The art of sound pictures (1930)

THE BUYER’S PROBLEMS 49 the entire movement, and of course all the talk must run on with the acts of the talkers. Try to change the conversation, and you must change the entire action as well. Attempt dropping a short passage, and you will be compelled to alter the musical record for a considerable distance before and after the deletion. Millions of dollars have been, and are still being, lost in Holl5nvood by producers who persist in following the old technique of the silent screen. In one case that came to our notice, the director worked on an uncompleted story until he was more than half through it; then he found that a dramatic situation in the fourth reel was rather silly and would have to be rebuilt. New ideas had to be brought in, and new words to express them. Some of these referred to things spoken of in earlier reels, so the latter had to be tinkered with. In the end, virtually the entire picture had to be remade. The loss ran far into the tens of thousands. The moral is plain enough. You story writers must furnish more finely finished work than ever before. You will find it much harder than dashing off the old silent scripts or magazine stories. The less competent workers will drop out. The survivors will be able to demand higher prices for their products, and the quality of the art will improve accordingly. Unfortunately, the problem of selling stories to the moving picture companies is complicated. The larger companies have had many embarrassing experiences with unknown authors who have sent in scripts to them. These scripts have been accepted and produced, only to prove shabby plagiarisms, either innocent or intentional, of