We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
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2 IXTRODLXTION aration. Given a sample script and a brief explanation, and the schoolboy can turn out a product that looks much the same as the work of a writer of merit. There are the same leaders, the same inserts, the same numbered scenes. Intelligence alone is lack- ing. The technique of form has been superficially mastered, but the greater technique, the technique of creation and development, is a sealed book still. 3. It is important that the author should be able to express his ideas in the clearest and most intelligible manner. It is necessary that the greatest of creators should write in the exact form that is taught the novice. There are some who profess to be superior to these needs. They discard the technical form and write as they please. Generally it is because they are lacking in the ability to write in form or are too lazy to study it. Their ideas must be made over into practical working scripts by some studio employee when their scripts are taken, because of the excellence of the idea. They are mentally deficient in this one point, for the thoroughly equipped author is familiar alike with creation and form and is able to communicate his ideas to others in proper form. He can not only think good plots but he can expose these plots in the proper action. 4. Technique, then, is the combination of an idea and the expres- sion of that idea in competent and adequate action. 5. But technique of form is something more than the mere setting down of idea in words of action, in leaders and in inserts. Even in this seemingly mechanical process there lie vast possibilities. The novice writer merely does his idea into action by scenes. The I artist-author so skillfully and cunningly contrives and places these scenes that each helps the others and so gives to the idea its fullest and most complete exposition. This is something that few realize and that many cannot understand. Too many accept the proposition that a photoplay is merely a certain number of scenes and the proper inserted matter written in set form. If the product looks like the model they follow, they presume it to be as good as that model. They cannot understand that the artistry of scene placement gives to one script a value superior to another. 6. Unless the reader here and now comes fully to a realization of the fact that technique is complex and many sided, that the technique of form alone is but the means of expressing the technique of idea—of creation—it will be well if he close this book at once and give no further thought to the study of photoplay writing. Photoplay writing is something that cannot be taught or communi- cated in any way. There is not, and in the nature of the work can never be, devised any system of instruction that can make competent the unfit. You cannot read this book and write photo- plays. You cannot study the volume and write plays unless you are gifted with the proper quality of imagination and are willing to cultivate and develop this imagination through hard work. Unless you are willing to work hard for perhaps a year or more without