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.
DRAMATURGY 51
principles which apply to the theater presentation variety will also apply to those that will be made especially for television.
The first serial to be made was Fantomas, a French production, in 1913. The first American imitation came with The Adventures of Kathleen. Since then, thousands have been ground out to regale juveniles and, more often than they care to admit, adults as well.
In the old days, such serials as The Man with the Iron Claw, The Voice on the Wire, and The Perils of Pauline were replete with death-dealing buzz saws, dynamited dams, lava cauldrons, alligator pools, flaming buildings, locomotives, and the like. Nowadays, the trend is to death rays, atomic bombs, poison steam, bacteria, nerve gas, and other such modern forms of civilized persuasion.
The serial screen-play writer's job is to dream up new and ingenious perils— fabulous "manholes" in which the hero or the heroine become entrapped. In addition, he must also supply the method by which the good guy is able to free himself.
The escape must come shortly after the introductory recap of each episode. This recap recounts the details of the previous episode's climactic point, in which the hero is left dangling over the cliff's edge the while a cougar nibbles at his straining fingers. Then comes what is known as the "take-out"— the rescue, in other words.
To accomplish this, it is necessary to cheat the audience with what is known as a "cheater cut." This is done by cutting in a few feet of a scene that introduces the means of escape which had been carefully ignored in the closing feet of the previous episode: that is, the hero's leaping from the wagon immediately before it goes crashing over the cliff, or succeeding in de-activating the death-ray machine seconds before it is to be detonated.
All this preliminary material must be brought out in the first two or three minutes of each episode. From then on, the action becomes once again a wild, headlong chase which, in the closing feet of the film, ends with the hero hopelessly entrapped by the baddie.
The first few minutes of this twelve-minute section should be devoted to exposing the course the new action is to take. The bad guy, for example, orders his henchmen (they're always henchmen in serials) to waylay the hero's girl as she wends her way to her father's scientific laboratory. Suspense is then introduced for about two minutes, as we see the girl being stalked by the mobsters, and as we yearn for the marines to arrive, in the form of the bemuscled