Short Screenplays

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). 

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. 

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. 

At this point, if you have faithfully done the exercises and assignments laid out in previous chapters, you will have learned, among other things, how to write and revise both character description and location description in format how to use offscreen sound to create mood and evoke offscreen events how to begin to develop a character how to gather and transform material for an adaptation and how to do a story outline for a short screenplay to be written using that material. 

If this is true for screenwriting in general, it is particularly so for the short screenplay and for dialogue in the short screenplay. To illustrate the process of "saying much in little," here is the opening scene of a short script by Pat Cooper, one of the coauthors of this book, in first-draft and then in rewrite form. The script is called "Annie s Flight," and its protagonist is a... 

This is information about the way you see the world and about your writing style, information that should be of great help as you move on to writing a short screenplay. 

What is notable about the master scene format is that it is organized so that the reader can visualize the story as easily as possible. There are no camera angles, no detailed technical instructions, only description and dialogue. You should acquaint yourself with the format and use it to develop your own short screenplay. 

The following five short screenplays present a cross section of student work at New York University. All the scripts have been produced and exhibited. Four of the scripts were written in the undergraduate program and one in the graduate program. One is the product of a collaboration. We chose these scripts for their quality and diversity in subject matter and approach. 

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