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.