Charlie Chaplin take in "The Kid". For "The Immigrant", a 20 minute-short, Chaplin shot 40,000 feet of film – enough for a feature-length. Describing his working method as "sheer perseverance to the point of madness", Chaplin would be completely consumed by the production of a picture. Robinson writes that even in Chaplin's later years, his work continued "to take precedence over everything and everyone else." The combination of story improvisation and relentless perfectionism – which resulted in days of effort and thousands of feet of film being wasted, all at enormous expense – often proved taxing for Chaplin who, in frustration, would
Feature length of the Kelly Gang" (1906), which was 60 minutes in length. Five-reel features became common practice in the industry in 1915. During the silent era a one-reel short ran for an average of 10 minutes, and a two-reeler (usually a comedy) for 20 minutes, thus a feature was around 50 minutes or more. Possibly due to competition from television, the average length of feature film increased from around 90 minutes in 1931 to almost 120 minutes in 1960. Feature length In motion picture terminology, feature length is the length of a feature film. According to the rules of the Academy