The studio had a sort of nominal supervisor, a Mr. Wake, whose job was to O. K. little expenditures in the studio and to pass on the purchase of scenarios. One day, not long after our A. B. affiliation, just as I was entering the main foyer, Mr. Griffith coming from the projection room seemed more than usually light-hearted. So I said, “You’re feeling good--picture nice?” “Oh, yes, all right, but”--this in a whisper--“Wake’s been fired.” I wondered how I could wait all that day, until evening, to hear what had happened. But I did, and learned that Mr. Wake with Biograph money had purchased silk stockings for Mutoscope girls, and then had given the girls the stockings for their own. However, during a temporary absence from the studio before Mr. Wake’s dismissal, Frank Woods came down with three more suggestions which were shown to Mr. Griffith direct. He bought the whole bunch, three at fifteen dollars apiece, _nine five-dollar bills, forty-five dollars_. Around the _Dramatic Mirror_ offices Mr. Woods was already jocularly being called “M. P. Woods.” And this day that he disposed of his three “suggestions,” Moving Picture Woods with much bravado entered the _Mirror’s_ office, went over to the desk, brushed aside some papers, cleared a place on the counter, and in a row laid his nine five-dollar bills. In the office at the time were George Terwilliger (how many scenarios he afterwards wrote), Al Trahern (Al continued with his stock companies and featuring his wife Jessie Mae Hall), and Jake Gerhardt, now in the business end of the movies. The trio looked--and gasped--and looked--and in unison spoke: “_Where_ did you get all that?” “Moving Pictures!” “Moving Pictures? For heaven’s sake, tell us about it.” “How did you do it?” queried George Terwilliger. “Forty-five dollars for three stories, good Lord, and they gave you the money right off, like that.” So Mr. Woods told his little story, and as the conversation ended, George Terwilliger reached for paper and pencil, for five-dollar bills were beckoning from every direction. Maybe he could put it over, too. He did--he sold lots and lots of “suggestions.” Frank Woods wrote thirty movies for Biograph. Frank Woods now set about to criticise the pictures with the same seriousness with which he would have criticised the theatre. He bought books about Indians and let the producers know there was a difference between the Hopi and the Apache and the Navajo. With a critical eye, he picked out errors and wrote of them frankly, and his influence in the betterment of the movies has been a bigger one than is generally known outside the movie world. Mr. Woods is really responsible for research. And Mr. Dougherty gives him credit for turning in the first “continuity.” The picture that has that honor is a version of Tennyson’s “Enoch Arden,” called “After Many Years.”