The art of sound pictures (1930)

i8 THE ART OF SOUND PICTURES picture stories. People respond in one manner when they are in a state of rest, comfort, ease, and freedom from fatigue, worry, or excessive stimulation. They behave quite differently after a strong emotional shock, or when exhausted from a hard day’s work, or in the midst of some worry, or after having watched some other picture than the one you want to use as a test. We all have hang-overs of many kinds. Each hang-over influences our mood in its own special way. Some hang-overs linger for only a few minutes. Others last a whole day. A few may last for weeks or months. Your response to a picture in which the death of a woman is depicted will take on one form if you have never loved nor hated nor feared a woman such as the one shown dying in the picture. It will shape up differently if you have just returned from the funeral of a woman whom you have long known and liked. It will be totally different if a woman strongly resembling the one in the picture has lately defrauded your maiden aunt out of her fortune. We all know this well enough. But few of us apply its lesson to the problems of writing stories and selling them. We think that, because our story evokes agreeable feelings and memories in a normal person who reads it when he is fresh and healthy and looking for some pleasant entertainment, the entire public will surely like it too. We overlook the fact that perhaps the public has lately had its fill of the kind of pleasant entertainment which our story supplies. People want to be brought back to a state of pleasant excitement. But where are they when they want to be