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THE ART OF SOUND PICTURES
of stereotyped slapstick and wild western melodrama, costs from $40,000 to $60,000, including selling costs, which amount to one-third of the total, or thereabouts. Lucky the producer who holds himself down to these figures! The run of fairly good pictures costs between $125,000 and $250,000 before the public gets its first glance at them. And many a picture has cost upwards of $500,000.
Gentle author, pause to weigh the significance of this. When you invite a producer to put your story on the screen, you are asking him to invest a small fortune in your bright idea. If the brain child you leave on his doorstep becomes a success, all well and good; if it turns out to be a flop, you still have the cash the producer paid you for it, but the producer loses the small fortune.
Here you come upon the fundamental explanation of the excessive conservatism of story editors in Hollywood. Scorn them as much as you like for their timidity in tackling something novel ; the fact remains that they must stick pretty closely to “sure fire stuff,” or else go under. A magazine editor can afford to be ten times more daring with stories than the picture producer can. For he stakes so little on each throw.
Over and above the production cost looms the problem of fitting the story to the actors and actresses whom the company has under contract. Then there is the problem of possible duplication of a story being brought out by some other company. Add to all these worries the fitness of the story for sound pictures, both in dialogue and in incidental sounds, and the producer is well stocked with nightmares. Lest you suspect these are mere generalities, which producers hand out to writers by way of over