After all, as has been pointed out, the trouble with many young writers is that they are not content with copying a single situation.  They have not been “in the game” long enough to realize either the risk that they are taking or the wrong that they are doing a fellow writer, so they not only adapt to their own needs a strong situation in another’s story but precede and follow it with other incidents and situations which are substantially the same as those surrounding the big situation in the original story.

But giving an old theme a new twist is a trick of the trade that comes only with experience, and experience is gained by practice.  Experience and practice soon teach the photoplaywright not to rely too heavily upon the newspaper for new ideas, for almost every day editors receive two or more plots which closely resemble each other, simply because the writers, having all chosen the same theme, have all worked that theme up in the same way—­the obvious way, the easiest way, the way that involves the least care, and therefore the least ingenuity.

“Where do the good plots come from, anyhow?” asks John Robert Moore.  “We people in universities often amuse ourselves by tracing stories back to their origins.  The trouble is that we often reach the limit of our knowledge, but rarely find the beginning; for the plot seems to be as old as the race.  What, then, has been changed in a story which has been raised from a mediaeval legend to a modern work of art?

“In such cases, the setting and the moral content are almost invariably altered.  An absurdly comic story about an Irishman and a monkey, which was current a couple of centuries ago, became ’The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ in the hands of Poe.  The central plot remained much the same, but the whole of the setting and the intellectual content assumed a new and vastly higher significance.  ‘The Bottle Imp’ harks back to the Middle Ages; but Stevenson made a world-famous story of it by giving it the flavor of the South Sea Islands which he knew so well.”

So there are both discouragement and cheer for those who accept the Wise Man’s dictum that there is nothing new under the sun.  In the one aspect, there seems little chance for the novice since the primary plots are really so few; but in the other view, fresh arrangements of old combinations are always possible for those who see life with open eyes, alert minds, warm hearts, and the resolve to be as original as they can.

CHAPTER XX

COMPLETE FIVE-REEL PHOTOPLAY SCRIPT “EVERYBODY’S GIRL”

Adapted from “O.  Henry’s” Short-Story, “Brickdust Row,” by A. Van Buren Powell, and Produced in Film Form by The Vitagraph Company[35]

[Footnote 35:  Used by permission.  Copyright, 1918, by the Vitagraph Company of America.  All rights reserved.]

The mere reading of the following photoplay script will not do you any good.  To get any benefit from it you must study it.