4.  Advance in Requirements

The real change has come within the past ten or twelve months.  A sort of weeding process has been carried on by the various manufacturers, and as a result they recognize certain writers as being capable of supplying them, at more or less regular intervals, with the kind of scripts they want, quite as certain magazine editors have lists of story-writers to whom they look for the bulk of their fiction.  Gradually this list of trained and capable, and consequently successful, writers for the screen is growing larger, for daily some new writer is demonstrating that the freshness, brightness, and ingenuity of his ideas warrant the editor’s putting him on the list of those from whom good material may be expected.

5.  The Demand for Photoplays

Is there not, therefore, it may be asked, a probability of the field’s becoming overcrowded?

Hardly.  The best proof of the opportunity that is held out to the capable outside writer, new or old, is that the staff-writers, whose duty it should be to make adaptations of plays and novels and write the scenario, or continuity, for stories bought from free-lance writers in synopsis form, are kept pretty busy writing so-called “original stories” for certain stars, or stories that may be “done” in certain parts of the country at a particular season of the year.  If enough thoroughly good stories could be purchased on the outside, staff writers would never be called upon to write stories to order; only what might be called “inspired” stories would be accepted from them.  Furthermore, if plenty of good, original stories, written directly for screen presentation, could be purchased by the editors, the practice of making screen adaptations of popular novels and stage plays would be cut down by more than half.

“Suppose that the staff writer suddenly gets the ’flash’—­the inspiration needed to write a Western story with a plot that is infinitely bigger and more dramatic than anything that he has done in a great many months.  Thinking it over, he gradually becomes brimful of the theme and its plot-possibilities.  He wants to feed the paper into his trusty typewriter and start pounding out the scenario before a single bit of the suddenly inspired plot can get away from him.  But he cannot; his company does not make Western stories; nor does it permit its staff writers to sell their work to other firms.  Even if it did, he is far too busy to give the time to the writing of a story not intended for the use of his own particular studio.

“So the inspired story has to be laid aside, possibly to be worked upon some time in the future, when he has severed his connection with that company and, by choice or of necessity, become a free-lance writer again.  Instead of writing that story he sits down and writes another society drama, after cudgeling his brain for some time in an effort to think up a plot that is, at least, different enough