Of course, the future of the movie, no matter how glorious it may be, must be, of necessity, circumscribed, as are fiction and the drama, by the basic limitations applying to human passions. Love, hatred, loyalty, jealousy, ambition, generosity, cupidity, philanthropy, selfishness, and the other dominating motives impelling men and women to beget the raw material of drama will not be increased in number because the screen has developed a new method for telling tales to a story-loving race. While the widely-accepted generalization that human nature never changes may not be true, it can not be questioned that the scenario-writer of the future will be forced to deal with the same manifestations of Man’s psychic make-up which engaged the attention of Æschylus, Sophocles, Molière, Shakespeare, and the lesser dramatists. But as the nations to-day are striving to find a new way to pay old debts, so is the screen seeking a new way to present the eternal dramatic clash of old passions. As the kinetoscope thirty years ago begot a novel form of amusement, so is its successor, the movie screen, bringing into being a new type of dramatic technique. The scenario-writer is something besides a combination of story-teller and playwright. He is experimenting in a youthful artistic medium, whose resources and possibilities are as yet only partially revealed, and he has become a pioneer in a realm that belongs to a kind of specialist bearing resemblance to both the novelist and dramatist but differing from them in ways peculiarly his own. The future welfare of the screen, in so far as it is confined to the amusement field, depends largely upon how stimulating to men and women possessing creative imagination this new method of tale-telling, rapidly developing its own technique, may prove to be. Will the movie produce its own Hugos, Sardous, Stevensons, Barries,—perhaps, its Shakespeare—who, fascinated by the most democratic method yet devised for genius to appeal to the masses, shall eschew the old methods for telling new tales and reach immortality by means of the photoplay scenario? If you who have read the preceding chapters of this book, believe, as does the writer, that the only universal language yet devised by Man is the most important contribution to the spiritual resources of the race that has been made for centuries, you will be inclined to hope that scenario-writing for the screen may become an occupation worthy, in succeeding generations, of the exclusive devotion of many imaginative creators. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER VIII THE MOVIE AND THE CONTINUITY WRITER _The Screen Demands the Inevitable—Movie Audiences no Longer Easily Fooled—They can Tell a Hawk from a Hernshaw—The Value of the Screen as a Mirror of Life—Man’s First Universal Means to Self-Knowledge._ ------------------------------------------------------------------------