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OF THE PHOTOPLAY The photoplay itself is the newest of the literary arts. Pictures of motion projected on the screen became a commercial proposi- tion only in 1895. Even then it was crude and undeveloped; the forty -and fifty foot comedies bearing but slight resemblance to the multiple-reel stories of to-day. Many of the machines of that time could not take more than fifty feet of film at one time, and it was not possible to give more than the hint of a story in the fifty to sixty seconds the picture ran. As the interest in these short, sketchy subjects waned, the makers of projectors increased the capacity of their machines. One, two and three hundred feet could be taken at one time and this capacity was increased until there are now machines that can project three thousand feet of film without reloading and the ultimate capacity of the machine is merely a matter of the size •of the magazine and the mechanical difficulties of handling a reel weighing more than twenty pounds. As the films grew in length, longer stories were produced and these more ambitious efforts called for the production of the picture under more careful management. In place of the man who had dropped into the business, regular stage managers were employed, recruited mostly from the stock and repertoire com- panies. For a time they wrote all their own plays; rehashes of the standard drama, adaptations from non-copyright books or the products of their own imagination. One of the Edison producers conceived the idea of making a western play with a large production and hired a small branch of a railroad for a Sunday. He told the players engaged that they could bring their friends, if they desired, and they could see 'how pictures were made if they would "go in" a couple of scenes. He had not counted on such a host as showed up at the sta- tion at train time, but they all went along and "The Great Train Robbery" was made with the largest company of people that to that time had ever been employed in a dramatic picture play. This production marked the turning point of the photoplay. It was shown that the pictures were not yet dead, for one New York vaudeville theater restored the pictures to their old ^'headline" position, making the "Train Robbery" the featured attraction. The change brought a demand for stronger stories. It was seen that the studio force could not produce each week a suf- ficiently strong story, and outside writers were invited to con- tribute suggestions, for which they were paid from five to fif- teen dollars. These mere synopses were developed in the studio into scripts, since few of the writers possessed the knowledge of picture-making requisite to enable them to develop the script.