A practical manual of screen playwriting : for theater and television films (1952)

DRAMATURGY 33 classify them in his collection of "Thirty-six Dramatic Situations." But these thirty-six can be simplified by even broader grouping. 1. Love pattern. Here, boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl is the order of events. It is the tried and true formula of many pictures. 2. Success Pattern. This deals with the attempts of a person to achieve success, which he either does or fails to do, according to the nature of the story. Any of the pseudoscientific, pseudohistorical pictures on the order of The Magic Bullet falls into this pattern. 3. Cinderella pattern. Here, the ancient story of the ugly duckling being metamorphosed into a beautiful girl is retold in countless forms. One of the most outstanding examples of this pattern is to be found in the picturization of Shaw's Pygmalion. 4. Triangle pattern. The interrelated loves of three protagonists have formed the set pattern for innumerable film stories. That these stories are cut to a pattern should not militate against their quality. The British picture Brief Encounter is a fine example of this pattern and is, at the same time, a superb picture. Too often, though, this pattern has degenerated into banalities. 5. Return pattern. The dramatic return of the prodigal son, the wandering father, the missing husband— of Enoch Arden, to use a classic example— is a pattern that has been used in many diverse forms. 6. Vengeance pattern. This is the basic pattern for most murdermystery stories. A crime is committed and vengeance must be wreaked on the criminal, either by the forces of law and order, or by the person most affected by the crime. 7. Conversion pattern. The story of the reformation of an evil person to virtue has been the subject of countless pictures, gopd and bad. The bad ones err in that the conversion is usually affected too quickly, and with insufficient motivation. The writers of the good