What is easily the best medium by which to gain the ear of the world has gained it under the splendid leadership of extremely clever and tireless business men, and, having gained it, doesn’t say anything worth listening to. The picture business in salesmanship, in organization, in mechanical and technical development, in direction and in photography is amazing, and there they stop. They fall down hard on the basic commodity they are selling; their story product isn’t good enough. They know this, of course, as well as I do, but they do not know the reason or at least those of them who do know the reason won’t tell the truth about it because if they did, it would mean the end of their importance. They will tell you that their writers fall down on them and that is in fact true. I have been fighting authors’ battles all my life, but I have no defense to offer for the New York writer of big name and bigger salary who goes to Hollywood with a nose turned up in contempt and takes their money and makes wise cracks at their expense. I see their side of the case so clearly that for three years I have been trying to do something to clarify this situation. The barrier between real writers and the studios is, I am convinced, the greatest obstacle to the advance of motion pictures and the real trouble I can sum up in one sentence: “The picture stories are not written by authors, they are written by executives!” During the winter in Hollywood I was a guest at a dinner given to Frederic Lonsdale, the English dramatist, by Arthur Richman. Around the tables in that room were fifty-four very well-known and very successful dramatists and novelists of New York and London. These men were there because they were successful and important men asked to meet and welcome a distinguished English writer to whom Mr. Richman wished to do honor. These fifty-four men have written many times fifty-four successful plays. They were not dated, worn out, or exhausted old fellows in their dotage, but men in their full swing—Sidney Howard, Louis Bromfield, Max Anderson, Laurence Stallings, A. E. Thomas, John Colton, Martin Flavin, Sam Behrman, and many more of the same importance, three Pulitzer Prize winners, three members of The National Institute; surely here was talent enough to write good stories. These fifty-four men were almost all of them questioned by me at some time during the winter and not one of them who had been writing in Hollywood for over a month could tell me that he had found it possible to do good work or that he could see any hope at all of ever being allowed to write the sort of thing that he had been successful enough in writing to cause the heads of the studios to pay him his large salary.