ese, there has been no hesitation on the
part of the director and sub-title editor to use just as many words in
a leader as might be necessary to make every point of the story
entirely clear and interesting. Paramount's "The Devil Stone," showing
the train of tragic events that followed the stealing by a wicked
Norse queen of the great emerald belonging to a certain Breton priest,
was one example of an intensely interesting detective story in which
sub-titles supplied much more than a third of the story--and supplied
it, apparently, quite unobtrusively. Here, again, only common sense
and experience can show you what to do.

Before leaving the subject of leaders let us say once more that you
must seek to find the golden middle ground between the leader that is
too flowery in its language and the other that is too stilted and
prosaic. Again, in connection with the length of leaders, study the
two following from Universal's feature, "The Kaiser, the Beast of
Berlin," the first of which contains only seven words, while the
second contains fifty-five.

Joy died, Hope fled. Desolation became supreme.

Then came the Master crime. An unoffending people was ground
into extinction beneath an iron heel. A nation was
destroyed. The Crime against Belgium being completed to its
fullest, the Prussian stalked onwards with his twin
comrades, Frightfulness and Horror. A new blotch of
infamy--the _Lusitania_--was added to the Black Name of the
Beast.

Notice, also, that as is being done with many feature pictures of this
or similar type today, the producers have adhered throughout to the
past tense in wording their sub-titles.

_6. The Use of Letters, News Items and Similar Inserts_

The great thing in using inserts other than leaders is to be able to
tell what would be most effective in scoring a point of the plot at an
important place in the story. You may start to "write in" a letter and
then suddenly get the idea that the same point might be better
explained if a newspaper paragraph were used. But no matter what other
kind of insert you employ, it will doubtless seem to be more a part of
the action than will a plain leader. For this reason it is best,
whenever possible, to use a letter, telegram, news item, or some
similar insert, in place of a leader. A carefully worded letter
introduced at just the right time will sometimes tell the audience as
much concerning the complications of th