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

90 THAT MARVEL— THE MOVIE in number because the screen has developed a new method for telling tales to a story -loving race. While the widely-accepted generalization that human nature never changes may not be true, it can not be questioned that the scenario-writer of the future will be forced to deal with the same manifestations of Man's psychic make-up which engaged the attention of iEschylus, Sophocles, Moliere, Shakespeare, and the lesser dramatists. But as the nations to-day are striving to find a new way to pay old debts, so is the screen seeking a new way to present the eternal dramatic clash of old passions. As the kinetoscope thirty years ago begot a novel form of amusement, so is its successor, the movie screen, bringing into being a new type of dramatic technique. The scenario-writer is something besides a combination of story-teller and playwright. He is experimenting in a youthful artistic medium, whose resources and possibilities are as yet only partially revealed, and he has become a pioneer in a realm that belongs to a kind of specialist bearing resemblance to both the novelist and dramatist but differing from them in ways peculiarly his own. The future welfare of the screen, in so far as it is confined to the amusement field, depends largely upon how stimulating to men and women possessing creative imagination this new method of tale-telling, ^