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THE STORY WORLD
79
moment a writer can ever expect to experience: specially if it is "the first one" he has put over. He may sell a hundred stories later, but not one of the checks will have the "kick" that the first one did. The first one means so much to him. It means that he has at last reached the brow of the hill : that the ascent has been made. From there on his greatest difficulty will be in staying up there. It is much easier to lose a footing and slide down than it is to remain at the objective. He is in great danger for a considerable time after he arrives at the top, for editors will be clamoring for his material, and he will be heralded as a new discovery. He isn't new. He's been here all the time, but nobody seemed to know it but himself. They will beg him for more stories, and, if he is foolish enough to try and meet every demand, before long he will find he is turning out inferior stories.
Most European countries regard the United States as a nation whose key-note is "haste.'' However, Ward Neuir, in the London Nation, has something to say on this subject which might interest some of our motion picture producers.
"Only a leisured nation could have invented the five or six-reel film," says Mr. Neuir. "The long, long film is infuriating, for often its theme could have been compressed into something authentically amusing or stirring. English producers
began imitating American faults, not American virtues, and one of prime faults they set up as a fetish was that the public likes length in its screen dramas. The English public merely endures because it must. It is not because the English film public literally can not spare time for a six-reel film. It wants the time filled, and filled very full. We are an impatient and busy people. Also we are poor, and therefore inclined to be thrifty. When we have committed the extravagance of shelling out cash for a light entertainment we asked our entertainer to entertain — and be quick about it. We are not buying his services (as apparently does the American public) to help us kill time, but to cram it so full of vividness that every minute is endowed with more than its normal life."
A correspondent sent me the above and requested me to tell him why it is that three and four-reel films are not made today. They are not made because the American public doesn't want them. They were all right in the early days, when picture making was in its infancy. The producers were not certain about the future of films, and they experimented with the length of a subject. The subject usually consisted of about two reels, and we were treated to three subjects in an evening's program. But, the producers gradually learned that the public liked the motion picture and that it was here to stay. So the producers began doing bigger things.