Hollywood Spectator (1931)

The One Solution of The Story Problem By The Editor PAINSTAKING perusal of all that the papers have reported up to this writing, fails to convince me that the screen writers in meetings assembled even hinted at the only permanent solution of the story problem. No plan adopted will be of lasting benefit to either writers or producers unless it be of lasting benefit to motion pictures. I am not interested in writers getting more for their services or in producers giving less for their stories. My sole interest is the welfare of the screen as an institution. When its welfare is promoted there is promoted also the welfare of those who have anything to contribute to it. The main trouble at present is that the big majority of those who call themselves screen writers have nothing to contribute, and there is no legitimate reason why anyone should be interested in their welfare. I have rather an accurate line on the abilities of Hollywood’s scenarists. I read a great many treatments and scripts, and among the dark secrets of the picture world are the identities of those for whom I read them and how much I get for the services rendered. I abuse producers frightfully, but that does not keep them from paying me for making suggestions regarding their stories. At first when they began to buy my services, it was hard to get them to understand that they were not buying also favorable comment in the Spectator, but I think the pages of the Spectator bear evidence that finally they grasped that important fact. At all events, they give me to read the work of screen writers and for what they pay me I give them detailed reports containing criticisms and suggestions. And when doing the reading I’ve learned a lot about the mental resources of our screen writers. The WRITER situation is fundamentally unsound and it is not going to be made sound by rather comical conferences between writers and producers, neither of whom have any clear idea of what ails them. To-day the studios are paying ten dollars for every two dollars’ worth of story value that reaches the screen. The other eight dollars is the price producers pay for the bluff that writers put up. It is easy for a writer to fool a producer. Upon nothing else is the average producer so densely ignorant as he is on stories and their treatment. He spends money on one writer after another upon a given story, the objective being the ultimate procuring of a motion picture on paper. I have read scripts that cost those for whom they were written fifteen thousand dollars or more, and I have found them hopeless. For that much money a producer is entitled to a motion picture. A producer will pay a stupendous and wildly ridiculous sum for a novel or a play, and then he will hire a succession of writers to endeavor to make a motion picture script from it. Some paper reports that Paramount paid a woman — I’ve forgotten the name — a large sum for her first book — forgotten the name of that, too — and is paying her one thousand dollars a week to adapt it to the screen, although she has had no screen experience. Is it any wonder I rave about the insanity of the film industry in general when I have an act of such extraordinary folly as that to point to? What is Paramount after when it commits this act of financial insanity? It is after a motion picture on paper. Very well then — why doesn't it buy a motion picture on paper in the first place ? Why doesn t it tell the writers of the whole wide world that its business is to produce motion pictures, not to write them, and that it is in the market for motion pictures — not stories ? Book publishers buy books. They don’t write them. Play producers buy plays. They don’t write them. Why can’t motion picture producers buy motion pictures? ^ ^ 1 HERE ARE A lot of people in the world who thought it worth their while financially to learn how to write novels. Most of them found out that they couldn’t write them and they gave up the idea. Others learned how, and they make a living at it. A few have grown wealthy. It is the same way with playwrights. The screen is an art as great as those of literature and the theatre. Why can’t it have its own writers, people who will learn how it is done and take pride in the doing of it? I do not mean by this that it should hire people to write for it. That is what it is doing now so foolishly and with such disastrous results. I mean that it should adopt a policy of buying only complete motion pictures on paper, and it soon would develop a corps of writers who would master screen technic and express themselves in it. Let me here answer the first and most absurd argument against the suggestion that producers will advance — that the announcement of such a policy would be followed by an avalanche of manuscripts that would swamp the studios. Out of every ten dollars that producers spend now in payment to contract writers and free lances, for adaptors, continuity writers and the like, they could save nine and spend one in taking care of the avalanche. In any event, the avalanche would not last long and soon would assume proportions that do not prove too cumbersome now for book publishers and WELFORD BEATON, EDITOR VOL. 12, NO. 3 ROBERT E. SHERWOOD, ASSOCIATE HOLLYWOOD SPECTATOR, published every other Saturday by The Film Spectator, Inc. Welford Beaton, president; Howard Hill, secretary and manager; at Los Angeles (Hollywood Station) in California. Address 6362 Hollywood Blvd. Telephone GL 5506. Entered as second class matter July 1 1931 at the post office at Los Angelee, California, under the act of March 3, 1879. Subscription price, $3.50 per year; foreign, $4.50; single copy, 15 cents’