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A Guide to Nine Days a Queen
roles, and one of the stars — Nova Pilbeam — does not appear until after one-third of the picture has been shown.
2. The convention that a costume picture depends for its appeal on expensive sets and elaborate spectacle. Nine Days a Queen was made at considerably less expense than the average modern story. Taking the average published cost of five recent historical plays, one finds that Nine Days a Queen was made for a quarter of these costs — without the loss of anything essential. On only one day were more than fifty extras called to the studio. This is directly opposed to the general practice of the studios, and is a return to the method of presenting historical drama that was used by the Elizabethans. With them "the play was the thing." Drama and human emotion were regarded as more important than lavish and extravagant spectacle.
3. The convention that it is necessary to distort history to create drama. Great care has been taken to make Nine Days a Queen accurate, and this general accuracy has been endorsed in England by Professor F. J. C. Hearnshaw and in the United States by Professor Daniel C. Knowlton.
4. The convention that it is necessary to distort historical characters to fit them to the personalities of glamorous screen stars. It would have been possible, for example, for Mr. Stevenson to have secured the services of a famous juvenile of the conventional type to play the part of Jane Grey. Instead, he employed for the role a child who was herself within a week of Jane Grey's age at the time of her death.
5. The convention that a motion-picture scenario must be written by a committee of authors in a series of prolonged "conferences." The story and script of Nine Days a Queen were written in a fortnight by Mr. Stevenson, while he was having his appendix out in a private hospital, and the dialogue was afterwards added by a single author, Miles Malleson.
6. The convention that the public is not interested in stories that have only a slight love interest and the ending of which is unhappy. (It is of significance to point out that if the ending of Nine Days a Queen is found by audiences to be a successful one, it is so because it was worked out in accordance with the theory of Greek drama, as expounded by Aristotle. In order to secure the desired katharsis, Mr. Stevenson scrupulously selected incidents which induced pity, and tried to avoid those that induced horror.)
7. In scenario, in direction, and in cutting, the technique is unconventional. The scenario, incidentally, is not based on ordinary scenario principles as followed in most photoplays, but is modeled on the technique employed by Shakespeare in his chronicle plays.