That marvel - the movie : a glance at its reckless past, its promising present, and its significant future (1923)

84 THAT MARVEL— THE MOVIE that which menaces our nation in connection with our forests. For many years we have been cutting down our trees without taking thought for the morrow by providing for a new growth of forest where our improvident axe has had its wanton way. The screen has recklessly leveled both its giant sequoias and its scrub-oaks and finds itself in sore straits for timber that will stand the strain it puts upon it. The younger generation of fictionwriters are not furnishing the studios with material with which to repair the gaps made as the romances of the past are, one by one, fed to the capacious maw of the hungry screen. Mark Twain asserted that there were only seven original stories in existence — or was it thirty? — and inferred that the latest novel by the most original of contemporary writers must be, of necescity, a variation upon one of these ancient, basic yarns. There still exists the suspicion that our greatest humorist was "spoofing us," as an Englishman would say. But the output of fiction to-day, both in America and Europe, leads to the conclusion that our imaginative writers were not born to the purple as master plot-makers. They repeatedly shock us, sometimes disgust us, often interest and amuse us, constantly furnish us with food for reflection and apprehension, and once in awhile startle us by their brilliancy — but, for the most part, their