Of late years I have been jumping between the New York theater and the studios of Hollywood, searching for the old spark of enthusiasm that made our lives so colorful, and I find Hollywood dull and depressing and the Broadway theater sad and discouraged. This sounds, I suppose, like the opinion of advanced age, but as a matter of fact it isn’t. I haven’t had a minute in the last thirty years in which to grow old and I share not at all in the pessimism of those who think the theater is doomed or the optimism of those who think the talking picture is all triumphant. I am absolutely sure in my own mind that the theater will advance and that the talking picture will fall back, not to ruin, because it fills a place in the lives of so many people that nothing can replace. But soon now both theater and pictures will have a clearly defined audience—a true drama for an audience that demands a mature form of entertainment and a fictional entertainment for the millions who demand a sugar-coating on their pill.

The picture men need not begrudge us this share of the amusement business because without a prosperous theater they would be in a bad fix. They are, and it seems to me they must always be, dependent in great measure on the theater for their raw material. The good play does not always make the best picture, but a produced play is easier to judge than an unproduced manuscript, and the highly successful play is always welcome on the screen.

Then, too, the best training school for actors is not the screen but the stage, although screen and stage acting are very different and the great actor of the stage is by no means sure of screen success, while a pretty girl or good-looking boy with no training at all can frequently do better work than an actor of long training. In the theater the actor projects his personality, on the screen the camera projects it—a very different thing. Still, however, the theater is needed by the screen and there is no reason for a feud between them. In fact, the dangers and the problems that confront the theater are less complex than those the screen is called upon to face. We have but one—to do good plays. I have another silver cup for any one who can persuade me that a really fine play has ever failed. On the other hand, ahead of the men who control the destiny of the talking picture there are many problems, almost staggering in their complexity. Let me try to state the vital one, from figures I have carefully prepared.

Twenty percent of the talking picture audience is composed of children. Another twenty percent consists of persons to whom the English language is in whole or in part unfamiliar. Sixty percent of the remaining percentage consists of those with what we may safely call immature minds, leaving an audience to be thrilled, amused and satisfied in which persons of a fair degree of culture and taste number some thirty odd percent. If you care to stop for a moment over these figures, you may find in them the answer to many of your moments of bewilderment. To satisfy this thirty odd percent, who do the writing of and the critical condemnation of talking pictures and at the same time to thrill this seventy percent who put up the money that makes them possible, is already a big problem and it grows bigger every day as the novelty of the mechanical device wears off, and the suitable supply of fiction becomes exhausted.

Hollywood to-day demands about four hundred good stories every year, and my third and last silver cup goes to the one who can list for me four hundred great stories written since the world began. Just for fun I tried my hand at making such a list, and from a rather extensive knowledge of the fiction and the plays of both the past and the present I was able to get two hundred and eight. After that they began to fall into squads with the precision of well-drilled soldiers and although many of them told the same story very charmingly it still remained a twice-told tale.

I had, reluctantly, agreed to make a trip to Hollywood the previous spring for Mr. Sheehan of the Fox Company, and there I had made for Will Rogers an adaptation of my friend Homer Croy’s novel, THEY HAD TO SEE PARIS, for the screen. As a result I had signed a six months’ contract starting in December. My experience with Famous Players Lasky Company had been unsatisfactory in spite of the real kindness of Mr. Lasky, and I felt that under the present conditions an author’s position in Hollywood left much to be desired. But I had the advantage of an unusual contract and I had two strong reasons for wanting to see more of Hollywood. The first reason was that both of my boys were there, and my wife and I are, I am afraid, rather too dependent on them and never completely satisfied unless they are near at hand. Then, too, I was greatly troubled by the difficulty of forming a fixed opinion of conditions out there and determined to at least satisfy myself that I understood them. I had never been able to see why a writer in Hollywood should be forced to deliver up his self-respect, and with it his only chance of being of real value. I saw both sides of the issue but to me the pressing need of the only men and women who are trained to write stories was so great that I thought it my duty, as one who has given a great part of his life to the effort to improve the condition of the men and women of his craft, to make an effort to find out if it wasn’t possible to break down the barrier that has always existed between New York writers and the studio executives in Hollywood.

Owen was a featured player for Fox and Donald was a staff writer and stage director. When I left New York I was pledged to a six months’ stay and had some difficulty in laying out my future plans with the degree of exactness that has become my habit; we got away at length, however, and I left behind me only the remains of one “tryout,” a farce called THE SHOTGUN WEDDING, produced by Wm. Harris, Jr., for a brief tour and never developed beyond that point, THE SHOTGUN WEDDING was funny, but not funny enough. Wm. Harris, Jr., is, I think, the best judge of a play of any man alive, although his critical judgment has been developed to the same extent that Sherlock Holmes developed his sense of deduction, and when it comes to discovering a clew to a bad play he could give Sherlock a stroke a hole.

Mrs. Davis and I joined the boys on the Coast early in December and we had a very comfortable and happy winter. I made an adaptation of SO THIS IS LONDON for Will Rogers, worked with Sam Behrman and wrote and adapted a number of stories. I like writing for the pictures, or at least I want to like it. It is not at all a difficult form and I can see no mystery in it. It is just story writing; the difference in technique is no more different than the step between farce and drama writing and nowhere near so different as the dramatic form and the modern method of building musical comedy.

The difficulty with picture writing is and always has been to get what one writes past one’s immediate supervisor and unfortunately this depends very little upon the value of what is written. Nowhere on earth are there so many totems, bugaboos and fetishes as there are in a motion picture studio and all argument is strictly forbidden. “Yes” is the only word ever spoken in the presence of the great out there, and an absurdity once perpetrated by executive order becomes a sacred custom and part of a ritual.

As a successful dramatist, I had become accustomed to having my opinion listened to with respect, and my judgment on questions of story construction was almost always final. I have had many differences with managers, but never heard of any dramatist who at least wasn’t given a chance to express his views on the work of his own brain and who was not consulted upon what was to be written into the story which was to bear his name. In Hollywood no author is ever considered to be of any importance at all. He ranks as a clerk to be put at any little job that comes to hand and after he has written a story, he never can by any possibility know what will be done to it before it gets to the screen. This is the outcome of the old days of silent pictures when a director took a company out on location and shot a story that he made up as he went along, very much as children who give shows for pins in a barn invent theirs. The talking picture brought something very like a drama form but the men in power, who had won their positions by using their own method, naturally enough prefer to keep on using it, in the first place because they had been successful with it, and in the second place because they don’t know any other.

In any study of the motion picture business it is always well to remember that it is a very wonderful thing to be able to send a show in a tin can by mail or express to any location in the world, and that the marvel of these talking figures was for a long time so great that only the most exacting worried much about what they talked about. If, however, the writing of picture stories is ever to offer any attraction at all to a writer beyond the very generous salary he is offered, it is quite obvious that some change must be made in the present system. Just now no writer could possibly find any other reason for writing screen stories than the money he makes out of it, and quite as obviously any writer with the skill they sorely need can make plenty of money without going there. Good writers of to-day are well paid and any man or woman of the reputation for success that they demand is very likely to be in a position of financial independence that frees him from any necessity of surrendering his dignity and his integrity. To be sure, plenty of writers are there now and plenty of others are probably anxious to go. But, as the good ones come to realize the absolutely hopeless task that confronts them, they will return to their former tasks, because they must, if they are ever going to write anything worth writing, preserve their originality of thought and style. Once they surrender that they are lost. Then it doesn’t in the least matter whether they go or stay, they won’t be worth anything in any case.

Hollywood is the strangest and the maddest place the world has ever seen. It is beautiful; its sunshine, its flowers, its bold sea coast with the blue Pacific challenging any beauty of Southern France or Italy, are really thrilling. It is a beehive of activity, it is the most cosmopolitan city in the world—and the dullest. For some reason one comes away from Hollywood with that impression stamped firmly in the memory. It’s a bore. Forget this “wild party” stuff. Don’t pay any attention to stories of the glamour and excitement of Hollywood. It’s just a dull place, a grand spot for winter golf, but a wash-out for any mature person who depends in the least upon mental stimulation; there isn’t any. The picture business is the second, or the third, or the first or some such silly number among the world’s industries, which is probably what’s the matter with Hollywood and with the motion pictures. They are standardized, circumscribed, advertised and circumcised to such an extent that all they can do is say “Mamma” when you step on them.

What is easily the best medium by which to gain the ear of the world has gained it under the splendid leadership of extremely clever and tireless business men, and, having gained it, doesn’t say anything worth listening to. The picture business in salesmanship, in organization, in mechanical and technical development, in direction and in photography is amazing, and there they stop. They fall down hard on the basic commodity they are selling; their story product isn’t good enough. They know this, of course, as well as I do, but they do not know the reason or at least those of them who do know the reason won’t tell the truth about it because if they did, it would mean the end of their importance.

They will tell you that their writers fall down on them and that is in fact true. I have been fighting authors’ battles all my life, but I have no defense to offer for the New York writer of big name and bigger salary who goes to Hollywood with a nose turned up in contempt and takes their money and makes wise cracks at their expense. I see their side of the case so clearly that for three years I have been trying to do something to clarify this situation. The barrier between real writers and the studios is, I am convinced, the greatest obstacle to the advance of motion pictures and the real trouble I can sum up in one sentence: “The picture stories are not written by authors, they are written by executives!”

During the winter in Hollywood I was a guest at a dinner given to Frederic Lonsdale, the English dramatist, by Arthur Richman. Around the tables in that room were fifty-four very well-known and very successful dramatists and novelists of New York and London. These men were there because they were successful and important men asked to meet and welcome a distinguished English writer to whom Mr. Richman wished to do honor. These fifty-four men have written many times fifty-four successful plays. They were not dated, worn out, or exhausted old fellows in their dotage, but men in their full swing—Sidney Howard, Louis Bromfield, Max Anderson, Laurence Stallings, A. E. Thomas, John Colton, Martin Flavin, Sam Behrman, and many more of the same importance, three Pulitzer Prize winners, three members of The National Institute; surely here was talent enough to write good stories. These fifty-four men were almost all of them questioned by me at some time during the winter and not one of them who had been writing in Hollywood for over a month could tell me that he had found it possible to do good work or that he could see any hope at all of ever being allowed to write the sort of thing that he had been successful enough in writing to cause the heads of the studios to pay him his large salary.

I heard stories told not in anger but in honest bewilderment that would have amazed me had they not been in line with the mass of information I had been collecting. Thirteen writers of standing had been given the same story to adapt to the screen, the idea being that bits of each would be collected by some inspired executive and formed into a masterpiece. Of course thirteen writers can’t write a story any more than thirteen cooks can bake a cake. One of the finest dramatists of our time had been for six weeks working on an adaptation of a novel and at the end of that time some one discovered that the rights to the novel belonged to another company. A fine novelist and a really distinguished dramatist were making over a dated and absurd old melodrama, while a very famous melodramatic craftsman sat in the next office trying to dramatize a very light and fluffy novel. The best dialogue writer in America, who is famous for his brilliant and sophisticated wit, was writing a Chicago gang war yarn, two very serious men of real literary taste were working together on a slapstick musical show, while two famous musical comedy writers were doing their best with an English drawing-room comedy.

And so it went. These men were well treated as in my experience all writers have been out there, contracts are always kept to the letter and salaries are always paid. The stories these writers were working on will very few of them ever see the screen, and those few will be made over time and time again under the eye of some supervisor. The assistance of trained screen writers will be called for and before any picture results practically nothing written by any one of the fifty-four men at that dinner will be left. Now I am going to admit that out of these fifty-four men it is extremely unlikely that there were five who knew enough about pictures to be able to write a proper “shooting script,” but I am not going to admit that in that room that night there weren’t brains and talent and energy enough to have written ten times more stories and ten times better ones than they ever were allowed to write.

If a ball club was formed of the nine best players in the leagues and that ball club lost every game, the sporting public would say that it was the result of bad handling, as of course it would be. If fifty-four men who have written several hundred good plays can’t write more than ten bad screen stories in six months my opinion is that they have been badly handled, and I see no other sane deduction from the facts.

Let me tell you, quite honestly, the usual experience of a writer who comes to Hollywood for the first time, not my own experience, but that of practically every man and woman with whom I have talked. The writer will be pleasantly and kindly received and a meeting will be arranged with the head of the studio. This gentleman will hand him a play or a novel and he will be asked to read it over, take a few days to think out a novel treatment of it, and hold himself ready to be called to a story conference.

After a day, or two, or three, or a week, or a month or something like that, for the studios are busy places and the executives’ time is valued far above rubies, the author is sent for and enters the presence. He is naturally ready with a carefully thought out method of treatment for the play or story he has been asked to study and eager to make a good first impression. Before he can tell his story, however, the executive will carelessly remark: “Did I tell you the ideas we had for this story?” The author will naturally reply that nobody has told him anything at all since his arrival except that “California is the most wonderful place in the world, and you don’t really mean to tell me that New York is still there.” Then the executive will inform him that “they” have some ideas of treatment of that story and perhaps he had better mention them. It has been decided not to have the scenes laid in China—“there have been too damned many of those Chink operas lately”—and anyway New York background is sure fire; the girl mustn’t be engaged to be married to the Unitarian missionary, she’s got to be the mistress of a side show barker, and earning her living as a high diver. “Will Hays can talk as much as he wants to but everybody knows what’s a proper costume for a high diver.”

Aside from that, and a happy ending, nobody wants to make any real changes in the story. The author, a bit bewildered but still anxious to make good here, makes the first concession that results in absolutely killing any hope of his knowledge and experience being of any value, as by now his creative power has been entirely pushed aside; he has joined the ranks of “picture writers” in five minutes.

Armed with the above-mentioned instructions, the author retires to his office, very probably the first office he ever had in his life, and starts to work. The studio is always generous in the time allowed, generous in fact in every way in their treatment of writers, and nobody rushes our hero who, in the course of time, say, three weeks, during which he has drawn a salary of from four hundred to six or seven times four hundred dollars each week, turns in his completed story.

This story is read and another story conference is called. Here the author meets the director and the supervisor. Every one of course knows what a director is. Some persons, however, and I am one of them, do not know exactly what supervisors are. As Mahomet was the Prophet of God so supervisors are there to add to the power and the glory, and their voices are softly tuned to utterance of the sweet word “yes.” At this first group conference it is stated that the story seems hopeless but stout hearts never despair and ideas begin to be thrown about the room with an ease that amazes the writer who, owing to the comparative poverty of his own powers of invention, is quite unable to keep up.

The results of this meeting are a complete recasting of the story. Now it’s back in China, but with a new set of characters and a different plot. After three weeks of story conferences, the director confides to the author that the trouble with this yarn is the supervisor is all wet and the best way out of it is for the author to come to his house at night and they’ll begin all over again and get a sure-fire knockout.

In two or three more weeks of hard work the story is ready and, owing to the great enthusiasm of the director, is “sold” to the studio executive and his O.K. is put on it. O.K.’s are very important, for without them no picture can be put into production. At last, however, the story is ready and the date of production arrives, the author’s story is actually about to be placed on the screen!—and how! The director, now that the picture is actually in production, is in absolute power, and he calmly throws away the story and strings together an entirely different one that is no more like the script so gravely O.K.’d than it is like the original one written by the author. Mad as this may seem it is actually what is being done in every studio.

Some supervisors are good men; they know better, but standing as they do between the devil and the deep blue sea they drift along. Many directors know a story, even if very few can write one, but the heritage of power is very strong and men who in the days of the silent pictures “shot their story on the cuff” bitterly resent any authority but their own, and write and produce only the sort of thing that they have learned by experience how to handle. The great directors, Frank Borzage, Louis Milestone, Lubitsch, King Vidor and a few others, know story values when they read them and have so much pride in their work that they can, like all strong men, afford to have less vanity. Directors from the theaters, like the De Milles, and others of the men who learned values in the library and the university, know of course the folly of such childish story building, but in the great volume of production their share is small. In spite of this the big man in Hollywood is the director—they are strong men, tireless, and creative.

The ideal screen story will, I think, always be written by the director or directed by the writer, the only difference here is in the words. The man who creates the mood of a story is the author of it, no matter by what name you call him. I have nothing but admiration for the director who can write a story or for the author who can direct one, but at present all directors without exception change and re-write every story they handle and there are one hundred and eight active directors in Hollywood. I think it fairly obvious that there are not and never have been and never will be one hundred and eight constructive story experts alive at any one time.

In any case, at the present writing the director is king and the writer is nobody. The opinion of the great of Hollywood as to the importance and the dignity of a writer was expressed by the head of one of the large companies who calmly announced during the early spring that he was about to try a new policy. He was going to discharge all his writers and engage new ones selected from men who had never written anything in their lives, to see if he couldn’t get some new ideas.

Aside from the absurdity of sending for a plumber when the baby is sick, the gentleman forgot that if his “new writers who had never written anything” had new ideas they would never in the world be allowed to use them. At present the motion pictures are an imitative and not a creative medium and I very much doubt if the gentleman ever met a new idea in all his life.

This is the present system and if its results are satisfactory to the men who have poured their millions into this industry then I am just another New York writer trying to tell Hollywood how to make pictures. If, however, there is any feeling that better work could be done, should be done, and must be done if this wonderful medium is ever to take the place it ought to take in our national life, if this advance of two hundred million is to be held and satisfied, then there is one way to do it, and only one.

The answer is very simple, so simple as to make it seem silly. Put in every studio a real editor with full authority. There isn’t one in Hollywood, and there never has been. Such a man could save each of the four great studios from half a million to a million a year simply by killing the impossible junk before it goes into production. Such a man knows writers and how to make them write. He knows how to make them earn their salary or how to get rid of them; that’s his business. It’s folly to say that such men can’t be had. Every great newspaper has one; so does every big publishing house; and when they die others are found to take their place. What they don’t know about pictures they could learn. Every editor learns the taste and wants of the public he serves. Bob Davis sat in Munsey’s office and picked the fiction for five different publications with five different classes of readers, and when he couldn’t find the type of story he wanted, he took a writer to lunch and in a month he had it.

That’s just an editor’s job. It is possible that even a fine editor might make some mistakes until he learned the taste of the picture public, but are there no mistakes made now? What percentage of pictures produced to-day is satisfactory, even to the companies who produce them? Think it over! I am one of the few writers who enjoyed writing for the screen, partly because of a habit I have of laughing at silly people, and partly because I love to write anything at all. I am not of the number who couldn’t catch the trick and retired in anger and contempt. When I left Hollywood in June it was because I “had a play,” and I have more offers to return there than one man could by any possibility take advantage of. I am too old a writer and too deeply devoted to my craft to hesitate to set down the result of three years of thought. I have never, in the theater or in Hollywood, sold to any man my right to free speech or freedom of thought and it is rather late for me to change.

It is a curious thing how, in the amusement business, history keeps on repeating itself. In the years I have been a student of conditions in this field, I have seen the rise and fall of many different forms of popular entertainment. The great chain of theaters of the Klaw and Erlanger Syndicate, the Stair and Havlin circuit of cheap theaters, the once highly popular stock houses—the Keith vaudeville, the old Columbia burlesque wheel, the circus, the skating rinks, all of these sprang into popularity under the guidance of shrewd showmanship. Their amazing profits drew big investors who poured their money in, building new theaters, consolidating chains of old ones, enlarging, spreading out. Then, long before the capital engaged could earn any real return, the boom was over and the investing public held the bag. There has never been a year when more money hasn’t been lost in theatrical ventures than has been made. I think the reason is that the men we have called shrewd showmen are in reality only shrewd business men and the enterprises started by their energy and ambition have first languished and then died because these men in every case failed to learn the rules of the game they were playing.

To satisfy and hold the interest of any great percentage of the public is a big job for a catch-penny showman. The reactions of a composite audience might well be studied by scientific minds. Two Topseys and two Lawyer Marks’s couldn’t keep the old UNCLE TOM’S CABIN shows alive. The old minstrel shows died of their own unimaginative elaboration; three-ring circuses only postponed the evil days for the tent shows where perhaps something new in one ring might have saved them. You can’t make a business out of any form of show business that will stand up beyond the point where the brains are in the business and not in the show.