Moving Pictures Read Online Free

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 thataudiences 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