Screenplay

The Graduate , screenplay by Calder Willingham and Buck Henry. Based on the novel by Charles Webb. Copyright 1967 by Mike Nichols-Laurence Turman Productions for UA/Embassy. 

It happens that the two structures that have proved most useful in shaping material for a short screenplay are those considered by scholars to be the very oldest of narrative forms the journey, and what we call the ritual occasion. If you have a main character clearly in mind, and a good idea of what that character s situation is and of what it is that he or she is after, you can often get a script off to a good start simply by choosing one or the other of these as a structure for your story line and seeing where it takes you. 

Male or female, we are all "younger sons" in one way or another, and what seizes us as we read or listen to or watch a well-told story is that powerful intermingling of feeling and thought that Aristotle called "recognition." If you substitute the word "image" for "sentence" in the quotation above, you will understand why it is that, as teachers, we have found myths and fairy tales so useful to the novice short-screenplay writer (who may well regard herself or himself as a filmmaker, and not a "real" writer at all). 

Write brief descriptions, using the present tense, of two quite different main characters as they go about their lives. Be sure to choose characters that engage you and situations you know something about. End each description with an encounter or incident that would make for a change in the character s situation. Set up one synopsis as if for a short script in which you employ the journey structure, and the other for a screenplay in which you use the ritual occasion. At this point, don t concern yourself with plot, although if ideas occur to you, be sure to jot them down for possible later use. Here are a couple of examples to illustrate we turned to the short films described above for inspiration ... 

This assignment may take several days and a number of drafts to complete. Because every assignment and exercise in this book is intended to lead to your writing an original screenplay, it will be worth your while to keep your notes, as well as any completed work, in a special folder. 

Perhaps no aspect of film and video is more powerful in terms of narrative than the appearance of reality. Images on the screen have a validity, a weight of their own, in a way that words do not. What follows is an excerpt from the scene in Orpheus to which Cocteau refers. In the screenplay, based on the myth, the poet Orpheus has lost his wife to Death. Heurtebise is the chauffeur of the Princess of Death. The film takes place in 1950, the year in which it was made. 

Note that the format is not proper screenplay format, which you will find in the Appendices, but a compressed version favored by book publishers. 

Cocteau the scriptwriter saw to it that his screenplays did not call for complicated special effects. And he used simple language to do this. 

An image in Cocteau s Beauty and the Beast, as breathtaking today as in 1945 when the film was first released, is described in the screenplay very simply. The story is set in the 17th century Beauty has just returned from the Beast s kingdom to visit her ailing father, a merchant. Her two wicked older sisters are hanging sheets in the yard, one of many household tasks that used to be left to poor Beauty. 

Jean Cocteau, Three Screenplays (New York Viking Press, 1972). 

Christopher Hampton, "Dangerous Liaisons," unpublished screenplay, 1988. 

Sound used as metaphor can create a whole dimension of meaning not immediately apparent in the visual images of a scene. It is one of the more powerful tools available to us in writing the short screenplay. 

In an essay called "The Language of Screenwriting," the playwright and scriptwriter Ronald Harwood writes, "A screenplay cannot be judged by form and technique, or by the abandonment of either. In his attempt to realize in its initial form a story that is, in the end, to be told in pictures, the writer must discover or invent a language that is both personal and effective, and that, above all, stimulates the mind s eye."5... 

The following description by Harwood is the first sequence in the screenplay for the film One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. It is somewhat more "literary" in its choice of words than many fine screenplays—perhaps because it is adapted from a famous novel—but it is wonderfully visual all... 

When you have done this, rewrite your final version in the master-scene format used in screenplay manuscripts. (Look at the examples in previous chapters or in the Appendices.) At this point, it would be wise to check grammar, spelling, and punctuation. 

Harold Pinter, Accident, in Five Screenplays (New York Grove Press, 1973), 219-220. 

Yet Gittes engages our interest from the very first page of the screenplay. How By his nonchalance, his mocking humor, and an air of easy authority that speaks of the consummate professional. 

Beyond the somewhat detached description of Miss Peach and the sigh, the box marked "auction" and the bare dining room set a feeling-tone that expresses in visual terms something about her inner state. In a metaphorical sense, the screenplay is about how that empty inner space becomes furnished. Note the different style of the language Taylor uses to describe his antagonist on her first appearance. Miss Peach is alone in the elevator of a Manhattan high-rise ... 

You are now going to revise Exercise 8, with the result put in proper screenplay format. Use your thesaurus, if necessary, to find words that convey what you see in your imagination, words that will make your characters come alive for the reader. Once again, it would be helpful to have your teacher, classmates, or knowledgeable friends respond to what you have written—essentially the first draft of an opening for a possible short script. 

Callie Khouri, "Thelma and Louise," unpublished screenplay. 

Christian Taylor, "Lady in Waiting," unpublished screenplay. 

Lisa Wood Shapiro, "Another Story," unpublished screenplay. 

Karyn Kusuma, "Sleeping Beauties," unpublished screenplay and Susan Emerling, "The Wounding," unpublished screenplay. 

Anais Granofsky and Michael Swanhaus, "Dead Letters Don t Lie," unpublished screenplay. 

Dramatic action, or "movement of spirit," as Aristotle defines it in the Poetics, is the life force, the heartbeat, of any screenplay.2 Psyche, the word he uses for spirit, meant both "mind" and "soul" to the ancient Greeks—the inner energy that fuels human thoughts and feelings, the underlying force that motivates us. 

Scene is a word with many definitions. We will be using it primarily in the sense of an episode that presents the working out of a single dramatic situation. The scene is the basic building block of any narrative screenplay. Every scene in a short script should serve to forward the action. 

Here then is our basic material, culled from a number of versions of the Daedalus/Icarus myth. There is more material than we could possibly use for a short screenplay, but we won t know which details will be important until we have answered some key questions. These are questions you may find it helpful to ask yourself each time you begin writing (or, for that matter, critiquing) a short screenplay. 

There will be times you would like to skip this question, leaving it until the last, and there will be times you ll be able to answer it immediately—only to find that the catalyst changes with each draft of the script. Either way, you are engaged in discovering what it is that you want to say, rather than what you think it is you want to say. Still, it is important to realize that a screenplay should not be considered complete until the catalyst is in place. 

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