The theatre of science; a volume of progress and achievement in the motion picture industry (1914)

0 f ^ c i e n c e 313 be only a temporary source of supply ; should the craze exhaust itself within a year or two — as many experienced men believe — the demand for big features originally conceived for the screen will be far greater than before. Moreover, the higher prices of admission and the inspiring spectacle of a dozen playhouses in New York's theatre zone presenting photoplays to much the same public as the spoken play, must bring about an insistent demand for the highest grade authors to enter the field. This does not mean that the latter vv-ill be represented by celebrities. On the contrary, much is expected from authors who have never achieved fame as playwrights or as novelists, but who have revealed through their scenarios a complete grasp of the technique of the new art. Such photoplaywrights as Bannister Merwin, Mark Swan, Monte Kattejohn, V\/illiam Tremayne, Captain Peacocke, Ashley Miller, Richard Washburn Child, and many others, are just commencing to embrace the multiple-reel proposition, and in every studio aside from the staff v/riters the producer has at his call a wealth of photoplay tim_ber among the players themselves. In the Edison and Vitagraph organizations alone there are a score of such actor-authors, from whom the great photoplays of to-morrow are as likely to come as from any source one may point to. And with productions like "Neptune's Daughter," "The Sea Wolf," "Antony and Cleopatra," "Les Miserables," and the productions of the Famous Players, Lasky, and "The-All-Star" companies, attracting at the box ofHce gross receipts on a par with those of the spoken drama, the day cannot be far off when the present custom of according to the author merely a stipulated compensation will be replaced by a system