royce — as the bride of a chaste and monogamous young millionaire. Photo dramatists, check yourselves ! We are living in For our readers who wish to engage in screen writing we publish a booklet called "Guideposts for Scenario Writers" which covers about every point on which beginners wish to be informed, and which will be sent for ten cents in stamps. For those who have written stories which they wish to submit to producers we publish a Market Booklet giving the addresses of all the leading companies, and telling what kind of stories they want. This booklet will be sent for six cents. Orders for these booklets should be addressed to the Scenario Writers' Department, Picture-Play Magazine, 79 Seventh Ave., New York City. Please note that we cannot read or criticize scripts. A. D., 1921, in a Renaissance of the "What You Are" Age ; the "What You Have", era belongs to the past of eternity. To-day the man with a million dollars keeps the fact dark; even the magazines devoted to success and getting ahead are laying off from facts and figures, and dealing more with a successful business man's attainments from the standpoint of his idealism and his hewing to convictions. The artist within the young American of to-day is struggling for assertion; the creative instinct is supplanting the exploitative. There are more people who would rather write photo plays than own banking systems — than vice versa. Mental Wanderlust masters ; The Morosco studios in Los Angeles recently received a story from a man in Alaska, the locale of which was Ecuador ! An examination of the script promptly revealed the author's ignorance of the little South American country. Since O. Henry, every one — including young photo dramatists — seems to essay a South American story garnished with a few revolutions, et cetera. The recipe is invariably the same. Why should a man living in as romantic a country as Alaska allow his noodle to wander off into Ecuador? Hasn't every authority on every form of art warned the tyro against attempting to describe or depict that which he has never seen or experienced? It is never necessary to so warn the they haven't the termerity of the beginner. Thompson Buchanan Opines Thompson Buchanan, author and playwright, and now supervising director at the Famous Players-Lasky studio in Hollywood, recently told the writer of this department that he believed every conscientious playwright should go to school to the screen. He believes that the screen plays of the past two years have surpassed the stage plays in point of depth and subtlety, and accounts for the fact in the greater significance and revelation possible through pantomime than through the spoken word. A gesture or a bodily movement may indicate vast areas of plot, theme, and individual and predilections — according to Buchanan — which could not be expressed in hours of dialogue. Buchanan, the author of "Civilian Clothes" and "Life," two of the most successful stage plays ever written, is convinced that what the stage needs is economy of dialogue. He says : "Words are cheap — and' will Continued on page 10