“The thing is to look at one’s own work from the viewpoint of the audience, and continually ask one’s self such questions as, ’Is it clear?  Can I follow it without confusion of mind?  Does it constantly keep my interest stimulated?’

“Now the question of breaking one’s scenes with close-ups and varied shots from different angles.  Of course, we all do this in preparing our scripts.  But lately I have wondered whether it would not be better to leave the breaking up of the scene to the producer, except in very obvious cases.  You see, I am now speaking as a producer as well as a writer.  The value of the close-up almost always is governed in practice by floor conditions.  I mean by this several things.  For one thing, if the cast is not the ideal cast you have had in mind when writing the play the character you have set down for a close-up may not be able to express what it is essential to express in that particular close-up.  The producer must then find some other means of punctuating the situation.  For another thing, no producer is likely to build a set and handle his people in it in exactly the way you have conceived.  For that matter, no two producers are likely to handle the set and the characters in the same way.  It follows that very often the producer can secure a natural close-up in the course of the action where you have called for a special close-up scene.  And on the other hand the producer may find that he needs a special close-up scene at a point where your conception of the movements of the characters has not made it appear necessary.  Anyhow, the close-up is an interpretation.  If, as I hold, the producer is an interpreter, would it not be better to leave this matter of close-ups to him, and write your scene straight, with emphasis on the points that should be brought out most strongly?  I don’t say that this surmise is right; I merely am wondering.  In any event, we do not want to see the close-up overdone.  We don’t want too much of the Griffith staccato.  It leads to what a certain friend of mine once called Tom Lawson’s method of muck-raking—­’The method of universal emphasis.’”

It is interesting to note in the first paragraph of the quotation from Mr. Merwin’s letter that he advocates giving, in most pictures, “the first few hundred feet” to a proper introduction of the characters and to laying the foundation, as it were, for the story proper.  This is in marked contrast to the method of a few years ago, when one-reel pictures were the rule, and when very little footage could be spared for such introductory scenes.  Today, with very much longer pictures, there is no excuse for any writer’s ever feeling himself cramped for room in which to make clear everything that the spectator ought to know in connection with his characters and his plot.

Finally, in connection with the story, as written by you, and the picture, as put on by the director, we again quote Mr. Sargent: