Page:Pictorial beauty on the screen.djvu/48

 adapt their own literary work or prepare new stories for the screen. But these literary men were among the first to discover that better writing does not in itself guarantee better pictures. It is the director who is more truly the picture maker than any one of his collaborators in the work. Ideally, he should prepare his own scenario, just as the painter makes his own preliminary sketches, and the fiction writer makes his own first draught of a story. Ideally, too, the plot should be devised by the director (who might then truly be called a cinema composer), devised especially for motion pictures, and with peculiar qualities and appeals that could never so well be expressed in other mediums.

But that is an ideal to be dreamed of. And, meanwhile, we "movie fans" can enjoy the best that is being produced by collaborative methods, and we can help toward the achievement of still better things by developing a thorough appreciation of what is pictorially pleasing, at the same time that we train ourselves to detect and talk out of existence the common faults of the movies.