I've been reading "A Killer Life," producer Christine Vachon's entertaining account of how an independent film producer survives deals and disasters in Hollywood and beyond. In talking about "One Hour Photo," she mentions one of the difficulties that a lot of writers have with the first act (or the first pages of their novel). Namely that we need to establish the 'normal' life of the protagonist before something happens to interrupt that life. Otherwise, it's hard to feel the impact of the change. Here's what she writes:
"Originally, the story was told in linear fashion. We meet the Yorkins. They take birthday pictures. They bring the film in to the mall. We meet Sy Parrish (Robin Williams) at the photo counter of the Sav-Mart, etc. What I didn’t anticipate was that the studio’s marketing would fill the audience in on the basic premise of the film (as it should). This rendered the first act a bit draggy, so all this setup seemed a little belabored to them.
At the test screening, the audience knew they were doing to see a dark “thriller” (a term I was loath to have the studio use in the recruiting of an audience), so they were a step ahead of the story, which causes unrest (of the bad kind). So now I had a first act that seemed interesting and necessary but somehow useless at the same time. A conundrum.”
She asked Francis Ford Coppola for advice. “He suggested something that would get the thriller aspect of the film going from the very start… We bookended the film with Sy already having been arrested for having done something awful and criminal. The audience doesn’t know what he’s done, exactly. This one change suddenly rendered the first act more compelling. The first act played out almost as before, but now the audience is paying closer attention. They’re now put in the position of trying to discover clues as to what Sy might’ve done. They’ve gone from passive viewers to detectives of a sort. And the first act came alive again."
In novels, a prologue often serves the same purpose. Of course the trick is to be sure that the story lives up to the expectations you arouse--that's the hard part!