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184 A PRACTICAL MANUAL OF SCREEN PLAYWRITING
Use cause and effect. To accomplish these necessary adjuncts to filmic movement, an important physical law must be applied: the law of cause and effect. First, the cause of the situation must be presented, to be followed shortly afterward by the effect it produces.
In the picture Return of Rusty, for instance, the little refugee boy, Loddy, is still devil-ridden with his memories of the war. In order to dramatize this, the writers prepared a scene as follows:
INT.— LIVING ROOM— DAY
full shot of room as Loddy paces the floor distractedly, on the
qui vive.
EXT.— STREET— DAY
long shot on newsboy pedaling his bicycle up the street.
INT.— LIVING ROOM
med. shot on Loddy as he seats himself at piano and disinterestedly plays one-finger, obviously at a breaking point.
EXT. —STREET— DA Y
med. long shot on newsboy pedaling up the street. He stops at house next door to Loddy's house and throws a folded newspaper, which lands with a thud on the porch.
INT.— LIVING ROOM— DAY
close shot on Loddy as he stops playing and listens intently to the sound of newspaper thud o.s. (off scene), in distance. Suddenly the sound of the newspaper thud is heard close up. Loddy's eyes widen. Then his head falls to the piano keys with a discordant bang. He starts to cry and, slowly, his body sags as he crawls under the piano and covers his head with his arms, as though trying to protect himself from an imagined missile.
From this it can be seen that cause and effect were taken into consideration in building the scene to pay off with the boy's terror. It should be observed that it was not necessary to show again the newsboy plopping the newspaper on the porch outside of Loddy's living room, because that action had already been established in the previous shot. Then, by suggestion, and by using only the sound of the newspaper's thud off scene, the action was suggested instead of being repeated, the suggestion heightening the action by indirection rather than by actual action.