An assignment once given my class called for a story based on this simple germ: “A servant kills his master.” To my great astonishment I found that fully seventy-five per cent. of the class had decided, as if by agreement, that the servant must be either a Japanese or a Chinaman. Why? The students themselves could not explain it, but I could. I had observed this unison of plot conception many times before. They had all drawn their inspiration from the same inexhaustible source—the moving pictures. In all probability not a single student had ever employed or seen his or her friends employ a Japanese or Chinese servant. If they had ever employed a servant at all, it was most likely some negro girl, and yet their fancy had taken them to the Asiatics. For every one has surely noticed that in the moving pictures the lowly individual who carries the master’s suitcase is always an Asiatic valet. It is fashionable and ethical. The laborer, the servant, is nearly always a foreigner, the American is the “boss,” the domineering chap who wears the full-dress suit and faces the camera with a compelling, clean-shaven chin. The drowsy members of our A. F. of L. and the weak-eyed bookkeepers and typists filling the galleries of our motion-picture houses must feel highly flattered as they applaud the shadows of their dreams projected on the screen. What has plausibility to do with the “Eighth Art”? And who is naïve enough to expect to find it there?
Yet to the student of the modern American short story, and novel as well, the moving pictures must come in for a great share of consideration. This institution exerts a tremendous influence on the trend of our fiction, determining both its form and substance. It is no longer a secret that most of our prominent fiction-writers who still are unattached to some studio are writing stories for the magazines with a view to their ultimate adaptation for the screen. A number of magazine publishers maintain brokerage departments where the stories appearing in their publications are sold to film manufacturers and the profits thus realized divided with the authors or quietly deposited to their own accounts. The editors of these magazines are instructed to keep an eye on moving-picture possibilities of manuscripts submitted to them. The remuneration involved is so alluring that even the best writers with high literary traditions behind them are fast succumbing. But whereas these old writers for the most part have already done their best work and have spent themselves, so that their loss to American letters is not very serious, the effect of the moving-pictures urge upon the young author is truly disastrous.
To write for the screen as it is at present managed requires neither art nor knowledge. Writers with any literary compunctions cannot hope to succeed in a field which demands a complete distortion of all values. What is required is the ability to supply some acrobatically inclined matinée idols and curly-haired ingénues with fast-moving vehicles to display their “stunts.” It presupposes an intimate acquaintance with the peculiar talents of each star. If a star can swim and dive and ride horse-back and jump off a running train and dance gracefully opportunities must be provided in the scenario for the parading of these talents. If another can wear pretty clothes daintily or has pretty dimples on her knees or looks particularly charming in the uniform of a maid or a governess the scenario writer must be governed accordingly in constructing his story. It is precisely because no one outside of a studio can have such an intimate knowledge of the abilities of the various stars featured by a producing company that staffs are employed to rewrite and prepare for production every script purchased from an outsider.
The moving-picture industry is almost entirely dominated by investors who are as far from literature as the average would-be story writer is from being featured in the pages of the Cosmopolitan. Their concern is solely with the box-office. They will purvey anything that will yield the desired dividends. Manifestly to apply the word “art” to an industry with such mercenaries at its helm is to cover the word with mud, unless we stretch the term to include the art of making money. As Channing Pollock, in a “Plain Talk About the Movies,”[12] once said: “One of the troubles with the regular theatre is its conviction that the possession of a hundred thousand dollars turns a laundryman into a littérateur.” The remark is still more pungently apposite to the cinema theatre. The ignorance of the rich investors controlling the destinies of the moving-picture industry is truly stupendous. An anecdote current among scenario editors and vouched for by one of them as an actual happening throws a pitiless light on this prevailing trait. When several years ago the craze of adapting Dickens’ novels for the screen was on, the president of a large film corporation one day stormed into his scenario editor’s office and demanded to know why Dickens’ work had been permitted to go to a rival company. The editor defended himself by saying that some of Dickens’ work could still be got. “See to it, then,” the great man ordered. “Wire Mr. Dickens that hereafter we want his entire output!”
And these intellectual giants are influencing the output of our Dickenses! The singularly few exceptions in the industry are powerless to change the state of affairs. They are either smothered by the great ones or are tolerated because they are so insignificant. And these great ones have decreed that adaptations of stage successes, old classics, best sellers, and magazine stories are more desirable wares than original stories written especially for the screen. The governing factor, of course, is the previous advertising that these adapted stories have had without cost to the film producers. Story values are the least consideration. Our public is so amusement-hungry and so well-trained that it will consume anything. Besides, the star is ninety per cent. of the show anyhow—people go to see the celebrated So-and-so rather than the vehicle in which So-and-so appears—otherwise the magnates would not pay five hundred dollars for a story and fifty thousand dollars for a star’s performance in it.
The fact, however, that moving-picture producers are not purchasing original scenarios does not deter the numerous literary schools of the country from offering instruction in photoplay writing. The advertising matter of these schools is as optimistic as ever. “Makes $50,000 a year by writing for the screen,” reads one headline. “Moving-picture stories in demand everywhere!” reads another. Then the information is generously volunteered that a certain scenario writer in a California studio is earning fifty thousand dollars a year; another twenty-five thousand; and countless others between five and ten thousand. Convincing proof is presented that no education or previous experience is necessary; that one farmer in the backwoods of Washington or Oregon or on the prairies of Illinois has sold a scenario for eighteen hundred and fifty dollars; that one woman who was never graduated from a public school has written a masterpiece in her spare time between cooking her victuals and tending to her seven children and an invalid husband, and that as a result of her exploit she has now paid off the mortgage on her house and is experimenting with the mechanism of a Dodge car.
This alluring prospect of becoming affluent via a course in photoplay writing is held out not only by the average correspondence school but also by not a few of our dignified institutions of learning. There is no excuse for offering any instruction in an art that is on such a low plane of development, except, perhaps, that of elevating it, which is not an aim avowed by any of these institutions; and, besides, mere honesty alone ought to compel even the most enterprising trustee or administrator to reach the simple conclusion that since the demand for original photoplays is practically non-existent, as far as the novice is concerned, it is useless to manufacture photoplaywrights. The refusal to accept such a logical conclusion results in disappointments and heartaches and the upsetting of normal useful careers. A glimpse at the record of original scenarios purchased by some of our leading producers even as far back as 1918, when the policy of using adaptations only was not yet rigidly adhered to, proves conclusively the extent of the market. The American Film Company purchased only fifteen scenarios during the entire year. The National Studios—twelve. William S. Hart—eight. The Fairbanks Studio—six. The Dorothy Gish Company—four. Mary Pickford—one. The Chaplin Studio—one.[13]
When it is considered that some of our ablest fictionists and dramatists have been writing photoplays and that some of these accepted scenarios were written for particular stars and often sent direct to them or to their directors, the chances of the obscure novice, even the most meritorious one, are far from glorious indeed. And since 1918 the policy of adaptations only has been enforced more stringently—almost to the complete exclusion of the original script submitted by the outsider. A few producing companies have frankly admitted, in the various writers’ magazines, that they do not even read manuscripts submitted by unknown outsiders.
But while the great mass of aspirants may not be aware of the true state of conditions our more or less successful writers know it full well. The Authors’ League and the Pen Women’s League and the various Writers’ Clubs throughout the country have all discussed and analyzed the moving-pictures market, and their members are taking means to meet its eccentric exactions. Why write a story in photoplay continuity or even detailed synopsis form only to have it returned from the Coast most likely unread, when the same material can be written up in a short story or a novelette, its serial rights sold to a magazine and its photoplay rights reserved and offered to a film company which is then sure to accord it a friendly reading? As a matter of record the price paid for photoplay rights to a magazine story is usually twice and sometimes tenfold the price paid for an original story written especially for the screen. Part of this extra compensation is probably for the advertising value of the story, and part for the judgment of the magazine editor which the film magnates are more inclined to accept than that of their own hired editors.
That fiction writers are taking advantage of this unusual opportunity to sell their work twice is an absolute certainty. “In fact, as several writers remarked at the Writers’ Club dinner, a large percentage of the present-day magazine stories are written—planned and plotted—with the screen directly in mind.... It is well known, on the inside of the game, that successful fictionists plan every situation and bit of dialogue in certain stories, visualizing, as they write, the way those situations will, as they hope, work out on the screen.”[14] And again: “Today, among the more successful writers of action-stories for the magazines, there exists the feeling that it is a criminal waste of time to write originals for the screen. Their method is deliberately to plan their fiction ... so that it will actually contain abundant photoplay material, while yet being properly balanced up with the necessary word-painting and dialogue which good fiction demands. In other words, they systematically plan their fiction to make its picture possibilities ‘hit the producer in the eye’ the first time he—or his scenario editor—reads it.... Almost nine-tenths of the pictures shown today are adaptations of successful fiction stories or stage plays. If you doubt that, watch the productions in your theatres and note their origin.”[15]
What this “systematic planning” results in is self-evident. The moving-picture story and the fiction story are two different products. Their technique is different. The photoplay is pantomime pure and simple. Ideas and emotions can only be expressed by means of gestures and facial contortions, with the aid of a schoolboy subtitle flashed on the screen. Literary style, psychologic delineation, and nice subtleties of thought and emotion cannot be transmitted. The plot must unfold rapidly and teem with surprising and tense situations. The actors must have something to do every second. To write a fiction story with photoplay possibilities requires a careful selection of theme and plot. Unlike the magazines, which run in types, each catering to a particular group of temperamental and intellectual stratum of our people, the moving pictures depend for success upon the approval of the Ladies’ Auxiliary Society and the Chew Tobacco Club of Dead Hollow as well as upon Greenwich Village and the bourgeois Philistines of our metropolises. No theme must be used that might give offense to any of these patrons; all must be kept satisfied so that a continuance of their patronage may be insured. It is also apparent that the pale, quiet story which does not depend upon action for its “punch” must be entirely sacrificed, since it cannot possibly have any moving-picture adaptability. Only the swift-moving, red-blooded plot can be utilized.
Needless to suggest that our story writers are well aware of these limitations. The fact that their work is adapted almost wholesale into photoplays speaks eloquently for their knowledge on this score. Needless to suggest, also, that they have become expert mechanics in the way of constructing a fiction story so that it will be certain to “hit the producer in the eye.” They have learned that “the photoplaywright depends upon his ability to think and write in action.”[16] And they have learned to think and write in action. They have also taken to heart the dictum regarding theme. “In selecting your theme, ask yourself if either dialogue or description may not be really required to bring out the theme satisfactorily. If such is the case, abandon the theme. The few inserts permitted cannot be relied upon to give much aid—the chief reliance must be pantomime.”[17] It is only natural, then, for our writers to eschew the unadaptable theme altogether.
That the bulk of our magazine fiction is, therefore, not magazine fiction at all, but merely disguised moving-picture stories is a fact that has found entirely too little general publicity. A moving-picture story differs from a fiction story not only in matter of technique and theme barred by limitations of technique but also in many other respects. As we have seen, because of the general appeal of the moving pictures certain themes that might offend any part of the great public must be avoided. Obviously this results in the humiliating condition of degenerating to the standard of the lowest patron, of courting his approval as the final goal of successful authorship. But should, perchance, an author with a virile conscience bolt the ranks of the meek conformists and yet, by dint of extraordinarily fortunate circumstances, break through with his product, the power of the various Boards of Censorship must be reckoned with.
There are, of course, official, semi-official and unofficial censors presiding over the production of our magazine fiction, too. But while a revolting author may take his work to some less respectable magazine and thus save his soul, no such outlet exists for the photoplaywright. His work must be so harmless that it will pass not only the National Board of Censorship but also the various State and city boards, otherwise no enterprising producer will risk his money producing it. The experienced photoplaywright, then, studies the proscriptions of the various boards and keeps himself informed of all their decisions. He knows, for instance, that crime must be treated cautiously, and it must always be punished in the end; that the National Board will not pass a picture in which there is a suicide, that burglary may be shown, but not by what means it is committed; that flirtations with women of easy virtue are banned; that lynching scenes are permissible only when the picture is laid in places where no other law exists; that scenes showing kidnapping do not always “get by”; that elopements must be handled delicately; that, in short, the effect of the picture on the young, the evil-minded, and the weak-minded must always be carefully gaged.
The experienced photoplaywright also knows of all important precedents established by the censors. He knows that Shakespeare’s plays have not gotten by unscathed; that “Macbeth” was deemed too full of crime and “Romeo and Juliet” too full of love; that a kiss between the two youngsters in the latter play was limited to three feet; that Eugene Walter’s “Easiest Way” could not be exhibited in the sovereign State of Pennsylvania because the Board of Censors of that State had condemned it “in accordance with Section 6 of the Act.... Because it deals with prostitution”; that in O. Henry’s “Past One at Rooney’s” such sub-titles as “At one end was a human pianola with drugged eyes,” and “I know how bad it looked—me smokin’ and comin’ in here. But I’ll promise you, Eddie—I’ll give up cigarettes and stay home every night if you want me to” were deleted; etc., etc. And above all he knows that religious and political views must never be expressed. Furthermore, that if he breaks the last law and does essay to express any views at all, they must be the worn-out popular views that even the humblest deacon or the mistress of the little red schoolhouse back home might be gladdened with, because they have been cherishing them as an heritage from their ancient forbears.
Thus the influence of the moving pictures on the bulk of our magazine and even book fiction. It is a moving-picture fiction, “strong,” fast-moving, startling, full of cheap ideas and a gushy hackneyed idealism, written largely by photoplaywrights who use the fiction medium simply because it enables them to exact a higher price for their product, and catering to a photoplay public. For this moving-picture influence extends not only to the makers of stories but to the general reading public as well. It tames it, if indeed it need any taming, molds it, forms it into a hardened cast with a definite æstheticism which it carries from the cinema house to Happy Stories and Virile Stories and Goody Stories and back again. There are traditional themes, traditional views and a traditional treatment, in spite of the loud cry for novelty, and any theme, view or treatment violating the tradition, should it succeed to get by the vigilantes higher up, has to brave a combat with this traditional moving-picture taste.
The young story writer, like his more mature brother or sister, is infected with this influence and from the very beginning of his career looks askance at any doctrine that conflicts with his proud æstheticism. But in our profession it is seldom that he is required to be false to the culture of the screen. Our textbooks and the bombastic dogmas they largely exploit are themselves for the most part a product of the same culture. He is told to think in terms of action rather than in terms of idea and character. He is trained in the construction and management of situation and incident until, although not consciously intending to, he is able, like his more successful colleagues, to turn out passable photoplay material. Small wonder that most of our short stories abound in wooden characters, clumsily moving about on well-oiled springs, thinking stereotyped thoughts and talking wooden dialogue. The atmosphere fanning upon them has the hot fetid tang of the darkened-theatre air.
When told to write a story the student almost without hesitation betakes himself to his supreme source for plot material. It matters little that this material itself merely represents the adaptation of some fiction story. The moving pictures today could be used as another illustration of Emerson’s theory of circles, or is it merely a modification of the delightful pastime of see-saw of which we were so fond in our childhood? The scenario writer adapts the magazine story and the magazine story writer adapts the photoplay story, etc., etc., ad infinitum. Of course the disguising twist often goes with it, but the material nevertheless basically remains the same. And, as a matter of fact, from the point of view of salability the method is not without merit, everybody involved—the scenario editor, the producer, the public—recognizes in the revamped material an old friend, and, if the revamping has been done dexterously and ingeniously, glories in its novel familiarity. The failures employing this method are confined mainly to two classes of students—those who are temperamentally entirely out of tune with the moving-picture traditions, a small minority to be sure, and those who, though favorably attuned to the spirit of the silver sheet, fail to acquire the knack of giving their work the necessary disguising twist which passes for the much-vaunted novelty.
Admitting that it would be extremely difficult and perhaps even futile to attempt to wean the young student-majority away from the well-assimilated influence of the show house, one cannot avoid speculation upon what could be made by a serious-minded critical teaching profession of the open-minded minority diffidently seeking encouragement in their desire to follow newer traditions or to give birth to still newer ones. If for one chapter in our texts or for one semester in our institutions of learning the joy of creating for the mere love of it, for the sheer beauty of it, had been glorified as we glorify popularity and commercial success, what a buoyancy of spirit we could have engendered, what a fluttering of young wings!
For two years in succession a young woman came to my classes and each year she dropped out before the expiration of the term sending me a note of despair. She had traveled extensively through Europe and the Orient as well as through North and South America and she had accumulated a fund of experience to draw on for material. She tried hard to imprison it in story form but the finished product lacked thrill and suspense and airiness. She received nothing but the cold platitudes of printed rejection slips, while other students—as innocent of any knowledge of life as a fluffy ingénue capering through five reels of silent drama—who modeled their work along the lines of Popular Stories and the Jolly Book Magazine and the latest releases, and seasoned it with a generous dash of O. Henryism, occasionally displayed fair-sized checks. She worked away despondently and each succeeding story tended to prove that the text we were using and the current magazines we were studying were helping her but little. There was a heaviness, almost an eeriness, permeating her work, and yet it was a heaviness somewhat akin to that which permeates the work of Thomas Hardy. She admitted that most of the magazines we were studying bored her, that she preferred “Beyond the Horizon” and “John Ferguson” to “Irene” and “The Passing Show.” I advised her to write sombre tragedy, yes, morbid stuff. She produced a passably good story. It was rejected by the first magazine she sent it to with a personal letter expressing the editors’ regrets at their inability to accept such an interesting story, but they never purchased “depressing” material. Wouldn’t she be kind enough to let them see something else of her work, something in much lighter vein? She refused to try another market, insisting that she had known all along that she could not write. All the writers’ magazines she had read and even our own textbook declared most emphatically that “morbid” stories were not wanted. She discontinued her studies.
The next year she came back. “I can’t help writing,” she apologized. “I simply can’t resist the impulse to write. I don’t care if I don’t sell, I am going to write just for myself—whatever I like. I merely want you to see what I am doing.” A few months later she sold a tragic little tale to an unpopular little periodical. But she did not take advantage of this, her first success. Soon her work began to show labored flippancy and attempted ingenuity, and it looked ludicrously pathetic—a Hawthorne austerity with an H. C. Witwer lightness; the combination was irritably grotesque. Before the end of the year she dropped out again. And now she is back once more. Whether she will ever be able to cut away entirely from the cords of a moving-picture impulse only time can tell.
This case is a mild example of the struggle now waged with a sinister environment alien to all literary aspiration except for immediate gain by many lonely souls. Their resistance could be materially strengthened by sympathetic guidance. Contrary to the proverbial jibes of the cynics the literary aspirant is far from possessing an over-abundance of confidence. Intelligent persistence is a rare quality, not to be found among too many. The mediocre aspirant either soon deserts the ranks or begins to turn out salable wares. And the person with a genuine case of divine afflatus also either leaves the ranks with a curse in his heart or finally learns to turn out regulation material and becomes a cynic for life. Cynicism may be a much more admirable attitude than open-mouthed subservience, but it is not always conducive to sturdy accomplishment. Often it is a sense of surrender. And since missions seem to be such a popular necessity among our pedagogues and literary clergy, what could be a more worthy one than the saving of these lonely strugglers from life-long cynicism? But that requires, first of all, an intelligent and fearless weighing of the forces on either side and the rolling up of greater support on the side of the weaker. Truth and spontaneity are struggling against stifling commercialism and artifice; against a hostile environment resting complacently on old dilapidated dogmas, and chuckling contentedly with its moving-picture standards of life, art, and literature,—its moving-picture civilization.