Owen Davis

“ As a practical man, born of a practical line of hard-headed Yanks, I have studied my own small talents and developed them and tried to make up for a lack of the real fires of genius by an honest admission of that lack and a true enthusiasm for the work that at the moment came nearest to expressing my attitude. The true genius, the true artist, is very rare, but Augustin Duncan is distinctly of that number. He is quite as incapable of doing any work that doesn’t seem fine to him as I am of writing anything at all unless I am going to be paid for it, and he is as firm in his refusals as I am. ”

“ There are and always have been two sorts of writers, the writer who tells what he sees, or has read or thought or been told, and the writer whose mind is a sort of old-fashioned kaleidoscope that forms little mental pictures quite without conscious effort. In other words, one writer uses trained observation, and the other has the gift of spontaneous creation. I have on several occasions seen the story line of an entire play laid out before me in one flash at a time when I, to the best of my knowledge, was not thinking of any such thing at all. ”

“ A forgetful actor, a careless stage hand, or the blowing of an electric fuse can and has spoiled many a good play, and all that he can do is suffer.
There is no second chance for a play; if its first night in New York is a failure it is dead forever. Luckily the first night audience, supposed to be so hard boiled and over critical, is the easiest audience in the world to sweep off its feet and the most generous in their real joy in the discovery of a good play. ”

“ Keep in mind that no part of a play, and this is especially true of farce, is effective when it is not convincing. The more belief you create in your characters and situations, the greater your success. Truth in play writing is quite as valuable as it is in life, but, just as in life, there is a limit to the extent to which simple truth telling may safely be indulged in. When Hamlet told the players to “hold the mirror up to nature” he was quite aware that when they looked in that mirror they would see a reflection, not nature itself. In the arts, truth is art, but it isn’t always true. ”

“ Experience has taught me that any manager who wants a play never lets an author out of his office until he has signed a contract, and he is crazy if he does. I have been roused from my bed at four o’clock in the morning and forced to promise a play to an excited manager before he allowed me to crawl back under the bedclothes, and any less ardent expression of willingness has grown to be very suspicious in my eyes. ”

“ We, the audience, must follow each step of a play with full belief in that step, but where the dramatist’s skill comes in is in being able to make of himself such a glamorous and subtle liar that what he feels to be true becomes the truth. It is the same with any of 160the arts of the theater; our skillfully placed lamps give us a feeling of sunlight, but they are not the sun. The great actor doesn’t die before your eyes, but he seems to die, just as he doesn’t live, he only seems to live. ”

“ One may learn a lot about what not to write, may learn much of literary style and taste and many of the tricks of construction, but I doubt if any one without the instinctive feel of the born dramatist can learn how to time a speech or pitch a climax and without this all the rest is useless.
Many of the greatest novelists, both of the past and the present, have failed utterly when they tried to write for the theater. Often they were far better writers than any dramatist I know. They knew as much about moods and character as any of us—but their words won’t play, no one can act their scenes. ”

“ It is an absurdity to say that they ever make or break a play. A good play is a very sturdy and very important force in itself, of far more importance than the opinion of any critic, and in the end it lives or dies because it’s good or because it isn’t. Critics can, and have, made a bad play live for a short time, but they never killed a good one—and what’s more, they never wanted to. I have never been an especial pet of dramatic critics, my somewhat spectacular career not exactly fitting with their idea of the proper dignity of a dramatist. ”

“ To me the thing that helps the theater most is a good show, no matter who writes it or who produces it or where it comes from; and to me a well-written, well-played play, produced by the commercial theater, is far more stimulating than an equally fine performance inspired by some art group. I have always admired Augustus Thomas; when I first came to New York in the early nineties he was the outstanding dramatist, and in fact as a writer of the better type of melodrama no man of my time has equaled him. ”

“ I have chuckled over many a farce situation that never got a laugh. A playwright’s words and his situations must have that strange power that will project them over the footlights. This projecting force is made up of instinct, experience, sincerity and a queer sense of rhythm, the timing of the dramatist.
When I am asked how much play writing may be taught I always hesitate. ”

“ In Hollywood no author is ever considered to be of any importance at all. He ranks as a clerk to be put at any little job that comes to hand and after he has written a story, he never can by any possibility know what will be done to it before it gets to the screen. This is the outcome of the old days of silent pictures when a director took a company out on location and shot a story that he made up as he went along, very much as children who give shows for pins in a barn invent theirs. ”

“ The instinctive feeling that it is a fine thing to be a gentleman that comes from sitting through one performance of JOURNEY’S END will go much deeper under any normal skin than any dirty joke heard in an off-color musical show. If I for one moment thought that the theater had anything at all to do with forming the moral tone of a nation, I might have more patience with all this talk of political and national censorship, but I know better. The theater reflects that tone, it does not guide it. ”

“ As most of our actors left us at the first demand of their union, we would have been sunk at once if Mr. Brady had not called for help, and we built up a cast from some very important actors who were not in sympathy with the Equity Society. There were, however, very few of these, and it became necessary for Mr. Brady himself to play the most difficult part, a butler with a big scene. He played him—big scene and all—plus the most amazing stage side-whiskers I had seen in many years. Mr. Brady loved it, whiskers and all, and had the time of his life. ”

“ If the ‘phone rings, don’t answer it, and if your wife rebels, divorce her. Nothing and nobody is important when the thoughts are boiling. Nobody expects a dramatist to be a respectable member of society, and any crime is justified. If you find yourself bored at your desk go and play golf, play anything, but stop writing. If you find yourself in your stride keep at it. I wrote one entire act of THE DETOUR without getting up from my chair, sixty-five hundred words in longhand in eight hours. Teach yourself this trick of crawling into your shell like a mud turtle and letting the world roll by. ”

“ This is natural enough when a writer has just finished a play or a novel, because, of course, he has put all he had into it and his mind feels empty. But this mood often comes at other times, and the best cure for it is to hang around doing nothing until you happen to read a fine novel that has just been published or see a really good play—the right play always sends me out of the theater walking on air, and I go to bed tingling all over to wake up the next morning with a new hope and a new determination. ”

“ I recall distinctly some of the great nights when I have been present, such as the first performance of THE FORTUNE HUNTER, ON TRIAL, RAIN, WHAT PRICE GLORY, BROADWAY, BURLESQUE, COQUETTE and many more where a wave of enthusiastic cheering swept the play into instantaneous success. We of the theater, I think, when we watch these first nights with an anxious eye, are apt to forget that the reason a play goes over with a bang is because it is a good play, or a novel play, or the sort of play that at that moment is the play the public wants and the play makes the first night enthusiasm. ”

“ Yet, as a matter of truth, the same skill, the same hard work and the same knowledge of life and of play structure goes into a man’s failures as he puts into his successes. The writer who knows his trade fails or triumphs the hour he makes his decision of what he is going to write about. Then, too, the subject matter of plays is still far too often dictated by the manager and between us we are still getting ourselves into trouble trying to guess what the public wants instead of trying to do the best work we know how to do and letting it go at that. ”

“ I like to follow a heavy drama with a farce, and a light comedy with a melodrama. Of course, one man usually writes one form of play better than he does another; yet even in an age of specialists, the good marksman should learn to handle all the tools of his trade, and no man can write deep drama without a sense of comedy, and most assuredly can’t write farce without a definite note of tragedy. ”

“ If I am sure of anything at all, I am sure that I am not my brother’s keeper, and, deeply as I resent dirt for dirt’s sake in the theater, I know that the way to end it is not by allowing some one person or some group of persons to set up their own moral or ethical standard and compel the rest of the world to abide by it. The professional moralist soon standardizes his own beliefs just as the professional politician does, and he never has and never can properly represent the shifting taste of the majority. ”

“ Some years later, at the dress rehearsal of a mystery play of mine, AT 9.45, John Cranwell and I were alone in the front of the theater. Mr. Brady was ill at home. The rehearsal was dreadful; there was no pace at all; it was dead and flat, and I knew that unless some miracle happened we faced a failure. We had been told not to bother Mr. Brady, but I was desperate, and without a word to John Cranwell I ran out of the theater and drove to Mr. Brady’s house, where I dragged him out, almost by force, sick and surly. ”

“ Of course, rules for play writing don’t mean anything, not even that the writer who lays down the rules ever uses them himself. He may be like the cook who prefers to go out to lunch, and yet I have picked up one or two tricks, short cuts, easy ways to do hard things, and I am going to write a few of them down in the faint hope of their being of some slight help to a beginner. ”

“ I love my work and as a result I have never had any trouble in making all the money necessary for comfort and decency. I am strong and well and those I love are well—why should I write of a sorrowful world? Yet for some reason every time I tried to write a true play the note of futility crept into it. ”

“ I can see how two dramatists might work together to advantage if one were a highly imaginative writer and the other an expert in form and construction, one to dream out the play and the other to build it. ”

“ As a matter of fact, one of the greatest differences between a good play and a bad one is that a good play says what the writer thinks it says, while a bad one doesn’t. Play writing is really an extraordinary difficult art; if all that was necessary for an emotion to reach an audience was for the writer to feel that emotion, we would have few failures. It is quite possible for a writer to be honestly affected by the sorrows of a character without the audience in the least sharing his feeling. I have often wept as I wrote a scene that never in the least affected any one besides myself. ”

“ To me a play is so essentially a mood and it is so impossible for two human beings to enter into the same exact mood that all such collaboration is started under a very real handicap. I can understand being in full agreement with another writer upon details of plot and even upon shades of character but the mood that would compel certain reactions from the characters, that must of necessity propel them along the narrative line in a certain way, could not dominate two writers at the same moment. ”

“ The novelist often succeeds upon his literary style, a painter by his drawing and his sense of color, but paradoxically enough a good play is a bad play unless the writer has been fortunate in the choice of his subject matter; skill alone won’t save him. Since the only real standard by which one may judge a play is the rather primitive one of whether one likes it or not, it is easy to see how dangerous a game this play writing is. ”

“ The Actors’ Equity is all powerful after years of honest effort, but more actors are out of work than ever before. It’s a fine thing for the actor and the writer to be able to enforce fair conditions of employment, but unfortunately we can’t force the employment itself. A good job under fair conditions is a great thing, but no job at all isn’t so good. It may be worth a thought in passing that if we of the two creative groups in the theater had been as active in working for the theater itself as we were in fighting for the power of our individual groups, we might at this writing be better off. ”

“ Any good newspaper man will tell you that if he couldn’t turn out three thousand words of copy a day he couldn’t hold his job. A play is seldom more than twenty-one thousand words, seven days’ work if you want it to be, seven years’ work if it happens to come that way.
As a matter of fact, I figure that it takes me one hundred hours to write a play, which, of course, can be one hour a day for one hundred days, or ten hours a day for ten days; but please note that my trick is never to start writing until I have solved every problem, drawn every character and completely laid out my story line. ”

“ Just now no writer could possibly find any other reason for writing screen stories than the money he makes out of it, and quite as obviously any writer with the skill they sorely need can make plenty of money without going there. Good writers of to-day are well paid and any man or woman of the reputation for success that they demand is very likely to be in a position of financial independence that frees him from any necessity of surrendering his dignity and his integrity. ”