HOW TO WRITE PHOTOPLAYS
First printing of the legendary Anita Loos's first book, a detailed insider's guide to writing for the screen and a classic of film history.
Very good plus in very good jacket.
Price: $300.00
HOW TO WRITE PHOTOPLAYS
"People do not want very tragic stories which depress them for the next twenty-four hours."
Loos's first book, a scenarist's manual co-written with collaborator and sometime husband John Emerson, whose name "precedes Loos's on the title page, though Loos probably wrote most of it" (Hefner). In later life, Loos would look back on her partnership with Emerson with clear eyes, describing the disillusionment of going after a "man of brains" only to discover that she was "smarter than he was." HOW TO WRITE PHOTOPLAYS draws on Loos's great success as a scenarist and intertitles writer, offering practical and demystifying tips for breaking into the movies: writing for the pictures, Loos says, "is as practical a profession as plumbing," more lucrative than writing for print, and requires "more technical mastery than natural genius." Easy for a natural genius to say.
Loos, the first woman to become a Hollywood staff scriptwriter after selling a scenario to D.W. Griffith in 1912, was an innovative and celebrated writer for film well before ascending to even greater fame as the author of GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES (1925); as a novelist, she stood out from her contemporaries in her sure mastery of the film idiom and its influence on modern vernacular speech, as well as for her deep understanding of the interplay of text and image. Despite the characteristic wit and flair of her title writing, in PHOTOPLAYS she advises restraint for the would-be scenarist: prologues, she says, are out of date, and lengthy ending subtitles are to be avoided "unless you have some idea which simply cannot be expressed in pictures." The manual includes the complete Emerson-Loos scenario for THE LOVE EXPERT, a 1920 silent romantic comedy starring Constance Talmadge in which the Loosian guidelines are shown in practice. Her tips on writing around censorship and avoiding too much coincidence remain useful, and after a full century her harshest rule has lost no relevance at all: "Your story, first of all, must have a point."
Read more: Loos, A Cast Of Thousands; Brooks Hefner, "Any Chance to Be Unrefined": Anita Loos, the Vernacular Modernist Diary, and Cinematic Narrative.
The Object
New York: The James McCann Company, 1920. 7.25'' x 5''. Original red cloth with black lettering to front board and spine. In original printed dust jacket. 154 pages. Black and white photographic illustrations and frontispiece. Small bookseller label to rear paste-down, light pencil notations to endpapers. Leaves lightly toned. Jacket with moderate toning and soil, with several small chips to edges.
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