Scenario and Screen. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, [1928].
First edition.
Octavo. x, [iv], 232 pp., with twelve black and white plates, including frontispiece, and three black and white text illustrations. Navy publisher's cloth, spine and front cover printed in yellow, with original dust jacket. Faint creasing to front cover, mild toning and foxing to endpapers and fore-edge, but still a near fine copy. Jacket is rubbed and lightly soiled, with a few small closed tears to edge (the largest about one inch long), but still very good. Scarce in any condition but especially hard to find in jacket.
First edition of this important early film book, an in-depth look at screenwriting and other aspects of film production.
Frances Taylor Patterson was was one of the earliest instructors of photoplay composition at Columbia University, which offered the first academic courses on film in the United States. Patterson was the first to argue that film was a distinct art, separate from theatre and literature, as well as the first to use film and movie clips in film instruction. She was so influential that her books on screenwriting and film criticism are still frequently cited today, and she plays a significant role in scholarship on early film education (see Polan's Scenes of Instruction).
Kelly, Mary. "Columbia's Cinema Class", New York Times, December 7, 1930; Polan, Dana B. Scenes of Instruction: The Beginnings of the U.S. Study of Film. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007; "Screen: Here and There", New York Times, October 23, 1929;
ID:
8422
$
550