| | | | | | Storytelling for film developed mostly out of necessity. As the movies lengthened and the stories grew in complexity, it no longer made sense to leave storytelling to the "momentary inspiration of directors, camera men, players, or workers of the office staff." 1 As a result, each studio quickly developed its own scenario department to help crank out the large number of shows required by the ever-expanding market. Soon afterwards though, it became clear that, by themselves, in-house writers were unable to prevent the kind of problems that arose from carelessness in shooting. For example, critics at the time complained a lot about sloppy continuity. One such case involved "a lost child who wandered away bareheaded, with nothing in his hands, yet later when he is shown among the hills he has a hat which plays quite an important part in his being found."2 As Janet Staiger puts it, it became obviously "cheaper to pay a few workers to prepare scripts and solve continuity problems at [an early] stage than it was to let a whole crew of laborers work it out on the set or by retakes later."3 Thomas Harper Ince, Hollywood's answer to Henry Ford, went to work and successfully managed to codify and standardize the entire practice of filmmaking under the aegis of a central producer. At ''Inceville," in the Santa Monica mountains, writing for films became truly efficient for the first time. It developed into the indispensable core in a systematic operation. For instance, to counter the problem of directors improvising at the last minute and coming up with shots that either did not cut well or failed to bring out the "punch" of a scene, the latter was carefully broken down and parceled out in specific shots at the time of the writing. The drama was thus articulated visually ahead of time and the role of the camera limited to the duplication of these shots. One such scenario editor explained: "Under our system a script goes to a director in perfect form. He can immediately go to work on it. Four or five experts of our staff have read and discussed every phase of the script and every effort has been made to eliminate any flaws of structure."4 The screenplay of The Big Parade (King Vidor, 1925) is exemplary in this domain. It mandates, early on in the film, that a street parade with flags and band be photographed in a long shot. This scene is followed by a close-up of the main protagonist, Jim, looking to the left. Then there is a close shot of his feet as they move to the beat of the music, a close-up of his face as he now turns to the right, and a medium shot of the base drum as it passes on the street. Then we cut back to Jim's face as he smiles. And back to his feet | | | | |
