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176 A PRACTICAL MANUAL OF SCREEN PLAYWRITING
In addition, as a qualified screen-play writer, he must know the possibilities and the limitations of the motion-picture camera.
At the same time, he should know quite a bit about acting and its problems, so as to be able to write the necessary action descriptions.
What is more, he should know something of opticals— the manner in which they are made so that he may know how they can best be used.
Then, he must have a considerable knowledge of sound-track devices and techniques, and be able to co-ordinate sight with sound.
He will be at a considerable advantage if he has, in addition, a working knowledge, at least, of film cutting, set designing, and musical background accompaniments.
The screen writer who possesses all of this knowledge is the ideal. Ordinarily, he would soon be able to step out of the screen-play writer class, and become a writer-director, a director, or even a producer. But it stands to reason that the more specialized knowledge the writer has of those elements that go into the making of a motion picture, the more qualified he would be for writing screen plays.
The problem is how to obtain that knowledge. Courses in screenplay writing at colleges and universities attempt to teach it but with varying success because, obviously, they can teach only the theories. The best place to learn the practical fundamentals is at a motion-picture studio. But studios rarely open their doors to beginners. A few of them, sporadically, have tried to institute a system of using junior writers, in which inexperienced screen-play writers (though they may have had a great deal of writing experience in other media) are taken in hand by an experienced supervisor, and put through a course. For the most part, though, studios seldom use inexperienced screen writers— which puts the ordinary writer more or less on the horns of a dilemma. Quite often, however, because a writer's book or play has been purchased by a studio, and an arrangement made whereby the author "goes with the deal" to work on the screen play, he is paired off with an experienced collaborator whose job it is to supply the technical details of the screen play.
At other times, if a collaborator is not furnished, the novitiate