Writers should remember that even though a film is passed by the National Board, if it gets into a city in which the local censorship board objects to one or two scenes, these scenes will be literally cut out for exhibition in that city.  Afterwards, they may be put back; but if this happens in several communities, the film is likely to be shortened by many feet, since in cutting and re-splicing each cut means the loss of at least two “frames,” or pictures, and even more if the operator does not know his business—­not to mention the loss of the actual scenes cut out.  Suppose that two or three of a writer’s “strong” scenes are cut when his picture is shown—­in Detroit, for instance—­the result on the screen is more likely to become an illogical and incoherent jumble than the powerful “drama with a punch” he had intended it to be.  But “Censorship realizes,” says Mr. A.W.  Thomas, in the Photoplay Magazine, “as does every editor and author, that morality is to be desired, and to this end, crime or suggestion of crime is presented, as a rule, to convey the moral.  ’Crime for crime’s sake’ is to be condemned.  Sensationalism and forbidden themes are seldom seen nowadays.”

Aside from murder and suicide, why is it that so many young authors imagine that to be strong a story must have at least one violent or tragic death-scene?  That there are hundreds of gripping stories, pictures with the biggest kind of “punch,” in which no death or suggestion of death is shown, is well-known to every photoplay patron whose mind and heart are in good working order.  And yet editors are every day returning scripts in which a murder, a suicide, a death as the result of a duel, or a death arising from disease or accident, is shown—­all for no other reason than that the writer imagines he is thereby producing a strong drama.

3.  Depressing Dramas

Death in a picture is neither undesirable nor out of place—­provided it is necessary to the proper and inevitable development of the plot.  But the mistaken idea that to snuff out a human life in a thrilling or a heart-rending manner, when there is really no logical necessity for it, makes a picture either strong or dramatic is responsible for scores of unaccepted scripts.  Yet it would not be well to try to apply to all picture stories Mr. George Cohan’s motto, “Always leave them laughing,” for, as every intelligent exhibitor knows, and as a certain producer once said, “they come to weep as well as to laugh.”  The point that seems to have escaped many young writers is this:  There is very often a more decided, a more convincing, and a far more welcome, “punch” in a scene which shows the saving of a human life than there is in one which shows a death, even of the most unworthy character in the cast.  To have your villain nursed back to life by the man whom he has so persistently and cruelly persecuted, and then to have him show the change of heart that one would expect in him in the circumstances, will be far more dramatic and gripping in the eyes of an intelligent audience than to have your hero “hurl the black-hearted ruffian to his doom” over a cliff a thousand feet high.