I have developed a habit of concentration until it is an almost idiotic

habit. When I have a play in my head neither time nor space exist for

me. I am forced to keep a car and a man to drive it because I have so

trained my mind to focusing that the moment I sat back in a seat on the

subway it was a foregone conclusion that I would be put off the train at

Van Cortland Park when I lived on East 63rd Street. For a time I tried

driving a car myself, but no sooner did I find myself on a straight road

than my mind clicked back on its job of play making until I drove into a

ditch or ran through a traffic light. At length I was persuaded to give

up driving, not entirely out of respect for the law, but because the

roars of outraged traffic cops disturbed my train of thought.

Some years ago my wife was taken to the hospital for a critical

operation and I spent the most horrible day of my life awaiting a

verdict that meant life or death. At length I was allowed to see her for

five minutes and told to go home and not to return until late the

following day. Absolutely broken by what I had been through I returned

to our empty rooms; it was ten o’clock at night; sleep was out of the

question. I sat at my desk making marks on a pad of paper. Suddenly I

was struck by, of all things, an idea for a farce, and I started to

write. Sometime later I had a feeling of fatigue, and I sadly said to

myself: “I’m getting old. I’m not the man I was.” Then I noticed that,

although my lights were burning, it was broad daylight outside. I looked

at my watch and discovered that it was two o’clock. I had been writing

for sixteen hours. When Mrs. Davis came back from the hospital two weeks

later I had written, sold, cast and started rehearsals of EASY COME,

EASY GO, and she was rather curious as to where this stranger had come

from.

I wrote a melodrama called HER MARRIAGE VOW in three days, many years

ago, and it played three years. On the other hand, I worked eleven

months on THE NERVOUS WRECK. Time doesn’t mean a thing. Any good

newspaper man will tell you that if he couldn’t turn out three thousand

words of copy a day he couldn’t hold his job. A play is seldom more than

twenty-one thousand words, seven days’ work if you want it to be, seven

years’ work if it happens to come that way.

As a matter of fact, I figure that it takes me one hundred hours to

write a play, which, of course, can be one hour a day for one hundred

days, or ten hours a day for ten days; but please note that my trick is

never to start writing until I have solved every problem, drawn every

character and completely laid out my story line. The trick of carrying

all this in your mind with absolutely no notes to fall back upon is

rather a difficult one to master, but it is, I am sure, of great value.

What really happens is that in the course of the weeks you go about with

this junk shifting about in your head, the sub-conscious part of your

mind does most of your work for you, and when you start to write it out

you will be amazed to read what your own hand has written.

When I am writing, I make it a rule to go over my story fully in my mind

just before I go to sleep and to start writing the next morning before I

have read my mail or even the morning papers. Very often points are

clear to me that were clouded the night before, and I find that the part

of my mind that remained active while I slept has been helping me to pay

the rent.

There is a great difference between inspiration and imagination, and

although I believe in inspired writing—that is, I believe that some men

and women upon some fortunate occasion write from an emotional prompting

deeper and finer than their conscious mind could inspire—I do not

confuse the mental pictures of an imaginative mind with so exalted a

word. There are and always have been two sorts of writers, the writer

who tells what he sees, or has read or thought or been told, and the

writer whose mind is a sort of old-fashioned kaleidoscope that forms

little mental pictures quite without conscious effort. In other words,

one writer uses trained observation, and the other has the gift of

spontaneous creation. I have on several occasions seen the story line of

an entire play laid out before me in one flash at a time when I, to the

best of my knowledge, was not thinking of any such thing at all. I can,

on a bet, at any time close my eyes and shake my head and look up and

tell a story that, so far as I can discover, I have never for a moment

thought of before.

As a matter of fact, this very unusual development of the power of

sub-conscious creation is a terrible nuisance to me, as my mind races

along so easily down any path that I am dragged along after it without

stopping long enough to make sure that this path is the one that taste

and prudence dictate. I often envy the writer who is forced to stop and

build his plot brick by brick, but so far as I know I never work out a

story at all. The story comes to me as Topsy came to an unappreciative

world “born growed.” If a story of mine is challenged by a manager in

whom I have confidence it is no trouble at all for me to say, “Well

then, suppose it went like this,” and rattle off a completely different

fiction. I have never been able to harness this trick of mine, and often

when I have made up a story in a flash and sold it to some friendly

manager I have gone home and started to write it to discover that it

insists upon coming out entirely different, and that the manager who

loved the first one has to recall to me the details of the plot I have

quite forgotten.

Once about ten years ago I read a play that never existed at all to a

famous manager. I had promised him a play, and when the time came to

deliver it I hadn’t had a moment to think of it, so I took with me to

his office an old typed manuscript and gravely read it to him in the

rough, a play that I made up as I went along. The manager liked the play

very much, but when I handed it in a few weeks later he said he had

never in his life seen so many changes made, and that he vastly

preferred the first draft.

11. Keep in mind that no part of a play, and this is especially true of

farce, is effective when it is not convincing. The more belief you

create in your characters and situations, the greater your success.

Truth in play writing is quite as valuable as it is in life, but, just

as in life, there is a limit to the extent to which simple truth telling

may safely be indulged in. When Hamlet told the players to “hold the

mirror up to nature” he was quite aware that when they looked in that

mirror they would see a reflection, not nature itself. In the arts,

truth is art, but it isn’t always true. We value a play either because

(1) of its truth, (2) of its wide departure from the truth, or (3)

because of a romantic desire excited in us that these related incidents

should be true.

We, the audience, must follow each step of a play with full belief in

that step, but where the dramatist’s skill comes in is in being able to

make of himself such a glamorous and subtle liar that what he feels to

be true becomes the truth. It is the same with any of the arts of the

theater; our skillfully placed lamps give us a feeling of sunlight, but

they are not the sun. The great actor doesn’t die before your eyes, but

he seems to die, just as he doesn’t live, he only seems to live. For a

while, here in America, we playwrights fell very much under the Russian

influence and rather wandered about in a fog. “Why?” we asked, “should

this play be a failure? Isn’t it true?” The answer was of course that

the probability is that if it had not been quite so laboriously true it

wouldn’t have been quite such a bore. Bad smells are true, rainbows are

lies. No man has ever put wisdom into simple and understandable words

better than Shakespeare did and Hamlet’s advice to the players remains a

marvelous guide both to the actor and the dramatist. “Hold the mirror up

to nature” but show it reflected—a mirage.

[Illustration:

OWEN DAVIS, JR.

Actor

(_Photograph by Underwood & Underwood, Chicago_)

]

[Illustration:

DONALD DAVIS

Playwright

(_Photograph by White Studio_)

]

12. I have often been asked what was the most valuable trait in the

equipment of the dramatist and I always answer, “Courage.” I put that

ahead of everything but genius, and genius is to me just an expression,

like “plovers’ eggs.” I’ve often read of “plovers’ eggs,” but up to now

I’ve never eaten any. I think I know personally all of the dramatists of

America and many of the best of England. I am sure that there are more

able and talented men and women writing for the stage to-day than ever

before, but Eugene O’Neill is the only one I know with what I would

admit to be genius. I don’t always like Mr. O’Neill’s plays and I never

like all of any of them, but there is always something under them that

the rest of us don’t get. To me he is a mile above the rest of us.

Sidney Howard, Max Anderson and, in melodrama, Bayard Veiller know their

business better than he does, but O’Neill’s plays come from deeper down,

not deeper in his brain as some people think, but from the depths of the

particularly sensitive heart of a particularly sensitive man. So,

leaving genius aside, I think courage the quality most valuable to the

man or woman who expects to win a place in the very odd world of the

theater where there are no standards at all, either mental, moral or

ethical, and where the author must of necessity stand alone against

groups with different and antagonistic interests. From the moment an

author signs a contract for the production of a play until that play has

lived its life on the stage, gone through its course of stock company

and foreign productions and been sold “down the river” and turned into a

moving picture, every single hand that comes in contact with that play

is the hand of a potential enemy. The manager and his staff, the actors

in a group, the scenic artists and the technical departments all have

the power and as a rule they desire to put in a little something by way

of change, something usually that will be to their advantage and

destructive to the best quality of the work.

This of course means fight. An author surely might as well fight and be

licked as to be licked without fighting, and the method adopted by the

experienced street fighter of getting in the first punch is most

earnestly recommended. There is to all these groups but one real hope in

any play—the hope that the author wrote something; if he did, they all,

manager, actor, etc., have a chance for success; if he didn’t they

haven’t. Authors of plays, like dentists, are never popular; nobody

really likes to have them around.

Writers are so different in their method that I hesitate to advise a

course that has been very useful to me, that is to vary the form of

writing often enough to escape the boredom that follows walking over the

same path too frequently. I like to follow a heavy drama with a farce,

and a light comedy with a melodrama. Of course, one man usually writes

one form of play better than he does another; yet even in an age of

specialists, the good marksman should learn to handle all the tools of

his trade, and no man can write deep drama without a sense of comedy,

and most assuredly can’t write farce without a definite note of tragedy.

I have always had a lot of fun writing mystery plays, although a

well-built mystery drama represents a staggering amount of hard work.

The formula is a very exact and very exacting one, and in addition to

its mechanical difficulties the author must not only create an interest

in who committed the crime, but, if he hopes for success, he must make

them fear that some one character dear to them is guilty. In other

words, the mystery play in which one hasn’t gone deep enough into the

emotions to make the audience care who committed the murder is never

successful, no matter how mysterious it may be.

Emile Gaboriau was the master of this form of writing, and to this day

we all more or less faithfully follow his model, although his

complicated plot structure requires more skill and patience than most

modern authors are able to supply. Poe borrowed the formula, as he quite

frankly admitted, and from him it descended to Anna Catherine Green,

whose LEAVENWORTH CASE and HAND AND RING are fine examples of this form

of writing. Jumping again across the Atlantic, we see in the Sherlock

Holmes character, and in Watson’s shrewd “feeding” of that character

strong traces of the Gaboriau style. After these came the deluge: Bayard

Veiller, with his almost perfect THE 13TH CHAIR, several of my own and

many others leading up to the endless stream of mysterious murders,

strange disappearances, midnight crimes, haunted houses, etc., etc.,

etc.

I know hundreds of men who read one at one sitting, but I defy any man

to write one in less than one hundred hours of solid work. When I tackle

a job of this sort, my study looks like an architect’s work room, charts

everywhere, on the wall and tables and even on the floor. I make a chart

for each character, showing exactly where he is, what he says and what

he is thinking of each moment of the play. In this sort of trick

writing, every word one says is extremely likely to be used against him.

Next to rough farce, the writing of a play of this sort calls for more

technical skill and inventive power than any other form of play making.

The only thing I can add to these scattered notes about play writing is

that no one should allow a failure to beat him. There isn’t anything at

all remarkable about having written a bad play; it’s been done before

and it’s going to be done again. It’s writing a good play that is

unusual as the man who bit the dog; he’s the fellow worth talking about.

No matter how much you may be scorned and derided for having written

what you wrote, no matter how sure you may be that you never again will

dare to look anybody in the face—for a dramatist’s failure in the

theater, for some reason that escapes me, seems to carry with it a moral

disgrace and a social ostracism—in spite of this you will get another

chance when you get another play. I have always demanded that each new

play of mine should be judged exactly as though I had never written one

before, and, as I said earlier in this article, the critic must tell the

truth; he may not want to, but if you really have done a good job he

can’t help himself. Critics, like dramatists, are emotional idiots.

Although I remain firmly of the opinion that the talent of the

dramatist, like the talent of the great singer, actor, painter and

musician, is a thing born in them and not to be acquired by any other

than the chosen few, I know that love and appreciation of the theater

may be taught and hidden talents discovered and developed. When in my

college days I was running one hundred yards in ten and one-fifth

seconds I often thought that, in spite of the fact that few men alive at

that time had me beaten that time, there were probably plenty of young

fellows in the country towns who could have been trained to beat it.

Every boy in the world doesn’t try to run a hundred yards, and of course

many a doctor and lawyer and business man has been born with the gift of

poetry, music, painting and drama and has neglected those talents or

even been quite unconscious of them. These new classes of Dramatic Arts

in the schools and universities will catch any submerged talent and

bring it to the light and beside this they will make cultured audiences,

and in the end good audiences will make good plays.

Our present bewilderment in the theater as to what the public wants

would soon vanish if we had a public who themselves knew what they

wanted and when the day comes when we have a large audience ready to

express the growing demand for mature and adult drama even we laggards

of the theater will hasten to furnish it—we are all of us hungry for

success even to the extreme of being willing to do good work for it.

In November of last year a group of Harvard undergraduates, accompanied

by Professor Parker of the Harvard English Department, called on me, and

at the same time on Winthrop Ames and Lee Simonson and asked us to help

them form a school of the drama in Cambridge. The Harvard faculty seemed

unwilling to provide the desired instruction in the arts of the theater

and since Professor Baker’s withdrawal there had been no Dramatic

Department. Mr. Ames, Mr. Simonson and I called a meeting of Harvard

graduates at the Harvard Club and asked these boys to meet us there and

tell us their troubles and their desires. As a result of that meeting

the Cambridge School of the Drama was organized with a board of

governors whose names read like an all-star cast. At this school

students of Harvard and Radcliffe and a limited number of outsiders may

now take courses in dramatic technique and the arts of the theater.

The faculty of the school is composed of Albert R. Lovejoy, Walter

Prichard Eaton and H. W. L. Dana. The visiting lecturers and board of

governors, each of whom is to lecture once each term and meet the

students for informal talks, are:

Lecturers on play production—Winthrop Ames, Vinton Freedley, Kenneth

Macgowan, Gilbert Seldes, Maurice Wertheim.

Lecturers on drama and criticism—Heywood Broun, J. Brooks Atkinson, J.

W. D. Seymour, H. K. Motherwell, John T. Williams, Isaac Goldberg,

Professor C. T. Copeland, Norman Hapgood, Prof. J. Tucker Murray, Owen

Wister, Robert Littell, H. T. Parker.

Lecturers on stage lighting, scene designing, etc.—Lee Simonson, Robert

Edmond Jones.

Lecturers on play construction—Eugene O’Neill, Sidney Howard, David

Carb, Philip Barry, Edward Sheldon, Percy Mackaye, Robert Sherwood, S.

N. Behrman, Owen Davis.

Lecturers on the art of acting, etc.—John Mason Brown, Walter Hampden,

Elliot Cabot, Robert Middlemass, Osgood Perkins.

There is a list for you! All Harvard men and all men who have done real

work. I can remember when I was one of three Harvard men in the game.

Now we are getting our new blood from all the great universities. Walter

Eaton told us at one of our meetings that he had listed over five

hundred universities and high schools in the country that were giving

special courses in the Arts of the theater! Does that look like a dying

institution? Five hundred schools turning out each year a flock of boys

and girls who, if they have learned nothing else, have learned to love

the theater.

To me that doesn’t spell the end of the theater, it means the beginning,

and I am eager to try to teach our own little group all I can before

they get started on their own and get so far ahead of me that I shall

have to turn about and study their methods.

This school, with its staff of real workers, seems to me to be about the

most practical place of instruction established since the day when the

boy in NICHOLAS NICKLEBY was told to spell w-i-n-d-e-r, and then go and

wash it. I know what meeting and talking to such a list of men would

have meant to me thirty-five years ago. Among the warm spots in my

memory are meetings I had years ago with Dion Boucicault, A. M. Palmer,

Daly and Percy Mackaye’s famous father, and these men weren’t trying to

teach me anything, they were trying to get rid of me as quickly as they

could.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

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CHAPTER VII ◆ THE DRAMATIST’S PROFESSION

────────────────

As time went on I found myself fully versed in all of the troubles that

beset a dramatist and armed against all of them but one. I had learned a

good substitute for patiently waiting for a production by turning out so

many plays that one of them was always on the fire. I had learned, in a

measure, to comfort myself for the present failure with the thought of a

coming success, but no philosophy of mine has ever taught me what could

possibly be done with a dramatist on the opening night of one of his

plays. I have, I think, tried everything, and all that I can be sure of

is that the last way of passing that dreadful ordeal was very much the

worst way I had ever experimented with.

Twenty years ago it was the custom to drag a terrified author before the

curtain at the end of the performance and entice him into telling the

audience how glad he was that they liked his play, and how grateful he

was to the manager, the director, the actors, stage hands, ushers and

stage-door-keeper. This gracious speech being received with some

applause, the poor author went home thrilled by this assurance of

overwhelming success, and woke up the next morning to read that his play

was probably the worst catastrophe of a direful season. This custom of

writers being part of the first night show has gone out—not, I think,

that the authors wouldn’t still be willing to oblige, but because the

managers learned that most of the shows were bad enough without any

added attraction.

Some of our more dignified authors a generation ago used to sit in the

stage box in full view of the audience, but they grew strong men in

those days, and I doubt if there is a playwright alive bold enough to

follow their example. I have tried sitting in the gallery, staying at

home, standing at the back of the theater after the house lights were

lowered, hanging around the stage alley, going to a picture show,

drinking too many cocktails, and walking around Central Park, but so far

I haven’t found a way that wasn’t awful. This night is the climax of six

weeks of hard work, to say nothing of all the effort put into the

writing of the play; it means a fortune or nothing, fame or something

that is almost disgrace, and the poor wretch can do nothing. A forgetful

actor, a careless stage hand, or the blowing of an electric fuse can and

has spoiled many a good play, and all that he can do is suffer.

There is no second chance for a play; if its first night in New York is

a failure it is dead forever. Luckily the first night audience, supposed

to be so hard boiled and over critical, is the easiest audience in the

world to sweep off its feet and the most generous in their real joy in

the discovery of a good play. Tough they are at first, but the moment

they get a feeling that something worth while is happening they go along

with you with a whoop. I have fallen down plenty of times, but the kick

that has come to me when I have put one over is worth a lot. Any way I

figure it I am ahead of the game.

This first night audience is a very powerful factor in deciding the fate

of a play, and the “thumbs down” of the old Romans was no more final

than the harsh laugh that follows some shabby bit of sentimentality or

some bit of hooey philosophy. Many authors and managers of late are

trying to fill their houses on a first night with a more friendly crowd,

thinking, like the well-known ostrich, that they are putting something

over, but they forget that mass psychology is a very curious thing, and

that if a man puts his doting mother out in front on a first night he is

very likely to hear her voice leading the first cry of “Off with his

head.”

The whole subject of dramatic criticism, either from a first night

audience or from professional dramatic critics, is a very simple one,

but for some reason it is very little understood. As a matter of fact

neither this audience nor the critics’ notices of the following day have

anything at all to do with the real success or failure of a play. In the

morning you open your paper and on the dramatic page you read that your

favorite critic saw a play the night before and made the remarkable

discovery that it was worth seeing—so did a thousand others at the same

time—the fact being simply that it was a good play. The critics’ praise

did no more toward making it good than did the favorable response of the

audience.

Of course many plays are in the balance; some persons like them and some

don’t; but there is little doubt in the minds of trained observers about

the really fine plays, and even less about the really bad ones. A play

comes to life for the first time when it is played before a wise

audience, and their verdict is as a rule both just and final. A good

play can take care of itself, and any fool knows a really bad one—when

he sees it. Any of us, when we go out and buy a dozen eggs, is likely

enough to get a bad one, but we are quick enough to gag over it when we

try to eat it. The critic is simply a man who knows a little more, and

usually cares a little more, about the theater than the ordinary man of

cultivated taste, and he has been trained in a proper manner of

expressing himself.

What he tells his readers about a new play is first the truth. This in

effect you or I could do as well as he does: it was a good play. The

modern critic, however, goes beyond that in his influence upon the

theater by insisting upon an increasingly higher standard both in

writing and in acting, and by pointing out the virtues or the defects in

the performance, instructing his public in what may fairly be expected

of the modern drama. Naturally there are bad critics, just as there are

bad writers and bad actors, and the bad ones do harm, just as the bad

actors and bad writers do.

The first night audience in itself, although still picturesque, has

changed greatly in the last few years. Twenty years ago opening nights

of any importance at all were naturally far fewer in number than they

are to-day, and an opening at Daly’s, Palmer’s, the Lyceum and later at

the Empire, drew a brilliant audience made up of the real lovers of the

theater and the cream of the “four hundred” that then represented New

York society. To be on the first night list in those days meant

something. The first night audience of to-day is very different. First

nights now are rarely social affairs, and the audience is very much more

of the profession, actors, managers, critics, writers and all the moving

picture crowd. These, together with the dressmakers and play agents and

scouts from the various studios on the lookout for screen material, make

up a colorful gathering and they know a lot about theatrical values even

if they lack a little of the distinction of the old first night crowd.

During the years I have been going to the theater I have seen some

thrilling first nights, but I have never really been one of the

regulars, as nowadays if one were to try to be present every time a new

play opened there would be very little time for anything else. I recall

distinctly some of the great nights when I have been present, such as

the first performance of THE FORTUNE HUNTER, ON TRIAL, RAIN, WHAT PRICE

GLORY, BROADWAY, BURLESQUE, COQUETTE and many more where a wave of

enthusiastic cheering swept the play into instantaneous success. We of

the theater, I think, when we watch these first nights with an anxious

eye, are apt to forget that the reason a play goes over with a bang is

because it is a good play, or a novel play, or the sort of play that at

that moment is the play the public wants and the play makes the first

night enthusiasm. The first night enthusiasm doesn’t make the play.

My years of almost frantic application to my work had by now resulted in

a fixed habit and I found myself pounding along at top speed long after

the necessity for such effort had disappeared. It is the literal truth

to say that for more than thirty years there has been no time in which I

have not had a play in some stage of its progress on my desk and in

response to long training, my mind continually drops automatically into

retrospective revery entirely without conscious direction on my part.

I was not satisfied with the work I was turning out and decided to make

an effort to take life more easily than had been my habit. I remember

getting quite a thrill out of this evidence of my sanity and prudence. I

had not fully realized how fixed the habits of a lifetime may become and

soon discovered how impossible it was for me to hope to reform.

Before I admitted defeat, however, I made really quite an honest effort

and forced myself to take part in several of the semi-social and

semi-political activities of the theater. I had always refused any

demands upon my time not connected either with my own work or with the

affairs of the Dramatists’ Guild or the Authors’ League, but I now

turned deliberately to these rather remote outlets for my energy. For

the first time in my life I tried to make myself believe that it is as

important to talk about work as it is to do the work itself, an error of

judgment on my part from which my sense of humor rescued me before I had

gone very far.

The most interesting of these activities was the attempt to establish a

National Theatre as it was called, and although the plan failed, I have

always thought the failure was unnecessary. The committee to organize

this National Theatre was selected from the best men of the theater, the

fine arts departments of the leading eastern universities and the

leading social and financial groups of New York. We were to produce one

play a year with special attention to manners and diction and show this

play at moderate prices in all of the larger cities of the country.

At the first meeting at the Astor Hotel, Augustus Thomas was selected as

chairman and from the start most of the active work fell upon his broad

shoulders. Augustus Thomas is by far the best presiding officer I have

ever known, and for years it has been my fate to be obliged to follow

him as chairman, president or mouthpiece of countless societies and

committees; but on this occasion I was content to remain in the

background. I seem to be of use only when there is a very practical

issue, and the National Theatre was a rather altruistic, rather

visionary scheme that seemed to me to be a little out of my range. To me

the thing that helps the theater most is a good show, no matter who

writes it or who produces it or where it comes from; and to me a

well-written, well-played play, produced by the commercial theater, is

far more stimulating than an equally fine performance inspired by some

art group. I have always admired Augustus Thomas; when I first came to

New York in the early nineties he was the outstanding dramatist, and in

fact as a writer of the better type of melodrama no man of my time has

equaled him. Aside from his ability as a writer, he is a man of real

eloquence and of commanding presence, and his control of any meeting

over which he presides always makes me blush at the thought of my own

abrupt and rather arbitrary methods.

Upon this occasion, in spite of the great names on the committee, Mr.

Thomas was given full charge, and it was decided that the first play to

be produced by the National Theatre should be AS YOU LIKE IT, a decision

I heard announced with dire misgivings as I have always thought it a

particularly dull and silly play. I was naturally afraid, however, to

announce any such radical views in that exalted company. A cast was

engaged and the production opened in due time before a brilliant

audience in Washington.

It is an unfortunate fact that even the plays of Shakespeare that have

retained their vitality can only be efficiently done by players who have

been trained to play them, and in this particular case the performance

was not anything to rave over. In fact the curtain fell on the first

performance with that dull thud that always announces failure, and the

audience was cold and unresponsive.

Mrs. Thomas, who had been with her husband through many of his own first

nights, and who had been trained, as all wives of playwrights are, to

give help and comfort to the stricken, hurried backstage as the curtain

fell and found her husband sitting sadly amidst the scenery of

Shakespeare’s famous masterpiece with his head bowed and a look of deep

dejection on his face. Her maternal instinct fully aroused by her man’s

agony, she stepped tenderly to his side and putting her arm gently over

his shoulder she murmured bravely: “Never mind, Gus, thank God you

didn’t write it.”

There was no reason that I could see why the first attempt of the

National Theatre should have ended its existence, but the fact remains

that from that day to this I have heard no more about it and I turned

back to my own work with some feeling of thankfulness. After all, if a

man must be mixed up in a failure, why shouldn’t he have the fun of

being responsible for all of it? and, since a man with a mind trained to

full activity must focus his thoughts on something, isn’t it better

after all that the something should be the activity he knows the most

about?

I don’t in the least know how long a writer is supposed to last. It may

well be that my thirty odd years have been the greater part of my share

although I am sure I should enjoy making it an even hundred, but I do

know that to keep up with the parade to-day a writing man must keep his

eyes wide open and his fingers on the pulse of the public. This is many

times more true to-day than it was in the years before the war, but even

then the critical sense of the public was growing rapidly.

In the old days a playwright’s plots and characters were accepted about

as automatically as the church creeds of the time were accepted, and for

about the same reason; the habit of the average citizen of thinking

things out for himself had not yet grown to its present stimulating

proportion. If both the church and the stage of to-day are placed in a

position where they must fight for their life, surely nothing that is

fine in either of them is in danger. With the bunk gone the truth will

be twice as powerful.

It has always seemed to me to have been Ibsen who sounded the first note

of modern characterization in the drama. Good dramatists have always

drawn good characters, but the accent upon the character and the

character’s propelling force upon the narrative was quite different.

Hamlet, Macbeth, Juliet, Portia, Rip, Caleb Plummer, Duston Kirk and

hundreds of others were finely drawn characters, but Ibsen’s Nora not

only lived and moved but she moved the play with her and her emotional

progress marked the progress of the drama.

After the production of THE NERVOUS WRECK I tried very hard to write the

play I earnestly wanted to write, but I couldn’t get it. THE DETOUR and

ICEBOUND were true plays from my point of view, honest attempts to do

the best work I knew how to do. But I had a feeling that the American

drama should express a more optimistic note, that it was, or ought to

be, possible to write of life as truly as plays of that class were

trying to write about it, and yet express the fundamental difference

between our lives and the lives of the people of Middle Europe, whose

dramatists had given birth to the new school of naturalistic play

writing.

I know, as a sane man of middle age, that the lives around me are not

always dull, drab, base or unhappy. I was acquainted with a mother, she

was in fact a member of my own household, who had given up a career for

her children and who was neither heartbroken nor neurotic; her children

weren’t idiots, ungrateful brats or headed either for the gallows or an

early grave. I had seen her make sacrifices for them that were well made

and well worth the making. On the whole in this world I have seen men

and women reap what they have sown, and I have looked closely at life

with a trained eye for a great many years and found it good.

I wanted to say something like this in a natural, true and unsentimental

way and I couldn’t do it. I don’t in the least know why it can’t be

done, but so far it hasn’t been. I don’t propose to take all the blame

for this. I’ll admit that NELLIE, THE BEAUTIFUL CLOAK MODEL said that

virtue always won out in the end, but before Nellie’s time that

statement had been made in platitude.

It may be that the sugar-coated play has killed the possibility of

optimistic play writing, but I didn’t want to write about life’s being

worth living just to trick a happy ending. I simply wanted to say that

life was worth living because that is the way I have found it. I have

lived fifty-six years very happily. I have been fortunate in having the

sort of wife and the sort of children that have added very greatly to

that happiness. I love my work and as a result I have never had any

trouble in making all the money necessary for comfort and decency. I am

strong and well and those I love are well—why should I write of a

sorrowful world? Yet for some reason every time I tried to write a true

play the note of futility crept into it.

I floundered about for the next year or two, turning out a few plays,

most of which I would have described in the far-off days when I had

worked for the Kentucky Coal Company as “run of the mine.” LAZYBONES had

some good points, THE DONOVAN AFFAIR made money, but always I was trying

for that real play that wouldn’t come.

The best work I did at this time was a dramatization of F. Scott

Fitzgerald’s novel THE GREAT GATSBY. The character of Gatsby made a

strong appeal to me, and here was another chance to do a play with Mr.

Brady, who seemed anxious for me to come in with him once more. The play

was really good, and moderately successful, but here was another time

when the truth was bitter and cruel and hard for the public to take.

Naturally I knew perfectly well when I read this novel that Mr.

Fitzgerald’s ending absolutely killed any hope of real success, but I

have my own theories about dramatizing a novel, and one of them is that

the dramatist is in honor bound not to cheapen or coarsen the original

author’s story. Gatsby was a great lover; for the sake of the girl he

loved he raised himself from nothing to wealth and power. To do this he

became a thief. She was unworthy of so great a love and he died by one

of those absurd ironic chances that saved him from ever knowing her

complete unworthiness. Mr. Fitzgerald knew that for Gatsby death was a

merciful friend, and I felt that I had no right to manufacture a

conclusion that would satisfy a sentimental audience.

As a matter of fact, I do not enjoy working on another writer’s story,

but when I make up my mind to do it I deliberately put myself into that

writer’s place and absorb his mind and style so that I write, as far as

I am able, as he would write rather than as I would write a scene

myself. In the case of F. Scott Fitzgerald that was difficult, not only

because I had never seen him, but because he was so much younger than I

that his whole mode of thought and all his reactions to life were

absurdly different from my own. But a faithful dramatist of an author’s

work should, I think, assume that author’s personality and should force

himself into the completely receptive attitude of the believer who, with

his fingers on a ouija board, lets the pencil go where the spirits

direct. The result of this collaboration was a good play, but not a real

success. I have always known that, if I had cared to do it, I could have

made from this material a great box-office hit, but as I have said

before, I think that when one takes another writer’s work, there is an

implied obligation not to alter the mood of it.

This feeling is the reason, I think, why I have never cared to work on a

play with another author, and why I object so strongly to the “story

conference” and the group writing of Hollywood. To me a play is so

essentially a mood and it is so impossible for two human beings to enter

into the same exact mood that all such collaboration is started under a

very real handicap. I can understand being in full agreement with

another writer upon details of plot and even upon shades of character

but the mood that would compel certain reactions from the characters,

that must of necessity propel them along the narrative line in a certain

way, could not dominate two writers at the same moment.

I have had little experience in collaboration but in the writing of

screen stories I do know that no matter how many writers are working on

the same job, only one of them is really doing anything, and, as there

is no established technical form to screen story writing, all that

happens at one of these famous story conferences is that the man with

the most authority writes the story and the others sit around and talk

about whatever subject, if any, interests them at the moment. I can see

how two dramatists might work together to advantage if one were a highly

imaginative writer and the other an expert in form and construction, one

to dream out the play and the other to build it. In fact I know of

several cases where this method has been highly successful but to me all

the joy of creating would be gone if I was forced to share it. Good or

bad, I want my play to be mine, and the thrill that has come to me on

the few occasions when I have been able to look at a play and say: “It

is good, and I did it,” has been a rich return for all the hard work I

have ever done.

At about this time Mr. Winthrop Ames, as Chairman of a Committee of the

Theatrical Managers, offered me the position of political head of their

association, the same sort of job as Judge Landis holds in baseball or

Will Hays in the motion picture field. I had a feeling that my wide

experience in all the branches of the theater gave me some of the

qualifications necessary for this work, and for some time I seriously

considered it. The actors, through Mr. Frank Gilmour, and the Authors’

League expressed a desire that I should try my luck, but in the end I

refused. Mr. Ames promised me full authority, but I could see no way by

which this authority could be enforced. I know the managers very well,

thank you, and any time I ride hard on those birds I want a big club and

the only gun in the outfit. Also I had a strong feeling that the time

hadn’t quite come. A little later some better man will take that job and

save the day.

In spite of my knowing that I was not doing all I ought to do as a

playwright, these were happy and prosperous years. I was very active in

the politics of the theater and very happy at home. My boys were growing

up. Donald was at Pomfret and Owen at Choate, and Mrs. Davis and I sold

our house in Yonkers and came to New York.

Always when I have the least to do I demand the most time in which to do

it, just as when I am not writing at all I insist that I can’t live

without an elaborate writing room, although I know perfectly well that I

have done the best work of my life with a ten-cent pad of paper and the

top of a trunk. In any case, I found the ride to Yonkers too long, and

we once more joined the ranks of apartment dwellers.

As a matter of fact, I have usually found that about the time a writer

starts in surrounding himself with every luxury in the way of an aid to

his work he never does very much with his swell equipment besides

occasionally showing it off to admiring acquaintances. It is quite

probable that the money he earned to pay for his elaborate study he

earned by writing a play on the top of a barrel. I myself have worked in

all sorts of places, ranging from a three-dollar-a-week hall bedroom to

a studio library in a pent house in the Park Avenue section. During the

most prolific years of my life most of my work was done at a desk in the

living room of an apartment with two small boys playing about on the

floor and crawling between my legs. It is, I suppose, because I have

always had so much fun with my writing that the members of my family

have never stood in any great awe of my labors, and I suppose the boys

saw no good reason why I should try to keep an amusing game all to

myself, and usually insisted on being let in on it.

Edgar Wallace told me last year that he loved New York and always had a

wonderful rest when he came here. It was, he said, the noisiest city in

the world and the only place on earth where he couldn’t write.

Personally I can write better in New York than I can anywhere else, and

although I am afraid I demand more quiet and privacy as the years go

past, I am still quite untroubled by anything less than a riveting

machine.

Some rather facetious remarks have been made about the volume of my

production, but this same Edgar Wallace makes me look like a drone. When

I am hard at work I turn out about four thousand words a day, usually in

longhand, written with the softest and dirtiest lead pencil that a

nickel can buy. Mr. Wallace tells me that on a good day he dictates ten

thousand words. I know that twenty-three percent of all the novels sold

in England last year were of his writing, and he calmly threw in three

or four plays by way of good measure. Ever since I dined with him I have

laughed with scorn at any one bold enough to insinuate that I write too

much, and I have been filled with good resolutions.

I surely must settle down to work. No matter how much a man may enjoy

his job, every writer in the world has times when he thinks he is

through. It’s part of the game. We all of us have hours of profound

depression when we are afraid of the future and in terror of our own

limitations. We are sure that no good story will ever again come to us

and doubtful if we would know what to do with it if it did. This is

natural enough when a writer has just finished a play or a novel,

because, of course, he has put all he had into it and his mind feels

empty. But this mood often comes at other times, and the best cure for

it is to hang around doing nothing until you happen to read a fine novel

that has just been published or see a really good play—the right play

always sends me out of the theater walking on air, and I go to bed

tingling all over to wake up the next morning with a new hope and a new

determination.

The worst disease, however, that comes to a writer who has been at his

job for a long time is the awful fear of being “dated.” Of course it’s

hard for one of middle age to write of life in any other way than as he

knows it, and equally, of course, our lasting impressions do not come to

us after fifty. I fussed for a while over the fear of getting to be a

back number, and wondered if I could possibly grow to understand what we

were pleased to call “the new generation.” I found, or fancied I found,

a great change in the old world, until I happened to recall that these

changes had been going on since time began. A very careful study of

audiences convinced me that they still reacted to an honest emotion,

just exactly as they always had done, and that the only difference in

the world around me was that the old gods had different names.

To me, with my conviction that as the world goes on it gets better and

more worth living in, it makes no difference at all whether it is the

custom to say “Hail! Cæsar!” or “Hello, Cæsar,” and I very much doubt if

any of our changes are very much deeper than this. We were a sentimental

people, as every race of adventurers must be. Now we have become a very

practical race, hard boiled, if one prefers to put it that way. A little

while ago we slopped over about our emotions because that was the

custom; to-day for the same reason we pretend we haven’t any. Of course

our emotions weren’t any greater because we made a fuss about them, or

any less because we now cover them up. The relationship between men and

women has changed during the last ten years, so had it changed in the

generation before that, and so on back to the time of Adam, but that

relationship then and now was a thing of enormous interest, and a swell

thing to write a play about.

It’s the writer’s business to meet the mood of the hour, and all he has

to do to meet this mood is to learn to sympathize with it. Just so long

as I feel myself a part of the life around me there is no reason why I

shouldn’t keep on writing, and at present I most decidedly do feel that.

If the time ever comes when I find myself bewildered and afraid of a

strange world that I no longer understand, I’ll stop—or rather, on

second thought—perhaps I’ll write a play about how hard it is to

understand it!

At this time I stepped out of my job as President of the Dramatists’

Guild and took the presidency of the Authors’ League of America. This,

as it happens, is not an honorary position, but comes under the head of

honest labor, and during the long fight between the Dramatists and the

Theatrical Managers’ Association that resulted in the present

Dramatists’ contract, I served on all of the many committees in addition

to my work as President of the League. I loved the work; the friendships

I formed among the members of the fighting committees are among the

pleasant and most helpful contacts of my life.

There are about a dozen men and women who mean a lot to me with whom I

have worked for sixteen years to bring about decent conditions for

writers. There are many more than a dozen now who are working faithfully

for the Authors’ League, but often, when I attend one of the meetings

and sit at the crowded council table, I catch the eye of one of the old

timers and wink pleasantly—we can remember years when there weren’t

enough authors around to fill the room with cigar smoke. We used to ask

one another if it was worth while to keep on fighting. James Forbes

always said that this was positively his last effort, but he always came

back; so did the rest of us, all busy men, not one of us needing the

help of any one to get decent contracts. We were proud of our calling

and wanted to advance its dignity and importance, and I think that in

the end our many years of hard work justified itself. The American

Theatre is to-day under a temporary cloud. It may be one year or two

years or three years before its old prosperity returns, but the

Dramatists’ Guild is the strongest and most powerful body of writing men

in the world and there are plenty of strong men of half my age who are

able and willing to keep it as powerful and as sane and moderate as it

is to-day. No matter what you hear don’t for a moment believe that the

prosperity of our theater is not going to return,—the theater is safe

and it always has been. Just so long as little boys instinctively pick

up a stick and become brave knights and gallant soldiers, and as long as

a girl child hugs a doll to her breast and becomes a mother, the theater

will live. A combination of circumstance, novel inventions, stupidity

and greed, plus lack of leadership and the arrogance of organized labor,

has resulted in sad days for many of us, but the turn of the wheel is

already bringing about changes and sooner than most of you are yet ready

to believe better days are coming.

If, when they come, the men who have been the leaders of the commercial

theater have learned their lesson, the temporary setback will have been

worth what it has cost; if they haven’t, they will be forced to step

aside and give up their power to those more worthy to possess it.

The sane, simple and practical way to govern the theater has been

pointed out. Three times already I have served on committees whose

object was to consolidate the interests of actors, managers and authors,

and hand over the authority to a group of twelve, made up from the men

of proved integrity among the three groups. We who have made a long

study of conditions know that this composite intelligence could find a

way to correct the principal evils that have been the cause of our loss

of public confidence and support. Those of the public who really prefer

to go to the picture houses can of course continue to go to them. Wise

men of the theater know that in the end the picture houses are great

incubators engaged in hatching out new audiences for us and that in a

very short space of time we could have a road circuit beside which the

old Stair and Havlin houses couldn’t cast a shadow.

There are, however, some very definite evils in the present state of the

theater and every one of them could be corrected or greatly reduced. The

regulation of the sale of tickets has been taken in hand by a

progressive group of managers and will be corrected if the managers can

be controlled, which is a bit like saying we could do away with evil if

there was no more sin. The unfair and unwise demands of the unions of

stage hands and musicians could be regulated by an honest facing of

facts and a fair presentation of present conditions. No organization has

the right, or as a matter of fact the power, to go beyond a clearly

marked line; the moment any group’s demands become unfair there is very

little difficulty in upsetting that group. It doesn’t demand an

Alexander, it simply calls for a little common sense.

No one of us really wants to kill the goose who lays the golden eggs.

Help from the railroads would follow an intelligent presentation of our

case. Clean theaters would promptly follow in the footsteps of a clean

administration. Box office reform depends upon six words spoken by the

right man with the right authority to back his six words up. Help from

the newspapers does not depend, I am convinced, upon the spending of

millions of dollars, but would follow an honest request for their

assistance based upon the ground of the theater’s cultural and

educational value, always provided that we could show some claim to

cultural and educational importance.

The revival of the road, until such time as the turn of the tide has

made that revival automatic, could be accomplished under wise leadership

that would work for, say, forty decent plays, decently produced,

underwritten by local subscription lists. Any community of a hundred

thousand population will furnish an audience, once they are assured that

there is a certainty of their getting adult entertainment. These aren’t

day dreams; everybody knows them; several times we have banded together

to fight for them. The last meeting called by John Golden of the

managerial group actually had a real grip on this problem, only dinner

time came around and we all went home. If some one were to call a

meeting of a strong group of actors, authors and managers, all

instructed to sit there until they accomplished something, I am sure we

would at last be under way—provided always that no lawyers be allowed at

the meeting and that it be called at a good restaurant.

During my two years with the Paramount Company, my contract reserved

half of my time for my own private affairs and I divided this time as

honestly as I knew how between my duties to the Authors’ League and my

writing. By now my son Donald had finished college and gone to Hollywood

as a staff writer, and Owen had walked out on Professor Baker at Yale,

horned into the theater when my back was turned and secured for himself

the part of the son in THE BARKER with Dick Bennett in Chicago. This

action of his, so his mother informed me, was the most dreadful calamity

of modern times and would undoubtedly bring her in sorrow to the grave,

but if you have ever seen her seated in an audience where this boy is a

member of the cast of players, you might possibly read in her deeply

absorbed face a certain smug satisfaction that would not, I am sure,

make you think of either graves or calamities.

I, being of coarser stuff, never for a moment regretted the fact that

these two boys of ours had insisted upon following in our footsteps; how

could they do anything else? They were born of two stage-struck parents

and had cut their teeth by biting managers who frequented our

establishment. If a child learns anything in the home circle, how could

they help learning about the theater? Their mother knows a little about

things outside its range, but I know nothing else at all, not even

enough to be ashamed of the fact. The great happiness of my life to-day

is that as we grow older, the four of us, we grow closer together, and

that I can talk with my sons of their problems with the authority of one

who knows something about them.

In the fall of 1928 I wrote a play called CARRY ON with a fine part in

it for young Owen. My intentions were good and I am sure he has quite

forgiven me. Later he played in another of my authorship called TONIGHT

AT 12, which was one of the sort of plays often described by Al Woods as

“all right, but what the hell did you write it for?” In both of these,

however, Owen fared better than I, and I knew that he was fairly

started.

In 1928 I turned for a change to the writing of musical comedy and

helped a little on WHOOPEE, produced by Ziegfeld with Eddie Cantor in

the old Otto Kruger part, for WHOOPEE is an adaptation of our old friend

THE NERVOUS WRECK, expertly tailored by Wm. Anthony McGuire.

I also fussed about with LADY FINGERS, a musical version of my old

farce, EASY COME, EASY GO, and wrote a show called SPRING IS HERE for

Aarons and Freedley. SPRING IS HERE, in spite of a good cast and

charming score and lyrics by Rogers and Hart, was only so-so. As a

matter of fact, Bill McGuire and Otto Harbach need not worry; they can

have the musical comedy field so far as I am concerned. Of all the forms

of writing I find it the least interesting and the most difficult; to me

it remains a trick like putting peas up your nostrils, not at all

impossible, but why do it? The mere statement that I soon discovered

that the properly concocted musical show must be dominated by its score

and not by its book is explanation enough as to why a vain old dramatist

can’t rave about this form of expression.

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CHAPTER VIII ◆ HOLLYWOOD

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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.

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CHAPTER IX ◆ I’D LIKE TO DO IT AGAIN

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In June my contract was up and for the moment at least I had had enough

of Hollywood. Some day I am going back, but not until I get some real

assurance of going there as I go into a theater, to practice the trade I

have learned. Owen had returned to New York in May to create a part in a

new play with Richard Bennett. This play, SOLID SOUTH, was running in

Chicago for the spring and summer and was booked to open on Broadway in

September.

Donald had almost finished his first play, in which I took as deep an

interest and delight as his mother would have taken in his first baby,

had his activities led him in that direction. I knew this play had real

promise and would soon call him to New York and that once more we would

be united. And so in June Mrs. Davis and I returned. As I picked up my

tools and started to work I knew that the round peg had slipped

comfortably back into the round hole. The fact that WHOOPEE was still

running in November saved me from a sad fate. For thirty years I have

had at least one play produced in New York each season. I’m going to

have one produced for as many more seasons as I can, more than one if I

can, and as good plays as I can.

It may well be that this thing of producing plays isn’t as wonderful a

thing as I think it is, but it’s my trade. I have served the theater

joyfully for a long time and if a good fairy appeared before me to-day

and offered me the famous “one wish” I am sure that I should say,

“Please, good fairy, I’d like to do it again.”

This doesn’t mean that my life has been all happiness. No man’s has

been. Perhaps it is best that way. We have had our griefs, my wife and

I, our share of sorrow, discouragement and our happiness, but, if I may

for a moment borrow the flamboyant style of my youth, as I look back

over the tapestry of my life, the bright spots do not seem so bright as

I had remembered them, and the dark spots do not seem so dark. The whole

fabric looks rather like one of these old rag carpets of my mother’s

time—woven of bits of crimson and blue, of yellow and black—blending now

in a soft harmony, softened by time.

THE END

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● Transcriber’s Notes:

○ Missing or obscured punctuation was silently corrected.

○ Typographical errors were silently corrected.

○ Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation were made consistent only

when a predominant form was found in this book.

○ Text that was in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).