WRITING AN ORIGINAL SHORT SCREENPLAY

Narrative is the art closest to the ordinary daily operation of the human mind. People find the meaning of their lives in the idea of sequence, in conflict, in metaphor and in moral. People think and make judgments from the confidence of narrative anyone, at any age, is able to tell the story of his or her life with authority. 

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. 

What follows is a discussion of ways in which character can be revealed in speech, and ways in which speech can be used to further a character s dramatic action. In good screenplay writing, dialogue is as much a form of behavior as any physical action it is also a form of dramatic action. 

Here is part of another scene from Chinatown. Two characters talk in the scene, each with a very different way of speaking. If you haven t seen the film or read any of the drafts of the script, you won t know the context—but you should be able to hear two very individual voices and to follow what is going 

The scene takes place in the outer office of Jake Gittes suite. He has just burst in on his associates, told them an off-color joke before they can stop him, and is laughing his ass off. He looks up and sees a stunning young woman watching him. She asks Gittes if they ve met and, ever the wise guy, he says no, they haven t—he would have remembered. 

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