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The Melodrama of Shadows 187
the movies must have their characters in blacks and whites because, to comport with an elementary logic, they must be saints or devils. 'So vanishes/ he goes on, 'from the films all nuisance, all complexity, all delineation.' I might reply by asking the writer to point out the depth of character drawing to be found now in the Broadway legitimate theater. That, however, would hardly be answering the charge. I make the claim that the photo play is feeling out a new art— and a new art is not found overnight. I tried to attain human action in /The Lone Wolf.' I tried to show the human hates and desires behind this French criminal yclept the Lone Wolf. I tried to show each character with its strengths and weaknesses. I am trying to do it again in the picture which I am now filming.
"Here is the murder mystery of a debonair millionaire, 'Merry' Perry Merithew, found dead on the dirty tin roof of an East Side tenement. There is one clew. In the dead man's hand is clutched a strand of red hair. I am attempting to invest the mystery with humanness. I am going to bring out the fancies and foibles of these characters, and the characters, I hope, will not be just black and white.
"In this story is a thrilling midnight automobile chase which dodges back and forth across the island of Manhattan, finally ending at the edge of Spuyten Duyvil Creek. This sort of thing would be impossible to the spoken stage.
"I am afraid, because the theater has found it impossible to handle big action
with anything like realism, that we have come to look down upon what we term melodrama. Yet we have only to open a newspaper to realize that life is melodrama. What is the great war but the most tremendous melodrama ever enacted in the world's history? Five years ago the war, if forecast on the stage or screen, would have been pronounced preposterous melodrama.
"Vachel Lindsay and the late Hugo Miinsterberg have both predicted that the supreme picture play of the future will give us things that have been but half expressed in all other mediums allied to it. The photo dramatist is a dramatist, a poet, a painter, and a sculptor in one. Possibly the future photo play will run along the border line between what we now term melodrama and drama. It will obviously not be an imitation of the stage. Neither can attain the values of the other.
"There is no doubt but that the individual charms of the photo dramatist and director's styles will be caught by the photo play of the future. To-day a certain director may be famous foi his handling of multitudes, another for his beauty of lighting and stage pictures, and so on. These are, of course, but tricks of the trade. These things gild the photo play. But to advance the screen drama we must keep plugging along toward a distinct technique — a technique that will not be borrowed from the artist, the dramatist, or the stage carpenter, although it may blend all these arts. But it will come to express life as none of these mediums express it."