The association with these two scholarly gentlemen Messrs. Kennedy and Marvin, unusual then as to-day in the picture business, helped to soften the crudities of the work, and tone down the apparent rough edges of our job. So considerate of our tender feelings were both Mr. Marvin and Mr. Kennedy, that when either desired to visit or bring interested friends into the studio, they would ask Mr. Griffith for a propitious moment, and then stand off in the background as though apologizing for the intrusion. Mr. Griffith, but not by way of retaliation, had reason to make intrusions on his bosses. He went pleading the cause of better screen stories. For that was the ticklish point--to raise our artistic standard--not to depart too rapidly from the accepted--and to keep our product commercial. David Griffith began feeling his wings. He dared to consider a production of Browning’s “Pippa Passes.” If just once he could do something radical to make the indifferent legitimate actors, critics, writers, and a better class of public take cognizance of us! So there resulted long discussions with the Biograph executives as to the advisability of Browning in moving pictures, and after much persuasion consent was eventually granted. There was no question in our minds as to whether “Pippa Passes” would be an artistic success. Had this classic writer fashioned his famous poem directly for the movies he couldn’t have turned out a better screen subject. But might not the bare idea of the high-brow Robert scare away the moving picture public? In those days there were several kinds of motion picture publics. In sections of New York City, there was the dirty, dark little store, a sheet at one end and the projection machine at the other. It took courage to sit through a show in such a place, for one seldom escaped without some weary soul finding a shoulder the while he indulged in forty winks. Besides this there were the better-known Keith and Proctor Theatres on Fourteenth Street, Twenty-third, and 125th Street, the Fourteenth Street Theatre, and the old Academy of Music. In the smaller American cities, the motion picture public was of middle-class homey folks who washed their own supper dishes in a hurry so as to see the new movie, and to meet their neighbors who, like themselves, dashed hatless to the nickelodeon, dragging along with them the children and the dog. Things like this happened, when dinner hour was approaching, and mother was anxiously awaiting her child: the neighborhood policeman would casually saunter over to the picture house, poke his head in at the door, spy the wanted child, tap her little shoulder, gently reproving: “Jennie, your mother wants you”--whereupon Jennie would reluctantly tear herself away so that the family could all sit down together to their pot-roast and noodles. Yes, Browning would need courage.