Moving Pictures (3 page)

“But Mr. Edison, if they read dime novels, why can’t they follow a single story on the screen?” So Porter described the classic confrontation to my father. “Once we show them they can
see
a story, as well as read it, they’ll never go back to ‘The Destruction of the Standard Oil Plant at Bayonne,’ or the vaudeville juggling acts we’ve been giving them.” When Edison refused to believe it, Porter boldly offered to pay for the negative himself if
Fireman
proved to be a failure.

“Porter, all this celluloid must be going to your brain,” Edison argued. “I understand this picture cost eight hundred dollars. If I take you up on your offer you’ll be dead broke.”

Porter stuck to his guns. Or his fire hoses. The picture went out to the nickelodeons and the little storefront theaters that were beginning to pop up around the country, and the effect was electric: what Griffith’s
The Birth of a Nation
would be to the next decade, and
Gone With the Wind
to the 1940s.

With this success behind him, Porter was permitted to make an even
more ambitious picture, what my father called “the Man o’War of American movies” because it sired an endless list of winning offspring all the way down to
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
There had been those who thought that
The Life of an American Fireman
was a fluke, its success based on its novelty. But
The Great Train Robbery
proved that the American story film was here to stay. Again, it was full of innovations that have been attributed to Porter’s successor, D. W. Griffith: the close-up, the dissolve, direct cuts from scene to scene without even a dissolve or a subtitle to clue the audience, letting the forward thrust of the story carry the viewers with it. Two lines of simultaneous action were juxtaposed, the train robbers escaping while the telegraph operator, bound and gagged, was discovered by his daughter in the station office. The action intercut between the posse formed to apprehend the robbers and the robbers themselves riding across western country to make their escape. At times Porter’s camera panned with his pursuing horsemen. At times he tilted his camera downward to follow the robbers scrambling down a wooded hillside. For the first time in history, the camera was moving with its subjects. Finally there was a sensational trick ending, a close-up of the face and hand of a besieged bandit firing his gun directly at the audience. The Edison handbill informed exhibitors that they had the choice of using this spectacular close-up either at the beginning of the picture as a “teaser,” or at the climax. When the shot was fired at the audience the effect was so startling that people actually jumped up from their seats and ran out of the theaters. So most of the pioneer showmen chose to use it at the end. The financial success of
The Great Train Robbery
finally convinced even the doubting Thomas Edison that the one-reel story film was a popular art form. The work of Edwin S. Porter was now studied—in New York and Chicago, in London, Paris, and Rome—his imitators taking their cameras out of doors, releasing them from their fixed positions, and making “chase” movies that were soon rivaling the originator’s.

When Porter left Edison in 1912 to form his own firm, Defender Films, my father approached the famous director on the set of his primitive studio in The Bronx and asked him to take out an ad in
Film Reports.
He would, he told my father, if the young man could write one that pleased him.

My father hurried back to his small office on Broadway to grapple with the problem. At the end of the day he was back on Porter’s set with his brainstorm: “Defend Your House [i.e., the movie theater] With
Defender Films.” Porter not only bought the ad, he felt he had stumbled upon a fresh writing talent that he could put to use in his studio. When he invited B.P. to write a scenario, Father admitted that although he was associate editor of
Film Reports
at that time, he had never actually seen a photoplay. Porter promptly handed him the scenario of a current production,
The School Marm’s Ride for Life.

“That script was exactly a page and a half long,” Father told me, “with a couple of crude sentences describing each of the eighteen scenes. ‘This is a scenario?’ I asked Mr. Porter. The great director, who had just introduced D. W. Griffith to motion pictures as an actor in
Rescued from an Eagle’s Nest,
assured me that this was a shooting script. ‘Well, if this is a scenario, then I am a scenario writer,’ I told him.” That same day, during his lunch hour, B.P. dashed off his first scenario. Porter was so pleased with it that he appointed him his regular scenario writer.

“It was great fun, really easy and exciting,” B.P. liked to reminisce. “I’d think up a plot and write it on Monday. Porter would cast it, paint his sets, and pick out locations on Tuesday. He would shoot the picture on Wednesday, by which time I’d be ready with the next one, which he’d cast, plan, and shoot by Friday. On Saturday our two one-reelers were shipped off to the distributors. That was our routine, week in and week out, over the two years before you were born.

“Actually I had started out with hopes of becoming a short-story writer, maybe even a novelist. And when F.P.A. accepted a few of my contributions for his ‘Conning Tower’ I had dreams of becoming another Jack London. But when I got married and your mother became pregnant with almost indecent haste, I knew that the life of a freelance writer would put us back in the ghetto. So I welcomed a chance to write those scenarios, even though I had no illusions that they were anything but dime novels flashed on a screen. By the time I met Porter, though he was the preeminent man in his field, he had really gone as far as he could go as a filmmaker. He had tried a few flights of imagination, inspired by Méliès, like
The Dream of a Rarebit Fiend,
and he had also tried his hand at social consciousness with a film called
The Kleptomaniac
about a wealthy lady who gets slapped on the wrist for shoplifting, while a poor mother goes to jail for stealing a loaf of bread for her hungry children. But mostly his preference was for the sentimental and melodramatic, and in those early years, happy to get my thirty dollars a week for the two scenarios plus bonuses for the extra work I did, I ground out a mess of footage. But the moving-picture show was still such a novelty that
audiences all over the country flocked to see our insipid offerings. You had to be really stupid and totally incompetent
not
to make money.”

My father remembered his very first scenario. With an eye to the approaching holiday season, he opened it with a kind-hearted cop who finds a lost child on Christmas Eve and takes her home to his wife and his own two children. The child explains, in a subtitle written by B.P., that she has run away from home because her mother has remarried and her stepfather is cruel to her. The big twist in the story was the wife’s discovery that the little girl is her own sister’s child! The cop and his wife decide to adopt the little girl, and since they don’t know her name they call her their Christmas
Carol.
The picture fades out on the cop’s equally kindhearted children sharing their Christmas presents with their new “sister.”

“We can laugh at it now,” B. P. told me, “but
A Cop’s Christmas Carol
cleaned up. There were actually lines at the little glass box offices. And all the ladies were sniffling into their handkerchiefs. Mr. Porter not only gave me an extra bonus that Christmas, he promoted me to Scenario Editor!”

While I was still in the fetal stage, the scenarios that my father was coping with were in a similar phase of primal development. At first they were jotted down on scraps of paper and the backs of envelopes by the producers themselves, and by their directors, the actors, bookkeepers—even the elevator men in those drafty lofts that passed for studios. But the hunger for the new entertainment was so insatiable that soon the producers—or manufacturers, as they were first called—actually began advertising for movie stories. “Earn one hundred dollars a month by writing photoplays!” was the siren song in popular magazines. The headline was a teaser, for the smaller print explained that the price for each accepted photoplay would be ten dollars. So all you had to do to earn your C-note was to write ten acceptable photoplays a month.

“They came pouring in, mostly in illegible scrawls,” B.P. would tell me, “written on everything from postcards to butcher paper. Everybody who paid his nickel to see one of our shows thought it was easy money to dash off a movie. Most of them were illiterate. Nearly all of them were godawful. I sat there with the lofty title of Scenario Editor for Rex Films (the successor to Defender), reading literally thousands of pages of handwritten drivel, with titles like ‘A Counterfeiter’s Regret,’ or ‘Never Darken My Door Again,’ in which the entire plot was told in the title. One in five hundred was acceptable. I told Mr. Porter that my job was
cruel and unusual punishment. I would rather write all the scripts myself than plow through moronic mush like ‘A Widow’s Revenge’ and ‘The Black Sheep Reforms.’”

But Porter was not only making his own films now, he was training new directors to work under him. The motion-picture audience and my mother’s middle were growing proportionately. My infancy, the infancy of Edison’s Kinetoscope, and Porter’s callow moving-picture shows are intertwined.

Self-proclaimed experts and “scenario schools” offered courses in photoplay writing for fees ranging from one dollar to twenty-five. The fakers who had dealt in patent medicines simply moved on to the new opportunity. They would offer to read, criticize, and correct scenarios for fees as low as fifty cents to a dollar. “Those fourflushers who had never been inside a film studio—such as they were—or had never seen a scenario were posing as old masters and pocketing fifty or sixty dollars a week, real money in those days,” my father told me. “I would have to read these ‘corrected’ scenarios and often they were worse than the originals.”

At the ripe old age of twenty, B. P. felt qualified to write that preface to
How to Write a Photoplay.
Giving up on the illiterate amateurs whose scenarios overflowed his desk, he suggested to Porter that they buy from or build up a staff of professional writers. Among these pioneer screenwriters was Frances Marion, who started at fifteen dollars for one scenario or twenty-five for two, and who worked her salary up over the next twenty years to two thousand dollars a week, with screen credit on such MGM powerhouses as
Stella Dallas, Anna Christie, The Champ,
and
Dinner at Eight.
Anita Loos sold her first scenario for fifteen dollars to D. W. Griffith when she was fifteen, launching the author of
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
on her marathon filmwriting career. Women’s Lib has no cause for complaint on the subject of pioneer screenwriters. For there was also Jeanie MacPherson, the silent actress later identified with nearly all the Cecil B. DeMille spectaculars; Clara Beranger, who married Cecil’s brother, William DeMille; and Ouida Bergere, who married Basil Rathbone and graduated from scripting silents to staging Hollywood’s most stylish parties. And there was also Louella O. Parsons, who later ruled over Hollywood as the gossip columnist of the Hearst Syndicate.

If B.P. sounds like the only boy writer of his day, I should add that there were others in that Middle Stone Age of the cinema. Bannister
Merwin wrote the very first serial,
What Happened to Mary,
named for Mary Fuller, one of the Edison Company’s earliest stars. Harold McGrath wrote another of those early serials,
The Adventures of Kathlyn,
starring Kathlyn Williams, who worked for Colonel William N. Selig, a fabled film prospector in the early days of the Gold Rush, a man who was to loom large in my Hollywood childhood. Another filmwriting pioneer was Hal Reid, whose son Wallace was soon to become one of the screen’s first matinee idols, along with Mary Pickford’s flamboyant brother Jack and the irrepressible Marshall (Mickey) Neilan.

Father in the year of my birth was ready to soar from a salary of two hundred dollars a week to a luxurious five hundred dollars. A writer with a facile, retentive mind, a flair for showmanship, and a sense of his own worth as a literate diamond in the murky field of illiteracy, he had come to the right business at the right moment, when it was growing out of its funky nickelodeon phase.

There was a stampede to “get into the movie game,” and if you couldn’t get a job in front of the camera as a featured player or as a five-dollar-a-day extra, or behind it as a director, cameraman, or technician, you could always try your hand at scribbling. When my father and mother wheeled my fancy carriage through Mt. Morris Park, they would be intercepted by passersby who had heard that young Schulberg was Edwin S. Porter’s Scenario Editor and would press on him their latest inspirations for Mary Pickford. Scenario writing became such a national madness that books on how to grind out these newfangled concoctions became bestsellers. While I was being pushed through that park, or being induced to eat with games like “Here we go down into the subway!” with my mouth encouraged to open to provide the subway entrance, associates of B. P. were writing books like
The Reel Thing
and
The A. B.C. of Motion Pictures.
In
The Motion Picture Story,
B.P.’s friend William Lord Wright advises, the trend of the motion picture is now upward, not downward, and the more refined one makes his stories the more will he contribute to the general uplift of cinematography…. Write of what you know; you have no business knowing anything about the seamy side of life. If you do know it, keep it to yourself.

As an example of an effective “heart-interest story,” Wright
recommended
Three Children,
written by James Dayton and produced by Harry A. Pollard for the Universal Film Manufacturing Company. Here is the original synopsis:

Billy and Grandfather are ‘pals.’ One is not happy without the other. However, Billy’s mother is frequently annoyed by Grandfather’s old-fashioned ways and influences her husband to send Grandfather to the Old Folks’ Home. Grandfather realizes his son’s position and does not object. Billy misses Grandfather greatly. He visits him occasionally at the Old Folks’ Home. Grandfather tells Billy that he has no teeth, no hair, and can’t walk very well, and that Billy’s Pa and Ma cannot afford to have him around. A new baby comes to Billy’s home. Billy doesn’t think much of the new arrival, he would rather have his Grandfather. He notices the new baby has no teeth, no hair, and cannot walk so he resolves to trade it to the Old Folks’ Home for Grandpa. Grandfather brings Billy and the new baby home safely and Billy’s mother decides that all three children are indispensable to her happiness.