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CHAPTER LVIII 289 the plot must be from six to ten times as great as the interest in the one reel plot, though the plot is not necessarily five times as long. 12. The longer your play is to run, the greater must ,be your in- terest. Your interest must grow upon what it feeds. It has been shown in other chapters that your play outline must show an irregular outline of alternating crises and falling action. You have been told that each crisis is represented by a peak higher than the preceding ones and growing relatively higher as the climax is approached. It follows that if you continue this diagram past your first reel, this gradual increase in the force of the crises will constantly require greater importance of plot, since the crises draw their interest from the fact that they are developments in the plot. To approach the climax of a five reel play with the same velocity as that with which you ascend toward the one reel plot would result in a series of crises in the fifth reel that would tax the skill of the most practical and experienced writers, but as the novelist more slowly approaches his climax and the dramatist exposes his plot more sl»wly in the long play, so it is proper, in photoplay, to preserve the same relative outline in your plot diagram but to draw this diagram at a less acute angle. You write with the same degree of interest, but not with the same degree of intensity. 13. Just as in the one reel play your action runs in a succession of crisis, so must your five reel story, and in the best planned stories four leading crises should end the first four parts, leaving the last reel for the catastrophe, the climax and what falling action you may have. If the end of your first reel is a crisis that is now of equal value with the climax of a one reel story, then your pace is too fast. You cannot maintain it for the distance. But note that in the ex- ample above, the crisis at the end of the first reel is practically the same as that which forms the climax of the one reel story, but now the point aimed at is not the elopement. In the face of the stronger material the frustrated elopement no longer has the same strength because it is not the end of the play, .but merely the terminal of one period of action. It is no longer the story of the elopement, but the elopement is merely the crisis that leads Nellie to take her place beside her husband in the hospital. The physical action is the same, but it has been shown that action gains its value from the idea of the plot, and now the elopement has become merely the prefatory matter to the later development and so no longer has a climax valuation. It is merely a stopping point in the story and not the terminal, the journey's end. 14. Each part of the story, if possible, should end on an acute crisis; upon a rising and not a falling action, that interest may be carried to the next part, just as each act in a stage play ends with a crisis that is intended to hold the interest of the spectator during the entr'acte. This is not so important where the five reels are run as a unit, but many houses run on a single machine and here the reels must be changed on the one machine, necessitating a stop, and