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Hollywood — The ^Authors
stemming from the original version ; it might have become fabulous, fantastic, bitter, or ironical, but it would certainly not have become the series of romantic novelette platitudes, the thing that it was when it finally reached the public.
A short while ago an odd American work came to our notice. It was called The Art of Attracting Men, and was a series of eight progressive brochures instructing the young American woman in the means to win herself a husband. It was a cynical, frank, and terrifying summing up of the sexual problem. It included fourteen infallible rules for cultivating a " winsome and cuddlesome character.' ' It defined the five distinct phases of man's sexual progress toward marriage : attention, interest, desire, judgment, and action. It warned girls, however, never to force on the action stage " until the man is ripe." " Many a girl has failed because she was too impatient to wait and allow the man's holy passion time to grow." But when the action stage was reached a number of different devices for urging on the proposal were suggested, or, as the book put the thing, " stimulating the necessary sentimental emotion." Of these the cinema was one. The Attracter of Men was warned to avoid films with a tendency toward the vampire, the gay, the wicked, or the criminal. " If when he leaves the theatre he has a lump in his throat he is likely to forget all about money matters." So we must recognize this factor as one of the obstacles before the sincere author who, in spite of his £60 a week, may have an ambition to reform the movies.
The adventures of a story once it has passed into the movie studio may be carried to almost any heights of apparent farce and yet be perfectly true. Indeed, Mr Van Vechten's Spider Boy might well be, in most of its details, a simple relation of the facts. The film The Way of All Flesh, for instance, touched the original at no point except that of one quotation from Samuel Butler. During the filming of his first
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