“Here’s How Movie Studios Rejected Scripts in the Early 1900s”

This is an awesome find from MovieFone:

If only The Essanay Film Manufacturing Company (1907–1925) was in existence today, perhaps we’d have at least one studio focused on producing original works. That’s what we might think after seeing a manuscript rejection slip from Essanay currently making the Internet rounds (originally scanned and uploaded by Old Hollywood from the book ‘Silent Movies: The Birth of Film and the Triumph of Movie Culture’). The notice lists a number of possible reasons why a screenwriter’s submission could have been declined, and the studio would check off their reason(s). The receiver of this rejection apparently sent in something unoriginal and so got the “idea has been done before” line checked off.

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It’s worth noting that Essanay produced the first American films based on ‘Sherlock Holmes’ and ‘A Christmas Carol.’ So they obviously didn’t really say no to adaptations. Just like other studios, franchises weren’t out of the question either, if we consider the regular characters of Chaplin and Ben Turpin to qualify as such. There’s no date on this particular notice, though it is clearly from the time before Essanay completely moved to California (they first had a branch out there). One more interesting bit of trivia with which to compare Essanay to today: co-founder/owner George K. Spoor, with partner Paul J. Bergren, was an early developer of 3-D movies back in the early 1920s. So who knows what he’d be doing if alive today.

For a contemporary example of how studios cover manuscripts, you should check out the GITS series The Story Behind Script Coverage, an analysis of the ICM Story Department Coverage Packet. If you don’t have time to do the whole series, at least check out this one: G. How to Write Coverage. 

For more of the MovieFone article, go here

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