sely scrutinized to see if they are full length in actual material.

So far as any special rules in connection with the writing of the
feature picture is concerned, there are really none--unless the
admonition to try to make a five-reel story five times as interesting
and five times as cleverly plotted as a one-reel story may be called
a rule. In other words, the writer who can turn out a salable
synopsis for a one-reel story ought to be able to write an equally
good synopsis for a five-reel feature; and similarly, if you can write
the continuity for a one-reel story--if you can write a single-reel
scenario of the kind that would have been acceptable in any studio a
few years ago--you undoubtedly can write a five-reel continuity that
is up to the technical standard demanded by those companies that
accept complete scripts today. And of course the same applies to the
"synopsis only" script.

The one thing that you cannot do, unless you are actually on the staff
of a certain company, is obvious, and has been referred to in the
chapter on "The Synopsis": You cannot write any story with the
certainty that it will be entirely unchanged after being accepted for
production. Any one of a dozen very good reasons may demand that some
alteration, addition to or elimination of certain scenes or parts of
scenes in your story must take place while it is in the director's
hands. There is a vast difference between the necessary changes
carefully made by an artistic and painstaking director and the
indiscriminate slashing to pieces of a writer's story common among a
certain variety of directors in the past. Fortunately for the writer,
this class of director is rapidly being outlawed, and the
photoplaywright should write at all times in the confident belief that
his perfect-as-he-can-make-it story will be adequately "put on" by a
director who knows his business and is, as Mr. Merwin says, an
interpreter of the author's plot.

We need only repeat here one other thing that we said in Chapter VIII:
No matter what the length of the story, today, it is always run
through--in all but the very smallest and most out-of-the-way theatres
and towns respectively--without interruption, because two projecting
machines are used, and another reel is started as soon as one
finishes, there being no perceptible break in the action on the
screen. For this reason, if you are writing a five-reel feature-story
with, say, forty scenes to a reel, you start wit