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.