Having examined your idea and decided that it can best be realized in screenplay form, your next task it to reduce it to its simplest statement. You must be able to answer the question: What is this script about? And you must be able to answer it in no more than two sentences. One sentence is preferable, and if you can reduce that sentence to one word, all the better. If you cannot do this, then you do not understand your idea correctly, and you will never be able to focus your screenplay on it. Your script will lack an ideational spine, a through-line, an integrity that only an underlying vision can give it. And when we talk about the central idea of the script – about its meaning – that is what we understand: What is the vision behind this work, and how best can we convey it through the medium of film?
For at every turn, at every scene change, with the introduction of every new character, this single, simply stated idea will be your guide. It will determine who and what you will write, and what value they will have in the script, because your choice of scene or character must serve the expression of your core idea. I have always found this to be true. Whenever I was unsure of what to cut to, or where the story should go, or which character I should focus on, I reverted to my single-sentence expression of the central idea and asked: Does this scene or character or dialogue serve to advance and elucidate the meaning I am trying to convey?
This is where many young screenwriters lose their way. If they have read the standard texts on writing the screenplay, they probably know that it must contain events, and even, that these events ought to occur at specific points in the text. And while, as I have said, I think this is utter nonsense, it is true that film scripts should be a framework of events – of things that happen and that can be seen – but that is only half the battle. Screenplays must also have meaning. As all art, they must convey a truth from the author to the audience. And herein lies the essence of screenwriting, or of any writing, from my point of view: Screenplays are not essentially about events; they are about Truth.
Not truths, with a small ‘t’ and a plural, but about Truth with a capital ‘T.’ If you do not believe that you are in possession of some form, some portion, of eternal, immutable Truth, and that you alone can bring that Truth to strangers in a unique voice with a unique vision, then please find some other line of work. And this is where your ability to voice your idea in a simple sentence, or even one word, comes into play. Your idea must be able to be expressed, in your mind at least, as a simple statement of truth. And this truth must reflect fixed, transcendent Truth, not changing, situational truth. Another, simpler way to put this is: Don’t tell people something they already know or could have figured out by themselves. Instead, tell them something you know to be true and that you believe they need to hear. That is what makes you a writer, and makes you worthy to be thought of in the same company as Sophocles and Shakespeare, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, Beckett and Chekhov.
For you do want to be in their company, and you must remember that, as a writer, you stand in a tradition for which many people have suffered and been persecuted, imprisoned and even killed, because they dared to put the truth as they understood it into words and onto paper. And I am not just thinking of the great dramatic writers of our tradition – there were great comedic writers who also suffered and died for the integrity of their art. As a writer, your duty is to the Truth, first and above all. Not to make money or to please some studio boss, or to win a prize, but to use the medium of film to enlighten and improve humanity. And as the ancient masks of dramatic art depict – you can do this by making your audience laugh or weep or both.
Friday, February 27, 2009
Monday, February 23, 2009
Why a Screenplay
The first question you must answer is: Why a screenplay? Now, the most common answer I have heard to that question involves money. People want to write, and they believe that movies are potentially the most lucrative form of literature. You simply cannot make a living writing poetry or short stories, and it is unlikely that you will become rich writing novels or plays. And you most certainly will not get to hang out with Will Smith or Tom Cruise by writing them. And so, assuming that the film script is a ticket to success and disposable income, people try to turn whatever ideas they have into screenplays.
Money is the worst, most ignoble, and irrelevant motive for writing anything. And it is almost certain to fail. The very fact of adhering to the idea that you will make your fortune by writing screenplays probably indicates that you will never succeed. Why? Because people who think this way usually have nothing to say that is worth hearing.
Now that brings us to our first point: You must have something to say. It must be something of such intense dramatic interest or of such ingenious comic invention that millions of strangers will be able to relate to it and take meaning or joy from it. Further, it must be something that only you can say to your audience in your own peculiar language. It may be that someone else can say it, but you must believe that only you can say it in your way. You must have an idea, an insight, an inspiration, or at the very least, an extremely compelling question that can be asked only in the screenplay form. It must be something that you believe passionately that an audience needs to hear. It must be important and universal. It must be a truth.
If you have such an idea, then you must ask yourself: Is film the appropriate medium in which to express it? Not every idea is, or even can be, turned into a film. I believe that one of the tragedies of the twentieth century was that many of the truly important novelists and playwrights never realized their destiny because, instead of writing in the forms their hearts and their material dictated, they wrote films. They did this at first because it was a new medium - a new toy - and they wanted to try it out. But later they did it because it was a good living. And so, we lost some of our best literature to screenplays for the worst possible reasons.
So you must look at your idea, and you must understand your motivation for wanting to express it, and then you must look at the film medium. In order to do this last, you absolutely must have a good grounding in the history of film, and in film aesthetics. And you do not have to go to film school or to a university to achieve this. You should read the best books you can find on film history, and glean from them what films you should watch. You must start where film art started, with the Lumieres and Melies, and work your way through Un Chien Andalou and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and Metropolis, Nosferatu, Wind and City Lights, learning how people, through trial and error, through invention and inspiration, created the genre of film art. You must be conversant with the work of Murnau, Bunuel, Renoir, Kurosawa, Tarkovsky, Welles, Eisenstein, Truffaut, Bertolini, Lang, Chaplin, Fields, Sjostrom, Fellini, de Mille, Bergman and others, paying special attention to how the scripts are made, before you attempt a screenplay. In short, you must possess a film culture before you try to write films.
Film is above all a closely observed visual exploration of an idea. It is at once a vast canvas and an intimate portrait for the expression of truth. It offers you possibilities that other media cannot, but it also imposes limits and restrictions of which you and your idea would be free in other forms. The visual nature of film can be very exciting in the expression of certain ideas. Film can go anywhere in time and space instantaneously, presenting almost infinite possibilities for the exploration and development of material. It offers vibrant use of light and shade, color and texture, composition of images, movement of point of view, and the chance to create visual metaphors with a vividness and immediacy that few other media offer. But a film does not have the sweep and metaphorical depth of the novel; feature films lack the conciseness and intensity of the short story; they lack the interaction of audience and live performers that the theater represents, with all of its possibilities for spontaneity, mistakes and momentary inspiration; and film can never approximate the intensity of language, the explosive depth of imagery, and the sheer verbal beauty which characterize great poetry.
And so, film is not necessarily the appropriate medium for every idea, and you must decide whether what you have to say is best said in screenplay form. You must ask yourself whether your idea is cinematically idiomatic. Be honest with yourself - regardless of your burning desire to lunch with Brad and Angie - and decide whether what you need to say is best said through film. If it is not, then find the correct medium and write in that. Far better to write one truly great poem, or one important novel, or a brilliant cycle of short stories, or a moving and well-made play than a lifetime of failed screenplays in the hope of grand residuals and dinner with Russell Crowe.
Money is the worst, most ignoble, and irrelevant motive for writing anything. And it is almost certain to fail. The very fact of adhering to the idea that you will make your fortune by writing screenplays probably indicates that you will never succeed. Why? Because people who think this way usually have nothing to say that is worth hearing.
Now that brings us to our first point: You must have something to say. It must be something of such intense dramatic interest or of such ingenious comic invention that millions of strangers will be able to relate to it and take meaning or joy from it. Further, it must be something that only you can say to your audience in your own peculiar language. It may be that someone else can say it, but you must believe that only you can say it in your way. You must have an idea, an insight, an inspiration, or at the very least, an extremely compelling question that can be asked only in the screenplay form. It must be something that you believe passionately that an audience needs to hear. It must be important and universal. It must be a truth.
If you have such an idea, then you must ask yourself: Is film the appropriate medium in which to express it? Not every idea is, or even can be, turned into a film. I believe that one of the tragedies of the twentieth century was that many of the truly important novelists and playwrights never realized their destiny because, instead of writing in the forms their hearts and their material dictated, they wrote films. They did this at first because it was a new medium - a new toy - and they wanted to try it out. But later they did it because it was a good living. And so, we lost some of our best literature to screenplays for the worst possible reasons.
So you must look at your idea, and you must understand your motivation for wanting to express it, and then you must look at the film medium. In order to do this last, you absolutely must have a good grounding in the history of film, and in film aesthetics. And you do not have to go to film school or to a university to achieve this. You should read the best books you can find on film history, and glean from them what films you should watch. You must start where film art started, with the Lumieres and Melies, and work your way through Un Chien Andalou and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and Metropolis, Nosferatu, Wind and City Lights, learning how people, through trial and error, through invention and inspiration, created the genre of film art. You must be conversant with the work of Murnau, Bunuel, Renoir, Kurosawa, Tarkovsky, Welles, Eisenstein, Truffaut, Bertolini, Lang, Chaplin, Fields, Sjostrom, Fellini, de Mille, Bergman and others, paying special attention to how the scripts are made, before you attempt a screenplay. In short, you must possess a film culture before you try to write films.
Film is above all a closely observed visual exploration of an idea. It is at once a vast canvas and an intimate portrait for the expression of truth. It offers you possibilities that other media cannot, but it also imposes limits and restrictions of which you and your idea would be free in other forms. The visual nature of film can be very exciting in the expression of certain ideas. Film can go anywhere in time and space instantaneously, presenting almost infinite possibilities for the exploration and development of material. It offers vibrant use of light and shade, color and texture, composition of images, movement of point of view, and the chance to create visual metaphors with a vividness and immediacy that few other media offer. But a film does not have the sweep and metaphorical depth of the novel; feature films lack the conciseness and intensity of the short story; they lack the interaction of audience and live performers that the theater represents, with all of its possibilities for spontaneity, mistakes and momentary inspiration; and film can never approximate the intensity of language, the explosive depth of imagery, and the sheer verbal beauty which characterize great poetry.
And so, film is not necessarily the appropriate medium for every idea, and you must decide whether what you have to say is best said in screenplay form. You must ask yourself whether your idea is cinematically idiomatic. Be honest with yourself - regardless of your burning desire to lunch with Brad and Angie - and decide whether what you need to say is best said through film. If it is not, then find the correct medium and write in that. Far better to write one truly great poem, or one important novel, or a brilliant cycle of short stories, or a moving and well-made play than a lifetime of failed screenplays in the hope of grand residuals and dinner with Russell Crowe.
Writing Screenplays
My computer-genius son created this blog for me because recently he has found me talking a good deal about the screenplay: its conception, its writing, its rewriting, and its eventual fate. Not surprisingly, having worked in the Hollywood film business for fifteen years, I have some rather strong views on these subjects, which I will endeavor to set down here from time to time. I do this partly to organize my own thinking on the matter (perhaps as the basis for an eventual book), and partly because I receive many requests each year for advice and guidance about screenplay writing, as well as receiving many scripts by aspiring screenwriters for my comments and notes.
Now, I must say that, until recently, I had never read a book on the writing of screenplays, though I had often heard them discussed. And so, in general terms, I was familiar with the approaches which the standard texts have taken. But I always found myself at a bit of a loss when I was serving on panels or presenting seminars on screenplay writing, and others asked me what I thought of so-and-so's views about structure or character or plot. I simply had never read their works, though some are considered classics in the field.
Finally, last summer, while in a bookshop, I bought a book on screenwriting both because I felt an obligation at least to familiarize myself with what such gurus were saying, and because, frankly, it had an engaging cover. It was written by a man who, I gather, offers as his chief claim to fame the fact that he has had meetings with Steven Spielberg. I made a point of reading it soon thereafter, and what I found there, I found appalling.
Aside from a certain glibness, the book had no value or appeal. The author has, in my view at least, virtually no insight into the art of screenwriting, nor very much to say about the process. So far as I can tell, having failed as a screenwriter, he decided to make his living telling other people how to do what he, apparently, has been unable to do successfully.
Nonetheless, what this author said jibes with what I was able to glean from my many conversations about screenwriting books with those who have read them and rely on them, and it is this: The screenplay is a form of mechanism, and if you assemble the parts in the right order according to certain formulae, it will become a thing of beauty and a source of wealth.
(This is how most writers of screenwriting books appear to regard the process, and so, it is also how most executives in the industry regard it: Involve enough people in the writing process and the work will somehow blossom into life. Which is rather like saying that if you involve enough engineers in the design of a car, it will one day stand on its rear tires and dance.)
To my mind this is nonsense. It violates everything I believe or think or intuit about writing. A screenplay is not a machine, its parts are not mechanical, and there are no formulae for assembling them into a whole. This is where I part company with those who have made a living, not writing films, but telling others how to write them.
A screenplay, to my way of thinking, is an organic being - a living thing. Its creation cannot be approached mechanistically any more than you can raise a child, or cultivate a garden, or grow wine grapes mechanically. Yes, there are certain recognizable rules to help you avoid the worst of mistakes, but these exist only to bring you into that arena in which the organic being of the work can be focused upon and made to flourish. For example, it may be enough to point out that you should not feed babies on gin, or that you cannot grow vegetables in deep shade, or that you must prune vines in order to get the results that you want. But apart from such broad, and fairly obvious, generalizations, the fostering of living beings has more to do with imagination, thought, feeling , hope, despair, invention, inspiration, care, insight, truthfulness, and love than it does with what part goes where, or how to arrive at a plot point on page sixty.
And so I have called this site The Art of the Screenplay because I regard writing in general, and screenwriting in particular, as a form of art. It is the creation of a living organism, akin to the creation of children, or the incarnation of an idea - verbum caro factum est - the word made flesh. The process is analogous to how life on earth occurs: An organic vessel is created which permits the indwelling of a living spirit, or, alternatively, a living truth finds an organic vessel through which it can express itself. This, to my mind at least, is how human beings are made, and it is the only way I know in which living art can be made. And since I believe that the screenplay is, or can be, or ought to be a form of art, this is how I think screenplays should be written.
I will try to define this process, or characterize it, or provide insight into it in this site, for the benefit of those who wish to write screenplays, or, having written them, wish to find a new way to approach their work. But do not seek here easy, ironclad rules for the construction of that blockbuster which will earn your Oscar or secure your fortune. Instead, look for a challenge to probe deeper into yourself, as a writer and as a human being; indeed, to search deep into your soul for the source and spirit of your work. For that, I truly believe, is where the sources of all true art reside. As W. B. Yeats said about finding his inspiration: I will lie down where all the ladders start/ In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.
My fondest hope is that the thoughts in these electronic pages may help you to descend that ladder, in order that you may learn how to climb up again reborn as a writer.
Now, I must say that, until recently, I had never read a book on the writing of screenplays, though I had often heard them discussed. And so, in general terms, I was familiar with the approaches which the standard texts have taken. But I always found myself at a bit of a loss when I was serving on panels or presenting seminars on screenplay writing, and others asked me what I thought of so-and-so's views about structure or character or plot. I simply had never read their works, though some are considered classics in the field.
Finally, last summer, while in a bookshop, I bought a book on screenwriting both because I felt an obligation at least to familiarize myself with what such gurus were saying, and because, frankly, it had an engaging cover. It was written by a man who, I gather, offers as his chief claim to fame the fact that he has had meetings with Steven Spielberg. I made a point of reading it soon thereafter, and what I found there, I found appalling.
Aside from a certain glibness, the book had no value or appeal. The author has, in my view at least, virtually no insight into the art of screenwriting, nor very much to say about the process. So far as I can tell, having failed as a screenwriter, he decided to make his living telling other people how to do what he, apparently, has been unable to do successfully.
Nonetheless, what this author said jibes with what I was able to glean from my many conversations about screenwriting books with those who have read them and rely on them, and it is this: The screenplay is a form of mechanism, and if you assemble the parts in the right order according to certain formulae, it will become a thing of beauty and a source of wealth.
(This is how most writers of screenwriting books appear to regard the process, and so, it is also how most executives in the industry regard it: Involve enough people in the writing process and the work will somehow blossom into life. Which is rather like saying that if you involve enough engineers in the design of a car, it will one day stand on its rear tires and dance.)
To my mind this is nonsense. It violates everything I believe or think or intuit about writing. A screenplay is not a machine, its parts are not mechanical, and there are no formulae for assembling them into a whole. This is where I part company with those who have made a living, not writing films, but telling others how to write them.
A screenplay, to my way of thinking, is an organic being - a living thing. Its creation cannot be approached mechanistically any more than you can raise a child, or cultivate a garden, or grow wine grapes mechanically. Yes, there are certain recognizable rules to help you avoid the worst of mistakes, but these exist only to bring you into that arena in which the organic being of the work can be focused upon and made to flourish. For example, it may be enough to point out that you should not feed babies on gin, or that you cannot grow vegetables in deep shade, or that you must prune vines in order to get the results that you want. But apart from such broad, and fairly obvious, generalizations, the fostering of living beings has more to do with imagination, thought, feeling , hope, despair, invention, inspiration, care, insight, truthfulness, and love than it does with what part goes where, or how to arrive at a plot point on page sixty.
And so I have called this site The Art of the Screenplay because I regard writing in general, and screenwriting in particular, as a form of art. It is the creation of a living organism, akin to the creation of children, or the incarnation of an idea - verbum caro factum est - the word made flesh. The process is analogous to how life on earth occurs: An organic vessel is created which permits the indwelling of a living spirit, or, alternatively, a living truth finds an organic vessel through which it can express itself. This, to my mind at least, is how human beings are made, and it is the only way I know in which living art can be made. And since I believe that the screenplay is, or can be, or ought to be a form of art, this is how I think screenplays should be written.
I will try to define this process, or characterize it, or provide insight into it in this site, for the benefit of those who wish to write screenplays, or, having written them, wish to find a new way to approach their work. But do not seek here easy, ironclad rules for the construction of that blockbuster which will earn your Oscar or secure your fortune. Instead, look for a challenge to probe deeper into yourself, as a writer and as a human being; indeed, to search deep into your soul for the source and spirit of your work. For that, I truly believe, is where the sources of all true art reside. As W. B. Yeats said about finding his inspiration: I will lie down where all the ladders start/ In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.
My fondest hope is that the thoughts in these electronic pages may help you to descend that ladder, in order that you may learn how to climb up again reborn as a writer.
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