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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 wascruel 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. BannisterMerwin 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,