Try to get away from the monotonous use of the “Next day,” “The next day,” and “Two years later,” style of leader.  Say:  “The following afternoon,” “After five years,” “Later in the evening,” or “Six months have passed.”  Even though you find when your story is produced that the director has seen fit to omit altogether the leader that you “wrote in” at a certain point of the action, you have the satisfaction of knowing that, had he used one there, he could not have improved upon the one you wrote.

(b) Clearing up a point in the action is too obvious a use of the leader to require much discussion.  Some things mere actions cannot express, and some explanations must be verbally made because pantomime suggestion is inadequate.  To take their proper place in the photoplay all such leaders should be more than merely explanatory:  they should have genuine dramatic value—­just as much as an important speech would have in a “legitimate” dramatic production.  In the pictured drama the leader really fills in a significant part of the plot which could not be portrayed by wordless action.

Miss Lois Weber, a well-known photoplay author who has also produced some very fine feature photoplays, says in The Moving Picture World:  “Often the right words in a leader or other insert are the means of creating an atmosphere that will heighten the effect of a scene, just as a tearful conversation or soliloquy, at a stage death-bed will move the audience to tears where the same scene enacted in silence would leave it dry-eyed.  Naturally, the wrong words may have the opposite effect, but that is no argument against the leader; it only argues that the wrong person wrote it.”

(c) “Breaking” a scene with a leader may be explained by an illustration, which at the same time will serve to exemplify how the mind experiences a more or less unconscious (d) preparation for the ensuing scene.

Suppose you have a comedy scene showing a bathtub gradually filling with water because the faucet was left open.  In the time required to fill the bath and cause it to overflow, five or six hundred feet of film would be used up if the scene were not changed.  Instead of this waste of film, you could, after registering the fact that the running water was rapidly filling the bath, introduce a leader:  “Ten minutes later—­the tide rises.”

Such a leader prepares the spectator for the funny scene that is to follow; and when the next scene is shown, in which the water is overflowing the bath and turning the bathroom into a miniature lake, the spectator realizes what has happened in the ten minutes which, according to your leader, has elapsed since the last scene was shown.