CHAPTER XIV

Tempo is such an intricate subject that the more that is said of it, the more it obtrudes itself on the matter of directing. If a director isn't careful, watching the progress of the various episodes of his picture and measuring their importance and actual length in his mind's eye, he is liable to have too much material on hand when he comes to the task of “cutting” his picture.

The cutting and the editing of a picture present together one of the most difficult processes through which it goes before reaching the public. And while cutting and editing are not exactly part of a director's duties, he exercises a certain amount of supervision over the process because in it his work is finished off and polished.

The cutting and editing of scenes is the process of putting them together in the proper sequences and trimming off unnecessary footage so that the picture approaches the proper length. Skilled cutting and editing, carrying with it a careful appreciation of the director's work, can sometimes redeem a picture that seems hopelessly bad. Likewise lack of skill and appreciation in the cutting and editing process sometimes “kills” a picture.

But when a director has failed to properly gauge the tempo of the various sequences that go to make up a picture, there is all sorts of trouble when the finishing off and polishing process is started. The director may have allowed too much space for each of his episodes and thus when the editing starts, the director or the editor finds it next to impossible to bring the picture down to the required length without mutilating the whole.

Of course, the ideal state of affairs would be to permit the picture to run its natural length. Then there would be no trouble at all about directors' overshooting. However, this would lead to pictures being unnecessarily long as there would always be directors who would abuse such a privilege. The length of the average feature is, however, elastic enough to permit a director to err a thousand feet or so in his judgment as to the length of a story and still be safe. Feature pictures run anywhere from forty-five hundred feet to six thousand feet. The average length is five thousand feet, hence the term “five reeler.”

And most stories can be told easily enough within the average five reels. There is one critic who claims that no story is big enough to consume more than five reels of film. He is pretty nearly right, at that.

But with all these footages known before hand there are directors who will so misjudge the tempo of the picture sequences and who will so misjudge the importance of sequences and include in them more scenes than are necessary (these directors are usually the ones who work without a continuity), that when they have finished with the camera work on a picture, they find themselves with too much footage on hand and forced into the necessity of cutting out much of the story value of their picture.

One of the most artistic pictures produced during the last year, a picture adapted from a brace of novels of universal fame was to a certain extent, spoiled because the director “overshot” various phases of the story. When he had cut it as much as he was able, when he had brought it down to ten thousand feet, it was quite perfect. And he was unable to cut it down further because each further cut he made on it would have been like sticking a knife in himself and twisting it. It takes more than courage for a director to cut out a scene over which he may have labored for hours at a time.

However, the public, through the theatre owners, has declared itself as generally opposed to pictures taking more than an hour and a half to run unless they provide some remarkably effective sustaining interest. As this picture lacked spectacular quality and was never smashingly dramatic it had to be cut down to average length and in this final cutting much that was good about it was removed and discarded.

Most directors, however, can judge their tempo and their footage to be sure not to run into such trouble. The real difficulty on this score comes when the short two reel picture is made and particularly the serial picture so popular in some theatres today.

In the direction of a serial, each chapter of which is usually told in two thousand feet of film, or two-fifths as much as is allotted the average feature picture, the director is faced with the necessity of making every foot of film contain either plot interest or action interest. Pictorial beauty, characterization, atmosphere, qualities which sometimes assist the interest of a feature picture to a great extent, are discarded from the slightest contemplation in the direction of a serial, even as similar elements are discarded in the writing of the magazine serial story.

So it is in the production of the ever-popular rapid-fire, thrill serial that the matter of tempo is of the utmost importance to the director. If he takes a little too long in picturizing a certain sequence, where does he stand? He can't resort to the practice of the feature director, that is cutting out a few scenes here and there that he may have included for their pictorial quality or for their atmosphere. He can't do this because he has excluded those scenes in the first place. Every foot of his film is given over to plot and action interest. So it may be seen that this question of tempo enters importantly into the director's work.

Incidentally the serial director's job is an exceedingly difficult one. Often in the two reels allowed him he must tell as much if not more story than is usually told in the five reel feature. He must constantly keep the action going at a break-neck speed. He can seldom let a player stand still for the short space of a half minute. Everyone is constantly on the move. The plot and the action demand it. The characters of the story must be characterized by plot and action. There is no space for the human touches and the characterization by little details. Not in a motion picture serial.

In addition much of the serial's action proceeds at an extraordinary rate of speed. The rate is hardly natural at all. The director must adapt himself to this strictly serial way of doing things. This ultra-speed is particularly noticeable when it comes to the big thrill, the big punch scene which usually closes an episode of a serial. Here the action assumes almost lightning like rapidity. The director must force his players to the limit of their capacity for speed. If in his scenes of plot interest there was not a half minute to be lost here in these scenes there is not a half second to be lost.

The serial director works down to the line and doesn't allow himself much to spare on one side of it or the other. So, it may be seen, if he isn't a good judge of tempo he is liable to find himself in the very deuce of a mix when he comes to cut and edit his episodes. If he has allowed too much film for a certain incident there usually isn't much to do but cut the entire incident out and cover the hole with a subtitle. If, by any chance, he has not allowed enough space for his action, the episode appears hurried, awkward, jumbled, hard to follow. And if he has slowed some scenes down a bit so that he will have the proper footage when it comes to this cutting and editing, his audiences will jump on him for trying to “pad out” the picture.

So, difficult as is the task that confronts the director of the five reel dramatic or humorous subject, the task that confronts the director of the serial must needs be set down as more difficult still. The only reason why the serial director is not given greater position in this volume is that the demands of his audiences and the limitations of his footage, permit him to attempt little that is regarded in a serious way by audiences of taste and discrimination.

The average feature picture can be summed up on its merits on the day that it is shown but, “features may come and features may go, but serials run on forever” and consequently no one can attempt to sum up a serial in one sitting.