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Show FINDING THE MOVIE PLOT l. .,- ,. .. . By WTXL M. EITOHEY, Well Known Photoplaywright. BEFORE anyone may aspire to writing saleable scenarios he must have the ability to recognize what to use and what not to use in his story. After all, a motion picture is a method of telling a story, and there must be a plot to hold it together. How to see a plot when' it arises m the mind is the problem. It is a trite saying, but a true one, that plots are to be found every time one comes in contact with human activity. ac-tivity. The difficulty is in discarding the unessential and holding to that which speeds along the drama of the story. Thus a newspaper paragraph may suggest, not something to be copied, but something widely different in appearance but having the same fundamental theme. The dramas of every day, modern life surround us. One has only to take some striking fea-ture, fea-ture, dress it with action relating to that feature, and work it out to some logical conclusion. But that is not aB easy as it sounds. It is not a plot merely to have the history of a character's life. While 1 the whole life may be interesting, it ' may be made up of many ldistinct events, around each of which a plot could be woven. What went before the particular event, or followed after, should not be told unless it relates directly di-rectly to that event. Life, of course, is all struggle, and what the dramatist strives to do is to 1 reflect it so that his audience will say, j "Why, that's true to life. I never i realized it before." But woven into the major struggle of existence are i many separate threads, each individual. Each thread may" be regarded as a plot. A man wishes something. lie plans to get it. Someone else wants the same thing. They struggle to gain possession. Their struggle grows more fierce until one gains the mastery. Then he obtains the object of his desire. I There is your plot m a nutshell. ' |