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.
WRITING THE SCREEN PLAY 179
essential to the television film, in which audience interest should be instantaneously aroused the moment after the opening commercial has been given. The station change-over dial is too readily available to the televiewer to risk losing his patronage. For ordinarily, it is the opening few seconds of the television film that induce the televiewer to continue viewing or send him off on a wave-length journey to more promising programs.
Opening with a bang, however, despite its attention-getting virtue of movement, has its drawbacks, drawbacks which European— and, especially, British— pictures have overcome simply by opening without a bang.
For opening with a bang can militate against building. It is necessary to keep up the opening pace throughout, to sustain interest. It is necessary, in order to build, that the pace be continually quickened so as to reach a satisfactory climax. Unfortunately, this is a difficult procedure. Such paces are seldom sustained. And the results are sagging scenes and sequences that make for disinterest and dissatisfaction.
Open slowly? British pictures have been criticized— by Americans—as being pedestrian and lacking in action. The reason is that British screen-play writers and directors deliberately pace their pictures—especially in the opening scenes— to a slower tempo. And they do it in the belief that, although action is a vital requirement in motion pictures, it is not to be used to the detriment of other requirements, which are just as, and sometimes even more, vital.
Opening to build. It is obvious from their pictures that the British believe the gradual— and therefore natural— development of character is vitally important. So they begin their pictures with an over-all visual exposition of the milieu in which the action will take place, as was done in It Always Rains on Sunday. That done, they go in from the general to the more specific, by showing the people who will be involved in the action as they go through their normal workaday lives. From this they become more specific, and single out the protagonists and antagonists, so as to set them up in their proper relation to each other, and to the story line.
Only when these expository preliminaries have been attended to