Modern photoplay writing, its craftsmanship; a manual demonstrating the structural and dramatic principles of the new art as paracticed by the modern photoplaywright (1922)

12 Modern Photoplay Writing — Its Craftsmanship the principal attraction and the story secondary, when the adaptation from standard or current literature was blazoned forth with the name of a director as the chief advertising appeal, confident that the name of the author would one day take its proper place in the industry, and the industry thereby become an art. That such premonitions were not without foun- dation is rapidly being established. The era of the screen author, whose profession is the creation of stories in dramatic form for the camera, is beginning; and the author's remuneration is coming to rank with that of other important arts. The adaptation is by no means extinct, nor will it be while literature holds out material worth transforming into the medium of screen drama, yet the preparation of adaptations is now the recognized work of still another class of recognized screen authors — the continuity writers or dramaturgists proper, who correspond to the adapting dramatists of the stage. It is not a far cry back to the days when there were no con- tinuity writers in the modern sense, and when those there were whose craft was not above that of the office-help or the "extras." Perhaps the most important single mutation of the new art is the gradual change in attitude toward the FORM in which the independent author is required to submit his story. The era of "ideas" was succeeded by the era in which the producers demanded the "scenario" or continuity; and this era may be called the era of smug incompetence, for the selection of scenarios fell into the hands of people as little fitted by education (if they could claim any!) and ability to judge the merits of