The art of sound pictures (1930)

THE NEW ART 5 alone in his own home, can and does cut off the sales talk at will — and usually he so wills. But let him be in a motion picture house, or any other gathering place, and he cannot and will not flee so deftly. Nor will he wish to flee the sound picture, for it offers him far more in the way of interest and pleasure than any radio chatter can. People appear. There is action. Color may add its lure to the complex. And — ^what is probably most important — there can be news or story values, or some attractive personality, directly presented in the screen version of the advertisement. All this, to be sure, calls for great skill in story writing, as well as in the technique of sound pictures; no mere copy writer in an advertising agency can dash off effective talkies for a client. It is an art apart. And the business man who grasps this fact first and applies it to his own enterprises will reap a rich harvest. In the following pages we shall sketch the new art in so far as it has taken form. And we shall endeavor to describe the resulting techniques, excepting only the more complicated details of sound recording. As you study these, bear in mind that every month of the next five years will add something novel in the way of producing artistic effects through the combination of photography and sound. Some of these novelties will come from actors, others from directors, still others from story writers. But all of them will finally come back to the writers themselves as problems and as opportunities. The problems which this new art raises are the chief subject of this book. The opportunities they create should become the reader’s inspiration. They are adding a cubit to the stature of the author who can make good in sound