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PREFACE
This book is a practical manual of screen-play writing. Its purpose is to supply practical rules and suggestions and to describe practices applicable to the writing of motion-picture screen plays for both theater and television presentation.
It should be obvious that motion-picture techniques are adaptable to television production— especially to filmed television drama.
The television drama, as produced on film, varies from the featurelength film mainly in the matter of the size of the script and, hence, the running length of the film. This difference operates so that ninety-minute films made for theater showings cannot be cut down for television without affecting their quality considerably, no matter how fine they may have been originally.
When this has been done— and it will be done more and more as the major studios release their old films— artistic mayhem results. Violent jump cuts, for example, are the rule rather than the exception. These jump cuts occur not only picture-wise but, what is even worse, in dialogue, in sound, and in music. Characters who have been arbitrarily cut from opening scenes suddenly appear as if from nowhere and disappear again just as mysteriously. Characters introduced in the opening scenes of the theater version are sometimes discussed in the TV version as though they were familiar to the viewer, despite the fact that they have found oblivion on the cuttingroom floor of the TV studio.
These as well as other crudities can mean only one thing: that the theater-length film is not ideally suited for television presentation when it is cut down to size. More and more it must become apparent that the only films suitable for television are those that are expressly written for television.
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