Part Four.
We’re up to number 11, which may prove unusually difficult.
11. All stories based on peculiar “influences,” or other uncommon sources.
How we respond to this suggestion depends on how we define “peculiar influences.” Some fine stories have been written under the influence of absinthe, an influence that would strike the average American as mighty peculiar.
However, it seems most likely that our author means “influences” of a literary character. If you are enraptured with the peculiar psychological theories of that Viennese quack Sigismond Fraud, or whatever his name is, then it would be an unsaleable mistake to base a scenario on them.
So that is just the sort of thing we must do if we are to defy Glyn’s advice. Instead of Sigmund Freud, we shall take William James as our peculiar influence, and in particular his hypothesis that physical expressions cause emotions instead of the other way around—that smiling makes us feel happy, scowling angry, and so forth.
This should give us at least enough material for a two-reeler. Our heroine, convinced by the Jamesian doctrine, tries to manipulate her own emotions accordingly, but is plunged into a series of difficult situations in which it would be desirable for her to feel different emotions from the ones naturally produced by the situation. It will be a showcase for our best silent performer. A few title cards at the beginning will be sufficient to establish the premise; after that, the situations and the heroine’s facial gymnastics will tell the story well enough without the intervention of titling.
12. The burglar who enters a house and is prevented from stealing by a child, sometimes even his own, adopted by the family. This type of play usually ends with a rapid-fire reformation, very unconvincing, to say the least.
By combining this theme with number 9, the mischievous little boy, we come close to the plot of the movie Home Alone, which we do not care to repeat. In order to be faithful to the hackneyed situation, however, we need to include the rapid-fire reformation; but perhaps we may take the liberty of not placing it precisely at the end.
We shall therefore make our burglar rather stupid and our child a con artist. She is an adorable little girl who manages to convince the burglar that she is probably his daughter, adopted into this wealthy family where she is not understood or appreciated. If only she had a real father who really cared about her! She has just brought the burglar to the point of promising to reform when the police, whom the girl had summoned earlier, burst into the room. The girl laughs as cops handcuff the burglar and tells him was a sucker he is, to which he can only respond, “Why, you little—” Iris out.
This is probably only a one-reeler, or even a split reel, but no director wants to have to wrangle a child actor for much longer than that anyway.
13. The escaped convict, who steals another man’s clothes and gets the other party “in bad.”
This might give us enough for a feature or a novel if we give it the obvious O. Henry twist. The escaped convict steals a distinctive set of clothes and is immediately mistaken for their owner. At first he is delighted to find himself living in luxury, but soon he discovers that the man he replaced has problems far worse than merely being on the lam: multiple people want to kill him for multiple reasons, and some of them are quite devious about it. Eventually, realizing he cannot live long this way, he turns himself in to the authorities. They laugh at him. The man whose clothes he stole has taken his place in prison and refuses to renounce his assumed identity, having discovered that prison is comfortable and safe.
14. The hero who assumes another’s crime because he loves the heroine.
The “other” whose crime is to be assumed must necessarily be someone important to the heroine, which practically limits the candidates to a parent, a sibling, or the heroine herself. It would be a striking demonstration of selfless love if the hero were to assume the crime of the heroine’s preferred lover because he truly desires her happiness; but, though there are such fools in real life, in fiction they make for squishy protagonists whom we just want to slap a few times to bring them back to their senses.
But we might have something if we combined this situation with hackneyed theme number 3, two men in love with the same girl competing in some task. The heroine has committed a minor crime; her two admirers calculate that a few months in jail will buy the heroine’s affections. When they discover that they both have the same plan, they spend the rest of our story trying to undermine each other, sabotaging each other’s carefully planted evidence. At last they both go to prison for incidental crimes committed while trying to establish their guilt; the heroine, having served her six months, marries her accomplice.
We stop once again at four. That has the effect of heaping up five hackneyed situations in our upcoming final installment, but, on the usual American principle of planning for the short term, we ignore that difficulty until we run up against it.
Continues in Part 5.