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WHAT PEOPLE WANT
IS
gives them the wrong slant on sound pictures. For the difference between the public that reads and the public that patronizes movie houses is vast.
When you write stories for the magazines, you know in advance that you are trying to reach people who can read. Usually your customers will be people who can read pretty fast. But when you devise a story for the pictures, you must bear in mind always that thousands of people who will look at the finished product on the screen will be very young children, slightly educated adults, or intelligent immigrants with an imperfect knowledge of the English language. They will read either slowly or not at all, and those who read slowly will be unable to understand words and expressions which are a little unusual.
To make your story satisfactory to them, you must first of all make it easily intelligible. This means that you must avoid all explanations, printed or spoken, which involve words beyond the comprehension of an ordinary ten-year-old child.
This technical limitation was bad enough in the days of the silent movie. It is ten times worse to-day, since the introduction of dialogue. For, to keep the conversation and interplay of ideas among the characters of your story down to this primitive level of expression is a task of extraordinary difficulty. It is a little like trying to explain Einstein’s theory wholly in words of one syllable. No playwright has ever been thus handicapped, for plays are addressed, in the main, to fairly sophisticated adult audiences. The only people who have had much experience with elementary dialogue are a few of our most popular writers of best sellers and the writers of vaudeville sketches.