To go back to my dinner. After Mrs. Glyn had concluded her report upon previous abodes of the ego, our conversation drifted toward the profession engrossing our present incarnations. Pictures! The topic was started, I believe, by Miss Elsie Ferguson, who at that time was working with the Famous Players-Lasky Company. To her announcement that she did not like her leading man of the moment, Mrs. Glyn turned a swiftly sympathetic ear. “My dear,” said she, “what do they know about soul, about art, about poetry? Blind, absolutely blind! The other day I took the loveliest young man to see them--he had the most beautiful eyes--but they didn’t see it--they didn’t appreciate it.” This verdict regarding my competitors’ callousness to the finer issues of life is not to be taken too seriously. For Mrs. Glyn was then in the midst of that period of disillusionment which seems almost inevitable in the career of the author who tries to adapt his manuscripts to the screen. Out of the depths of my own experience I can speak of the friction which arises among author, producer, star, and director. I thought that I had encountered some eminent difficulties before I organised the Eminent Authors; but when the Goldwyn Company introduced this literary faction in the fold, I was to look back on other days as being comparatively placid. This fact does not reflect upon the personalities of those writers whom we engaged. Socially, each one of them is a delightful being; but when the tradition of the pen ran athwart the tradition of the screen I am bound to say that I suffered considerably from the impact. The great trouble with the usual author is that he approaches the camera with some fixed literary ideal and he can not compromise with the motion-picture view-point. He does not realise that a page of Henry James prose, leading through the finest shades of human consciousness, is absolutely lost on the screen, a medium which demands first of all tangible drama, the elementary interaction between person and person or person and circumstance. This attitude brought many of the writers whom I had assembled into almost immediate conflict with our scenario department, and I was constantly being called upon to hear the tale of woe regarding some title that had been changed or some awfully important situation which had either been left out entirely or else altered in such a way as to ruin the literary conception. Nor did this end the difficulty. For often the author and the star became hopelessly entangled in similar controversies. This latter situation is deftly suggested by Will Rogers when he says, “I was on the lot the last year of the reign of the Eminent Authors and, while I helped spoil none of their stories, I made various ones for the near-Eminents and lost the friendship of every living one of whose stories I made. So now,” adds Will, “I have made Washington Irving’s _Ichabod Crane_. I am off all living authors’ works--me for the dead ones!”