Motography (Oct-Dec 1916)

November 18, 1916. MOTOGRAPHY 1129 The Photoplay Scenario CONDUCTED BY B. F. BARRETT Former Editor of Photoplay Scenario Magazine. Note — This department will appear hereafter in each issue of Motography, and will treat of all subjects of interest to the photo playwright — whether amateur or professional. You are invited to suggest any subjects you desire to have discussed, or ask questions on any matters relating to the writing of photoplays which have been puzzling you. The department is also open to you at any time for the expression of your own ideas or the submitting of ideas of others which have helped you, and will be interesting to other photoplay writers. Treat the Public Fairly By Mary Grant This paper was read before the Photodramatists' Club of New York City. Mary Louise Farley, secretary of this club, has kindly offered to Motography the exclusive publication of the papers -which are prepared for that organization. WHILE so much complaint is being registered by producing companies against censorship, it seems to me they are proving the necessity of just that thing, though along another line than usual. I refer to a matter that seems to me if it were continued much longer will bring forth a righteous protest from the public against the companies. It is the matter of screen adaptations from books. A couple of weeks ago I went to see the screen production of Mary Johnson's famous novel, "Audrey," which featured Miss Pauline Frederick. Miss Frederick's acting was splendid, as it always is ; but, as is usually the case, the play was not a thing like the book, proving no adaptation at all, simply a photoplay with the same name as the book. The idea of obtaining permission to use a book, advertising the play as taken from the book, and then showing something that is nothing like the book except in name! Staff writers leave out characters, make up characters, change the plot, change the ending and change anything else that happens to suit them, throwing to the four winds all precedences or intentions of following the book. A book is not changed when dramatized for the legitimate stage. What is the idea of changing it beyond all originality for the screen? Why not change the name, too? When a story is twisted and turned and added to and taken from until it is another story altogether, then why still keep the name? Is the name used to draw the public, to "get the play over"? I have not yet seen a screen play taken from a book that held to the standard of the book. It seems intolerable presumption on the part of a staff writer to think he is improving the story by changing it. When I went to see "Audrey" I went with many trepidations and misgivings, for I feared that Mary Johnson's truly dramatic ending of her book would come to a weak, hackneyed conclusion in the screen play. I saw just what I feared I would see — the overdone, happy ending on which the motion picture companies have so surfeited the public. No matter what has gone before, the moving picture play always ends with the supposition that "they were married and lived happily ever after." One of the finest characters in that fine book was not mentioned at all in the play ; the character of a father was left out and a brother added ; not to mention the many other changes that helped to spoil the play. Why? If a book has to have all those changes to make it "suitable to the needs of the screen" they had better let it alone. "Audrey" is a very beautiful book but a bauble was certainly made of it when it was put into pictures. I realize that some situations in a book are impossible to depict properly in pictures but does the story necessarily have to be so distorted? Truly, I do not think the public is so ignorant as the motion picture directors and others think it is. I suppose they excuse the ending they make of these plays by saying that "it is what the public wants." I think that if they try intelligent methods on the public they will find to their surprise that the public is able to grasp them, aye, and appreciate them, too. I am only voicing the opinions of some that go to make up the public. I have always held the company that produced that play in high esteem, but it would seem they fell short of their standard when they allowed that play to pass on. If the moving picture business expects to prove useful to the public and meet its needs it can never do so by false representations. A person goes to a play to see what has been advertised, not to be subjected to a sad disappointment. If he is not familiar with the story and does not know what he is going to see, he is given a grossly erroneous idea of the story. The truly artistic plot has been sacrificed for the sake of a series of sensational scenes. Where is he benefited? There is too much slack judgment and elastic imagination as to what the public wants. What it does want is the thing that is true and it wants art, and those are the things it will always gladly accept. I know the motion pictures are abundantly capable of giving those things, for they have given them before. Another book that was torn to pieces beyond possible recognition in its screen adaptation was "The Trail of the Lonesome Pine." If I had seen the play before the title I would have seen not one single thing in it that would have connected it with the book to my mind. It would have meant simply a photoplay to me, and a very poor, trite one at that. Other beautiful books that were dramatized for the screen but changed were Hall Caine's "The Bondman," Bret Harte's "Tennessee's Partner," the opera "Madame Butterfly," and others T could mention but which would only mean a repetition of what I have said before. If producing companies continue to put on such plays and dare to call them by their book names I can foresee the doom of adaptations, for I do not think the public will continue to accept, without protest, such unfair methods nor the authors submit to such garbling of their books. For it is unfair to the public, and it is cheating the author. Isn't it? Mutual Seeks "The Greatest Story" <<\1/HERE is the world's greatest scenario? VV "I want to see it." This challenge to the million strong army of scenario writers comes from John R. Freuler, president of the Mutual Film Corporation and engineer of