Shaggy Genius

Amateur Playwrights Get Every Consideration

Shaggy Genius from those unhappy far-off things called country towns is vastly cynical. Shaggy Genius has usually written a play. After interminable weeks, the play has come back, eternally damned with the faint praise of the rejection slip. Therefore Shaggy Genius believes that managers do not read plays. Those that they read, he believes, they steal. No one but the established playwrights have a chance. Shaggy Genius stops writing plays and returns to the banalities of the barnyard.

In point of fact the yearning yokel has run the engine of his one-track mind into a blind switch. Managers do read plays. That is to say, managers see to it that plays are read. In the larger offices individuals are employed for that express purpose. They read four to six plays a day. With a shudder they send the ninety and nine incredibly bad plays whence they came. The best they place in analyzed detail on the manager's desk.

For twelve years a certain eminent producer retained in his service a succession of these play detectors. In all that time only a single manuscript wandered in from the literary wilds that merited production. Put on, it failed immediately.

On the other hand, they say that Rain kicked endlessly around the offices until Sam Harris perceived the million dollar watermarks behind the typing. Play-readers who passed it up are still wondering how they retained their jobs. Some of them did not.

Unsolicited plays are received with far more consideration than most of them deserve. They are certainly received with more consideration by the playreader than by the manager or the public. The manager may go through the $500 formality of accepting a play. But a play in rehearsal is worth six in the manager's safe. It may take him three years to lift it from his shelf and feed it to the actors. And even then the odds, according to statistics, are eight to one against the material expression of public approval through large and continued contributions at the box office.

What the Shaggy Genius does not generally consider is that if a manager produces his play, the manager is staking $30,000 or so on the turn of public favor. If the public liked His Shaggy Highness better, the managers might treat His Highness kinder! W. B.