THE TYPES IN FRANK BORZAGE'S “GET RICH QUICK WALLINGFORD” ARE RECOGNIZABLE TO ALL
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.