The art of sound pictures (1930)

154 THE ART OF SOUND PICTURES 1 > \ 'r isfied person feels a certain self-sufficiency which frequently makes him complacent and self-satisfied. The emotion of satisfaction must be handled with considerable care and finesse in the building of stories. The transition from desire to satisfaction must be much more dramatic in stories than it is in real life, to hold the interest of the average audience. Desire must be kept unsatisfied up to the last possible moment. Satisfaction must then be complete and sudden. This abrupt transition from one emotion to another in the form of a natural emotional climax is known as “drama,” without which a story will have little appeal to any editor. The “tag” of a motion picture follows the final climax and is appended to complete the satisfaction of all the sympathetic characters in the story. Suppose, for instance, that the hero has been tried for murder and acquitted. Following this climax, a tag may be used, showing the satisfactory results of the trial. The hero’s sweetheart is eager to marry him. His father, who had cut him off without a nickel, prays the boy’s forgiveness. His employer, who had believed our hero guilty of the murder, admits his mistake and offers the boy a far better position. The tag might well be called the satisfaction epilogue. Though it is not popular with editors, it has been our experience that the average audience enjoys the tag, provided it is not too prolonged. The audience gets its maximum enjoyment from any story that presents each desire early in the picture and works them out to satisfaction in the end. As an experiment, The Love Trap was shown without a “satisfaction tag” to a group of i,ooo students at the