101 Reasons Why You Shouldn't Write A Play

( Originally Published 1944 )

My gains increase, my wealth is vanishing;

THE STAGE, to all intents and purposes, is a closed market for the new writer.

There are various side-entrances that the new writer may approach in connection with it none of them too satisfactory. Betty Smith, author of the phenomenal Best Seller, "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn," approached the stage directly many years ago. She acted upon it, and wrote full-,length plays with the hope that one might be produced. When this failed she set herself to writing little one-act plays which she sold, not for direct production, to a firm called Samuel French & Co., which publishes them in book form. Sold in book form they are hawked around the country to groups of what-have-you such as Parent-Teachers' Associations, who wish to monkey with dramaturgy. When they produce a Samuel French one-act play they send in some royalties to the Company and these royalties are divided between the Company and the author. Thus if the author has a lot of them in circulation he may make a bare living out of it, as did Mrs. Smith when she lived for years with her two daughters in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Finally Mrs. Smith wrote a novel, and it promptly rolled up such monumental dough for her that she quickly moved to the Savoy-Plaza Hotel, New York.

Once Mrs. Smith had thus, in her oblique manner of doing so, approached the legitimate stage, only one more hectic stride still separated her from making a touchdown. That step was the writing of a full-length play suitable for present-day production. I say present-day production because the stage, whatever the text-books tell you to the contrary, with all their drivel about the unities and the immutable laws of drama, is a strictly topical proposition rivalled only by the press. Were this not so then Mrs. Smith would simply have gone to the storage concern she employs to house her trunks full of yellowing and aged manuscripts, and, presto, had every producer, backer, and Broadway theatre-owner reading them avidly. Not that Mrs. Smith's new "full-length play suitable for present-day production" would necessarily have been better than her former ones; it may, indeed, have been much worse. The point is that now she could romp into the offices of producers in New York and Hollywood and get some attention.

I once sold a play four times without having it ever produced once by anybody. It is customary now for play producers in New York to "option" plays. According to a ruling by the Dramatists' Guild of the Authors' League of America the producer, after buying a play on option, must return the full rights in the play (but not, fortunately, request his money back) to the author if the option is not taken up on the due date. Whereupon the author may sell his play again as many times as he likes and always get back his rights in it in a short time if it is not produced. There are playwrights in New York who have never had a play produced who have lived (scantily) for years on this form of "playwriting.'' And playwriting, of course, in fact, it is!

It is almost unknown, however, for a free-lance writer who wishes to approach the New York play market to succeed in getting attention without going to New York. If, therefore, you live in Stupesville, Ohio, or Dopeston, Idaho, and are not so mentally depleted by this fact as to be incapable of acting on sound advice, you will not write a play. Plays are written by the super-duper pluperfectly brilliant lords of dramatic creation who live a half block off Times Square, or by sons-in-law of theatre owners. You may have my most positive assurance that nobody who ever did live in Stupesville, Ohio, or Dopeston, Idaho, ever did write a successful play. If, however, you write a novel, or a short story, you simply mail or express it to New York, to an agent or a publisher or an editor, and like as not the thing will be accepted and published without further ado. Not so a play. If you mail a play to a producer he will throw it up on a shelf somewhere. Years later, after you have threatened to sue him, he may get one of his flunkies to dig it out and send it back to you unread.

If you send it to an agent you find, first, that you do not know any such agents and can't find any except snide advertising ones. Those that are any good do not advertise, and they will almost never take on newcomers. They are not the same as the usual literary agents; they have separate offices and work in an entirely different way. If you do find one and send in your play the agent will have little or no interest in it even if it is good. Producers wish to deal only with known names, usually.

About once every ten or fifteen years some newcomer, such as Lillian Hellman ("Children's Hour") beats this rap and does get a play produced without having any "in." But Lillian Hellman is replete with schmaltz. Do you have schmaltz? And, Jeez, is it important! Not that it's a sine qua non. I myself have no schmaltz. But to revert, she is, before everything else, an individual of high pressure and terrific voltage. She probably tagged Shumlin (who produced "Children's Hour") around until he damned near went mad and had to produce her play to get any peace. But that sort of thing happens so seldom it is a waste of time to try it. Unfortunately when a Hell-man or an Ann Nichols ("Abie's Irish Rose") does go over that way they talk about it widely, and everyone jumps to the conclusion that many plays are accepted and produced that way.

It just isn't so.

Ann Nichols tramped around New York driving harried producers into frenzies with "Abie's Irish Rose" for several years before it was finally produced. It was, I think, the biggest money-maker of the last two or three decades. At first every producer in New York agreed that there was nothing in it whatever. I still agree with that thought; but evidently there was something in Ann Nichols.

If the new writer were to follow Ann Nichols' or Miss Hellman's lead his chances of running a producer to earth would be so small as not to be worth trying. The better angle would be the Betty Smith angle first to make a name in some other field of writing and then, after becoming a Big Shot, have at the producers.