The earnings of a motion-picture production are as fluctuating as the rise and fall of stock prices in Wall Street. The cost of a thousand-foot picture is usually placed at the average of a thousand dollars, and the manufacturer selling his positive prints at ten cents a foot and releasing through established channels markets twenty-five prints, though the number may run many more or less, according to the efficiency of the selling organization and the popularity of the particular type of picture. He may thus be seen to have more than doubled his investment. His foreign sales may double this figure again. But this instance treats of the manufacturer who has been years in business, and who is releasing through one of the combinations strong enough to practically guarantee a market. Even in these cases inferior-quality pictures or a change in the tastes of the public may quickly force a drop in the number of prints sold. Likewise it does not require a very great increase in the cost of production to eat up the profit. The manufacturer of long pictures faces even greater uncertainty. His investment in each picture will average between ten and twenty-five thousand dollars, and it does not require many high-salaried stars or spectacular scenes to reach the higher figure. Nor have we considered the overhead expense of maintaining a studio and offices and the heavy outlay to market the picture. A poor picture can lose all of the original investment and even more, the latter if a strenuous effort is made by means of advertising and so on to sell it. A good picture can double the investment, and the outlook for a picture of unusual strength is rosy indeed. Many very costly productions have been forgotten a month after they were released; many very good pictures are still earning money for their producers two and three years after they first came on the market. The life of the negative is without limit, and after the original investment has been recovered, the cost of supplying new positive prints for those that have worn out is a small item.