CHAPTER I

DRAMA AND MELODRAMA; TRAGEDY; COMEDY; OTHER FORMS; “SPLIT REEL”; SHORT PLAY; LONG PLAY; SPECTACLE; ADAPTATIONS; PLAY DIVISIONS.

PHOTOPLAY audiences arrived at a stage of mature understanding and appreciation of the photodrama long before the manufacturers and producers had emerged from the jungle of crudity. The latter are inclined to remain money-makers and not become art producers; they are filling theirpockets today from the emptied brains of yesterday and forcing tomorrow to go begging. With few exceptions the plain drama is exaggerated into melodrama, startling the audiences thru the violent acts of the characters, or dynamic spectacle, or extraordinary setting—rather than thru the simple medium of pure dramatic construction that stirs the imagination and sways the emotions with a semblance of real experience. Drama is one of life’s exquisite emotional phenomena brought home to an audience thru the pictured experience of others.

Melodrama is easiest to write, since it is all high-lights and black shadows. It demands the concoction of a series of violence and spectacle to happen in a logical and progressive order. Melodrama resembles farce, in that the characters are cursed with all the earmarks of the deepest-dyed type they portray—the beetle-browed villain, or the ludicrous Jew-Irishman-Nigger. In the true drama we meet men and women who live poignantly in our lives—tho we see them for the first time. The melodramatists had things their way because the few artists had no co-operation.

Comedy is most difficult to write, and is easiest to sell—meaning, of course, pure comedy. It is more difficult, for instance, to keep an audience laughing for twenty minutes than it is to keep them in suspense over a dramatic story for an hour or more. The photo-counterpart of the Play of Manners, or the Polite Comedy, is bound to become one of the future developments of the Photodrama. Photoplay Comedy has been in the hands of the Philistines since its inception. Rarely do we see anything but the rollicking farce. Polite Comedy has its exquisite moments that mingle delighted smiles with pathetic tears; Rollicking Comedy is all wide-mouthed laughter.

If we are careful in distinguishing from its coarser parasite—“slap-stick” farce—we may say that Rollicking Comedy is an art worthy of one’s serious effort. There are certain temperaments, however, incapable of comedy in any form. These playwrights are self-conscious of their failing! The Polite Comedy is marked by grace, repression and humor. It is a delicate cameo of the serious drama—only it avoids the villainies, perils and horrorsof life, substituting in their place the failings, fantasies and prejudices that are both humorously and pathetically human.

In the Rollicking Comedy, then,everything must be comical. The term “everything” is imperative; it means idea, title, plot, every situation, every scene, every insert, every reference, every character, every setting, every action, every suggestion. “It is to laugh!” Comedy demands exhaustive treatment of detail. It is insufficient to say that a character performs an act in a funny way; we must tell in detail how the action is done to make it so funny. Comedy must always be delineated good-naturedly, and never with satire or animus. Misfortune is not a comedy subject.

In all good drama—whether it be drama, melodrama, comedy or tragedy—there must be an idea in the material, a motive in the characterization, a definite end to be attained; a reasonable cause, a logical effect and a climacteric deed; a plot.

In all drama there is struggle with an obstacle. In pure drama and melodrama we have the hero struggling against the obstacles and pitfalls placed in his path by the villain;in comedy the character struggles against the ludicrous situations that rise in his course; in tragedy evil circumstances overwhelm the hero no matter how heroic his struggles are against them.

The reel, or unit of photoplay length, has both its advantages and its disadvantages. The “Split reel” play is under a disadvantage. If it be only a plotless farce—which it is most frequently—it makes little difference, since that form is only a fragment, or series of them.

There are many ways in which the Short Play—or one-reel—may be compared to the Short Story, and the Long Play—or multiple-reel—to the Novel. The Short Play, is intensive in method. We pursue the development swiftly and relentlessly from the opening scene to the culmination.

The Long Play is not a Short Play amplified—as we so often see them padded. It is not in any sense a Short Play told in two or more parts (or reels). Each part (or reel) of the Long Play, like each chapter of the Novel, is a unit in itself, having its own beginning, development and climacteric situation. Yetit is progressive and becomes fragmentary unless considered as an intergral part of the whole production. Each part (or reel) of the Long Play accumulates and takes care of its own situations and complications, which may tend to pile up revelations of dramatic interest to heighten the suspense of the reel to follow, or which may be a direct progressive result of the reel preceding. In the Long Play each reel ends with the introduction of a new complication that necessitates an entirely new line of treatment. It is literally “continued in our next.” Each reel must always advance; it never can go backward. In each succeeding reel of the Long Play we find that the story has just received a set-back in its solution, thru the introduction of a new and formidable obstacle that demands another line of solution from that employed in the preceding reel.

(EXAMPLE 84.)In “The Coming of the Real Prince,” the first reel ends with the climacteric situation showing our heroine really won heart and soul by the unprincipled villain. But the story cannot end here; common sense and instinct tell us that that is not the culmination of the plot. And sure enough, just as the audience thought the villain wasgoing to be caught and thrashed perhaps, by the hero—the heroine elopes with the villain! Thus we have the constructive foundation for another reel, that demands an entirely different course of action.

The studios themselves are usually responsible for the thrilling or gorgeous spectacles displaying a wonderful array of scenery, setting, hordes of actors, marvelous mechanism and a hundred other entertaining, and possibly pleasing, features that bear only a distant relationship to bona fide drama. If the manufacturer has a menagerie, a railroad, a thousand pounds of dynamite, a wild west outfit or a military equipment on his hands he naturally desires to make use of it. It is then that the photoplay hack is called upon to write one or more stories “around” it—and they usually are considerably around it and seldom inside of it.

The play offered in the following chapter is an unpretentious example, falling short of perfection in more than one particular, tho equal to the occasion of modestly exemplifying most of the rules and principles set forth in the present work.

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