Page:The Point of Attack, or, How to Start the Photoplay.djvu/6

 drop-curtain rises in a motion picture theatre and the shadow action commences, the audience is looking, not at figures projected upon a screen, but through a window into the private lives of fictitious characters around whom the plot is woven. The photoplaywright is the creator of those characters and the absolute ruler of their destinies. Therefore, it is the photoplaywright who must decide at just what period in their lives the window curtain is raised and the audience is allowed its first peep at what is going on.

3. In the exhibition of a five-reel subject about seventy-five minutes are occupied in running the five thousand feet of film through the projecting machine, and the time for the showing of one, two, six or seven reel subjects may be calculated accordingly—an average of about fifteen minutes to each reel. These are the standard lengths of the screen dramas and comedies of the present day. Therefore, it is obvious that a limit must be set to the length of each story that is photographed. So, in starting to visualize a story, the author must of necessity mark a beginning from which the action develops—he must draw a line of demarcation between the events that the spectators are to witness during a set space of time and the events which have preceded and are related, but which have no actual part in the picture itself. In dealing with the drama of the speaking stage these preceding events, which are never seen although frequently suggested, are known as the conditions antecedent, and for lack of a better term I shall hereafter so refer to them.

4. In selecting a point of attack or beginning, the photoplaywright is confronted with the task of skillfully forming a link between the outside occurrences that 4