events that have occurred before the rise of the curtain. How many times, in witnessing a spoken drama, have we seen the butler and the housemaid dusting about and putting to order the furniture and bric-a-brac, while engaged in dialogue which describes in detail to the eavesdropping audience the conditions which prepare for what is to follow. In many cases much of the first act is given over to such preparatory and explanatory dialogue, although the butler-housemaid conversation is avoided or modified in modern usage. But the characters in a photoplay are dumb, except for occasional sub-titles. Hence we see that while the photoplaywright has a wider sweep of possibilities after his story is once under way, he is in the clutch of greater difficulties than either the novelist or the dramatist so far as the matter of getting started is concerned.
9. [1]Proceeding upon the assumption that a photoplay is a screen drama which must be unrolled before an audience within a specified time limit, it is clearly necessary to give concentrated attention to the important matter of beginning the story. We are dealing with a situation—a dramatic crisis or a correlated series of situations or dramatic crises. The start must not be too far in advance of the climax, for in that case there will not be sufficient time or film footage to logically and consecutively arrive at such climax. On the other hand, the audience must be made acquainted with the characters and the events surrounding their lives far enough in advance of the climax to assure a thorough under-
- ↑ Note: I have said that the photoplaywright is a screen dramatist and that the photoplay is screen drama. It is a fact that many novels have been more or less successfully adapted to screen use, but almost invariably it has been necessary to reorganize and rewrite them into the form of dramatic action. In some few cases novels have been photographed in their full and original order, but these have almost invariably been failures as screen productions. In dealing with the photoplay as the drama of the screen, I am assuming that the time is not far distant when practically all photoplays will be the original work of successful students of screen craft—photodramas created by trained photodramatists.
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