Notwithstanding the great advances in the art of moving-picture production during the last few years, and the corresponding improvement in the film-stories shown, the great mass of photoplay patrons are still, as they always were, of the middle class.  Better pictures have gradually drawn into the picture theatres a more highly educated type of patron, but very few exhibitors would stay in business if the middle-class spectators were to discontinue their attendance.  The average working man can take his little family to the picture theatre, say once a week, for fifty cents, whereas it would cost him about that sum for one poor seat in a first-class regular theatre.  Hence the immense popularity of the picture theatre, and hence too the necessity for effort on the part of the theatre manager to please all his patrons.

First, of course, he must please the majority, but he must by no means overlook the tastes of the minority.  Every man, as the wise proprietor knows, enjoys most what he understands best.  The plain people are not necessarily the unintelligent ones, for the working man can both understand and enjoy pictured versions of Dante’s Inferno and Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, but he will feel more at home while watching a picture of contemporary American life; and who shall say, provided the photoplay be a good one, that he is not receiving as much profit therefrom as from the film version of either of the classics!

The really successful photoplaywright is nothing if not versatile.  Unless he is content to have a very limited market, he more than any other type of professional writer must be able to write for all classes.

Furthermore, he must be able to write on a variety of themes.  The photoplaywright who can produce only Western dramas, or stories dealing with slum life, will find his sales averaging very low as compared with the author who can construct a society drama, a Western story, a photoplay of business life, a story of the Kentucky mountains, or still other types.  To be able to write photoplays that will appeal to every class of photoplay patron is the supreme test of the photoplaywright.

These words of a celebrated French novelist and playwright, Ludovic Halevy, are worthy of attention: 

“We must not write simply for the refined, the blase, and the squeamish.  We must write for that man who goes there on the street with his nose in his newspaper and his umbrella under his arm.  We must write for that fat, breathless woman whom I see from my window, as she climbs painfully into the Odeon omnibus.  We must write courageously for the bourgeois, if it were only to try to refine them, to make them less bourgeois.  And if I dared, I should say that we must write even for fools.”

3.  A High Quality of Imagination Demanded

Another well-known French dramatist, Marcel Prevost, who is a photoplaywright as well, in a recent issue of the Paris Figaro replied to a question whether motion pictures are harmful to the legitimate theatre, by stating that, while he likes the pictures, their authors are lacking in imagination.