Motion pictures are not yet nearly so good as they ought to be. Not so interesting. Not so funny. Not so artistic. People who know what they are talking about—teachers and artists and editors and preachers—say so. Indeed, it’s an almost self-evident fact. One of the main reasons is that you and I and the others who watch motion pictures, millions of us every day, don’t know enough about them. So we can’t demand better pictures, and refuse to make poor ones profitable. Taken by and large, we don’t know whether or not the movie stories are well told, or how they are made, or what sort of people make them. We simply go in and watch what appears on the screen, and perhaps wonder whether we really liked it or not. We take what is set before us, unable to praise or criticise intelligently, because we know so little about the matter. It is true that whole articles are written about the dresses and automobiles of lovely Lotta Breeze, the popular star, and we see pictures of directors, and actors, and even an occasional producer. But that is about all. No real public ability to judge movies accurately has yet been developed. Almost any teacher can tell you why the _Atlantic Monthly_ and _Century_ and _Harper’s_ are better than some of the cheaper magazines; almost any teacher can explain, as well, why the circulation of those magazines is smaller than that of many of their competitors, and why you and I prefer, possibly, stories of the forest or the forecastle. But so far there has been no one to point out what brands of pictures are the best and why they are the best, and where they must be improved, and how it can be done. We have got to learn—you and I and the rest, now that the movies have come along to claim our time and attention—something about story-telling, and a lot more about how movies are made, and who makes them. Fortunately, it is mostly very interesting. Let us look at some facts about story-telling. Whenever we watch motion pictures, we see somebody doing something, somewhere. It may be a young fellow from the country, who has come to the city to make his fortune, and finds work as a truck-driver, hauling piano-boxes that are filled with rifles for shipment to the Soviet. It may be a girl who decided to wake up “Ellum Center” by putting in a real live department store. It may be an old man who sails away to the South Seas to try to locate his runaway grandson, and finds a pearl island as well. But always it is somebody, somewhere, doing something. Those three things are the foundations on which all story-telling is built. People—the things they do—and the places they do them in. Characters, action, and locale.