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Why Stories Are Changed
that of the engineer of a transpacific Diesel motor ship trying to tell Captain Musick of the transpacific airplane China Clipper that the manner in which he operated his compact, powerful internal combustion airplane motors was wrong. The engineer and the captain each depended for motive power upon a product of crude petroleum, but one common experience afforded no basis for sound criticism.
Without attempting to establish them as exact rules, four generalizations with respect to criticism are made.
The first two refer to the adaptation of the novel and of the drama to the motion picture form. The third indicates the necessity for adaptation. The fourth states the attempt which the motion picture industry is constantly making to improve its own standards and to achieve a greater emphasis upon good taste and good art than hitherto has been possible.
The first of the generalizations is this: novels, because their width of canvas is similar to that of motion pictures, require the least change to enter the motion picture form. The main changes from the novel are for condensation. For example, Anthony Adverse and David Copperfield have more material than could possibly be crowded into a two-hour picture. But frequently a novel is so near to the picture pattern that it requires few changes and it is lifted to the screen practically as it is. This was true of Pearl Buck's The Good Earth.
To have filmed David Copperfield exactly as Dickens wrote it would have required thirty-seven reels. Among the scenes of the book, there are many which, while
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