If the producer was an enthusiast, there was certainly a method in his enthusiasm. His table was covered with elaborate geometrical drawings, which, I was told, were first sketches for successive scenes. On pegs hung little schedules of the artists required for each scene, and of the scenes wherein each of the principals was concerned. Innumerable photographs, of course—photographs of scenes actually represented on the “film,” and of others not represented, experiments for the actual, final thing. For it is to be remembered that the producer of a “film” is relatively more important than the producer of a “spoken drama.” He is always part, and sometimes whole, author of the play. He has to conceive the successive phases of the action in detail, and to conceive them in terms of photography. Even with some one else’s play as a datum he has, I take it, to invent a good deal. For while the “spoken drama” can only show selected, critical moments of life, the “silent stage” aims at continuity and gives you the intervening moments. On the one stage, when a lady makes an afternoon call, you see her hostess’s drawing-room, and she walks in; on the other stage you see her starting from home, jumping into her Rolls-Royce, dashing through the crowded streets, knocking at the front door, being relieved of her cloak by the flunkey, mounting the stairs to the drawing-room, etc., etc. Indeed, this mania for continuity is a besetting sin of the “silent stage”; it leads to sheer irrelevance and the ruin of all proportion. My enthusiastic producer, it is only fair to say, was far too good an artist to approve it.