Several complex methods of making visible scenarios are listed in this work.  Here is one that is mechanically simple.  Let the man searching for tableau combinations, even if he is of the practical commercial type, prepare himself with eight hundred signs from Egypt.  He can construct the outlines of his scenarios by placing these little pictures in rows.  It may not be impractical to cut his hundreds of them from black cardboard and shuffle them on his table every morning.  The list will contain all elementary and familiar things.  Let him first give the most literal meaning to the patterns.  Then if he desires to rise above the commercial field, let him turn over each cardboard, making the white undersurface uppermost, and there write a more abstract meaning of the hieroglyphic, one that has a fairly close relation to his way of thinking about the primary form.  From a proper balance of primary and secondary meanings photoplays with souls could come.  Not that he must needs become an expert Egyptologist.  Yet it would profit any photoplay man to study to think like the Egyptians, the great picture-writing people.  There is as much reason for this course as for the Bible student’s apprenticeship in Hebrew.

Hieroglyphics can prove their worth, even without the help of an Egyptian history.  Humorous and startling analogies can be pointed out by opening the Standard Dictionary, page fifty-nine.  Look under the word alphabet.  There is the diagram of the evolution of inscriptions from the Egyptian and Phoenician idea of what letters should be, on through the Greek and Roman systems.

In the Egyptian row is the picture of a throne, [Illustration] that has its equivalent in the Roman letter C. And a throne has as much place in what might be called the moving-picture alphabet as the letter C has in ours.  There are sometimes three thrones in this small town of Springfield in an evening.  When you see one flashed on the screen, you know instantly you are dealing with royalty or its implications.  The last one I saw that made any particular impression was when Mary Pickford acted in Such a Little Queen.  I only wished then that she had a more convincing throne.  Let us cut one out of black cardboard.  Turning the cardboard over to write on it the spirit-meaning, we inscribe some such phrase as The Throne of Wisdom or The Throne of Liberty.

Here is the hieroglyphic of a hand:  [Illustration] Roman equivalent, the letter D. The human hand, magnified till it is as big as the whole screen, is as useful in the moving picture alphabet as the letter D in the printed alphabet.  This hand may open a lock.  It may pour poison in a bottle.  It may work a telegraph key.  Then turning the white side of the cardboard uppermost we inscribe something to the effect that this hand may write on the wall, as at the feast of Belshazzar.  Or it may represent some such conception as Rodin’s Hand of God, discussed in the Sculpture-in-motion chapter.