Another room is more interesting still. This room is dark once more, with a row of high-speed projection machines along one side and a blank wall on the other. Here the finished film, colored and patched, receives its final inspection. Against the white wall four or five pictures are flickering simultaneously. Since the projection machines are only a few feet away from the white surface that acts as a screen, each picture measures only two or three feet long and two-thirds as much in height. In one picture we may see a jungle scene; alongside it a reel of titles is being flashed through, one after another; next to this again is the “rush stuff” for a news reel with the president shaking hands so fast it looks as if he had St. Vitus dance; next comes a beautifully colored scenic, and at the end of the row the dramatic climax of a “society film,” rushing along at nearly double its normal theater speed. Leaving the laboratory, we pass down a street, bordered on one side by a row of little boxlike offices that are used by the directors of the different companies; opposite, in a similar row of offices, the scenario writers are housed. The end of the street brings us back once more to the building that houses the administrative offices through which we came when we entered. If we had time we could visit the menagerie that lies at the rear of the studio proper, and that makes even the line-up of a circus tent look tame. Or, we could spend a day watching the company shooting the storm scene at the back edge of the lot, where the customary old airplane propeller has been mounted on a solid block with a motor attached and backed up alongside the scenes to furnish a gale of wind. But we have already seen enough for an introduction. To make a six-reel picture takes from three or four weeks to twice as many months and costs all the way from ten or fifteen thousand dollars to half a million, and sometimes even a million. You can imagine the investment required where a producing organization is running ten or a dozen companies at once, each turning out pictures at top speed. Only the other day one of the Hollywood studios changed hands at the sale price of three-quarters of a million dollars. Some are worth twice that amount. But it is not the size of the investment that counts. It is the quality of the finished product. That is the thing we want to look farther into. [Illustration: _Courtesy Goldwyn Pictures Corporation._ FILMING AN OLD ENGINEER ON A FAST-MOVING LOCOMOTIVE. Notice how close director and assistant director are to the line of the “camera angle.” The director using a small megaphone to overcome the noise of the train and the rushing air.] [Illustration: _Courtesy Goldwyn Pictures Corporation._ ANOTHER RAILROAD SCENE. The umbrella put up to shade the company gives an idea of the length of time often necessary to take even the simplest scenes. Hours, possibly, were spent at this one spot.]