I DON'T know how I get these morbid cravings, but I sometimes feel a strange, wild longing surging restlessly within me. I want to be a moving picture manager. I yearn to produce movies—to tell the actors in them what to do, and how not to do it. To me, it seems the only life.

I don't know any of the seamy side of it, of course: any of the snares and pitfalls that lie in wait for the straying feet of innocent movie magnates. But even the thought of these dangers cannot head me off. I want to try out the life. I have the utmost faith in myself—a firm, a deep-rooted conviction that, as a film dictator, I would unquestionably be There.

The point is that I should be something entirely NEW. I don't like to talk about myself—as the saying goes —but I simply can't help remarking that I would bring a touch of novelty into the life of the screen. I would begin radically, and treat all the established precedents in the way the playful little Huns have been treating churches.

I wouldn't go right on doing things just as they used to be done in the dear old days of the biograph.

I might be over-daring, and all that, but I certainly could do things in a non-Keystone way. When I tell you that—were I a moving picture manager—I would feel that a successful comedy did not necessarily depend on knocking down a battalion of trick policemen, and then setting them up again. You must begin to see that my ideas would completely revolutionize the motion picture world.

BUT I would institute even more startling changes. When engaging a leading lady, for instance, I "would write a clause in her contract saying' that she must choose between me and* high white shoes—once and forever.'

I would, speak a few well-chosen words to her, then and there, on the subject of garments. I would intimate that, contrary to the prevailing impression, the role of a debutante daughter of one of the oldest and richest families in New York society is not necessarily indicated by the wearing of a set of soiled white fox furs.

I would go still further, and explain, as gently as possible, that it is not always imperative for a lady's coiffure to look as if it had been arranged with a knife and fork. If, by that time, the would-be leading lady had not swept disdainfully out of my employ, I would even venture to suggest that it really isn't immodest for a woman to be seen—on occasions— without her wrist-watch.

Most moving picture stars have evidently sworn an awful oath never to be parted from their wrist-watches. They wear them incessantly, even though playing in one of those pictures supposed to take place in the early B. C.'s, like "The Triumph of Ptolemy," for instance. They wear them with evening gowns and with nightgowns; they even wear them in those bright, infrequent flashes that show them, for an all-too-brief second, as they are about to remove the chiffon that stands between them* and the personal bath.

As for the leading men, I would be even more vehement on this question of clothes. I would restrain them, forcibly if necessary, from wearing the unmentionable things they now wear—those coats which look as if the hangers were still in the shoulders, those overcoats with the girdles, those collars that look as if the wearer were all ready for the guillotine. Any leading man who attempted to wear one of those fuzzy Byron hats in the presence of my camera would spend his next few days in an exhaustive study of the pages of advertisements headed "Help Wanted—Male."

In sports, too, I would bring about tremendous changes. In tennis scenes, I would try to instill into the heads of the participants that the racquet is not grasped over the maker's name. I might even venture to hint that ladies and gentlemen, in scenes showing their prowess on the courts, might abstain from French heel slippers—and spats. Golf is seldom shown—there's not enough action in it for the voracious action-hounds who form the audiences of moving pictures. If, however, it is necessary for the hero to take a swat at a golf ball, just to show his virility and versatility, I would see that the swat was administered with the right hand lower on the shaft of the club than the left.

Haven't you often seen those animated scenes on the porch of the property country club, representing life in the very smartest set? All the supes are called into requisition to play the roles of the gay and happy golfers, tennisers, riders, and automobilists, and they appear in what is supposed to be the correct costumes for these diversions. Have you ever noticed those costumes—particularly the riding habits? I should certainly take steps about those habits. If I couldn't do it any other way, I wouldn't say that the scene was a country club, I would call it, quite simply, a masquerade.

THE interior decorations of the moving picture homes would be another wide field for my activities. Somehow, I have never seemed to feel that a man's wealth was measured by the number of articles that could be jammed into his domicile; if the scenario called for a setting showing the library of a multi-millionaire, I wouldn't feel that I would have to do all that lay in my power to make it look like a cross section of Silo's auction rooms. I would keep as far away from plush as possible; and I would have nothing whatever to do with those elaborate wooden grilles without which no doorway in the movies can be considered complete. I would try not to become involved in any of those curtains of synthetic lace with which movie windows are so intricately draped, and I would do my best completely to blot all art calendars out of my life.

In drawing-room scenes, I would strive without ceasing to keep the heroine's tresses from being blown by the obviously out-door wind coming in through the roof of the studio. There must be some way of doing this—I know it hasn't been discovered as yet, but surely some one will be able to figure it out some day.

WHEN the scenes are laid, as they so often are, in the offices of captains of tremendous industries and affairs, I don't think I'd go in very strongly for massive, leather - upholstered chairs. I know that there is a tradition that the offices of big business men must be simply thronged with large chairs upholstered in leather, like those in the lobbies of the hotels dedicated to traveling men, but I don't seem to remember them in any regular offices. Would you mind just glancing hastily around your office and seeing if there are any concealed about it?

Also, in these same offices, I would try to impress upon the gifted actresses who enact the trying roles of stenographers, that, on almost every brand of typewriter, it is possible to use more than two keys. I would do my utmost to place a ban on the little scenes where clerks, stenographers, salesmen, and comedy relief office boys all gather around their employer's door, jostling each other in their attempts to get within listening distance of the keyhole, and, when the door is suddenly opened, falling heavily in a sitting position. I feel, sometimes, that I could manage to struggle along if I never witnessed that episode again; but, every time I attend the movies, there it is in some form or another. It is to the movies what ladies with pasts are to the spoken drama.

EVEN after these things were cleaned up, there would still be work for me. I am one of those who must be forever messing around trying to leave things better than I found them—it's congenital with me. Not even these movie reforms would be enough for me; I would have to keep on, doing a lot of other little things around the films. Once I've started, I must go on to the bitter end.

For instance, I would feel that something might be done about those highly instructive little divertissements so appropriately entitled, "News of the Week." If I ever got into the state where I felt I must produce things like that, I would firmly omit the inevitable flood scene. There is an element of sameness about flood scenes; I find it slightly enervating to gaze, week after week, upon the watery streets of some town in lower Arkansas—population two hundred and eighty-seven, at the last census—with the inhabitants traveling about by means of row boats. I cannot feel that there is a fresh flood every week. I confess to a slight sense of grievance, as if the flood of week before last were being put over on me as being strictly up-to-date stuff. Unveilings, too, now so popular in the weekly panorama of events, I think I would irretrievably "can." The children of the public schools of towns in Indiana doing their ceaseless Morris dances in the city park, and the parade of floats incidental to the celebration of Elk Week in some place in southwestern Minnesota would never find their way into my films.

THERE are many other little things that would require my attention. The letters, for instance, that form part of every cinema drama! I would contrive somehow to have them written in a hand other than that of a six-year-old child, and I would strain every nerve to make them slightly more interesting. When I once got on the subject of movie literature, I would go right on through to the captions, with which every play must of necessity be so liberally interspersed. I would go to the talented writers of those captions and I would urge them, as a personal favor, not. to go out of their way to split the infinitives. I would expect them, of course, to go right ahead and shatter them when it came naturally, but not to go to any great trouble to do it. Also, I would take a solemn oath that never would I have anything to do with those "Art" captions—the highly decorated affairs illustrated with pictures said to be symbolic of the scenes that are to follow. You know the inevitable decorations— the bags of gold, the hand wielding a sceptre, the broken heart, the two Easter lilies, and all the other well-known insignia of dramatic situations on the films.

There are countless other reforms that I would accomplish, but the thing would run into as many volumes as the Enc. Brit. There are a few points, however, that not even the cost of paper can prevent me from adding. I want my stand on them distinctly understood. I want to get them in writing, and have them witnessed if necessary.

IN short, I want to make it clearly understood that, if I were a movie manager, I would never, under any conceivable circumstances, produce a picture that contained any of the following atrocities: A scene in which a mob chases a fleeing comedian; a close-up of the leading lady taken with any kitten, puppy, canary, horse, calf, goldfish, pigeon, deer, monkey, or any other fauna whatever; a close-up of the leading lady showing large, well-formed tears sliding smoothly down her cheeks; any close-up of any leading man; a fade-away of the leading man and the leading woman, with their backs to the camera and their arms around each others' waists, walking slowly away toward the glowing West; a "dual role," played by the star who takes the part of two people, one unbelievably noble and the other unspeakably wicked; a comedian whose humor only consists in his avoirdupois ; a Western drama in which the town bad man is completely reformed by a little child; an early English coaching or hunting scene, taken at the inn at Forest Hills, Long Island, and, lastly, any picture of Mr. Francis X. Bushman.