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WRITING THE SCREEN PLAY l8l
chanical sameness is bound to appear. Moreover, this defect tends to make the good sequences stand out from the bad. That is why so many otherwise excellent British films invariably contain sequences that are quite inept.
It is because we have been conditioned by the swifter paced American films that most of us find British films pedestrian. But the success of so many excellent British films has changed the situation somewhat. Our audiences are seeing more and more British films. And the more they see, the more will they enjoy the slower paced but more realistic British pictures, and the more opportunities will there be for the screen writer to present the screen play that opens more leisurely, with more characterization and, certainly, more effectively.
This brings up another subject— one of particular interest to television screen-play writers. Until recently, most of the better foreign films were shown at movie theaters that specialized in them. They were called "sure seaters" because a certain segment of movie-goers attended them faithfully every week. This segment, however, was quite small compared to the millions who studiously avoided foreign films, and it has remained fairly constant in size so that, even today, few foreign films achieve the box-office success of many less deserving Hollywood products.
Television films can change that because they go directly to the audience, whereas the audience must go to the theater for a nontelevision film. Television allows the audience to view its wares, to sample its entertainment, for no extra charge. This means that, from now on, millions who would never have crossed the street to see a foreign film or a more intelligently written home-grown product with a more limited appeal than the usual Hollywood fare will have them delivered into their homes. Thus, by making accessible to a vast new audience those pictures that have heretofore been shunned, the norm of good taste and appreciation can be tremendously increased. The television film writer has in his craft a potential for improving the American standard of visual entertainment.