The picture men need not begrudge us this share of the amusement business because without a prosperous theater they would be in a bad fix. They are, and it seems to me they must always be, dependent in great measure on the theater for their raw material. The good play does not always make the best picture, but a produced play is easier to judge than an unproduced manuscript, and the highly successful play is always welcome on the screen. Then, too, the best training school for actors is not the screen but the stage, although screen and stage acting are very different and the great actor of the stage is by no means sure of screen success, while a pretty girl or good-looking boy with no training at all can frequently do better work than an actor of long training. In the theater the actor projects his personality, on the screen the camera projects it—a very different thing. Still, however, the theater is needed by the screen and there is no reason for a feud between them. In fact, the dangers and the problems that confront the theater are less complex than those the screen is called upon to face. We have but one—to do good plays. I have another silver cup for any one who can persuade me that a really fine play has ever failed. On the other hand, ahead of the men who control the destiny of the talking picture there are many problems, almost staggering in their complexity. Let me try to state the vital one, from figures I have carefully prepared. Twenty percent of the talking picture audience is composed of children. Another twenty percent consists of persons to whom the English language is in whole or in part unfamiliar. Sixty percent of the remaining percentage consists of those with what we may safely call immature minds, leaving an audience to be thrilled, amused and satisfied in which persons of a fair degree of culture and taste number some thirty odd percent. If you care to stop for a moment over these figures, you may find in them the answer to many of your moments of bewilderment. To satisfy this thirty odd percent, who do the writing of and the critical condemnation of talking pictures and at the same time to thrill this seventy percent who put up the money that makes them possible, is already a big problem and it grows bigger every day as the novelty of the mechanical device wears off, and the suitable supply of fiction becomes exhausted. Hollywood to-day demands about four hundred good stories every year, and my third and last silver cup goes to the one who can list for me four hundred great stories written since the world began. Just for fun I tried my hand at making such a list, and from a rather extensive knowledge of the fiction and the plays of both the past and the present I was able to get two hundred and eight. After that they began to fall into squads with the precision of well-drilled soldiers and although many of them told the same story very charmingly it still remained a twice-told tale.