“I had all the synopses numbered and put on top here,” he went on, “so you can run them over and see what they’re like.  A small company will do, Luck.  That’s one point that struck me.  Two or three die, on an average, in the first four hundred feet of every story; so you can double a lot.  I’ve had Clements go over them and start the carpenters on the street set where most of the exterior action takes place; we’re behind on releases, you know, and these ought to be rushed.  You’d better go over and see how he’s making out; you may want to make some changes.”

Luck hesitated so long that Martinson was on the edge of withdrawing the proffered scripts.  But he took them finally, and ran his eye disparagingly over the titles.  “Bently Brown!” he said, as though he were naming something disagreeable.  “I’m to film Bently Brown’s blood-and-battle stuff, am I?” He grinned, with the corners of his mouth tipped downward so that you never would have suspected it of ever producing Luck’s famous smile.  “I might turn them into comedy,” he suggested.  “I expect I could get a punch by burlesquing—­”

“Punch!” Martinson pushed his chair back impetuously.  “Punch?  Why, my godfrey, man, that stuff’s all punch!”

Luck curved a palm over his too-expressive mouth while he skimmed the central idea from two or three synopses.  Martinson watched him uneasily.  Martinson claimed to keep one finger pressed firmly upon the public pulse—­wherever that may be found—­and to be ever alert for its warning flutterings.  Martinson claimed to know a great deal about what the public liked in the way of moving pictures.  He believed in Luck’s knowledge of the West, but he did not believe that the public would stand for the real West at all; the public, he maintained, wanted its West served hot and strong and reeking with the smoke of black powder.  So—­

“Well, the market demands that sort of thing,” he declared, arguing against that curved palm and the telltale wrinkles around Luck’s eyes.  “It’s all tommyrot, of course.  I don’t say it’s good; I say it’s the stuff that goes.  We’re here to make what the public will pay to look at.”  Martinson, besides keeping his finger on the public pulse and attending to the marketing of the Acme wares and watching that expenses did not run too high, found a little time in which to be human.  “I know, Luck,” the human side of him observed sympathetically; “it’s just made-to-order melodrama, but business is simply rotten, old man.  We’ve just got to release films the market calls for.  There’s no art-for-art’s-sake in the movie business, and you know it.  Now, personally, I like that scenario of yours—­”

“Forget it!” said Luck crisply, warning him off the subject.  To make the warning keener-edged, he lifted the typed sheets over which he had worked so late the night before, glanced at the top one, gave a snort, and tore them twice down the length of them with vicious twists of his fingers.  He did not mean to be spectacular; he simply felt that way at that particular moment, and he indulged the impulse to destroy something.  He dropped the fragments into Martinson’s waste basket, picked up the bundle of scripts and his hat, and went out with his mouth pulled down at the corners and with his neck pretty stiff.