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144 A PRACTICAL MANUAL OF SCREEN PLAYWRITING
Grant taking an interminable auto drive in Brazil to do their spying. Welles's Lady From Shanghai was similarly overloaded with overlong scenic transitions that did nothing but pad low spots in the shooting script.
Detailed transitions for pay-off. Such a detailed excursion, however, has its place occasionally, especially when it pays off in some way or other, as in the Charles Laughton sequence of // / Had a Million. There, Laughton, a harassed office clerk who had just received word of his million-dollar inheritance, is seen to get up from his desk, leave his cubbyhole office, go through a hall, climb a long flight of stairs, cross a hallway, enter a reception room, cross it, enter the president's office, walk up to the president's desk, rasp out a loud Bronx cheer directly at his disconcerted boss, turn, exit, and retrace his victorious journey down the stairs and back to his office.
Cook's tour unnecessary. Ordinarily, though, it is not necessary to go to such extremes in order to create an effective transition. The slightest of visual hooks is usually sufficient to carry the audience attention and orientation from one scene to another. No matter what the IQ of the average audience is supposed to be, they can be depended upon to bridge a minor time gap without resorting to a major Cook's tour.
Dialogue transitions. If there is nothing in a scene that can be used as a transitional hook, the writer can always fall back on dialogue, as was explained in the section on time lapses. The ways of effecting this type of transition are many, and range from the simplest, "Well, I'll be getting along to the office, now" followed by a dissolve and a shot of the character seated in his office, to "I wonder what Stinky's up to?" to be followed by a direct cut to Stinky, at home, spreading glue on his grandfather's toupee.
Match-dissolve transition. Then there is the overworked but highly effective "match dissolve." With this transition device, the action in the closing frames of a shot, usually a close-up, matches the action of the opening frames of the next shot, also usually a close-up. These matching actions are connected by means of an optical dissolve so that, as the closing frames of the first shot fade out, the opening