many people see the poster and imagine they have seen the
picture before, not noticing the difference in the make of film, and
so go elsewhere to see some show that is entirely fresh to them.
Therefore keep posted, as fully as possible, as to what the
manufacturers are putting out.

Of course this matter of title-duplication has a bearing, though a
remote one, on titles that are similar yet not identical, as when
Artcraft releases "Wolves of the Rail" (with William S. Hart) and
Triangle puts out "Wolves of the Border" (with Roy Stewart). Perhaps
there is no valid objection to such similarity, which can be called
imitation only when the themes are more or less alike, but it actually
seems to have been the policy of many companies to follow the line of
least resistance when selecting titles for their pictures, using a
title, provided it is good in itself, and appropriate to the picture
under consideration, regardless of whether or not it is already
familiar to the public as the title of another photoplay, fiction
story, or legitimate drama. Needless to say, this has led to a great
deal of confusion--and, in one or two cases, to law suits.

Bear in mind that the titles of already published fiction and already
produced stage plays are not the lawful prey of the photoplaywright
merely because he is working in a different literary field. More than
one librarian has told us of the confusion caused by reason of Anna
Katharine Green's title, "The Woman in the Alcove," having been used
later by another popular woman novelist. Again, such a unique and
thoroughly distinctive title as Gouverneur Morris's "It" has been used
for a very different type of short-story by another writer.
Occasionally, we will admit, this happens by the merest
chance--although not when a certain motion picture concern puts out a
picture showing life in an American factory town and bearing Kipling's
well-known title "The Light That Failed." Your literary conscience
must dictate what you should do--willing as we are to admit that there
is, very frequently, a great temptation to use the title already
employed by another writer because of its extreme appropriateness to
your own story.

It may be said that most photoplay producing companies are led to use
unoriginal titles because of the poor and inappropriate titles given
the stories sent in to them by the authors themselves. Your duty,
then, is to help to keep the producing company from "going wrong" in
t