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Show f I . i j Authors on the Screen ! j j j By Frederic J. Haskin. j j 4 NEW YOKIC, Aig. IT. T::e re.-ent formation for-mation of a corporation t:' authors to supervise tae screening vt their own novels is the greatest sensation that the movie industry has yet produced. It was amazing enough when our secretary of the treasury went into the moving picture business, but that Rex Beach and Mary Roberts Rinehart and several other well known novelists should attempt to produce pro-duce their own pictures is regarded as nothing less than epoch-making The new e n t e rp r t d e bears i : ; e m o d est name of the Kminent Authors Pictures corporation, the eminent authors being Gouverneur Morris, It ex Beach. Bail King, Rupert Hughes, Leroy Scott, Gertrude Ger-trude Atherton and Mary Roberts Kino-hart. Kino-hart. The president is Rex Reach and the chief stockholder is Samuel Coldwyu, well known moving picture producer. The chief object of the organization, as announced an-nounced by the members, is to improve the standard of screen versions. This is to be done by permitting each author to super vise the production of his own work. The writing of the continuity, or the seenarioiz.ii g of his story, will -be under his direction ; he will choose the player f"r each part, and he will select the place where the picture is to bo made, in order to secure the proper local color. In photographing Mr. Beach's story. "The Silver Horde," for example, the company will be sent to the northern Pacific coast, where pictures may be obtained of the great salmon canneries. Only authors are to be featured by the new corporation. The stars may be mentioned men-tioned on the screen, of course, but it will be in small print. It is to be thoroughly thor-oughly understood that the story and not the star is the important consideration, which is something startlingly new in the movio business. Heretofore, stories have always been selected to suit the personalities personali-ties of various stars; now for the first time stars are to be selected to suit the characters in various stories. In the past, and to a groat extent in the present, it has been the custom of the movie producer to buy a story outright from its author, and then turn it over to his scenario department to be put into true movie form. Usually this process was referred to as "whipping the story into shape," and, as Rupert Hughes points out it was frequently "so unusually wnipped that the blood ran out and the shape was a ruin." "The author of a book or play that had pleased multitudes and earned fortunes," says Mr. Hughes, "was mysteriously supposed sup-posed to be unable to contribute to the picturizatlon of his material anything important im-portant enough to repay for the time and trouble of listening to him." It is quite common for a continuity writer to eliminate elimi-nate certain characters altogether and to insert others; to change the character of the heroine so as to play up the dimples or the small feet or any other particular asset of the star, and generally so to mutilate the entire story that the author is happily unable to recognize It and the movie fans go home wondering if ihey hadn't made a mistake in supposing they had read the thing. In some instances companies have paid five and ten thousand thou-sand dollars for a story and then have made use of nothing but the title and the author's name. In excuse of this practico, the movie people have always declared that the average novel was unsuitable for screen use in its original form. It is an entirely1 different matter to explain an incident by dialogue, they point out, and to explain ex-plain It by pictures. Like the theater, the screen has certain technicalities which the novelist does not understand. Furthermore", Fur-thermore", experience has shown that certain cer-tain things are successful on the screen, so far as the public is concerned, and that some things are extremely unsuccessful. It is impossible, for instance, to make the public like a picture in which the heroine is not a sweet, good natiired little creature who never willingly did a wrong. The heroes must always be noble and at the same time athletic, while no moving picture pic-ture audience will tolerate a picture which does not end with a fade out of the embracing em-bracing couple with a snappy subtitle to the effect that they lived happily ever after. In one picture the heroine was permitted to commit suicide by Jumping into a live volcano, but this was because death In this Instance was preferable to certain living conditions which she faced. With these specific rules laid down early in the movie game, it was only natural that for a long time screen versions ver-sions of famous or successful novels were not overwhelmingly popular. One frequently fre-quently heard it stated throughout the industry that the only really successful movies were those written by men and women who had never written anything else but scenarios. This was encouraging, because It was supposed to Indicate that the movies were developing their own particular par-ticular form of art. Moreover, added to this evidence against the novel scenario was the modest conviction of the stars that the picture really didn't imatter anyway that the public actually came to tho movies to see its favorite players. Such was the situation when Ben Hampton Hamp-ton of publishing fame entered the moving mov-ing picture business. It was he who brought the publisher's point of view into the industry, and who raised the prestige of the author in the movies by permitting him to make suggestions as to the screening screen-ing of his stories. He formed a company known as Great Authors' Pictures, Inc., with Rex Beach, Zane Grey, Stewart Edward Ed-ward White, Irving Bacheller, Winston Churchill and others under contract. The first picture produced, Beach's "The Barrier." Bar-rier." proved a great success, although the. author had supervised the writing of the continuity, had picked the locations, chosen the character types, and was present pres-ent when the picture was filmed. The same was true of the next picture turned out by the company, which was Zane Grey's "Desert Gold." In this case Mr. Grev even superintended the cutting of the film. As a result of these successes, the whole industry became intensely interested in authors. It still clung to the opinion that the author should be kept away from the studio, however, and attributed the success suc-cess of Hampton's picture solely to the popularitv of his authors' names. Everybody Every-body seemed to see at once that the million mil-lion or so people who had read some author's au-thor's stories in one of our large American Amer-ican magazines and had liked them would naturally want to see the same stories on the screen. So. the author became the rage or, to be absolutely correr-t, the successful" suc-cessful" author, with a loud emphasis on the adjective. Companies bf-.gan to pay fabulous sums for the picture richt s of novels or plays, arjd .to fea lure the a !-triors' !-triors' names above the names of the stars. And now the wildest kind of a scramble Is taking place among all the producers to capture successful authors and sign them un before their competitors competi-tors get them. According to one movip authority, in a few months there won't be one successful author left who isn't under contract. While Hampton was the man who first introduced the successful author Into the moving picture business, it Is the Eminent Emi-nent Authors' corporation, two months old. which has startled the industry into action. Hampton could always hie regarded re-garded as an outsider, an experimenter and a visionary, but Samuel Coidwyn is supposed to be an old-timer. If lie makes a success of it. no one can lornrer dmy that the author is incapable of making good as a producer. Aircrtdy there is a new c o r d i a 1 i ty toward the author who ventures to offer a few suggestions on the screening of his work, and in some instances he has even be-n called up on th telephone and consulted. Meantime, the eminent an thorn are ouietlv going about thMr work "f rf-vo-luMonizinsr movie methods. Gertrude Atherton is out on the Pac:fic const. superr vising the production of her novel. "The Pemh of the Devi!." and Basil King is work I on the filming of his "s treet Called Straichf." In thp east the p-:hM- is being educated to look for the author and not for the star. Whether or not the movies will from now on los their peculiar pe-culiar identity and become a literary sideline side-line still remains to be seen, of courne. One movie authority premn to think that the present mania for authors i.s merely a pas.-inp phase, which makes a very clever talking point In s 11 i n k new pictures. A fter a time, he says, the authors will pret tired of it. They'll fhvl it is enpjor to receive their moir-y outright, for their stories than 1 o work for mont hs on a picture and then see il fail, especially on a royalty ni!p's. "The Kminent Author.', I unMest ami. are workintr on that ba sis, ami i c only stands to reason that in spit e of the;r most earnest efforts they will have to endure, a- c-rtain percent a ere of failun-s. We all do." |