Other things followed, for we discussed everything from cabbages to kings, and then I plumped the question at him that I had been waiting to ask from the first.

“How do you like the movies as compared to the speaking drama?  Come now, cross your heart and hope to die.  When the night comes down and the lights go up, isn’t there a blue minute now and then?”

“Surest thing you know,” he grinned.  “It isn’t because there’s such a radical difference between the ‘talkies’ and the movies, however.” [He refers to musical comedy as the “screamies.”] “The play in the theatre is largely a matter of pantomime, you know.  Dialogue is employed to advance the actual plot only when it is impossible or impracticable to do it with dumb show.  And when I think of some of the lines I’ve been called upon to spout, I can’t say that I regret the movies’ lack of dialogue.

“What does hurt, though,” he admitted, “is the absence of response.  I don’t mean applause, but the something that comes up over the footlights to you from the audience, the big something that tells you instantly whether you have hit it or missed, whether you are ringing true or false.  You don’t get that in the pictures.  Your audience is the director, and you know that it will be weeks or months before your work is going to get its test.

“But in everything else, the movie has the talkie skinned a mile.  Instead of mouthing somebody else’s words, you are doing the thing yourself.  There’s action, and life—­one day you are in the forest, the next in the desert, the next on the sea.”

“Nonsense!” I exclaimed.  “I understand that it’s all done in a studio.”

“I had the idea myself,” he laughed.  “But no more.  When I was in the ‘talkies,’ I used to hear a lot about realism.  Father must wash in a real basin with real water and real soap.  There had to be two hens at least in every barnyard scene, and when Lottie came home from the cruel city, she had to have a real baby in her arms.  Lordy, I never knew what realism was until I struck the movies.  They’ve gone crazy over it.

“‘The Half-Breed,’ you know, was adapted from one of Bret Harte’s stories, and nothing would do the director but a trip up to the Carquinez woods in northern California.  A forest fire figured in one of the scenes, but I never thought much about it until I saw them bringing up some chemical engines, hose reels, and five or six fire-brigades.

“‘What’s the idea?’ I asked.

“‘To keep the flames from spreading,’ they told me.

“And let me tell you, it was some fire.  After I got out of it I felt like a shave from a Mexican barber.”

“What effect is the movie going to have on the speaking drama?” was my next question.

“Look at the effect it’s had already,” he said.  “Shaw is the only playwright clever enough to write dialogue that will hold any number of people in the theatre.  The motion picture has made the public demand action.  It has changed the plot and progress of the drama completely.”