from the one he wrote last week to insure its ‘getting by’ the scenario editor, the director and ‘the boss.’  And that is just the point:  Although many of these plots do ‘get by’ the powers that be (or the staff writer would not be holding his job), the photoplay-loving public knows only too well that there is a lamentably close relationship between ‘A Wall Street Romance,’ shown at the Novelty Theatre last night, and ‘Love and Business,’ produced by the same company and ‘featured’ at the same theatre three weeks ago.  Therefore the constant demand in nine out of every ten studios for good material from outside writers.  Since the writer of photoplay plots must write action-stories constantly, and since, as has been said, the staff writers are just as apt to run dry of new plots as are any other writers, it follows that there must be a market at all times for the really original and highly interesting story, no matter by whom written.  If the big photoplay producing companies are to remain in business, if their various stars are to be kept working, and their rate of production up to schedule, there must continue to be a fairly steady flow of good, new stories into the scenario department."[2]

[Footnote 2:  “What Chance Has the ‘Outside’ Writer?” by Arthur Leeds, Moving Picture Stories, October 5, 1917.]

No, the field is not overcrowded—­with capable writers; nor is it likely to be.  With incapable amateurs it undoubtedly is.  Every walk of life has contributed its share to the thousands who are trying to write photoplays.  Hundreds fail because they are both illiterate and totally unfitted for the work.  Hundreds more struggle on without a sufficient knowledge of dramatic values and plot building, not knowing precisely what can and what can not be presented successfully in the silent drama.  Lacking this knowledge, it is impossible to succeed.  But the great majority of the ones who fail, and who, otherwise, would almost certainly have succeeded sooner or later, owe their failure to their inability to hit upon and develop original, ingenious and dramatic or truly humorous plots and plot-situations.  Many a man of brains and of excellent education who in any other calling might easily make his mark, finds himself totally unable to win success in short-story writing and photoplay writing simply because, not having an imaginative or (in the literary sense) creative mind, he neglects the thousand-and-one opportunities to stock that unimaginative mind with ideas furnished wholesale by the life he sees about him every day, or by available books of reference, magazines and daily papers; and, last, but far from least in importance, the pictured stories seen on the screen.

CHAPTER III

PHOTOPLAY TERMS