from Fade In through Fade Out

INTRODUCTION

Many people want to write scripts for motion pictures. Many more would like to understand what makes the movie they pay their money to see worth seeing. And some of both types secretly wish for the fortune and fame that belong to those few who make their living in show business. For all of these, I believe the following material will offer something of value. It presents the essentials of crafting a story for film that a beginner must know in order to write a good screenplay. It also provides some insights into how to create a script that will be accepted as a professional read in the business.

Even if you have no interest in creating films, reading this material will help you to discover what to watch for and how to criticize the story-telling elements in the films you pay to see. While from Fade In through Fade Out might not be your only route to fame and fortune or even to the modest success in the business that I have had, I believe the information I am passing along can help the beginner in climbing that slippery-runged ladder to the stars.

Additionally, after you have read my book you may pick my brain for whatever else it may hold that will help you as a budding screenwriter. Possibly, other than the material I have given on writing films, and watching them, in sequences rather than scenes, a fair amount of what is in my book does not claim to be especially fresh and different. All of the good books on screenwriting as a craft, as well as the many instructors across the country who teach aspiring screenwriters, cover much the same ground that is found here in from Fade In through Fade Out. Knowing this, one of my former co-writers who also teaches screenwriting at UCLA asked me why in the world I would bother with the effort of writing a book on the basics of the craft. "Everything has already been said a hundred times over," he told me.

Yeah. This may be true, but... In from Fade In through Fade Out, I get to tell beginning scripters my own version of the eternal verities, which in some instances are at considerable odds with conventional wisdom. Second, I believe that beginning screenwriters often need encouragement and guidance as much as they need a grounding in the principles of the craft. In the book I try to give that encouraging word here and there, and unlike some other purveyors of film wisdom who miss on follow-through with those they want to help, I am accessible and available via cyberspace whenever you need an answer or even that pat on the back. Finally, I began this exercise with a clear agreement with myself that I would not stop with the essentials of how to write a script, but continue on, providing my own insights and experiences in writing for film as a sort of map through the wilderness for the nimrod, the neophyte, and most of all, the nervous.

from Fade In through Fade Out is not so much a sequel to my first work as it is an expanded version with all the extra thoughts, emendations, and changes that I have come up with in the past few years. Inthis new edition I have expanded sections which cover subjects such as breaking in, the players and the power structure, agents and repping, the WGA, legal and ethical implications of scriptwriting, and freelancing and assignment work, among others. I also have expanded the question and answer chapter about writing and about the biz. There are several new chapters which cover subjects that I neglected in the first edition and topics that have come to the forefront of contemporary filmmaking.

What you now have in from Fade In through Fade Out is my gift to everybody who has slid into an empty seat in an nearly empty mid-day theater wreathed in the reek of popcorn and anticipation, who has settled down in front of the VCR with a Ben & Jerry's and a couple of fresh videos, who has watched the Academy Awards and dreamed, or who has ever felt a kinship with the old storytellers around the campfire. If you know nothing about the form, the format, and the formulas of screenwriting, read on. Even if you do, read anyway. Maybe you'll discover a surprise or two. And, hey, it's free.

BEGINNINGS

I usually start my writing classes and seminars by asking the attending hopefuls why they want to write a script. Their answers range from the expected -- money, fame, Oscars, mingling with the beautiful people, and making the world a safer place for their own particular brand of beliefs -- to the occasionally bizarre. One woman wanted to tell a probably apocryphal family story with details that would have shamed most tellers; a man was clearly looking for a more graphic resource for living out his questionable and outré fantasy lives; another man was responding to voices he had been hearing in his head since a child telling him to write, write, write; a last insisted throughout the seminar that both she and her therapist agreed that a film- writing career was her best hope to avoid being immediately institutionalized.

But the essence of wanting to write a script is to see it come into its final form as a completed film. Unless you can envision your words on paper as moments experienced in a darkened theater, you may still write screenplays, but you probably won't enjoy the process. I have managed to steer a number of would-be screenwriters into the more welcome arenas of novels, newswriting, poetry. For many, writing for film just doesn't provide the kind of creative outlet with words they are searching for. Many others, sadly, have no real affinity for creative writing at all. And a large number of soi-disant screenwriters are utterly without talent. This is not in itself a requirement for a successful career, but when coupled with a disinterest in learning the fundamental aspects of the craft, it becomes a deadly combination. Quite obviously, those who have thought seriously about it have discovered their own reasons for writing. Below, I have listed a few of those motivations that I feel compel the beginning screenwriter to move out along his path with some clarity of purpose and reasonable dispatch.

Some possible motivations to be a screenwriter: (a) You have something to say and need the broadest possible audience to say it to. For example, my wife and a friend became producers on a project about the life of a remarkable woman called "Peace Pilgrim" because they both believed in the message the woman was conveying to the world. Even though the project was never made, two producers never worked so hard to get something off the ground; (b) allied to this is the political motivation, as when the material is merely the medium to take a political stand on an issue the writer wants to change public opinion about, to force social change through the power of the medium. While many television MOWS take this route, usually the underlying lack of personal motivation for the writers dooms them to become less satisfying to their authors than, for example, the politically motivated films from Eastern Europe in the sixties and seventies; (c) writing a screenplay because of a genetic predisposition to be a storyteller. It is true that many of the successful writers in the business today write not because they want to, but because they have to; it is built into their very nature. They probably lied to parents and at school, their conversations are embroidered with extra twists and turns, and the ordinary events of their lives when depicted for friends often take on the proportions of saga. This bred- in-the-bone consummate teller of tales may do very well or terribly in the cut-and-thrust of LaLaLand. Many times he makes a fantastic pitchman, but is unable to subsume the raconteur's urge in his scripts; sometimes he can translate this storytelling zeal into a remarkable career. The push of the innate storyteller to captivate an audience is very visible in the highly successful work of writer/directors like Kasden and Milius; (d) egotism drives many to succeed as a screenwriter. In an ego-driven business like film, writing is one quick way to see one's name in twelve foot letters. It is also true that many with weak or no talent for the writing game leap into it because it is one of the surest means for rapid ego- gratification in the business in that the aspirant needs nothing more than a finished script to be noticed; (e) some writers write out of a sheer sense of aesthetics, seeing the beauty and charm of the arrangement of ideas and words, in the rhythm of a story, in the way the parts get fitted together. So long as this doesn't descend into an urge to make the script a work of art, it is a very strong and useful reason to get involved in writing; f) some write a script because there is no other medium as effective for getting across their ideas. Remember, film is visual, it is plastic, and it is relatively time-flexible; therefore, it is perfect for the expression of concepts that fit within these boundaries, but only for those concepts; (g) and, of course, for the same reason people bet the Big 6 at the Vegas crap tables or take a flyer on a bangtail in the eighth at Santa Anita. Though it's a longshot, there is always the potential to make a killing with one play. As Dr. Johnson observed, "No one but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money."

Here are some other precepts that I mention to my classes as worthwhile guidelines for beginners: (a) Write about something that is important to you. Much of the time, if you do go on to make yourself a career in the industry, you will not have the luxury of feeling passionate about your projects. More often than not, someone who approaches you with a pre-formed premise is expecting your craft, not your heart. All speculative writing you do, however, should originate with a concept that you are actually interested in, whose characters you want to get to know more intimately, and whose events you genuinely care about. Of course, many new writers get so caught up in a love affair with their material they forget to run a reality check on it before leaping into the work of the screenplay. And the reality of the marketplace is that the concept that you feel so deeply about must also capture the interest, if not enthusiasm of your two-headed audience -- the script-buying producer and the ticket-buying public. Within these limits, though, you should be interested in your material. And yes, it is true that interest can be manufactured; I have become absolutely enamored of a project once I received my first paycheck on it. But, as any hooker will tell you; bought love may satisfy for the moment, but it'll never replace the real thing. (b) Look for the universal in what you are going to be writing about. This does not mean that every script must have a "message" -- at least once in your career, someone will be quoting you the "If I want to send a message, I'll call Western Union" line. I do believe that universality is what separates the really good concept from the ones that are merely pot-boilers, even though there is certainly nothing wrong with a career spent writing the latter. But by putting something at stake in your story that can potentially affect the minds, hearts, and attitudes of your audiences you are more apt to spark the interest of prospective purchasers than with a good tale whose issue is confined to the players on the screen. In another sense, this is called "upping the ante". It is looking for whatever lies in your initial concept that can be expanded to take on a greater significance. This does not always mean creating some earth-shattering thematic ideals for your piece. Rarely the act of infusing a story with greater significance means simply posing a greater risk or threat to the protagonist. Sometimes, greater significance is that warm sense of self- worth that comes over character and audience alike at the commission of a positive act. Even though that act may emanate from a morally ambiguous character or situation, there is no doubt that the "good deed" sequence is looked upon favorably by buyer and viewer alike. If you can't pluck out whatever in your idea that will make it appear to be worth more to audiences, you will probably be doomed to writing perfectly useful little projects that never move people, never are remembered six months after release date, and never, never, never win the awards. They do boil the pot, however, and as such are nothing to be sneered at. I refer you once again to Dr. Johnson's dictum. (3) Somewhat like this business of the "universal" element, is the moral choice question. Many pundits of film demand that the protagonist be faced with one or more moral dilemmas during the course of the action, usually escalating in power and conviction. The principal character is then seen to "grow" if he takes the moral high ground and chooses the popular alternative. This is called the character "arc". Having your hero take the other tack, or having him waffle about making either selection runs you the risk of creating a morally or ethically ambiguous character. Candidly, I think that the better part of this argument is bunk. Certainly events can be so manipulated by you that your lead character must choose between two ethical stances. If this is all that makes your protagonist a viable character, though, you are in deep trouble. In my own experience, when you really have your characters acting rather than reacting to the circumstances you have placed them in that they will be making "moral" choices just like you and I do, with a sort of situational ethics that makes any choice the potentially right one for the circumstances. If your hero is innately a fairly straight-arrow type, then you can rest assured that his choices will in all probability reflect the public norm. If he is thornier, he may not always do the right thing, and, wonder of wonders, if it fits his character, the audience will not only not mind, they will cheer him on. Dirty Harry is not all that noble a cop, but nobody seems to care. Let's face it. Movies are very poor podiums for preaching. They are entertainment. I wouldn't worry so much about right or wrong moral choices; I would be more concerned with telling a good, enthralling story on film. (4) Naturally, your concept should fit the medium you are writing in. Many of my seminar students come up with first premises which are exciting, interesting, and cry to be written. They are not however crying to be written for the screen. Sometimes testing your concept against the medium is easy. If, for example, you have a historical tale, multigenerational, an enormous character list, and dozens of world-wide locations, it is not too hard to see that you are really thinking novel. Of course, not all broad-scope material is automatically destined for the six hundred dense prose pages of a novel. You have to judge; try to see if any one single time segment or sequential set of actions are more movie-like. Think of what could have been told in the film, GLORY. We could have known the tribulations of the slave-turned-soldiers from their African origins all the way to the survivors of that last bloody battle settling into contented old age. A part of that vast historical sweep made a decently good film. Similarly, some material is too close and closeted to ever make really good film material. Constraints of location, time, and characters may point out these non-filmic concepts; more often it is a matter of not seeing enough movement in the story. I cannot stress this too much; movies move! If your concept has no room for events, for things happening on the screen that we will want to watch happening, then it probably isn't film. While MY DINNER WITH ANDRE was certainly an intellectual treat for many, it wasn't a very good film. Look at the many pictures which have been derived from stage drama for some other good examples of how some movies fail to move sufficiently to make good films. Mamet is probably one of our premiere dialogists writing today. But a Mamet play is not automatically a box-office winner in the film stakes and may not even deserve to be made into film, something even he acknowledges left-handedly in his Speed the Plow.

THE CONCEPT

Every screenplay and every film begins with an idea about a story. For want of a more all-inclusive and unequivocal term, I will call this the concept. If you get into the business you will hear it called many other things, including the "story" and the "film", and often just the "idea". Briefly, the concept of the film is the essential story material expressed in the shortest possible space. It is nor unlike a log-line for your concept; you know, the type of thing TV Guide might be writing about it in their listings a few years down the line. The log line may, however, leave out an essential part of the story and still suffice to get the idea across. To assume the same thing about a concept is to run the risk of failing to have control of your material. Notice the work essential in the definition above. What is essential to a concept? First, you must have a basic story, beginning, middle, and end. You must have a set of primary characters to play out their parts in your story, and you must have a world in and against which they can fulfill their assigned destinies. Finally, and this I believe is critical to a well-thought out concept, you must have a sense of story time to your tale. Story time is the linear movement from event to event that draws the watcher from his real world environment into the imaginary, yet familiar world of the story. I will have more to say about linear events later on. It is the fundamental task of the writer in developing his concept to have a complete grasp of these essential elements before he sets a single word to the page.

I believe that it is as important for the beginning screenwriter to recognize what a concept is not as it is for him to know what it is. Below are some instances of the non-concept masquerading as full-fledged script material. You should be aware that the concept is an entirely different thing from the germ which usually opens the duel between screenwriter and the blank screen. There are worlds of places to obtain ideas for a movie; if you do not believe that this is true, I invite you to come out to LaLaLand and interview the first fifty people you meet. Forty-nine of them will have "this wonderful idea for a movie". The fiftieth will have already written the script on his idea. Ideas are great, but as a rule they are not concepts. They can be gimmicks, good openers that may well set a story in motion, but these will not contain any real clues about where that story is going. Gimmicks are wonderful creatures. Every writer should keep a storehouse of his best gimmicky ideas. Many times they will work into a story. What is a gimmick idea? Many years ago a producer came to me and my then partner with a "terrific premise for a story". What she then told us was, in brief, that two people, a young man and woman arrive in San Francisco, take a cab from the airport to the grand old SanFran house one of them has already rented. The girl pays off the taxi while the boy goes to open the front door. He puts the key in the lock, and -- the whole house explodes! My partner and I were listening avidly. Here was a nice opening gimmick. But our producer was through for the day. What she had said was all she had, and, believe me, it was no concept. An aspiring screenwriter may believe that he has found a good story in some idea which has been floating around in his head for years. These ideas are also good places to look for material within a larger work, but at best they may be mere notions. Notions arrive out of that fairly vague sense that most of us have about what might be a good story. Hey, that's why we are good audiences. But, again, these chimerical overtures do not constitute either a concept or even a set of story circumstances solid enough from which to create a concept. For instance, ever since my first trip to Rome, I have been fascinated with the idea that there are so many stray cats running around among the ruins of that city, and even more intrigued that they are often fed with leftover pasta by old ladies dressed in funereal garments. A striking image, a nice idea, but I was never able to make it into a concept, because viewed in isolation it doesn't carry more than its own weight. A story idea may be germinated from a sense of character but it should never be character alone that becomes the concept. Your uncle Willy may have been the most unforgettable character you or anybody else ever met, but he alone is not a concept. I personally believe that some of our worst films get made every year because they begin with a sense of character and never figure out how that character fits into a story. Almost everybody knows at least one funny gnarled old fella who rambles on a lot about trains or keeps his spare teeth in his hat or some such... but it is not easy to turn that character into a full-blown concept unless we also know the accompanying story that goes along with his peculiarities. Some story ideas are the result of a great deal of assiduous research into a particular subject. As a former professor and long-time lover of the musty smell of book stacks, I can always get into the meat of an idea through researching it. But I have learned that researched material by itself will not automatically become a concept for a film. If you want to look for them, there are literally thousands of good starting places to be nudged out of history, biography, and personal recollections, among other sources. But unless you recognize them as no more than starting places for the development of the concept, you will never make them into good scripts. The whole skein of MOWs that drove a great deal of network television programming in the past three decades are the result of initial researching of topical events from daily newspapers and journals. Most beginning writers who try to manufacture a script from a current incident do not know of the significant middle steps that must be taken to turn those ideas into full-blown stories.

The concept is something that should be figured out before you actually begin to write... not only the screenplay, but anything at all about your story. In other words, think about what you want to say before you start trying to say it. This is so basic, but so often overlooked -- even by me sometimes -- that I can never stress this point too strongly. A few hours, or dozens of hours spent thinking about your material at the concept stage will save you weeks of agony later on in the writing process. For make no mistake about it, writing is a process, and its first step, whether you are writing for films or composing a note for granny, is the thinking stage. In effect, the concept asks and then answers some very basic things about your story. What happens in your story? What are the essential sequences of events that move your story from its inception, through its mid stages and to its inevitable conclusion? Next, who are the principals? Notice that this is not the same thing as saying "who is your hero or protagonist?" which is what many say is the only character prerequisite for the screen story. I think that you should not only have a fairly good grasp on your hero, but on the opposition, cohorts, fellow-travelers, and equals in the events of his story. Too often people spend a lot of time developing a concept around a terrific character only to learn too late that they have what amounts to a one-role movie on their hands. You should, in your concept, be able to identify all of the principal players, their relationships, and where each fits in the world of the story. The next question is what is the world of your concept? To answer this question clearly is to recognize where you see the sphere of action that will occur in your script. This is more than just being able to identify place and time; it has a great deal to do with the "sense" of the film you are about to write, too. By sense I am referring to the overall gestalt that rises from the story, something that may be as simple to identify as the romantic flavor of An Affair to Remember, the nostalgia of a Grease or as problematical as the feelings generated by Ghandi or Schindler's List. The third question is to ask about the concept is what are the goals of the characters? You must look for what it is that your characters are striving to attain in your concept. These may be physical, social, emotional, or even psychological goals -- but they should be very clearly defined in your head before you begin to write. Amorphous goals for vaguely defined characters may do more to destroy good ideas at the concept stage than any other single factor.The last question to be asked regarding your concept is what is the outcome? Without knowing where your story will ultimately lead, you will almost invariably lose yourself somewhere along the way. It is like starting a trip without a destination. The going may be a lot of fun, but a major disappointment is in store for you when you finally realize that the journey has no end.

When you can answer all of the above questions with reasonable clarity, and have spent time answering any others that may have risen during this long-think step, you may believe that you are ready to plunge into the script. Wait! You aren't ready yet. The initial and best piece of writing you can do, and this is the first thing I ask of all my seminar students, is to write out your concept in a single sentence. Granted, the first few tries may create sentences Henry James would have been proud of, but your own goal is to create an acceptable one-sentence concept that answers all of the questions I outlined above. This is a tough job. I know. But I make a habit of doing it for every concept I'm even lukewarm about working on, including assignment work on somebody else's already written material. If a concept cannot be stated succinctly, it usually means either the writer hasn't a firm grip on its essential elements or those elements are missing from the concept itself. In either case, it's a good thing to know before beginning to write a script, because your material will ultimately demand these answers. Believe me. Making it up as you go along is not a good way to approach screenwriting.

THE STORY

I decided to add a chapter about the story because not enough attention gets paid to what is, after all, the essence of any film. If your movie does not tell a story, and tell it well, then it is not going to succeed in its first and most significant duty, to entertain the audience. If you stop and think about the whole history of this medium, movies have always existed simply to tell a story. The story might be a factually accurate documentary, a retelling of a story told elsewhere, on stage,in print, or in another form, or it may spring full-blown from the sweating brow of a script writer -- but make no mistake! The story is the one essential element, and should those who are in the process of creating the artifact of film lose sight of this basic truth, the movie will fail utterly, no matter how many accolades are heaped upon it. Accolades for film are, by the way, fairly common coin these days. I would be much less gratified by a shelf full of awards proffered by my peers than I would by the simultaneous gasps, laughs or applause of an ordinary afternoon audience at the local bijou during the screening of one of my films.

The story defines itself, regardless of its form. But it has a few central elements that, though not immutable, are best not tinkered with by aspiring screenwriters.

Stories are inevitably coupled with that form of discourse labeled by the Greeks as narrative. Simply, a well-told story is one that progresses in a reasonably orderly fashion through sereal time. From here to here to here and so on, time-wise! If, as a screenwriter, you want to diddle with the regular passage of event that everyone in your presumptive audience is already trained damn near from birth to recognize as temporal order, you better have a reason so cogent that it overwhelms our natural resistance to seeing time order disrupted. I have no quarrel with those marks of brilliance that are indisputably there in a work like PULP FICTION. But, as both a writer and as a film-goer, I would question whatever motivated Tarantino to so butcher his timeline in that film. And in more recent bad copies of PULP FICTION the results of ignoring the audience's predisposition to want their stories told in roughly the same order of events as how they live their lives are even more appalling.

The second thing we always should expect in story-telling is the new. Though I cannot prove it, I sincerely believe that stories originated with our species as a means for conveying from one to the group information that was heretofore unknown, even if that information was no more than some indigene's bad dream. In their seemingly endless quest for novelty, suppliers of film to the television networks ceaselessly mine the front (and back) pages of newspapers for the timely story material that will translate into a MOW. They know what they are doing. While it may be a truism that there is nothing really new in terms of a story to tell, the screenwriter should never, ever accept this as the truth. Even if your story is an ancient one, you must tell it as if it were brand new to your audience. In many cases this is so. As we continue to populate our theaters with new generations, most of whom have had little contact with not only films but also with the literal history before their era, then virtually every story you choose to tell becomes a new one for that generation. Even if you set yourself down to re-write the Genesis flood, you should approach the task as if it were the first flood story ever.

For me new translates into wonder, which brings me to the third common element to all stories. A story should convey a sense of wonder to its audience. This is especially important for stories told through film. Let's face it; film is a very realistic medium. Despite whatever magic might get worked over in the FX departments, the camera basically captures what it sees with its single, two-dimensional eye. If what it sees is, as it must inevitably be, what we have seen already, then the context in which we are viewing the moving pictures must appear a fresh one. The screenwriter achieves this freshness by creating a sense of anticipation in his audience. I will watch prison pictures till the cows come home, utterly aware that all the directorial techniques and tricks won't really alter the pictures I am watching; only the imprint of encouraging my delight in watching the story will matter. I think that one of the screenwriter's most important story-telling duties is suggesting to all of his film-making collaborators how best to attain this sense of wonder in the finished product. If we can put together our story sequences in such a way as to make out audience either figuratively or literally sit there gape-mouthed eager for what is coming next, then we have accomplished our job as storyteller as soundly as the novelist who is keeping that reader turning the pages long after bed-time.

The next element that belongs to the story is finality. A story that doesn't ultimately obtain a predestined resolution is somehow not really a story. This is what I call the satisfaction element when I am reading and evaluating other writers' scripts. Whatever else the work does, at base the story should be satisfying. I must put it down with a sense of completion, a sense that that particular story ended the only way it could have ended for me, and that its closure, to borrow an analyst's phrase, was complete. I often suspect that one of the greatest gifts possessed by the early oral tale-tellers was their ability to leave their audience content and fulfilled at the end of their story-telling. This might well have been an evolutionary step for all writers. Our writers' forebears must have been the ones who left their listeners happy; those who failed were probably stoned and eaten.

Seriously, I believe that one of the must useful things you can do as a writer is to test this satisfaction quotient out before you unleash your script on the world. Polish telling your story aloud. This will pay off anyway when you are out pitching it. Then tell it at intimate parties and family gatherings, anywhere you can find a receptive audience. Pay attention to what happens at the end of your recital. Poll your listeners. Find out if the story you told pleased them. You will most assuredly hear a lot of drivel; many will want to offer alternatives or advice; a few will confuse your query and respond with happy-or-sad commentary; but listen anyway. You would be surprised how easy it is to assess the satisfaction quotient in your story from this simple exercise. And, of course, you should be prepared to adjust your story based on how well it fulfills this basic part of being a story.

If you can keep all these important aspects of the story part of your job in mind, and at the same time pay attention to the technical elements, the various formats, the "shopping list" qualities, and the myriad other variable factors in constructing a script, you are well on your way.

THE PAPER CHASE

Most beginners in this business think only of writing the script. However there is a lot more to the "documents of the case" than the script itself. The following material outlines some of these forms and makes some initial comments about the screenplay itself as a selling document. Generally, producers, financiers, and others who listen to your pitches look for one of three types of "paper" on the project you are trying to sell: the short form notation of the concept itself, a longer prose version of the story you just told them, or a complete sequence-by-sequence writing out of that story, including shot headings, descriptions of the actions and background, and dialogue. In other words, you should be prepared with either a concept sheet, a treatment, or the script itself.

First, and not necessarily the least important is the concept sheet. Whatever it is named, this document should be little more than a very short retelling of your pitch. More than the one-sentence concept statement I just suggested you write for yourself but less than a full-fledged story, it should cover the essential points of the story, invariably including protagonist, his goal, his impediments, and the outcome. It is never a good idea to "cheat" in the concept sheet by omitting one or more of the above items in an attempt to encourage interest in the project, a bad habit I have only lately begun to break myself of. At its simplest, when the concept sheet is requested the requesting person is looking for a brief mnemonic on the pitched material, something that will help him make a decision later on about the worth of pursuing the project. First-timers should always practice writing out concept sheets for every piece of material they will ever possibly pitch. In fact, putting together the essential story elements in such a short form is an excellent discipline for writers who tend to let their material get away from them.

The second possibility is that form of storytelling dreaded by the pro writers known as the treatment. The treatment, a bastardized third-person historical present tense prose rendering of the major sequences of your script, is often awkward, and sometimes unreadable even when written by otherwise competent writers. Beginning treatment writers should not worry unduly about the innate limpness of the form. Most of those who read treatments regularly are aware of the limitations of the format and are inclined to be lenient critics. But this is no excuse for sloppy storytelling. What those who call for treatments are looking for is a straightforward expression of the central points of your story. Leave anything out that is an integral part of your scripted story at your own peril. What may also be included in treatments, especially those running over the fifteen to twenty page average scale, are snippets of dialogue, more detailed description of action sequences, and, occasionally, direct instructions as to how a particular bit must be presented for it to fly. Some writers are confident enough in the story they are telling to also include brief advertisements about the work, citing marketability, demographic hits, and so forth. Although probably not a good idea, particularly for beginning writers, I don't believe I have ever heard negatively on this from any producer, Studio readers may be another case, however, as this can usurp some of their own prerogatives.

Finally, and the document that screenwriters should be prepared most often to offer at the end of a pitch, is the script itself. Accompany the script with your own synopsis, if you prefer; but have the script available. Asking for a completed screenplay, as opposed to requesting concept sheet or treatment, is sometimes a good indication of the degree of interest on the part of the potential purchaser. Remember that the material that you have ready should be a complete selling script, professionally bound, and with either your own or your agent's contact clearly visible on the title page. Incidentally, do title your screenplay; even if it changes -- and it may very well change -- before production; you have given the principals a convenient "handle" to use for reference, rather than them resorting to "...that project about the dwarf, the goat, and the strawberry jam." If the party you are pitching to requests more than one copy of your material, don't apologize for having a single copy; offer to leave extra copies later, or suggest that a minion make additional copies then and there. And, do not expect to get your script back, at least any time soon. Most screenplays that are left after pitch sessions either are dropped into a great hole in the fabric of the universe, or must be retrieved later with a good deal of effort and at the risk of alienating the production entity for subsequent pitches. In short, do not let five bucks worth of paper make you appear a piker to your principals. Later, if you are represented by a large enough agency, you will find that they will absorb the losses of unretrieved scripts.

Formatting and stylistics for the three essential documents -- concept sheet, treatment, and script -- follows some generally accepted lines in the business, although there is enough variation to allow some flexibility. The material that follows is intended to serve as a general guide for formatting, and writers should be aware that as times change so do the vagaries of formatting faddism, in the major studios especially. The best patterns to follow are very recent copies of selling concept sheets, treatments, and scripts in a large enough variety for you to be able to extract from the total the latest fashion in that particular "paper".

Formatting and style for the concept sheet is rather simple. Center your title in full caps at the top of the paper, a heavy white stock, please. Leave at least one inch margins all round the page; one and one-half inch can be even better, if you are an extremely efficient writer. Double space your material, full cap all first references to principals, and number pages consecutively beginning with the second page. Keep your prose style short and snappy. Pretend that Hemingway was about to edit your concept sheet, and then pass it on to E.B. White for a final look. Avoid figurative language, but work toward evocative language. And, above all, especially with the concept sheet, keep it concise! Everyone should try for the ideal of a single page concept sheet, if on that one page they can clearly explain the essentials of their concept and suggest its potential as a story for film.

The stylistic and format for a treatment generally follows that of the concept sheet. The margins may be a bit more generous than an inch, with between fifteen and twenty pages available to tell your story. Either tab or block paragraph each sequence in your screenplay as a separate element of the story you are telling in the treatment. Avoid going outside the present tense except where the time patterning in your story material is vital. If you have spent an appropriate amount of prose at the outset of the treatment describing the world of your story, you can keep the descriptions backgrounding particular sequences brief and concentrate on describing action which is essential to your story. If a particular point of action or bit of dialogue seems to embody the essence of your story go ahead and put it into your treatment, formatting and writing it just as if it were from the screenplay. Do not do this unless you are certain that what you are including outside the treatment form is truly useful in getting a grip on the story. When you think your story is told in your treatment, cross-reference it with the script, and edit anything that you find superfluous. And, finally, go back and proof, then proof again your final draft of the treatment.

Formatting a screenplay can become a huge headache for a new screenwriter who isn't comfortable with the look and feel of a script. Often neophyte writers will go out and spend a lot of money on sophisticated script formatting programs without understanding why or if they really need them. I sometimes think it is almost as if they believe that by somehow putting everything into the correct format the script will magically become a good one. In point of fact, the format of a script really depends on only two things; first, are you within the ballpark for standard readability; and second, are you formatting your material while you are writing it. As I mentioned, industry standards vary from studio to studio and producer to producer; in fact, there is no such thing as an industry standard for exactly how a script will look, at least not in terms of margins, tabs, headers and footers, and so forth. Looking at anything fairly recently sold will point you in the right direction, if you avoid old samples which make use of named shots and the like, or various shooting copies, which are rife with production inclusions.

My second point, about achieving the proper format as you go along, is one that is seldom addressed by either the screenwriting pundits or by the purveyors of auto-formatting programs. Most of these people would like you to believe that the best road to writing a script uses their formatting roadmap. I believe that if you want your shot heads, dialogue lines, and the rest of the simple stuff that makes a script a script, it doesn't really matter how you get them. A very simple macro to inset the proper number of tabs for a dialogue heading does the same thing as tab- tapping the appropriate number, which is the same result one gets by hitting the auto-format jiggerbob after entering the raw text. What I am saying is that anything that works while you are in the actual process of creating your script is probably your best choice, because you can then have the best sense of how it is faring as a script. When I write, I find myself constantly backing up, revising, reworking a sequence, a scene, a line. To not set it as it ought to look in the finished product while I am working is not common sense to me. I want the true feel of the material coming through. And in case you didn't already know, life for a writer is life at the keyboard. I think that everybody who cries about how they cannot keep up with the business because they don't have the latest version of the hot new script formatting program should be forced to sit with an old Selectric for a hundred and twenty pages of screenplay. Better yet; give them a legal pad and pencil.

A final word about the paper chase. There has been a recent trend in the business toward screenwriters attempting to write their own script coverage before submitting it for a studio reading. Even established screenwriters will often submit to their agents a synopsis along with the completed manuscript. Having read some coverage notes on my own material, I can understand why this is such a heady idea for many screenwriters. However, I suppose that I am still willing to let others provide coverage on my material. Courtesy reads aside, most of those who read screenplays, from studio rank and file to mid-level executives, are more than willing to give a decent piece of material a favorable nod. Despite the occasional and usually apocryphal tale about the overlooked masterpiece, no one in the business really wants to respond negatively to a potentially good project. If you truly believe that others are "out to get you", by all means include your own synopsis and/or recommendations with your submittals. Personally, I think it is both naive and unprofessional to do so.

STRUCTURE

Get any three screenwriters together talking about their craft and sooner or later the conversation will inevitably get around to structure. The structuring of a script is of paramount importance to the writer, usually because the structuring of the script is inextricably woven into the structuring of the story elements, and both are sunk within that often swampy area called plotting. First, in the question of screenplay structure, I refer you to the chapter of this book titled SEQUENCES. As you will find there, I make a correlation between the structuring of the script and the structuring of the story that is told within the script form. However, some discussion of the structure of the story in its own right can be useful both as a way to look at the purer storytelling elements of the process and as a way of connecting both script and story structure to plot.

Though it took me an inordinately long time to recognize the patterns, far too long for one who was schooled in formal literature, story structure in film is really no more nor less than the structuring of story material in any other literary form. Now let's be clear on one point; I am not calling any script literature. I don't think that any screenplay could ever be accurately designated by that name, at least as the term is understood by the academics of the discipline. But it is the job of the screenwriter to try to tell a coherent story within the peculiar limitations of the medium he has chosen to write in, and when attempting that job he can and should make use of the same basic storytelling structures to be found in any other primary story material in literature, be it the narrative prose of anyone from Fielding to Joyce, the fabliaux of fifteenth century jongleurs, or the recent romantic maunderings of a Harlequin paperback.

The stuff of the story remains fairly constant: a focal point, most often in the form of a human figure to follow; the evocation of an environment to place him in, a world peopled with similar beings who surround him and provide substance for him to interact with; often a charge or goal to pursue, though sometimes this is ignored and we unfold the story without any discernible purpose; and finally a solution or end point to the narrative thread. How this material becomes structured in the particular form in literature, and how these literary forms become, if not paradigms, at least functional patterns the script writer may apply to his own material formulate the essentials of story structure.

I believe that there are only three basic story structure types that a screenwriter should be concerned with. They are (a) narrative, (b) episodic, (c) epic.

The narrative structure is the classic storyteller's method, a tale told in linear form, with one event following another along a chronologically stable and logically valid line. In the narrative structure, the viewers are taken from sequence to sequence by their own perception of how time passes and their tacit agreement that causality is a universal force governing the world and all who live there. Although many conventions have evolved in film around this fairly strict temporal ordering of events -- storytelling techniques like flashbacks, compression, and simultaneous actions -- the essential thrust of the structurally narrative screenplay is to tell the story by moving it through the passage of time in an order of logically connected events that is accessible by the audience. However, although creating your screen story along a temporal and logical narrative line is probably the best choice for beginning screenwriters, narrative scriptwriting is not nearly as easy as many imagine. One problem I see more than any other in beginning scripts that choose to employ narrative structuring is one that doesn't even appear to have anything to do with structuring the story, because it relates to choice as well as time and causality. What neophytes don't always recognize is that the problem lies not so much in keeping their causally related story points fairly spaced along a temporal spine as it is a matter of not understanding the incredible number of time choices in any given story material. If you were to graph out any recent narratively structured film using time as your baseline for the sequences of events, you would probably be surprised to discover how unsymmetrical and erratic the spacing of sequences and events would appear. This is because any story, even one that attempts to follow Aristotle's skimpy but virtuous three act time-frame, can encompass massive amounts of film-world time. With narratively structured screenplays, it is not so much a question of "did I put my story in the right order?" as it is "did I make the right choices of items to put into some structured order?" I believe that finding where to place the decimal point is the most difficult job for beginners in creating a narrative structure. And the key to this is allowing the logical half of the formula to dictate the temporal choices. If you can recognize and make use of the causal connectivity of your events, then it simplifies enormously the task of winnowing from the vast array possible those events which are best suited to completing the sequential ordering of a narrative screen story. In short, choose wisely. In reference to choice in these matters, students have started asking me to clarify what I mean by logical choice of event. Briefly, if you consider that every event pertinent to the story that you are telling can be laid along a single linear timeline, then technically each of those events is a legitimate part of your story. However, neither you nor your audience really wants to view every event. You, as the writer, most decide which of those actions is vital to understanding the story. This is the logical key. If you write out a sequence for your script that, upon review, is not essential to the comprehension of what is actually occurring in the story itself, then that sequence is quite readily discardable. The logic that should guide your choice is the logic of your storyline. Choices based on any other criteria, including everything from those assumed necessaries like character development or back story to indulgences on the order of exquisite verbal expression or the imitation of other successful sequences, are illogical and therefore poor choices.

The next form, the episodically structured script derives from an equally long and established literary pedigree. Episodic tales make up some of the seminal stories of every culture.Episodics are really a series of linked events, each one essentially complete in itself, that are combined through common theme, world, or character. From Smollett's novels to the British CARRY ON comedies of the sixties, the structure of episodics has remained fairly constant: episodes are roughly equal in length, and tightly compacted with events; there is an assumption on the part of the storyteller that the audience will pick up and follow the sources of linkage between episodes; and the stories generally have rapid pacing of all the material making up each episode. One can see episodic structuring in many of the big action pictures of recent years. Each set of action sequences constitutes an episode in the peripatetic adventures of the hero; all episodes are about the same in overall content and screen impact (or they try to be), and the material whips right along, rarely pausing to flesh out a linear storyline.

A specialized form of the episodic script seems to be gaining acceptance with producers, although it is met with somewhat less enthusiasm with audiences and certainly with little by me. This structure does not rely on the traditional roles of character, world, or thematic continuity to engage the watcher in the story. Instead each sequence of events is a complete whole in itself, and its relationship to the other sequences in the film is made through a visual association designed to provoke an immediate emotional response. This specialized type of episodic, one which I label iconic writing, I believe derives in large part from recognition of a generation reared on regular television watching and a subsequent generation raised on music videos. Iconic films depend for their impact on immediate recognition and response in the viewer to what is iconized on the screen. Once taken in, the next icon is presented, and so on. Iconic pictures are innately visual, unusually viscerally reactive, and generally abysmally short on story. For examples of this episodic sub-form, just think of any recent picture whose demographics is pointed directly at the so- called X generation.

The last basic type of story structure useful for the screenwriter, the epic form, is used less often for films than many mavens of scriptwriting might have you believe. Epic structure also has its paradigm in literature, but many tend to confuse the structure with the common story elements found in epic literature. Yes, the Poetics does use the term "myth" as a referent for plot or narrative structure, but the mythic really has little to do with structuring out a script. Certainly the "hero" may be of a particular type, with a particular background; the events of his story may involve a quest, a search for a particular object upon which certain events will turn (what the Medievalist would call a fylfot, perhaps; we can call it a McGuffin); he may even meet his end in a certain fashion. However, all these are trappings of epic poetry, and have little to do with epic structure. Epic structure, though, has a few elements that speak directly to con-structure of the form itself. To be epic, a screenplay must align itself along a central theme as securely as a narrative structure uses time and logic. Epic structure is the logos, or orderly structuring of material through idea. The epic theme is embodied in a single character whose passage through the events of the epic story is measured solely by the relevance to the theme. That is, you make choices as to what parts of your character's story to tell in epic structure based primarily on how well they illustrate the theme you have chosen to present. Epic structure is, by definition slowly paced, almost serene in its use of sequence. Events within epic structure can almost invariably be graphed on an ascending order of impact; they crescendo, like grand opera. Film does not lend itself well to epic structuring. Occasionally, in material where the underlying structure was already in place, as in MAN WHO WOULD BE KING, in historical epics like

GHANDI, or several of the early Kurasawa pictures, it can work very well. But if we remember that all the great epic literature was a reflection of the central cultural zeitgeist, understanding how little epic material we actually have to work with today becomes a bit clearer.

If you believe that you have story material that is epic in nature, I can offer the following sincere advice. Do not attempt to write your script using an epic structure. You will in all likelihood fail. Instead look again at the concept and try to isolate why the thematic aspects are so important to what you are trying to say. Many times, you can subsume these elements and go on with a regular narrative structure. I honestly believe that any truly epically structured screenplay would be a very hard sell today. For one thing, epic, as the term implies subjectively, suggests filmmaking "on a grand scale". And it is all but impossible to write an epic script that doesn't scream for a huge budget to realize its thematic importance. I suspect also that not too many studio people will respond to the dynamics of epic storytelling. They all too often equate thematically epic material with a "message", and overt message movies are anathema at major studios. Presented with an epic structure these producers will probably try to recreate it as episodic, because they are much more familiar with this form, and the two methods usually do have some things in common, such as impressively dimensioned heroes.

To me, plot is one of the greatest joys of the writer. Plotting out the events which make up the sequences of your screenplay is primarily a matter of making the most felicitous choice from among an incredible number of available choices. For example, your screenplay is pretty much a straight-forward narrative about the tribulations of a beat cop, brought on by his own dogged determination to remain loyal to the people he encounters on his daily rounds. You decide a critical sequence in your narrative will be made up of the betrayal of his trust by the one he has been closest to in earlier street sequences. Now, you may plot. You can try out any number of patterns of logical events, preferably causally related, occasionally serendipitous, that will serve to illustrate your story point and fulfill the sequential requirement of that portion of your screen story. If you plot well, you will try a myriad of possibilities before settling on the one which satisfies all of the narrative necessities and is aesthetically integrated into the whole of the script that you hold in your mind.

Plotting is an exercise for the good writer; what follows is one of the best ways of running the scales writers can use in improving their plotting skills. Some will tell you that plotting is more a matter of stringing out the essential "beats" or plot (i.e. story) points on a string of narrative, and that the hardest part of plotting out the story is getting the rhythm of the plot points down correctly. I don't totally buy this explanation. I think that any writer worth his salt can sit down with a shooting script or a video of any good movie and pluck out story sequences, re-write them into something entirely new, and refit them into the story material without substantially harming the storytelling aspect of the picture. Indeed, there is no better way to expand your plotting horizons than to do this, at least in your head; at best on paper. If we re-wrote the sequence where we learned some entirely new set of circumstances governing the prior relationship in Paris between Bogey and Bergman, would this then make a better CASABLANCA? Not necessarily, but if it were well done neither would it substantially shift the overall thrust of that narrative. This is what I mean by plot. Rick's noble sacrifice is story; "We'll always have Paris" is plot.

BACK STORY

Back story is a term given for anything that occurs, in the movie time, prior to the opening of the script. In other words, anything that happens to your characters in the world you have created before you write FADE IN can be considered legitimate back story. More to the point, perhaps, back story in anything that happens before FADE OUT that your audience must know in order to understand what is happening on screen. Back story includes such stuff as character background, the prior history of your world, single events or actions that were causative factors or shaped later on-screen events or actions -- more specifically, back story within the script is anything that clarifies present screentime reality for the viewer.

The problem is not so much with identifying what part of your back story needs inclusion in your script, but getting it in there without its intruding on the present story you are telling. Classic methods include telling back story over heavy actions, as when during the fistfight between the principals we might get told about how their fathers began the feud in the first place; presenting back story elements visually, as when a film begins twenty years in the past, then title cards us into the present movie time; back story can be suggested by letting the audience make backward inferences from present events, as when the series of strange doings inevitably lead the kids to conclude that the house has a haunted history; and of course the all too often used but ever-popular "face the camera" and read out the what happened before method. In some cases this kind of blatant expression is okay; certain genres accept it as part of the traditional baggage of the form -- historical yarns, for example -- but, on the whole, a little attention paid to trying to be more subtle in the introduction of the needed back story points in your screenplay will make you a craftsman instead of a journeyman. Because back story is so intimately related to how the screenwriter works time in his script, it is probably worthwhile to read, or re-read the chapter of this book which deals with that subject. But, briefly, you should remember a few precepts on film and time as they relate to imparting back story into your script. Avoid moving forward and backward in the movie time of your script; keep the duration of your overall movie time as short as your story will allow; make every point outside of movie time -- as any unavoidable time slips for back story presentation -- very clear as a time break to your audience; and, finally, be constantly aware of how real time plays as movie time. Back story elements should not violate your movie time, with the possible exception of the flashback or flashforward dictated by your story. I believe that choosing flashbacks to tell back story is a poor choice, particularly for beginners. Flashbacks force audiences to concentrate on the movie time rather than forget it, and therefore interrupt the flow of the story. For a real example of how back story can intrude on the movie time of a film look at any of the BACK TO THE FUTURE films, but particularly at the first one. The filmmakers tried to cram so much of what they knew the audience would need to know in the forepart of the film, especially the material setting up character relationships, that it becomes top-heavy and ultimately confusing in a film whose main thrust is playing around with time itself. On the other hand, notice how subtly Bolt sets up the Lawrence character's background in a single scene in the maps room at the beginning of LAWRENCE. This is efficient back story presentation at its best.

Ultimately, as with everything else in your script, you will have to decide how much back story you must tell to your audience and how to go about telling it. There are some things to pay attention to while you are doing this. First, most beginning writers tend to put far more of their characters' early lives into the script than is necessary for good character development. Most of what we want to know about your character exists in watching him behave in the situations on screen; deep motivation is fine for the guy acting him; most often you will find that the audience doesn't care. Next, beginning writers often try to squeeze most of the necessary back story into the first few sequences, probably in the belief that "get it over and done with" is the best way to handle the back story problem. In fact, the opposite is more often true. Depending, as always, on the particular story you are telling, it is often better to lace in necessary bits of back story throughout the script rather than bunching it all up front (or at the back, as in the Inspector's denouement in the drawing room mystery). This will serve two purposes; you will only have to discover clever ways to sneak in a tad of back story as it is necessary to further your story; and you will often find that much of what you thought was vital to an audience understanding your story isn't that vital after all. A third issue new writers encounter in dealing with back story is in separating out from everything that lies before the FADE OUT the necessary information that actually impinges on their film story. The expository elements in an average script are usually quite slim; most material in a film is devoted to the on-screen "moving" of the story. One way to deal with a back story that is threatening to overpower your script is to write out the screen story as a short story (yeah, I know; if it's film story it isn't really short story material), then graph it just as you would with any short piece of fiction. If your expo line is normal for a short story -- ten to fifteen percent or so -- then you probably have too much back story you are planning to put into your script. This is because a film with all its attendant assistance in presenting world and character does not usually require the expository support short fiction demands.

A final problem concerning back story is the perennial one of description versus dialogue. Remember, you have only two basic ways to pass on back story information to your audience: you can describe it to them, and by extension, hope that the director can interpret your description into on-screen actions and visuals that will relate the material sufficiently to keep the audience unconfused; or, alternatively, you can put your back story material into the mouths of the actors and trust them not to alter your lines to the point that vital information will be lost to the audience. Again, based on the story you are telling, it is your call. Personally, I tend to give the nod to the director. First, because, as we know, dialogue is not the best way to initiate story points, even back story ones. I guess I also feel that the director will have a better understanding than an actor of how a particular piece of information may be needed to play out something later in the film. Probably naïve, I know, but spero meliori.

ESSENTIAL PARTS

Like Gaul all scripts are divided into three essential parts: the shot heading, the description, and the dialogue. Each of these parts is an integral part of the finished screenplay, but in terms of those who will be reading your script each part is vital to different people for different reasons.

The shot headings -- those elements that always begin with INT. Or EXT., continue with the briefest possible notation of locale, and conclude with either DAY or NIGHT -- are of most interest to the readers who are parsing your material looking for potential costs. How many location shoots are we looking at, as opposed to how many built sets on a sound stage; how intricate is the location to be found/built, and how many day, night, or day-for-night shooting sequences are we plucking out of the material. Shot heads are, then, of importance to the many technical staff who will eventually participate in making your screenplay into a film. This is why you, as the writer, should only be concerned in your shot heads with the same kind of information they were designed to impart. In other words, do not try to tell parts of your story through your shot heads. One sure sign of a neophyte is an extended descriptive passage in the center of a slug line, something that might read A SMALL ROOM OFF THE MAIN BEDROOM IN JOHN AND MARTHA'S PALATIAL ESTATE. Come on, guys. All you need is A ROOM. Incidentally, I do not subscribe to the school that adjusts the last item in a slug line to indicate more subtle elements of time; as in EVENING or DUSK or JUST BEFORE DAWN. The primary purpose of the information that you are imparting is merely to tell somebody if its a day or a night shoot. That's all. If you want to finely hone the movement of the sun across the sky in your story, do it in the description, not the shot head. These shot headings can give valuable information to the writer as well as the potential producer. I discovered some time ago away to help show you what your shot heads are saying about your script. I used to use a freeware program created by Michael Part of the old WICKED SCHERZO Bulletin Board for writers in L.A. With some tinkering to make it read my own script files, I got it to print out a list of just the shot heads in my various screenplays. Today, whether you are using either a sophisticated writing program or dedicated screenwriting software, you can do the same thing quite easily. Sift out a listing of all your slug lines. Be warned! This can be a humbling experience. For one thing, it is possible to see (and adjust where necessary) any over-reliance on either inside or outside locations just by counting up what you have done with your individual scenes. The length and clarity of the location notations also are easily studied, and the too elaborate or too confusing stand out like the proverbial thumbs on chickens. You can also look and make sure that every shot head ends with either day or night. It is even possible to get a good sense of the overall rhythm of your script by examining only the shot heads.

The second essential element of the screenplay, the description, is of paramount interest to the most important group of your potential readers -- the agents, producers, and financiers who will be deciding on the merits of your story as possible film. It is also significant to those who will be reading your material for coverage. For me, the descriptive parts of a script are the most important parts. Even given the peculiarities of the medium, the vagaries of formatting, and the sometimes stringent rules that govern how the material is presented, it is in the description that the storyteller can really get his story told. Despite its name, description is not merely describing what is actually going to be seen on the screen in any given sequence. Good descriptive writing in a script means providing the basic elements of this envisioning, but also means adding nuances to the events and characters described that will awaken the interest of the reader and make him want to know what is going to happen next. In fact, finding the proper balance between the pure description of what will be portrayed on screen and the elements of story that must be told to make an effective narrative is probably the toughest job any screenwriter, new or experienced, must face. This is where, I believe, talent enters the equation and ultimately makes the difference. One suggestion I give my students may help the rest of you as well. Try and find a copy of a selling script for a recent film. Read the descriptions within a particular sequence while, at the same time, you are unspooling the sequence on your video tape player. Usually, the difference between what is seen and what is said on the page are enough to underline what I point out here. Good scripts are sixty to seventy per cent description, 0r more, a figure which may seem heavy to some who can be fooled by the necessity of breaking up long descriptive passages on the page with dialogue bits or shot heads.

There is a technique that can help new writers cope with both underdone and overblown description. I think that it is worthwhile, for those whose word processing programs allow appropriate manipulation, to separate out and print all description in a script. Read this, and you should have read your story. Check how long it is, relative to the remainder of your material. Are there any passages whose stylistic is markedly different from the rest of the description? How many places can you be ruthless in leaning out your prose? Are there any obvious breaks in the story line, which you are sure aren't covered by some transitional method utilizing dialogue only? Cross check this long description document against your original story line, looking for places where the description seems to be emphasizing something other than what you had in mind when your were working out your story sequences. And, finally, pass the description along to a reading friend and see if, after reading it, they can tell your story back to you without omitting any essential plot points. Looking at the written descriptions in your script unadulterated by shot heads or dialogue can be a real eye-opener for scripters.

The final essential element of any screenplay is the dialogue. While the whole matter of dialogue is treated in a separate chapter, I think it is valuable to note here that most of those who will be concentrating on the written dialogue in your script are those who will be most intimately involved with it, namely, the director and the actors. Thus your dialogue should speak to them as the primary audience. It is possible to put material in the mouths of your characters that might otherwise be off-putting to potential buyers of your screenplay. Most of my "in jokes" or little polemics get stuck into dialogue lines in my scripts, largely because I know through experience that there they are relatively harmless and not destined to destroy interest or a sale, and, indeed, often lost in the rewrites. Some fellow writers believe that it is possible to angle dialogue in such a fashion so as to imply a certain actor or actress as suitable for the role. I have never had much luck with this technique; my Clint Eastwood lines seem to end up in much wimpier mouths, and any impassioned speeches I tailored just for Meryl Streep get altered during production to fit within the mouths of some producer's bimbette. But, if you want to try, feel free; but remember that your character is the seminal source for the lines, not whomever acts him.

In addition to these three essential parts of the screenplay, there is another, less obvious element. You can study script after script and never find it. Or you can discover the thing staring out at you from page one. It goes by a number of names -- craft, storytelling skill, talent. I prefer another term, the same one I used many years ago teaching college Freshmen how to write clear, concise prose. I call this element readability. Your screenplay must have this readability factor, in some measure, if you are ever to get anywhere in Hollywoodland. Even the prods and financiers who don't know what they are reading have a visceral awareness of its inclusion or exclusion in the script. They know this by using the same rule of thumb I used years ago with student essays. Just as with the readers of the scripts, I could determine the readability of what was written merely by gauging how much I could stomach reading the things. Readability has no stringent rules or signs. It is simply the ability to make what you put on paper palatable to those who will be reading it. I do not honestly know if readability rises largely from learning the craft or from innate talent. I only know that it must be as important a part of your script as your attention to shots, description or dialogue. Don't fret. If your screenplays do not have this element, you will soon discover the lack.

SEQUENCES

If in my years of work I have come upon something worthwhile in all of the process of screenwriting, it is my understanding of the significance of sequencing in the craft of writing the film. I believe that too many screenwriters, experienced ones as well as beginners, try to write their stories in scenes rather than another more "story-friendly" division. In a very real way, this is letting the format dictate the storytelling. It is as if we all were trying to write our scripts in blank verse, or even worse, in camera shots. And those who define the "master scene" as the critical division of a script, while they may be headed in the right direction, are still bound by their insistence on format-driven and rather arbitrary initiating and end points to quantify their master scenes.

After a good deal of trial and error, what I discovered writing scripts, reading them, and viewing a vast number of films over and over again was something I really should have known all along, given my education and background in the study of literary forms. The story transcends the form through which it is told! Sounds simple, doesn't it? But if you will follow through on this idea, you will discover that here is the heart of finding the natural break points in your film narrative.

Literature is full of examples of the literary form leading the story around by the nose, which is why you will find so many otherwise excellent storytellers working the nether regions of the august body of the literati, writing detective fiction, science fiction, thrillers, and other so-called inferior types of literature. But what these writers have learned is that the formulas of these genres never inhibit the craft of the first-rate storyteller because the forms are already set in the formulas and thus do not interfere with the business of the storyteller which is telling his story.

As an aside, I would like to explain to why it has become almost impossible for me to read much recent science fiction. Most younger sci-fi writers seem to me to have discovered the power of form in dictating how their work will read on the page. Thus they are turning out works of undeniable literary merit that are so thin in sheer storytelling technique that they don't hold the interest of a reader like the older material of the fifties and sixties. While this has accomplished wonders for the prestige of science fiction in the lit departments of major universities, it hasn't helped many of the newer authors learn how to tell their stories unencumbered by the forms that have dazzled them. Although you may think that this isn't about writing scripts, there is a lesson to be learned here; if screenwriters start concentrating on the configuration of their work rather than the story it tells, because filmmaking is so collaborative, the failure to hold their audiences will be even more dramatic than the decline of science fiction novels. And I now think that, with the release of films like STARGATE,THE FIFTH ELEMENT, and INDEPENDENCE DAY, I have lived to see this come to pass. If we are entering in film into an age of form dictating story much of what I say here will rapidly become obsolete. If, unlike what is suggested by Bruce Willis' recent comment, writers are still important contributors to the filmmaking process, then these form-driven films will become merely aberrant blips along the great skein of movie history. I can only hope so.

I am always hesitant to use finished films as examples of good scripts, because, as we already know, the on-screen vision is the result of a collaborative effort by many people. But if we look at a movie as a series of sequences, great chucks of the storyteller's "stuff", I believe we can begin to learn a lot more about how to put together our own blueprints for making good screenplays for great films. Defining a sequence has always been for me a daunting job. Frankly, in my classes sometimes I succeed brilliantly and sometimes I fail miserably. Possibly the best gloss I can put on how I use the term is to make the analogy with those wonderful headers some eighteenth century novelists like Smollett or Sterne set at the chapter beginnings of their work. You remember: the "In which our hero loses his chastity while winning his heart's desire" kind of thing. So often we are not told of the actual happenstances of the events unfolded in the chapters, but instead are told the essential story elements being covered. Hero meets villain; hero is defeated by great odds; hero discovers truth about self, and so on. There are commonalties in almost every story, and certainly within genre forms of story types; these commonalties are the stuff of sequential storytelling because they allow the writer to see his story in its purest form, one which transcends simple event. If I, as the creator of the story, can separate out the underlying pattern of story sequence from the specific actions I envision my characters essaying, then I have gone a long way toward simplifying the way in which I put those event down on paper.

There are several things you must look for in defining sequences in a script or a completed film. First, that segment of the material which I am calling a sequence has nothing at all to do with the actual format used in the script or the directorial techniques in a film. A sequence may begin with a slug line and end with a cut to a new venue -- it may just as well begin in the middle of a traditional scene or end on a dialogue line somewhere in the middle of a short passage. For example, when Roy Scheider types the word "shark" into the accident report, that sequence of JAWS is completed; the protagonist has met the enemy through his work. Sequences are not dependent on formal starts and stops. They begin and end where that part of their function in telling the story is required. A sequence is determined by what it must do to further the story. If the writer is crafting a mix of action and dialogue whose primary story purpose is to introduce the protagonist to the antagonist for the first time, that is basically what he should concentrate on. This story function may well cross several traditional "counters" of scenes, locations, time patterns. It may take for your particular story ten or a dozen pages of script, or it may take half a page. The sequence remains the constant... it is that part of the script where the writer tells a discrete and identifiable part of his story. The particulars of the events which make up that sequence is a matter of plot, not structure, and plot is the variable factor.

A curious thing happens after you have lived with this way of looking at films for a while. It begins to color your perspective of the medium. My wife tells me I am not a lot of fun to go to the movies with any more. Maybe it's true. I tend to laugh, cry, groan, or cheer at peculiar intervals in the screening. I am responding to what I see going on in the actual mechanism of the storytelling craft. For example, in one of my all-time favorites, LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, I no longer am as awed by O'Toole's grand gesture of returning across the desert for the lost Arab as I am by how well the whole magnificent sequence is defined by Bolt and delineated by Lean -- Lawrence gives the Arab army not just Aqaba, but pride, a sequence that begins with the protagonist's gorgeously framed all-night introspection and concludes somewhere in the "camels in the sea" scene.

There is one thing that can help screenwriters more than anything else to begin to recognize this different perspective on films, and to learn how to make use of it in their own work. One piece of advice I give to all my screenwriting students is to rent and watch as many films as they can, looking for the innate divisions of the pictures into what the writer is trying to accomplish in telling his story, rather than watching, as so many do, from scene to scene. The VCR is one of the best tools of a scriptwriter. With one, you can reverse, replay, or fast forward a picture until it ceases to have its intended effect and becomes the sum of its constituent parts. And, if you are looking for the parts of the story, rather than the parts of the script, you will begin to learn the nature of sequential storytelling, at least as far as film stories are concerned. Incidentally, I also advise my groups to pick out material that they are not only not familiar with, but choose genres they don't particularly enjoy. Such distancing is a help in teaching yourself to see sequences in a film. I should add that at one of my seminars a woman taking it for a second time disagreed with this advice, telling me that picking her favorite picture was the best eye-opener for her; because she already knew the "beats" of the story so well, it was easier to cut into sequences.

Another element of the sequence is its tendency to exhibit a discernible beginning, middle, and end -- regardless of its location within a script. Sequences, because they are distinct portions of a story, have a kind of symmetry to them. This is, unfortunately, more often noticed in its absence than seen accomplished. A sequence that has not fulfilled its story requirement will appear incomplete and, finally, unsatisfying. One way to help keep your sequences entire is to constantly test what is happening on the page against what service the sequence is supposed to perform. For instance, you might look at a part of your script which deals with the relationship between the protagonist and his soulmate, just to see if that is indeed what is being portrayed, or, as often happens, you have fallen into the typical "love montage" trap. If your material is not doing the job, it will more often be because something is missing than because something is wrong.

Finally, I think that at the concept stage of your work you should try a rough organization of your material by sequence rather than by (master) scene. Doing so will give you greater flexibility later on in that, since you know what part of your story that sequence is trying to get across, you will not be so locked in to how you are trying to make your point. For example, say that you have a sequence planned early on that you know is your protagonist's discovery of his central dilemma, and you have this marked out as a series of events where he learns about his ignoble birth, confronts his putative father, and is thrown off the estate. If you remain constant to your storytelling focus, you will discover the many possibilities of dividing this story sequence up into discrete parts, how they fit together, or how they may be conveniently separated by portions of another overlapping sequence. Also, you can even trade off that whole set of events for another that will accomplish the same thing. This is what I mean by sequential flexibility.

Sometimes it is difficult for the beginning screenwriter to distinguish between film sequences, film scenes, and film shots. Because it is important that you approach developing your story through a pattern of sequences, and because most of the spec scripts which are written "shot-for-shot" are not taken too seriously by industry professionals, knowing how to recognize film sequences is a large step toward handling your own material this way rather than trying to tell your story in individual shots or short scenes. As I mentioned, one good way to acquire the sense of sequential storytelling is to break down movies by sequence. It is sometimes easier to see the sequential movement of the story elements in a completed film than it is to see them in even the final draft of the shooting script. The following breakdown of the first sequence of the popular movie JAWS is interesting on several counts, as it is not only a good example of sequential storytelling on film, but also shows how flexible this approach may be in the hands of someone who knows what he is doing. Notice how the material appears to violate one of the first principles of good movie-making by setting up the antagonist before the protagonist. The Sequence: We meet the antagonist in his own environment. The Content of the sequence: the first shark attack. The Scenes of the sequence, including specific numbers of camera shots: Around the campfire (four shots); running along the shoreline (nine shots); in the water (many, many shots, with at least two cuts back to the boy on the beach). What we see here is a complete sequence performing its demanded role in the film, with a discrete opening, mid-section, and conclusion, and presenting the actual story content in a visually effective way. Now as an exercise try and think of at least ten dozen other different ways Benchley and Spielberg might have accomplished the same story requirement. For more practice, you should look at the rest of JAWS and see how many other sequences you can discover. Remember: the shot is the individual camera focus or movement in the scene, which is a specific set of actions and dialogue common to a single point of your story, and in the aggregate these form a sequence, a major dramatic segment of the story you are telling. Sequences are generally (a) composed of a number of specific scenes; (b) relatively complete entities with discernible beginning, body, and completion; (c) transcend location and time; (d) may or may not be contiguous; and (e) are intimately related in both function and design to your core storyline.

The final thing you should know about sequences, and something that will be covered in more detail later on, is their relevance to the overall pacing of your script. Sequential rhythms are a significant part of pacing, and I believe that the relative duration (not length per se, but the actual screen time taken up in telling that particular sequence) of the various sequential patterns of the screenplay form an integral part of its general readability. That is, your sequences should contribute to the sense of story being told in your script, as well as presenting its content. Not everyone I've tried this information out on agrees with the importance I give to understanding and using sequence as a method of scriptwriting. I do know that forcing myself to carve up the material in this new way of seeing the film story has improved my own storytelling techniques in scripts I have written, and it has also allowed me to become far more attuned to knowing how and why a particular part of a script, my own or another's, is not working. I believe that recognizing and using sequential storytelling in scripts is a very necessary part of being a good screenplay writer. And, if nothing else, it will keep young writers from writing their scripts out scene by scene.

CHARACTER

Although I firmly believe in almost all film that drama is action, there still must always be someone to act. Knowing your characters is one of a beginning writer's most important jobs, after working out the story sequences. As you begin to flesh out your concept, you will probably come to have some understanding of your protagonist, and possibly his antithesis, the antagonist. But in the process of writing your script you will have to get to know all of your characters, major, secondary, and peripheral.

Advice on building characters in films generally takes the form of compiling a list of a character's salient characteristics, physical, mental, and psychological. This is an old pattern, a la Lagos Egri. And there is certainly nothing wrong with beginning a character list by jotting down as many of these traits as you are comfortable assigning to your characters. But it is important to continue from there, because a good, workable character is far more than just an aggregation of characteristics. A good character must have depth and intensity, and evoke a patina of reality that generates sympathy or empathy in the audience.

If the audience recognizes those elements in your characterizations that approximate their own experiences, elements that are validated by the reflection of reality in the characters' actions, dialogue, demeanor, and sensibilities, then they will engage your characters, relate to them, and accept them within the reality of the film story your have created. Remember, your characters are presumptive people, and as such should have verisimilitude with those other presumptive people, your audience.

In film, a character is defined by his actions, and confirmed by his dialogue. This is very important to remember. You should not let your characters explain themselves, except when the explanation is illuminating a prior or pending action. And even then I suspect that it's not always a good idea; the character then too often takes on an added and unwanted characteristic of moodiness, or introspection, or even sheer talkiness. The use of interior monologue, a mainstay of character revelation on stage, doesn't really work very well in film, probably because the direct expression of inner self violates that sense of filmic reality that creates the world of the picture. And scripters should also recognize that action that defines a character does not necessarily imply the purely physical action generally associated with the term. An action evoking character can be a look, a stance, a grimace or a gesture -- any physical manifestation of attitude or personality that is graphic and visual rather than verbal in form. Remember that incredible framing of Lawrence atop the wrecked train in Lean's masterpiece; or the even more subtle method by which young Lawrence extinguishes a match. Sometimes even the failure to act tells us more about character than an overt action. The distinction I want to make clear in this passage is between revealing character through what we actually see on screen as opposed to attempting to tell us about character through letting that character speak or others speak about him. The latter is a wonderful technique in prose; in film it evokes immediate qualities of amateurism. And there is another distinction, one that many newcomers to script writing never quite get under control. You must never, never tell your readers in the character descriptions who you think the characters are. I have read many many first time screenplays with overblown character analyses immediately appended to the first mention of a character. If your initial thumbnail of a character in your script can be clever and succinct, terrific -- but the character will ultimately become known to the reader by what you have him do, not by what you say he is.

A character must act, rather than react. By this I mean that when you place your principals within your story sequences, you must give them the room to determine their own behaviors and to accept the consequences of their actions (just like real life, isn't it?). If you are constantly meddling in their actions, placing improbable impediments before them and then waiting for them to respond, you may be creating a hell of an exciting interactive computer game, but you are probably also creating bad characters. It is a truism in this business that, somewhere in the second act, characters begin to take on life outside what you have set for them in the script. I think that this is a true truism. It is validated by how often inexperienced writers let their principal characters get away from them in the middle part of their screenplay. You look up and suddenly discover that your hero has gone off on a tangent of his own, and you are way, way off your story spine. Even with these alarms, internal character vitality is something you should watch for and exploit. At best, it opens entire new vistas in your sequences; at the least, it is a clear indication that your characters are becoming strong and well-realized.

It is important, particularly in today's climate of filmmaking, to create characters who express emotion and "feel" things. Because of my own shortcomings in this area, I recently came on a trick that can be extremely helpful to other writers whose characters have forgotten the emotional side of life. You should try and let your characters feel the feelings and emotions that real people are prone to manifest. My own people tend to be too cerebral; I have been criticized for this often enough to know that characters that exhibit the ordinary manifestations of human feelings are more warmly received. Someone in a seminar asked me how to make their characters have appropriate feeling responses to their situations. I couldn't answer then very well; since that time, I believe that I would recommend that everyone get a copy of the DMSIV, the "bible" used by therapists in assessing clients and determining diagnoses. Within that book is listed, albeit in neurotic, psychotic, or at least dysfunctional modes, virtually every manifestation of human emotion and feeling to be found on this planet. I would like to be able to say my own characters have benefited from what I have learned browsing there; unfortunately they still veer toward the intellectual side of behavior. Maybe it's just me.

Ideally, your characters should have several lives. They must live within the confines of the world you are creating with your film story. They should also be capable of living within another story. An excellent test of your principals is to place them in minor roles in another script. Do they behave correctly; i.e. within character? Are their actions and speech consistent with who they are? Or, as we often discover to our dismay, are they only workable as the leads in their own dramatic circumstances? A character who is fully realized should be able to go out to dinner with you, to fill out a job application at a local business, ask a friend for a date. If you have trouble envisioning your characters performing any of these actions, or anything else you can think up to stretch the vitality of your players, then, quite possibly, your characters are not real enough to exist without the twin underpinnings of your story world and your story sequences. Another good measure of whether you have created really good characters is your own willingness to live with them as real people, particularly within their own stories. Who of us wouldn't relish going along with Danny and Peachy to Kaffiristan, now? In fact, it sometimes useful to place yourself in some minor role in a sequence, merely to see how involved you can become with the other players in your script. If you have trouble talking with or relating to your principals, they may not be real enough to work.

Good characters are well-motivated characters. This almost goes without saying. But so much is made by others of the super-significance of motivating characters adequately, I must put my two cents in. Sure motivation is important. But overt motivation is, I think, always a poor idea. Your expression of motivation should probably not be explicitly stated, but be inherent in the totality of the character you have created. To have your principal explain, even through how he behaves, his burning desire for revenge is always less effective than to create him with the kind of personality who is innately revengeful. In my own experience as a script analyst, editor and doctor, I have generally found characters in screenplays to be over- motivated. That is, many writers appear to try to openly state character motivation, either so they can produce some discernable character "arc", or as if this were the way to realize the character himself. It just doesn't work that way, folks. The obviously motivated character is a character who will appear flat, underdeveloped, and weak to your audience. Better by far to exhibit no motivation for your principals at all other than what the audience may infer from their actions than to try and cram character motivation down your audience's throats.

Since I have brought up the term "arc", I want to discuss the recent phenomenon of "internal growth" as the mark of quality characterization and, in many cases, screenplay quality itself. More and more in the biz I am running into people, who should otherwise know better, who tell me that a script whose principal character or characters do not develop internally, or display an arc, during the course of the story is somehow a poor piece of work. What I have found more often than not in reading the material, is that a character's so-called "growth" is more often than not equated with somehow becoming a "better" person; there is a whole sub-text message in this character necessarily developing and growing business that smacks of, as the Aussies call it, Wowserism. If you want to examine any number of films, and hugely successful ones, too, over the past ten years, I doubt that you will find a preponderance of leading characters whose moral improvement over the course of the film is in any way central to the story they are in. This does not mean that a good character cannot change (although in many films, even this is negligible in terms of real human personal growth) as a result of the events we put him through in a script. But, I do not believe that any change must perforce be a change for the better, to a more upright, moral or ethically pure character. All we are doing here, people, is allowing an implicitly moralistic world view, and hopefully a very temporary one, to guide our perceptions and distort our sense of what makes a workable character in a script. To the young writers out there, may I suggest concentrating on creating characters along the guidelines elsewhere in this chapter, and not concerning yourselves with the moral improvement of Sly Stallone or Arnie S.

It is an inevitable phenomenon of the movies that they make characters either big or small. Although much of this lies within the purlieu of the director, a screenwriter does get first crack at exploiting this phenomenon in the service of character generation and development. Especially in that first evocation of your character, you have an opportunity to give your audience a mind-set on where the character fits within the reality of your film world. For example, the opening sequence can depict your principals as marginal, ant-like beings in a vast universe (note how the hardware dwarfs the human figures in the space shuttle sequence of 2001); claustraphobes clawing their way out of their environment (the first, sleeping pod sequence of ALIENS); or looming over and overpowering their circumstances (the beginning sequence of MAGNIFICENT SEVEN). You don't have to strive too hard or make too much of this quirk of the medium; but note it and use it if it fits within your film structure. Even if you only suggest the opportunity, a clever director can pick up on cues you have placed and make this work toward better characterization.

Characters may be functionally classified as either major, secondary, or peripheral. Major characters, and of course this will vary according to the story you are telling, the budget you have in hand, and your own professional stature as a scriptwriter, should generally number no more than five or six. The protagonist, his antagonist, a foil for each, a love interest, and perhaps a mentor are possibilities out of a much larger canon available to the writer. Secondary characters are usually a factor of three of your majors; that is, with five principals, you can conveniently have as many as fifteen secondary characters. Peripheral characters are virtually unlimited in number, though anything upwards of fifty to sixty better be both a significant contribution to story and part of a major production. Too often in first-time screenplays, all three categories are unnecessarily high. You really do not have to make that Waitress or that Bell Boy a day player; in many cases you do not even have to reference a character there at all. As a rule of thumb, writing economically in the use of actors for your script equates with a professional understanding of the cost of what can become one of the larger budget items in a production.

Here are some additional points on characterization which can aid screenwriters in creating the right kind of people to inhabit the film world of their story. (1) Remember that your characters will be played by actors. And despite their massive egos, actors do have limits. Never give your characters actions to perform that are outside the physical limits of an actor's ability. Never ask your characters to display feelings and emotions that are beyond an actor's skills. And never allow your characters to speak dialogue lines that an actor is incapable of getting his mouth around. (2) One good way to get acquainted with your characters -- certainly the principals, and probably the secondaries and the peripherals as well -- is to write brief biographies for each character, starting, like back story, well before the script begins and following them long after from Fade In through Fade Out. To see your characters live lives outside the experiences of your story is to find additional powerful insights into who they really are. (3) Recognize the universality of humanity. Use it rarely for your principals, sparingly for your secondary players, and openly as needed for your peripherals. The universality of humanity is merely a nice catch-phrase for stereotyping. Your major creations usually do not require stereotypical traits; in most cases it would detract from who you have created; and, often, your secondary characters are fully realized enough to stand on their own without this crutch, although there are exceptions, some of which are virtually unconscious. Think about how many slick-backed, double-breasted lawyers and/or FBI men you may have seen in recent films. With the day players and meat scenery, however, I believe that the shorthand of judicious stereotyping is not only countenanced in the industry but often welcomed. Certainly creating a marvelous, well- rounded and sound character for that car park attendant we will see but once in your film is a laudable effort, if you can even do it without stereotyping him! But, if you want to get on with your story, give him acne, a cowlick, and loud rock music and drive on. I once spent an inordinate amount of time creating a rich, full-blown character for one of my projects; he only had a few actions, a line or two, but I grew more and more enamored of making him live and breathe. Oddly, because the venue of his sequence was the Chihuahuan desert, I failed to recognize that what I was doing was attempting to recreate the archetypal desert rat. It was something I could have easily sketched in a few lines. Instead I took days. I believe that many script readers in this town are happy to immediately recognize a fairly stock figure in a minor role and then go on with their reading. But, and I repeat, this is not something that should be used with either major or second-level characterizations. Another aspect of this stereotyping occurs with the calling up of a particular actor as evocative of the character, as in "a Mel Gibson" type or a "Keanu Reeves" type. Though many of my fellow writers do it, I try to avoid linking any known actor with one of my characters in a script. I feel it projects an immediate image that may not really be what the character is about (what is a "Clint Eastwood" type, anyway?), and in addition it can predispose a reading producer or financier to dismiss your material because they know that whoever you mentioned is unavailable (Who can ever get Malpaso to answer their phones?). (4) Study and understand the principal of the persona. I used to teach a grad class on this concept, emphasizing its function as a literary technique in the hands of, for example, a Sterne or, more recently, a Barth. Only much later have I realized how well this adapts to designing characterizations in film. Basically, the process goes like this. In reality, few of us present our total selves to others. In particular situations we mask ourselves, creating a persona, or sub-set of our real character which we present to others. Often the deepest revelation of our character lies in our willingness to pull away these masks and reveal our true selves. This behavior applies equally well to the characters we create in films. Formulating a character who may be masking a part of himself, only to reveal what lies beneath the mask later is a wonderful way to enrich your creation. This is not something to be overdone; and it is something to be done with touch; but one of the best ways I know to deepen your characters, particularly with a story genre that does not easily lend itself to great character depth, is to make use of personae for your principals. (5) Many will tell you that your antagonist is a mirror of your hero, but with a moral lacking or a character flaw., and therefore your must work to make your villain as interesting, deep, and ultimately near-heroic as your hero. I thoroughly disagree. The vitality of a bad guy's badness arrives full-blown out of the totality of his character. He's a villain because it his business to be one, just as it is the hero's burden to be a hero. Sure, change the circumstances and we might root for Darth Vador (but notice that it doesn't work too well when we finally are asked to do just that); but if Darth is antagonist to Luke, he is never anywhere to be Luke's equal. I have found that a far more likely occurrence with beginning writers is to make the antagonist in every way superior to the hero, creating a situation which makes it virtually impossible for any triumph in the conflict without, as usually happens, the overt and obvious intervention of the author. My word on antagonists: let them be themselves; if they are fully realized, they will become precisely whom the protagonist requires in his story. (6) Never, as a rule, split your protagonist. Double heroes certainly exist in filmdom; sometimes they even work; but usually it is better for you to determine which alter- ego of the protagonist you want to be dominant, and then relegate the other to his natural place as off-sider, confidante, or trusted lieutenant. A pop quiz -- who is the protagonist of RAINMAN? For answer, see film budget. Along this vein, keep the hierarchy of your characters fairly well-established -- don't let major characters flow into minor ones, and minors into majors or peripherals. If for no other reason, the casting director will honor you for this.

DIALOGUE

Dialogue for the screen is significantly different from dialogue for the stage, though many writers never figure this out. Stage dialogue is meant to tell the story; screen dialogue merely supplements the storytelling. A little application of this rather simple principal will do wonders in changing how you go about writing a screenplay. One weakness I consistently find in the scripts I am asked to make better is a writer trying to tell his story through dialogue rather than description.

For starters, I believe that any script that is more than one third dialogue is probably trying desperately to be a stage play. There simply isn't room for long, windy passages on the screen. People may talk up something like GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS, but, at heart, it isn't a film but a filmed stage piece. In fact, many of the most vocal of our films have their origins in the theater. Once the beginning scripter recognizes that he rather than his characters is the storyteller, he can get on with letting them talk only as an adjunct to the actions they perform in the story.

Some things that dialogue will not do for your script: It will not solve your story problems. The days of an audience accepting the Inspector summing up the evidence in the drawing room at the picture's end are long gone. If you have not worked out your plot sequences, you cannot expect your audience to swallow any deus ex machina verbiage to cover your shortcomings. Certainly you can confirm story elements; this is actually a very appropriate use for dialogue for a screenwriter. But you should not either set up or try to get across essentials of your story in spoken words. At best it is awkward, "stagy" and often obtuse; at worst, it is a vital turning point of your tale lost on the lips of an actor. Similarly, dialogue is never a very effective substitute for the visuals of your script. Show it, don't say it is the watchword. Believe me, your audience would much rather see someone go over Niagara Falls, with or without barrel, than have the best actor in the world tell them about it. Also, I do not believe that you should allow your dialogue to be the primary vehicle for expressing the inner feelings and attitudes of your principal characters. Soliloquies worked fine for Hamlet; for film they are a weak substitute for actually seeing the outward manifestations of a character's emotional take. Some might disagree with me here under the impression that I am somehow discountenancing ever having a character say a word about how he might be feeling. Not so. If there is an appropriate time and situation for a character to say something self-revealing, by all means let him say it. But think how much more effective an "I love you" is when accompanied by a hug and a kiss. The physical expression of internal emotions is much more accessible on film than it can ever be on stage -- remember the close up? -- and it is especially satisfying to the audience to have this intimate view offered to them. Please. Please never let your dialogue preach a moral message or put your own point of view in the mouths of your characters. If you really have something important to say in your script; don't worry, it will be in there in the overall imprint of your authorship; and, besides, the audience probably won't get it anyway. If a screenwriter wants to use film as his medium to change the world, more power to him. But he better find an altogether congenial group of collaborators to work with and he better find an entertaining way to put his points across, and having a character preach to an audience is never entertaining, except maybe for Orson Welles in MOBY DICK.

Finally, and I find that this is a constant problem with beginning scripts, do not let your dialogue fill space. New screenwriters quickly get enamored of dialogue once the see how rapidly it uses up pages, and forget that a movie is supposed to move, not talk. In my seminars I use a flip test to illustrate how dialogue can get away with a writer who isn't keeping strict control of his medium. Thumb rapidly through a completed script; if there is a good deal of right-margin white space showing, there is probably too much talk relative to description. One of the first things to cut in revision is dialogue; and it is surprising how much unnecessary garrulity goes into a script, even for experienced writers. The touchstone here is to only let your characters speak when the speech fits the action. Characters who describe themselves for us, who spout inconsequentials, or who labor the obvious (like repeating what we are actually witnessing on screen, as in "Oh, there's a knock at the door. I better answer it.") are not saying anything worthwhile, and it is your job as writer to shut them up.

Essentially, good dialogue must be clear, fast, appropriate to the character, speakable, and real. Let me explain what I mean by each of these points.

Clear. You must have your characters say precisely what they mean, without backing or filling; they must get their points across as accurately and sincerely as if they were pleading with a loved one for one more chance. Clarity also means that they must use the best possible choice of words to express themselves, so long as their vocabulary remains in character for them.

Fast. I think that the shorter the film speech; the better it plays. Certainly, nobody would want to take an editor's pencil to some of Chayevsky's wonderful set pieces in his films; nor is much of CITIZEN KANE bad just because it is "talky" in spots. Many of our older classic films gave actors more lines than now. But then, there are other "old-fashioned" elements working in those films as well, and we wouldn't call for a irising dissolve just because we were Flash Gorden fans, would we? I used to believe that screen dialogue should be kept short either because (a) the actors couldn't remember much of anything without screwing it up, (b) the audiences were too dense to pay attention longer than a couple of three word sentences, or (c) both. Now I know better; but I still subscribe to the terser is better school of dialoguing a script. For one thing, it moves your story along faster; it keeps an action flow from bogging down in words. It also is easier to follow material presented in small doses. And another point here is having the courage to omit the obvious in your dialogues. So much of our daily conversation consists of social niceties, auto- responses required by etiquette, or non-substantive, fill- in-the-empty-silence lines. None of these are necessary in film, with the possible exception of Altman's pictures. It is not your job to precisely replicate real-speak; merely to reflect it as it is appropriate for the story world you are creating.

Appropriate to the character. Too often a new scriptwriter will finish a piece totally unaware that most, if not all of his characters are essentially speaking alike. The audible voice has rhythms, tonalities, inflections which are peculiar to a region, a culture, a social class, and particularly, an individual. Each of your characters should sound uniquely himself and not, as too often happens, very much like the author. Listen, eavesdrop on others; you will hear innumerable varieties of speech patterns and vocal nuances. Incorporate these into your character's personality if they fit it correctly. Soon, each of your players will begin to take on his own speech properties. This makes for much better dialogue. Let your character talk from who they are, not from your own manner of expression. Another aspect of this appropriateness is simply letting the characters express themselves. If you have created fully developed, living players for your story, you will discover that they are often more trustworthy than you thought about speaking for themselves. Speakable. It may sound obvious, but if you cannot easily get your own mouth to speak a line of dialogue, why should you expect an actor to do any better? Reading your dialogue aloud; taping it and listening; getting others to read it to you -- all of these are useful in weeding out the odd-sounding or unspeakable line. I remember reading a newcomer's script not long ago where he made the mistake of echoing character's names with unconsciously repetitive words. So we got lines like "That's sad, Sid." And "Oh, how I pity Polly". Also, do not forget just how confusing the English language can be, and the many vagaries which happen when transporting it from the written word to the spoken word. Similar sounded words can have strikingly dissimilar meanings with disastrous consequences for your character's believability. Remember: is it brassiere or brazier for Harvey? Real.

Finally, and many may disagree with me on this, I believe that good dialogue should reflect, if not exactly mirror, the talk that you hear in everyday life. Some writers try to fit their dialogue more closely to the film world they have created. Sometimes this can work; more often than not, though, it is somehow less satisfying than if they had simply let their characters talk like real life. I once had a terrific argument with a co-writer on a project. He felt, with the background of a lot of research and a strong sense of historical realism, that the characters in our 1890 vintage script ought to talk the way a great many people did talk in those days -- not the "authentic frontier gibberish" lampooned so well in BLAZING SADDLES, but the articulate, educated English found in most popular publications of the era. I finally gave in, and at least some of our characters began to talk like the pages of the Tombstone Epitaph; that is, intellectually able. It didn't work; even my partner, after a while, agreed that we should give up on authenticity and opt for letting the players talk much like people talk today. I believe that so long as the dialogue fits the story you are telling, it isn't necessary to try to make it conform exactly to the world of that story. There is nothing sillier than one of those early "tits and toga" epics badly dubbed in the stilted English of assumed Roman nobility.

What, in the final analysis, does dialogue really do in a script? It helps...

The context of your film, the mise-en-scene as some term it, is essentially the world of the story you are telling. It is where, when, and how the story gets told, especially in the sphere of time and space. It is also how the filmic experience of the story is expressed, with regard to time, style, and the overall sense of the story itself. Because a movie is made up of pictures, unlike, say, a theatrical drama which is largely told through dialogue, how you express the bulk of your context will be found in the blocks of description that you use in the screenplay to tell your story. Clearly, description must also add to the creation of the world of that story while never losing sight of its primary objective, the expression of the events which make up your film story. Shot heads, while they may center a particular scene's actions in both time and space, are not particularly evocative of context; nor do they relate to the real manner in which the story is told, which is through the use of sequences which often transcend particular scene divisions. Similarly, while dialogue can sometimes indicate both time and location and even at times evoke some of the atmosphere of your screenplay story, dialogue that works toward these ends rather than its own innate purpose is usually stilted and unreal.

I believe that context is terribly important in a good script. The ability to express the totality of the world of your story while working within the rather strict stylistic confines of the medium requires a lot of hard thought and even more revision. The physical context of the film is both the whole world the writer is creating -- a scatter of rebellious planets chafing under a dictatorship at some far point in the future -- and the invocation of particular parts of that world -- the farming planet, the death star, the garbage disposal shaft. In describing those individual venues where each sequence of actions will play itself out, you must always be aware of how the parts fit the whole, and whether any single element will violate the rules of your creation. For every film context must have its own set of laws as absolute as physics. What distinguishes the failure of many thriller movies, including at least one of my own, is a failure to maintain consistency in the laws of the world of that movie. You simply cannot have a villain that is superhuman and invincible in the forepart of your picture suddenly become an easy mark for your feckless teenage heroes in the final sequence. Generally, the audience is quite aware when you violate the integrity of the world you are making. This can be seen easily as in the dropping in of temporal anomalies in a piece which is expressly set up for a particular period of time; i.e. a current slang phrase in a "sand-and-sandals" epic. But it also can appear as a much more subtle mistake. Because a good part of the overall context of a film is its presumptive tonal sense, to ignore this aspect is virtually as glaring as to park a new Mercedes in a forties street scene. For instance, if your overall world is one of anticipation of something terrible in the offing, a sense of dread, and you drop in a character doing a comic turn right out of a youth movie, you have broken the rules of your own world as thoroughly as you do when you add gravity to a hitherto weightless world or slip an anachronistic phrase into the mouth of a character.

Also part of that physical context is the duration of event that makes up the time factor in the story. The whole question of how time works within a story is so complex that to fully explore it deserves a separate book. For beginners, it is enough to mention that the closer your story stays to real time, the more it will be acceptable to your audience. Obviously, a story whose scope surpasses the approximate two hour time limit of the film itself is going to have to discover ways to move the audience through time without giving them temporal vertigo. A little later, I will talk more about how time works in the medium. For some of us, the trouble with handling context has some ready-made solutions. Genres usually deal in a sort of pre-set context; that is, the world of a western genre, cattle drive sub-genre, has its world already fairly well created for the writer -- and it is a world that the audience is quite familiar with. The predisposition of genre forms to carry their own method of story-telling and to hold their own context within their form can make life a lot easier for many scripters. Think for a moment of any John Ford western, or even CITY SLICKERS. There, once we are past the set-up, we are plunked into a very familiar world, our context is set, and we can get on with other things the storytellers want to do. Occasionally, you might want to go against the genre's traditional context; it might work, depending on your story, but be warned. Going against the form is taking a large chance that the audience will follow you away from the well- known world you have initially suggested by invoking the genre. And once they have followed you, you better be a very clear guide to the new and unfamiliar world you are assembling for them, and you also better have a good reason for dislocating them from the familiar.

The discernible parts which make up a screenplay's context include the following elements: the physical world, as we have seen; the temporal world, or the time both of your physical, that is, the movie's world, and the real-time expression on the page; the pacing of the events of the script; and what I call the mental aspects of context, the mood that rises from your screenplay like a suite of rich, expressive smells over a city. Making the context apparent without forcing it down your audience's throat is one of the more difficult jobs a beginning screenwriter must face. A more detailed examination of how these elements work within a script may help the beginning s