As simply and as emphatically as we can put it, the most important thing in connection with the writing of the scenario is to have the action progress smoothly, logically, and interestingly from the first to the last scene.  Wherever possible, one scene should lead into the next scene, and each scene should appear to be the only one possible—­from the standpoint of the action it contains—­at that stage of the plot’s development.  If, even for a moment, a scene appears to have been written in solely for effect, or merely to delay the climax of the story, the picture is open to criticism for padding.  Not only should the denouement (the untying, the clearing up of the story at the close) appear to be the only one logically possible, but each successive scene should follow the one preceding it with inevitableness.

To be sure, this does not mean, as we explained in the chapter on Plot, that the sequence of your scenes must be the simple, straight-forward sequence of everyday life, in which one character is seen to carry out his action without interruption from start to finish.  Quite to the contrary, photoplay action must often interrupt the course of one character so as to bring another personage, or set of personages, into the action at the proper time to furnish the surprising interruptions and complications—­and their unfoldings—­required to make a plot.  But all this really is the progressive, logical development of the story in good climacteric style.

Elsewhere in this volume we have spoken of the way in which the action progresses in the twelve- to sixteen-scene comic pictures in the comic supplements to the Sunday newspapers.  Take for example the well-known “Bringing Up Father” series of “comics.”  Commencing with the basic situation, the action moves progressively to a logical conclusion, the climax coming, usually, in the next to the last picture.  The last picture is the surprise-denouement—­the event which naturally and inevitably follows the climax.  There is, of course, a wide contrast between one of these series and a “dramatic” photoplay; but the same principle that governs the evolution of the story in the comic supplement should be applied to the working out of your photoplay story.  Cultivate the picturing eye, we repeat, so that by being able to visualize each scene as you plan it in your mind you cannot fail to produce in your scenario a series of scenes whose action is logically connected and essentially natural and unforced.

5.  The Interest of Suspense

To say that there must be a logical sequence in progressing from scene to scene, and that each must appear to be the natural outcome of the one preceding it, is by no means to say that you must suggest in one scene what is about to follow in the next.  It is when we review a photoplay in retrospection that we decide whether proper care has been given to the planning of the scenes so as to make them lead smoothly one into the other, but while we are watching a photoplay for the first time, half the charm lies in not knowing what is coming next.