The talkies (1930)

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THE TALKIES 183 on the matter make interesting reading. This is what Douglas Fairbanks said : "The creator of a fine bit of work in the Talkie medium will have to be an enormous man. He will have to deal with composition, with movement, with dialogue, with many things. All forms are combined in this new medium. The engineers will stand behind him with their slide rules and insist that he do everything to measure. Dialogue will be used as a means of clarifying the picture, or putting in philosophy. It will be like sugar in a cake. There will have to be just the right measure or the cake will not taste right. We ought to get some really beautiful phrases from great writers and work them into our pictures. If they were spoken well, they would enhance the value of the picture greatly. We have got to find some way to overcome pauses in sound, especially at the ends of sequences, which are so noticeable and horrible. The screen is different from the stage. On the stage the dialogue works up to a climax which is ended by a curtain. We can't do that on the screen for the simple reason that real life, which the Talkies resemble, has no curtains. For that reason my opinion is that stage plays will not be successful on the talking screen. The stage isn't life,"