You've stuck to your close-up,great-heaven scenes so much,"she went on with merciless frankness,"that you've really not cheapened the place by showing more than a little bit at a time.
"You might start by making Lee up for my brother,and kill him in the first reel;show the outlaws when they shoot him and run off with a bunch of stock they're after.Lite can find him and bring him home.Lite would know just how to do that sort of thing,and make people see it's real stuff.I believe he'd show he was a real cow-puncher,even to the people who never saw one.There's an awful lot of difference between the real thing and your actors."She was so perfectly sincere and so matter-of-fact that the men she criticised could do no more than grin.
"You might,for the sake of complications,put a traitor and spy on the ranch.Oh,I tell you!Have Hepsibah be the mother of one of the outlaws.She wouldn't need to do any acting;you could show her sneaking out in the dark to meet her son and tell him what she has overheard.And show her listening,perhaps,through the crack in a door.Mrs.Gay would have to be the mother.Gil says that Hepsibah has the figure of a comedy cook and what he calls a character face.I believe we could manage her all right,for what little she would have to do,don't you?"Jean having poured out her inspiration with a fluency born of her first enthusiasm,began to feel that she had been somewhat presumptuous in thus offering advice wholesale to the highest paid director of the Great Western Film Company.She blushed and laughed a little,and shrugged her shoulders.
"That's just a suggestion,"she said with forced lightness."I'm subject to attacks of acute imagination,sometimes.Don't mind me,Mr.Burns.Your scenario is a very nice scenario,I'm sure.Do you want me to be a braid-down-the-back girl in this?Or a curls-around-the-face girl?"Robert Grant Burns stood absent-mindedly tapping his left palm with the folded scenario which Jean had just damned by calling it a very nice scenario.Nice was not the adjective one would apply to it in sincere admiration.Robert Grant Burns himself had mentally called it a hummer.He did not reply to Jean's tentative apology for her own plot-idea.He was thinking about the idea itself.
Robert Grant Burns was not what one would call petty.He would not,for instance,stick to his own story if he considered that Jean's was a better one.
And,after all,Jean was now his leading woman,and it is not unusual for a leading woman to manufacture her own plots,especially when she is being featured by her company.There was no question of hurt pride to be debated within the mind of him,therefore.He was just weighing the idea itself for what it was worth.
"Seems to me your plot-idea isn't so much tamer than mine,after all."He tested her shrewdly after a prolonged pause."You've got a killing in the first five hundred feet,and outlaws and rustling--""Oh,but don't you see,it isn't the skeleton that makes the difference;it's the kind of meat you put on the bones!Paradise Lost would be a howling melodrama,if some of you picture-people tried to make it.
You'd take this plot of mine and make it just like these pictures I've been working in,Mr.Burns:Exciting and all that,but not the real West after all;spectacular without being probable.What I mean,--I can't explain it to you,I'm afraid;but I have it in my head."She looked at him with that lightening of the eyes which was not a smile,really,but rather the amusement which might grow into laughter later on.
"You'd better fine me for insubordination,"she drawled whimsically,"and tell me whether it's to be braids or curls,so I can go and make up."At that moment she saw Gil Huntley beckoning to her with a frantic kind of furtiveness that was a fair mixture of pinched-together eyebrows and slight jerkings of the head,and a guarded movement of his hand that hung at his side.Gil,she thought,was trying to draw her away before she went too far with her trouble-inviting freedom of speech.She laughed lazily.
"Braids or curls?"she insisted."And please,sir,I won't do so no more,honest."Robert Grant Burns looked at her from under his eyebrows and made a sound between his grunt of indignation and his chuckle of amusement."Sure you won't?"he queried shortly."Stay the way you are,if you want to;chances are you won't go to work right away,anyhow."Jean flashed him a glance of inquiry.Did that mean that she had at last gone beyond the limit?Was Robert Grant Burns going to FIRE her?She looked at Gil,who was sauntering off with the perfectly apparent expectation that she would follow him;and Mrs.Gay,who was regarding her with a certain melancholy conviction that Jean's time as leading woman was short indeed.She pursed her lips with a rueful resignation,and followed Gil to the spring behind the house.
"Say,you mustn't hand out things like that,Jean!"he protested,when they were quite out of sight and hearing of the others."Let me give you a tip,girl.