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.