cannot
be taken to guard against everything that may make for jerky or
illogical action of this kind. The merciless scissors of a careless
operator in the picture theatre may remove three or four inches of the
film at a certain point, with the result that a character leaving one
side of the room and starting to go out by the door on the other side
may be made to cross the room at a bound, causing a surprised laugh
at a very serious moment of your play. Do not approximate this
ludicrous effect by writing your scenes as illustrated in the
foregoing example.

Still another laughable error of the novice is to introduce into a
scene certain action which could not be properly registered in mere
pantomime. We lately examined an amateur script in which the following
appeared as part of the action between a girl and a man in a farm
location:

so (Mary) tells the stranger that her father is over in the
next field, milking the cow. He starts to, etc.

Now, whether or not the spectator in the theatre were shown a previous
scene in which Father actually milked a cow, the pantomime of Mary, in
trying to make plain without the aid of a cut-in leader the fact that
she was telling the man what her father was doing, would be extremely
ludicrous, to say the least. You must give thought to every bit of
action you write, remembering that it is of no use to say that
so-and-so happens if the action described will not register clearly in
pantomime. Here again experience will teach you what to put in and
what to leave out.

_9. The "Cut-Back"_

Readers of the boys' story papers published a few years ago will
remember how at the end of one chapter the hero would be left hanging
by a slender vine over a yawning chasm, "one thousand feet deep." The
next chapter, instead of continuing the logical sequence of action and
explaining how he was rescued--or rescued himself--would begin: "Let
us now return to Captain Barlow and Professor Whipple, whom we left
facing the band of dwarfs at the mouth of the cave, etc." These
stories exemplified practically the same technique as is employed
today by photoplaywrights who use what has become known as the
"cut-back," sometimes referred to as the "flash-back."

Mr. D.W. Griffith is commonly credited with having "invented" this
technical device, which is simply a frequent switching from one scene
to another, and then back again to the first, in order to heighten
interest by maintaining the su