Writing the Photoplay | Page 3

necessary. A discussion of this point should help to impress on the student just what sort of preparation will be of the greatest assistance to him in the work he is taking up.
1. Experience in Fiction Writing Valuable to the Photoplaywright
Let us consider the case of a man born with a talent and love for music. As he grows up, he learns to play upon the violin--learns as hundreds have done, by first taking up the most simple exercises and constantly working up until he becomes more proficient. As in all other occupations, practice eventually brings skill, and he at last becomes a master of the violin. He may have been born a genius--it has always been in him to become the exceptional performer upon the instrument of his choice. Nevertheless, the hard work was necessary, as that maker of epigrams saw when he said that genius was an infinite capacity for taking pains.
To carry the simple illustration a step further: geniuses are few, so it is certain that our artist has become a master of the violin because he is a man who, loving his work and putting his whole soul into it, daily improved in technique and quality by intelligent labor. If he is a concert performer, he feels his art becoming more perfect with each new recital. He has learned how to play, and now there remains nothing but the necessity for keeping constantly--note the expressive phrase--in practice, and improving the quality and style of his playing.
Let us suppose, now, that this musical artist is offered an exceptionally good salary to appear in vaudeville with another musician, who performs equally well upon two or three, or even more, very different instruments. He accepts the offer; he and his partner "open" in the act; and, after a week or two, in order to "build up" the act as well as to become capable of playing another kind of instrument, he decides to take up the study of the cornet. The violin and cornet are, of course, widely different in construction, and they produce very different effects. Besides, the methods of producing those effects are totally unlike, since one is drawn from the violin with the aid of trained hands and fingers, while the other is produced by the skillful operation of the human lips, tongue and lungs, with only minor assistance from the fingers. Yet the tones of these two instruments may be equally harmonious and pleasing when each is skillfully played. So, in the course of time, the violinist becomes almost, if not quite, as accomplished a player upon the cornet as he is upon the instrument whose study first engrossed him.
And now a question--one which certainly should not admit of much difference of opinions in the answering: Of two men, both possessed of a natural talent and love for music, which would be likely first to learn to play upon the cornet correctly and with pleasing expression--the man who had previously learned the technique of violin playing, together with the meaning and value of musical terms, or the one who, without any knowledge of music or of how to perform, should suddenly determine to learn to play a given instrument?
2. Photoplay Writing Requires a Separate Training
Apply the same reasoning to the question of who should become the most successful photoplaywright--the trained and experienced fiction writer, or the ordinarily intelligent and imaginative follower of some other vocation, who is suddenly struck by the idea that he could, and filled with the determination that he will, write a photoplay. We accentuate the word become in order to emphasize the fact that even the professional writer must learn the technique of photoplay construction before he can hope to produce a script that will not only be accepted by a film manufacturing company for production, but will be produced exactly as he has written it, _without the need of drastic revision or rewriting_. This, however, is very rare today.
This last point is important. While, as we have said, it is improbable that an experienced fiction writer would fail in the field of photoplay writing once he had learned to put the plot together in proper form and had mastered a knowledge of the limitations of the moving-picture stage, it is also just as unlikely that the most famous writer living could legitimately sell a photoplay that was essentially faulty in construction and absolutely lacking in screen quality. If the idea were a good one and the writer were to submit it to the producing company under his own name, the chance is that the company would accept it, and, after using his idea to construct the photoplay in proper form, produce and even feature it--on account of the big name won in the field of fiction writing. If, on the