The cost of producing a motion picture which provides a full evening’s entertainment averages between ten thousand and twenty-five thousand dollars. One-reel pictures, which require about fifteen minutes to show in a theater, usually cost in the neighborhood of a thousand dollars to produce. It may easily be said that this money is spent by one man--the motion-picture director--yet, with all his responsibility, the director is a character little known to the layman. Within the picture ranks the terms “director” and “producer” have become interchangeable, though not always correctly so. Directors of the best type are deserving of the title “producer,” because their completed productions bear evidence in every branch of their imagination and creative ability. But the more common type of director is really little more than a “stage-manager”; he takes the story as it comes from the author’s hands and, “following instructions,” stages the manuscript for the camera. He tells the players what they are to do in each scene, lays out the scenic requirements, and so on, but injects none of his own individuality into the pictures. Between the two extremes there is the average director, and it is of his work that we shall treat here. Who, then, is the motion-picture director? We have explained in a preceding chapter that he is “the man in charge of the making of the picture.” But here we shall see him at close range, from the time he receives the story from the photoplay editor until he finally turns his negative film into the factory for developing and editing, after which the positive prints are made. Between the manuscript and the completed film many an interesting event has happened. Perhaps a factory has been burned to the ground, and the heroine rescued from almost certain death; mayhap a daring criminal has run amuck, only to be brought to bay by the noted detective and captured after a thrilling fight; or it is possible that armies have clashed in battle before a battery of cameras. But one and all--heroine, criminal, detective, and soldier--have answered to the beck and call of a director. “The world’s a stage,” and the picture producer’s world is limited only by the imagination of the author.