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DRAMATURGY 53
of sufferance" and, at the same time, sturdy enough to withstand the rigors of being mauled and of mauling back. Never must there be even the slightest leer of sex to besmirch her relations with the hero. This is so because all serials are made for only one kind of audience— the Saturday-afternoon kid trade, particularly in rural areas. City kids get their blood and thunder from the radio and television serials. British kids, somehow, aren't taken in by them unless, of course, they are Western serials, with cowboys and Indians. On the other hand, South American audiences have been known to see fifteen complete episodes at one sitting!
The making of serials is definitely a budget proposition. Only the most economy-minded producers are put on them. Cheap screenplay writing is used. Shots calling for big sets fall back on the use of sets that have been used in other pictures and have not been struck. Stock film is a must: wild animals, train crashes, conflagrations, and the like. If horses are called for, only a few are rented and they are mounted by a few riders who are photographed separately, to give the impression of a mob of horses and riders. Shooting schedules are hectic sessions, with action comparable to the action in the scenes shot. A good serial unit should be able to get an average of 125 shots in the can— about 18 minutes of running film— in one day's work. The average cost of a serial runs to anywhere from $300,000 to $500,000— that is for 30 reels of finished film or about four feature-length pictures.
A word about the serial's opening episode: it must introduce and establish the characters first. Then it must introduce the "weenie." This is the thing, the object, the papers, the will, the secret formula, the treasure map, the pearl of great value which sets the suave bad guy off on his trail of mayhem and arson against the good guy and his gal. It is the seesawing struggle to obtain this weenie which motivates the action of the serial. If you can think up a new weenie, and devise new methods of torture, new manhole situations, and new take-out devices, you can be kept busy at the Columbia, Universal-International, and Republic Studios, where most serials are made.
But your creative faculties should stop there. For from then on you must conform to the strict rules of serial-making. They are inflexible. Like the rigid, formalistic movements of a ceremonial dance, they must be adhered to with complete conformance.