I had, reluctantly, agreed to make a trip to Hollywood the previous spring for Mr. Sheehan of the Fox Company, and there I had made for Will Rogers an adaptation of my friend Homer Croy’s novel, THEY HAD TO SEE PARIS, for the screen. As a result I had signed a six months’ contract starting in December. My experience with Famous Players Lasky Company had been unsatisfactory in spite of the real kindness of Mr. Lasky, and I felt that under the present conditions an author’s position in Hollywood left much to be desired. But I had the advantage of an unusual contract and I had two strong reasons for wanting to see more of Hollywood. The first reason was that both of my boys were there, and my wife and I are, I am afraid, rather too dependent on them and never completely satisfied unless they are near at hand. Then, too, I was greatly troubled by the difficulty of forming a fixed opinion of conditions out there and determined to at least satisfy myself that I understood them. I had never been able to see why a writer in Hollywood should be forced to deliver up his self-respect, and with it his only chance of being of real value. I saw both sides of the issue but to me the pressing need of the only men and women who are trained to write stories was so great that I thought it my duty, as one who has given a great part of his life to the effort to improve the condition of the men and women of his craft, to make an effort to find out if it wasn’t possible to break down the barrier that has always existed between New York writers and the studio executives in Hollywood. Owen was a featured player for Fox and Donald was a staff writer and stage director. When I left New York I was pledged to a six months’ stay and had some difficulty in laying out my future plans with the degree of exactness that has become my habit; we got away at length, however, and I left behind me only the remains of one “tryout,” a farce called THE SHOTGUN WEDDING, produced by Wm. Harris, Jr., for a brief tour and never developed beyond that point, THE SHOTGUN WEDDING was funny, but not funny enough. Wm. Harris, Jr., is, I think, the best judge of a play of any man alive, although his critical judgment has been developed to the same extent that Sherlock Holmes developed his sense of deduction, and when it comes to discovering a clew to a bad play he could give Sherlock a stroke a hole. Mrs. Davis and I joined the boys on the Coast early in December and we had a very comfortable and happy winter. I made an adaptation of SO THIS IS LONDON for Will Rogers, worked with Sam Behrman and wrote and adapted a number of stories. I like writing for the pictures, or at least I want to like it. It is not at all a difficult form and I can see no mystery in it. It is just story writing; the difference in technique is no more different than the step between farce and drama writing and nowhere near so different as the dramatic form and the modern method of building musical comedy.