Have you ever watched a film and wondered why certain scenes felt like they were just dragging on, not quite connecting to the main storyline? Well, you’re not alone! The brilliant Anita Loos, a pivotal player in the early days of American cinema, reminds us of the importance of keeping our plots tight and focused. In her collaborative work with John Emerson, they laid down principles that screenwriters still find valuable today, including a crucial nugget of wisdom: “It is inadvisable to attempt a minor plot in a photoplay unless it has a distinct and important bearing on your big story.” If you’ve ever felt tempted to throw in a subplot for fun, Loos’s insight might just save your screenplay from confusion. Let’s dive into what this means for today’s storytellers and why understanding the relationship between the main plot and subplots is vital for engaging audiences. If you’d like to dig deeper into these foundational screenwriting lessons from the past, click here to LEARN MORE.
“It is inadvisable to attempt a minor plot in a photoplay unless it has a distinct and important bearing on your big story.”
If you are a screenwriter, you should know about Anita Loos. Loos was one of the most influential writers in the early stages of American cinema, associated with 136 film projects per IMDb.
Married to writer John Emerson, the pair wrote one of the first books on screenwriting in 1920: “How to Write Photoplays”. I have been running a weekly series based on the book. You can access those posts here.
Today: Midway in the Photoplay [P. 100].
It is inadvisable to attempt a minor plot in a photoplay unless it has a distinct and important bearing on your big story. It is easy to confuse photoplay audiences, and there should be none of these “odd moments” of the spoken drama in the screen play.
As noted last time, what Loos and Emerson are talking about here is what has come to be known as a subplot, a secondary or “minor” plot.
Their advice is sound and speaks to one of the most fundamental truisms about a screenplay: Every aspect of the narrative has to be connected with and move forward the Plotline / central plot. At a bare minimum, as Loos and Emerson suggest, we do not want to veer…
