zes," says Mr. A.W.
Thomas, in the _Photoplay Magazine_, "as does every editor and author,
that morality is to be desired, and to this end, crime or suggestion
of crime is presented, as a rule, to convey the moral. 'Crime for
crime's sake' is to be condemned. Sensationalism and forbidden themes
are seldom seen nowadays."

Aside from murder and suicide, why is it that so many young authors
imagine that to be strong a story must have at least one violent or
tragic death-scene? That there are hundreds of gripping stories,
pictures with the biggest kind of "punch," in which no death or
suggestion of death is shown, is well-known to every photoplay patron
whose mind and heart are in good working order. And yet editors are
every day returning scripts in which a murder, a suicide, a death as
the result of a duel, or a death arising from disease or accident, is
shown--all for no other reason than that the writer imagines he is
thereby producing a strong drama.

_3. Depressing Dramas_

Death in a picture is neither undesirable nor out of place--_provided
it is necessary to the proper and inevitable development of the plot_.
But the mistaken idea that to snuff out a human life in a thrilling or
a heart-rending manner, when there is really no logical necessity for
it, makes a picture either strong or dramatic is responsible for
scores of unaccepted scripts. Yet it would not be well to try to apply
to all picture stories Mr. George Cohan's motto, "Always leave them
laughing," for, as every intelligent exhibitor knows, and as a certain
producer once said, "they come to weep as well as to laugh." The point
that seems to have escaped many young writers is this: There is very
often a more decided, a more convincing, and a far more welcome,
"punch" in a scene which shows the saving of a human life than there
is in one which shows a death, even of the most unworthy character in
the cast. To have your villain nursed back to life by the man whom he
has so persistently and cruelly persecuted, and then to have him show
the change of heart that one would expect in him in the circumstances,
will be far more dramatic and gripping in the eyes of an intelligent
audience than to have your hero "hurl the black-hearted ruffian to
his doom" over a cliff a thousand feet high.

There is a distinction, with a very decided difference, between the
picture that fills the spectators with gloom and the one that simply
allows them to have what many wom