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CHAPTER XXXIV 147 Note that they do not say that it "will make" but that it "can be made into" five thousand feet. In other words, if you have about forty scenes that are not cut back a director should be able to work your story into a reel, but one author who specialized in writing half- reel comedies for one company almost always sold them to another company for full reels if the first company did not take them. 7. The number of words has nothing to do with the length of the action. "Jack climbs up the ladder," suggests a much longer scene than "Jack falls off the ladder," but the number of words is the same. In A-1 in the Appendix scenes one and nine should take about the same footage. One has more than three times the number of words than the other. 8. Since the number of pages is roughly dependent upon the num- ber of words, this is no more reliable as a guide. 9. In other words there is no way of determining or even approxi- mating the length of action a script will run. Like the housekeeper who takes "a pinch" of this and "about so much" of that, you must come to learn about how much story should make a reel subject. Then you try to write that story in action that should take about a thou- sand feet, allowing for the inserts. This done you sell it and turn your head away to hide from your sight the ensuing butchery. This is not intended as a pleasantry. Until stories are permitted to run their natural lengths, there cannot but be a succession of literary abor- tions. A story that might be charming in fourteen hundred feet may be absolutely bad in a thousand. In the course of time you will come to the point where you will write by instinct a story that will go about a thousand feet to the reel in well played action, but more than this you cannot do. You can tell that this story has plot enough to hold the interest for two thousand feet and that this other should be worth five reels, and you can do your work accordingly, but closer than this you may not come. 10. Some writers profess to be able to time the action with a split second watch. This would be a good plan if all directors used pre- cisely the same business the author did and if all directors always worked at the same speed, but if a director is listless he may let the action drag a little or if he is feeling particularly sprightly he may hurry the action. Usually this will serve only to give a rough idea and the student is apt to give more attention to the watch than to his action. 11. Some studios have tried the experiment of assigning to each scene a predetermined footage. The director and the manager of pro- duction, or either, will mark the footage on the scene. This scene is worth ten feet, this eighteen and so on. The total is struck and the footage added to or decreased until it comes to the right length. The scene is rehearsed with a stop watch and cut or amplified until it runs to schedule. In theory the idea is good, but in practice the method is too inflexible. 12. It is customary to allow from one to two hundred feet for in-