We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
stage and screen plays in the upper brackets when it is obvious that every good play short on inherent appeal won critical applause simply because it contained all the elements of a spirited and an evenly matched contest.
Art is Merely a Matter of Nip-and-Tuck
Unceasing warfare between opposing forces so well matched that the audience never knew from one minute to the next which was going to win or survive accounted for the success of all of our great plays, both stage and screen, and the outcome of any warfare, if that outcome is to be continuously in question, unpredictable, must be foundationed in an equality of appeal in a movie's major opposing forces, or primarily the main pursuits. Whether that appeal be inherently equal or equalized through inducement and provocation that equality is the basis for an ever-mounting suspense.
Now suspense in itself is produced in many ways and we are devoting this chapter to the simple mechanics of producing suspense, but regardless of mechanics, suspense has its greater potentials in an equality of appeal in main pursuits, and the appeal or nonappeal inherent in opposing pursuits determines the kind and degree of inducement and provocation necessary to secure and sustain that equality.
In another way of putting it, two fighters of equal weight and pugnacity face each other, both strangers to the audience. Therefore sympathy is nil, suspense the only reaction.
Now then, a little man squares off to a big man and sympathy becomes the dominant reaction, suspense of a dubious quality. To pitch suspense at a height produced by evenly-matched battlers the little fellow must further a cause or fight with a skill as great or greater than the big fellow. But skill, resourcefulness and versatility, even though they serve to equalize appeal, are primarily elements of furtherance, not elements of inherent appeal, or non-appeal.
Furtherance, incidentally, is in itself a force or the employment of forces that advance, sustain and intensify both sympathy and suspense, but the quality and quantity, or the kind and amount of furtherance necessary to keep advancement of both pursuits equal
64