Moving Picture World (April-June 1915)

May 1, 1915 THE MOVING PICTURE WORLD 721 THE PHOTOPLAYWRIGHT Conducted by EPES WINTHROP SARGENT INQUIRIES. Questions concerning photoplay writing addressed to this department will be replied to by mail if a fully addressed and stamped envelope accompanies the letter, which should be addressed to this department. Questions should be stated clearly and should be typewritten or written with pen and ink. Under no circumstances will manuscripts or synopses be criticized, whether or not a fee is sent therefor. A list of companies will be sent if the request is made to the paper direct and not to this department, and a return stamped envelope is enclosed. Amateur Authors. REPLYING to a request for information as to what companies would consider material from "amateur authors." we told the man that there was no such thing as an "amateur author," and there is not. There are authors and persons who wish to become authors, but there cannot, in the nature of things, be amateur authors^ consequently no company wants the work of amateur authors. When a writer reaches tile point that he can sell what he writes, he ceases to be an amateur and becomes a professional writer. Until then he is a novice, but not an author, for were he an author he would be able to write and if he Is able to write he is no longer an amateur. A thorough appreciation of this fact will take the sting out of a lot of rejections. A more thorough appreciation of the same fact will enable the beginner to avoid these depressing rejections. Why should a manufacturer of films seek the unfinished work of the beginner? Why should he purchase the half-baked product of some raw student when for the same money or comparatively little more he can get a professional grade of work. True he advertises that he wants ideas more than he does complete plays, but this does not mean that he wants the rot that the beginner turns out in the mistaken belief that he is writing plays instead of doing experimental work. If the beginner will start in to work along the proper lines with the full realization that photoplay writing Is not a simple, easily acquired art but a regular profession, to be studied and MASTERED before success can come, we would have vastly fewer yawps from the disgruntled. But the man who starts in with the determination that he will first learn to write and then try to sell is the thousandth man. The other 999 work more along these lines. He sees advertisements in the papers that anyone can write photoplays. He writes a few and sends them out. What he has written is merely a skeleton narrative, but he thinks it is a play and a better play than he ever saw on the screen. He keeps on doing this until some editor sends a story back with the statement that it is "not in scenario form." This is usually his first hint that there is some special form in which photoplays should be written, so perhaps he needs a school course, after all. Perhaps this ts the reason— it must be the reason — why his excellent plays have been returned. He becomes a school pupil. To his delight his first work is highly praised and he is urged to send two more dollars for the next batch of lessons. He does so, and his wonderful progress continues. By the time he has completed his course and is graduated, he knows that he must be good because Professor Bunko has told him so. Now there will be no further trouble. He does over his old stuff Into proper form. Strange to say it all comes back the same as even Perhaps he sees the story on the screen. It may have been made by'^a company other than the ones to which the story has been sent, but of course he knows that they all hang together and that the Vitagraph makes the stories that Thanhouser steals and gives Victor the products of Vitagraph's own thefts to divert suspicion. The entire business Is leagued against him. He knoiis his stories are better than the ones he sees on the screen and he knows they are original because he thought of them himself. The inference is obvious. He will quit the company of such bandits. He cannot know that the story that Vitagraph made that is so like his own may have been done from an old film because there was a rush demand. He cannot know that perhaps a hundred other versions of the story exist, some of them five and six years old. He knows only that he thought out, all by himself, the clever idea of the little child who keeps her parents from separation, and that this idea was stolen and sold to another studio. But if he does not quit then he falls for the "old reliable" revisionist, or the Literary Bureau, or the sales bureau or the fake League or Association or Clan or Tribe, and each time it is from two to five dollars or even more and each time he is "kidded" along while his money and patience last. And all the time he knows he is an author and all the time he is running along on those ten or a dozen scripts that he wrote before he fell for the school, because there is no use writing more until he sells these. He is not an amateur and he is not an author. He is a credulous ass, envious of the success of others ever seeking for the short cut to success and never willing to take the advice that he work and study. He has worked and he has studied. He completed his studies with Professor Bunck and Bunck himself wrote that he was good. Eventually he Eoes out of business, still with those ten or twelve scripts and still with the fixed belief that film makers and editors are liars, fools and thieves and that successful authors are spit-licking trucklers who sell through pull and influence and not through ability. That is the "amateur author." it there can be such a thing. Now look on the novice. He first should find out whether he can plot. If he can, ho gets books on plotting and on the technique of photoplay writing, not one book, but two or three. If he knows what is what, he first gets the books from the library, looks at all on hand and then] and not until then, decides on what he wants to purchase for desk use. He knows that he will need to own a couple because he will know that they are text books to be studied and absorbed and not merely to be read through once or twice. Now he will get to work. He will divide his time between study of plotting, study of technique and study of the screen. He will study plotting because he will know that without a plot technique is nothing. He will study technique because he will know that only through proper technique can he convey his thought clearly to the director. He will study the screen, tor without a knowledge of effects and how they are gained, he will not know how to plan and gain he effects his stories need. He will give two-thirds of his study time to plots. He will study the stories of all the films in the trade papers. He will mentally decide what is good and what is bod. He will not be disappointed in his own plots nor will he become unduly proud of them. He will know that at first he cannot hope to. compete with the more experienced and he will know that the more practice work he does himself the more experienced will he become. He will not try to sell at once. He will know better. He will know that his work must come into competition with the best work of writers of long training and that it will not compare favorably with this product, so he will keep out of the studios until such a time as he feels that he can offer an occasional story with a reasonable chance for success. In the course of time he will cease to be a novice and he will become an author, but to his dying day he will remain a student because he will know that he will need to keep studying to keep up with the gradual improvement.' The stories that would sell four years ago are being turned back now because there are so many better stories. The stuff that sells today will find no market whatever in 1920. Be a student always, be an author as soon as you can, but don't be an illuminated ass. Suspense in Comedy. That suspense is as successful and as necessary in comedy as in drama was shown in a recent Keystone. It had the usual Keystone coarseness but in one scene Charles Conklin is balanced on the edge of an open trap in the theater. It totters to the edge and back, he walks around it and over it. he stumbles over it and jumps over it. He does everything but fall through, and it was all laughter. Had he fallen through, as he did later, there would be but a single laugh. On the same bill Charles Chaplin, in an Essanay, fell over a limb of a tree with a girl. Then he fell over again and a couple of more times, then another character came in and fell over and another man did the same thing, each time to a decreasing laugh. The audience was tired of the repetition. But if Chaplin had almost fallen over backward, just as many times and perhaps once or twice more, the laughter would have been crescendo with each avoidance of disaster. It is not always what happens that is funniest in comedy. Sometimes it is what might happen and does not. Two Letters. It is not often that we print comment on Technique of Photoplay, but two letters in the same mail are so widely at variance that we take the liberty of quoting from them. One is from a man who saw one of our pictures on the screen and who writes as though it had wrecked his whole lite. He says in part : It is useless for any amateur to try to compete against tommyrot of this brand. I doubt whether the mental faculties of any amateur are so shop worn as to enable him to get down to it. I have also read your book, "Technique of the Photoplay," but, being a Scotchman, I borrowed it. I thereby saved two dollars, because practically and theoretically I found it to be of no use whatever. And yet in the same mail Miss Elaine Sterne writes: I suppose I must receive from two to six letters a day asking how to write photoplays, and my answer to the host of inquiries has invariably been "Buy Epes Winthrop Sargent's text book, The Technique of the Photoplay." It Is the finest and most concise work of its kind obtainable. We wonder which is right. Heart Interest. "The editor says he wants heart interest." wails a correspondent. "And I gave it to him the first time. I married off three couples— all I had in the story. Does he expect me to go out and find a wife for the dog?" And the funny part ts that there was no more heart interest to the story than there is to a can of beans. Love affairs, perhaps, for he worked the three marriages with the cold professionalism of a bigamist marrying his sixteenth wife, but heart Interest and love interest, even where the love affair is made interesting, are wholly different things. Heart interest is the appeal to the kindly emotions, not the appeal to love of romance. AH the world loves a lover, perhaps, but better still is the appeal that warms the heart, that elevates the soul, and this may be done in many ways other than by having Bill want to marry Bess only her father objects. The heart interest in "Shore Acres" was not in the touch of romance but in the kindly hearted old light keeper. He was the central figure, the basis of the heart Interest.