Fate having thrust me back into the ranks of the dramatists I have never again dared to desert and devoted my efforts only to play writing, although at odd times, driven by financial or business necessity, I have served in all the branches of the theater, having worked as actor, stage manager, stage director, treasurer, box-office man, advance agent, play doctor, dramatist, business manager, partner in plays of my own and of other writers, as well as in later years serving a rather varied apprenticeship in the motion picture studios both in New York and in California. Determined to sell this first play of mine I approached at this time the firm of Davis and Keough and tried to sell them a romantic costume drama dealing with the Wars of the Roses. When Mr. Keough got through laughing, he asked me to go that night to see a play he had just produced called THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY and to call on him the next day. When I called he asked me if “I thought I could write a play like that.” I replied that I thought anybody could, but didn’t see why they should. But when he told me that he would give me five hundred dollars if I wrote one he liked, I rushed back to my furnished room and went to work. I am sure the play I wrote was almost as bad as the one he sent me to see, but for some deep managerial reason he couldn’t see it and told me to go away and stop bothering him. The Davis and Keough melodrama, however, had made me think. I had seen that the theater had been crowded with an audience that responded tremendously to the crude plot and the rather obvious situations and, as I had told Mr. Keough, it had seemed to me to be a simple formula to acquire. Later investigation convinced me that this formula was capable of some expansion without loss to its effectiveness and I began a rather more scientific study of this form of play manufacture than had ever before seemed necessary to any of the writers who had been engaged in it. As a result of this study I soon evolved a rather mechanical but really effective mold that served me in the writing of more than one hundred and fifty of these melodramas with an average of success that seems startling to me as I look back upon it. Charles Dickens had beaten me to the trick and of course many others have used it, but as a labor-saving device it served me well. It had always seemed to me that Dickens’s stories fell very readily into three molds: one represented by THE TALE OF TWO CITIES, one by DAVID COPPERFIELD and one by the strictly humorous type represented by THE PICKWICK PAPERS. I therefore devised my molds, in my case represented by such western thrillers as THE GAMBLER OF THE WEST, the second type the New York comedy-drama represented by CHINATOWN CHARLIE and BROADWAY AFTER DARK, and the last group of what Hollywood would call the “sexy” type, illustrated by NELLIE, THE BEAUTIFUL CLOAK MODEL and a long string of her persecuted and unfortunate sisters.