Another thing to remember is that—­aside from the moving-pictures exhibited in the various “regular” theatres—­dozens of incidents which are shown on the regular stage without being questioned in any way, would never be allowed on the screen.  This is partly due to the fact that such a large percentage of the attendants of moving-picture theatres are children and undiscriminating adults.  The writer of fiction entering the field of photoplay writing will do well to bear this further fact in mind:  the very incident that might be the means of selling a story to a certain magazine might be the cause of a rejection if introduced into a moving-picture plot.  The photoplay has standards all its own.

“One type of the unpleasant drama,” says a writer in the Photoplay Magazine, “is the kind showing scenes of drinking and wild debauchery, where some character becomes drunk and slinks home to his sickly wife, beats her, and then, finally, after reaching the last stages of becoming a sot, suddenly braces up and reforms.”  The same writer also remarks:  “The only time that murder should be shown, and that very delicately, is either in a detective drama or else in good tragedy, where the removal of some character is essential to the plot.”  “Every one of Shakespeare’s tragedies tells of crime,” says an editorial in The Moving Picture World, “but does not exploit it, and never revels in the harrowing details to produce a thrill.”

It is not to be denied that careless and unthinking directors are responsible for a good deal of what is objectionable on the screen.  At the same time—­and this is especially true of comedy subjects—­the director is merely, as a rule, carrying out the author’s suggestions, if not his actual directions.  The best way is not to give the director the opportunity to adopt objectionable features—­leave even questionable incidents out of your photoplay.

For example, the elopement is legitimate moving-picture material, provided it is not introduced in such a way as to instill mischief into the minds of young men and women.  At least one picture was produced a year or so ago which showed two high-school girls eloping with a couple of young rakes who in another part of the photoplay “registered” that they were by no means the kind of young men who would ever have received the sanction of the girls’ parents to marry their daughters.  Such a picture may have been conceived innocently enough, but as a subject that would be shown to thousands of young people all over the world it was decidedly deserving of censure.  And yet some of the very incidents that served to make the picture doubly objectionable in the eyes of grown people, especially fathers and mothers, might have been the result of the director’s unthinkingly adding certain scenes that served to portray young men in a bad light—­incidents which were not even thought of by the author when he planned his picture of a youthful escapade.  We sympathize with the lovers when Dorothy’s father refuses to let her marry Jack, to whom she is plainly devoted.  But when, in another scene, we see Jack wasting his time in pool-rooms or lounging in a saloon, we give the father credit for being a good judge of character, and not simply a harsh and stubborn guardian.