While the
inconsistencies and absurdities occasionally seen on the screen are
often traceable to the director alone, the writer must do his share
toward eliminating what is incorrect or out of place. Take for
instance the Red Cross in war-pictures. The introduction of the Red
Cross into American Civil War pictures was something that one of the
present writers had commented upon and criticized two or three years
before Mr. Herbert Hoagland, of Pathe Freres American company, wrote
his helpful little book on the technique of the photoplay[27], but,
since Mr. Hoagland puts it so comprehensively in that work, what he
says is quoted here:
"In a Civil War story the scenario called for a field hospital with
the Red Cross flag flying from a staff. Well, the Red Cross wasn't
organized until the closing year of the war, and then it was done in
Switzerland. The Southerners and the Yankees never saw this emblem of
mercy _during the whole four years of strife."_
[Footnote 27: Herbert Case Hoagland, _How to Write a Photoplay_.]
Following the foregoing paragraph in his book, Mr. Hoagland speaks of
another script in which an officer in Confederate uniform is informed
by a courier--in Confederate uniform--that war had been declared
between the North and the South. "But," the Pathe censor of scripts
remarks, "there was no gray uniform of the Confederacy before the
C.
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