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70 A PRACTICAL MANUAL OF SCREEN PLAYWRITING
certain background information from the audience in order to build suspense, or to create a delayed dramatic impact. In the main, this is a device that is confined to mystery stories, where the audience has been conditioned to being cheated in this manner. In such cases, and where it is imperative to reveal the withheld information to make its use pay off, the flash-back technique can be resorted to despite the obvious fact that, in being used, it destroys the continuity build-up, unhinges the pacing, and shocks the audience's attention receptivity by forcing them to reorient themselves from the present to the past, and then back to the present again.
When used for this purpose, the flash back properly belongs near the picture's end, almost immediately before the climax is reached. In no case, though, should the flash back itself be used as the climax, for then it will lose the quality of immediacy which is so essential to dramatic impact. The denouement must be shown to be happening, not in the past— as far as the time of the picture is concerned, of course— but in the present.
When the flash back is thrown into the opening sequences— as has been the case quite often— the audience becomes confused by the indirect line of action. Even before they have been completely oriented to the characters as they see them involved in events that are happening in the immediate present, orientation is snapped and they are wrenched away to a time in the past, peopled by characters who, because they are younger and differently attired, are of necessity considerably different from those whom they have met at the picture's opening.
Start at the beginning. The flash back's only excuse for being is that it can depict characters in actions that took place some time before the picture's story began. If the flash back concerns these people in incidents that took place only a short time before the opening of the picture, there is no reason for its use. The picture could just as well have started with the previous incident presented in the normal manner, with a time lapse to connect it with the ensuing action.
Flash backs within flash backs. Confusion can be confounded with flash backs. In some pictures (The Passionate Friends) screen-play writers have thought it necessary to write a flash back within a flash