If there is anything which introduces a characteristic element into the creation of the photoplay as against all other arts, it may be found in the undeniable fact that the photoplay always demands the cooeperation of two inventive personalities, the scenario writer and the producer.  Some collaboration exists in other arts too.  The opera demands the poet and the composer; and yet the text of the opera is a work of literature independent and complete in itself, and the music of the opera has its own life.  Again, every musical work demands the performer.  The orchestra must play the symphonies, the pianist or the singer must make the melodies living, the actors must play the drama.  But the music is a perfect work of art even before it is sung or played on an instrument, just as a drama is complete as a work of literature even if it never reaches the stage.  Moreover it is evident that the realization by actors is needed for the photoplay too.  But we may disregard that.  What we have in mind is that the work which the scenario writer creates is in itself still entirely imperfect and becomes a complete work of art only through the action of the producer.  He plays a role entirely different from that of the mere stage manager in the drama.  The stage manager carries out what the writer of the drama prescribes, however much his own skill and visual imagination and insight into the demands of the characters may add to the embodiment of the dramatic action.  But the producer of the photoplay really must show himself a creative artist, inasmuch as he is the one who actually transforms the plays into pictures.  The emphasis in the drama lies on the spoken word, to which the stage manager does not add anything.  It is all contained in the lines.  In the photoplay the whole emphasis lies on the picture and its composition is left entirely to the producing artist.

But the scenario writer must not only have talent for dramatic invention and construction; he must be wide awake to the uniqueness of his task, that is, he must feel at every moment that he is writing for the screen and not for the stage or for a book.  And this brings us back to our central argument.  He must understand that the photoplay is not a photographed drama, but that it is controlled by psychological conditions of its own.  As soon as it is grasped that the film play is not simply a mechanical reproduction of another art but is an art of a special kind, it follows that talents of a special kind must be devoted to it and that nobody ought to feel it beneath his artistic dignity to write scenarios in the service of this new art.  No doubt the moving picture performances today still stand on a low artistic level.  Nine tenths of the plays are cheap melodramas or vulgar farces.  The question is not how much larger a percentage of really valuable dramas can be found in our theaters.  Many of their plays are just as much an appeal to the lowest instincts.  But at least the theater is not forced to be satisfied