Or it may be that, the logical length of that
particular story being five thousand feet, the director lets it run on
for another reel, or even two, in order to be able to work in several
hundred feet of quite unnecessary close-ups of the female "lead," who
chances to be his wife, and whose popularity he is naturally anxious
to maintain. This actually has happened; but even a conscientious and
otherwise artistic director may occasionally "stretch a picture out a
little" in order to take advantage of the beautiful natural locations
of the part of the country in which he is working.
All these things being so, it becomes more and more the duty of the
author to see that his story _has_ plenty of _story_. Give the
director a strong, well-developed plot and he will have far less
opportunity and much less excuse for introducing anything that will be
in the nature of padding. Moreover, so evident is it that photoplay
audiences have come to recognize the padded story when one is shown,
that the producers have started to call a halt on this foolish
practice, and as a result stories accepted from the outside are
closely 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.
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