The art of sound pictures (1930)

YOUR STORY 99 long for the average audience, in spite of its being a superproduction. It is well, in analyzing your story, to keep the number of sequences reduced as much as possible. If you find that you have more than five or six sequences, begin to eliminate unnecessary action and characters. These, if allowed to remain in your story, will only prejudice the screen editors against recommending it for consideration by the studio executives. When you have analyzed your story into sequences, with the actions and sets in each sequence as suggested, you will find that a peculiar thing has taken place. The story, as you thought it was, has become something quite different. The pleasing language and vague, abstract ideas, which often carry a written story to success, have all been eliminated. When you are listing the essential characters and action in each sequence, these vague ideas and literary forms of expression have been resolved into visualized action and brief, pithy dialogue. You may find that a story which seemed over-long in its original literary form has boiled itself down to one or two sequences containing usable action. If so, you know that you have no picture story. On the other hand, you may find that a very short story, which jumps from San Francisco to Russia, through Siberia, back to England, and home again, contains an impossible number of sequences, a tremendous number of extra characters, and an altogether prohibitive amount of motion picture material. In that case, you must take the same story and search out the essential parts of the plot, characters, scenes, and dialogue. You will find, much to your surprise, that when a story is translated from words to scenes and ac