"the Guru of all screenwriters"
—CNN
"the first prophet of writing for the screen"
— The Los Angeles Times Magazine
"A true Hollywood character...no one sees films quite
the way Field does. An engineer's report on film construction
and the view of an original thinker worth appreciating."
—Kirkus Reviews
"The most sought after screenwriting teacher in the world."
— The Hollywood Reporter on Syd Field
"If I were writing screenplays... I would carry Syd Field
around in my back pocket wherever I went."
— Steven Bochco, writer/producer/director, L.A. Law, NYPD Blue
"Full of common sense, an uncommon commodity."
—Esquire
"Syd writes both with passion and an astute understanding."
— Hanz Zimmer, film composer, Thelma & Louise
"Impressive... His easy-to-follow step-by-step
approaches are comforting and his emphasis
on right attitude and motivation is uplifting."
—Los Angeles Times Book Review
"Syd Field is the preeminent analyzer in the study
of American screenplays. Incredibly, he manages to
remain idealistic while tendering practical 'how to' books."
—James L Brooks, scriptwriter, The Mary Tyler Moore Show,
Terms of Endearment, Broadcast News
"Syd Field takes us on a fascinating journey through
30 years of movie going—asking the questions we all ask:
'What makes a movie work?' and finding the answers."
— Fay Kanin, former President of the Academy
of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
"Those of us who've wondered why Syd would devote
himself to raising the bar for screenwriting now learn why—
a lifelong and passionate love for movies and filmmaking."
— Marc Norman, Academy Award-winning
co-screenwriter for Shakespeare in Love
"I based Like Water For Chocolate on what I learned in Syd's
books. Before, I always felt structure imprisoned me, but what
I learned was structure really freed me to focus on the story."
— Laurel Esquivel
THE DEFINITIVE GUIDE TO
SCREEN
WRITING
SYD FIELD
Acclaimed as "The guru of all screen writers" (CNN), Syd Field is regarded by many Hollywood professionals as the leading authority in the art and craft of screenwriting in the world today. His internationally acclaimed best-selling books Screenplay, The Screenwriter's Workbook, and The Screenwriter's Problem Solver have established themselves as the "bibles" of the film industry. They are used in more than 395 colleges and universities and have been translated into 19 languages.
Field is currently on faculty at the USC Masters of Professional Writing Program. He chaired the Academic Liaison Committee at The Writer's Guild of America, West, has taught at Harvard, Stanford, UC Berkeley, UCLA, the AFI and many other noted institutions. He has been a special script consultant to 20th Century Fox, the Disney Studios, Universal and Tristar Pictures and has collaborated with such noted filmmakers as Alphonso Cuaron (Y Tu Mama Tambien), James L. Brooks (Broadcast News, As Good As It Gets), Luis Mandoki (When A Man Loves A Woman), Roland Joffe (The Killing Fields, The Mission), and Tony Kaye (American History X).
Field has taught screenwriting workshops in South America, Mexico, Europe, and South Africa, and has conducted workshops for the Canadian Film Industry. He was chosen as the President of the International Film Jury at the 1999 Flanders International Film Festival, Ghent, Belgium.
Syd Field was the first inductee into the prestigious Screenwriting Hall of Fame of the American Screenwriting Association in 2001. Some of his former students include Anna Hamilton Phelan (Mask, Gorillas in the Mist), John Singleton (Boys In the Hood, Poetic Justice), Randi Mayem Singer (Mrs. Doubtfire), Laura Esquival (Like Water For Chocalate), Michael Kane (The Color of Money), and Kevin Williamson (Scream, Scream 2 and 3).
SYD FIELD
This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author's and publisher's rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
ISBN 978-1-4090-2413-2
Version 1.0
www.randomhouse.co.uk
The Definitive Guide to Screenwriting
first published by Ebury Press in Great Britain in 2003
Screenplay, the Foundations of Screenwriting
first published by Dell Publishing in 1979
The Screenwriter's Problem Solver
first published by Dell Publishing in 1998
5 7 9 10 8 6
Text © 2003 Syd Field
Syd Field has asserted his right to be identified as the author of
this work under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This electronic book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
Ebury Press, an imprint of Ebury Press.
Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London SW1V 2SA
The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009
www.randomhouse.co.uk
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-1-4090-2413-2
Version 1.0
Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following for permission
to use selected materials from the following films:
David Hare, Stephen Daldry and Michael Cunningham for The Hours
Frances Walsh, Peter Jackson and J.R.R Tolkien for Lord of the Rings:
The Two Towers and The Fellowship of the Ring
Alan Ball and Sam Mendes for American Beauty
Ronald Harwood, Wladyslaw Szpilman and Roman Polanski for The Pianist
Quentin Tarantino for letting me quote from Pulp Fiction
Robert Towne for excerpt from screenplay of Chinatown
MDP Worldwide for granting me permission to discuss Loved.
Jerry Bruckheimer for supporting my efforts to analyze Crimson Tide
Alan Sargent for his great insights. David Koepp for
letting me quote from Jurassic Park
Jim Cameron and Will Wisher for their keen
insight in Terminator 2: Judgment Day
Doug, Cherry, and Joan for letting me pick apart
and analyze their screenplays
Frank Darabont for The Shawshank Redemption
Copyright 1994 Castle Rock Entertainment. All Rights Reserved.
Reprinted by permission of Castle Rock Entertainment.
Thelma & Louise Copyright 1991 Metro-Goldyn Mayer Inc.
All Rights Reserved.
The Silence of the Lambs Copyright 1991 Orion Pictures Corporation.
All Rights Reserved.
From Network by Paddy Chaefsky: Printed by permission of Simcha
Productions, Inc. Copyright © Simcha Productions, Inc., 1976.
Colin Higgins for excerpt from the screenplay of Silver Streak. McDonald's
Corporation for "Press On," the motto of McDonald's Corporation.
Lisa Chambers and Patricia Troy for letting me quote from the article "Lethal
Weapon" from Written By, the Journal of the Writers' Guild of America.
"Sitting" by Cat Stevens: © 1972 Freshwater Music Ltd. –
London, England. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
To all the Siddha Saints and Masters
who walked the path and keep the flame burning ...
and, of course, to Aviva, who helped show me the way
THE ORIGINS OF THIS BOOK
"My task...is to make you hear, to make you feel – and above all to make you see. That is all, and it is everything."
–Joseph Conrad
It seems like I've spent most of my life sitting in a darkened theater, popcorn in hand, gazing in rapt wonder at the images projected on a river of light reflected on that monster screen.
I was one of those kids who grew up in Hollywood surrounded by the film industry. While playing the trumpet in the Sheriff's Boys Band, like my brother before me, I was cast as one of the band members of Frank Capra's The State of the Union starring Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. I don't remember much about the experience except Van Johnson taught me how to play checkers.
Yes, I can truly say I was a child of Hollywood.
For the past thirty-five years, I've watched movies as they've become an integral part of our culture, part of our heritage, watched as they have become an international way of life. Once an audience is joined together in the darkness of the movie theater, they become one being, one entity, connected in a community of emotion, an unspoken, deep-seated connection to the human spirit that exists beyond time, place and circumstance.
Going to the movies is both an individual and collective experience, a collection of singular moments standing out against the landscape of time. Watching those flickering images flutter across the screen can bear witness to the entire range of human experience: a moment of wonder and poetry, like the opening sequence of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, or capturing the full scope of human history as a wooden club thrown into the air merges into a spacecraft in Stanley Kubrick's 2001. Thousands of years and the evolution of humankind condensed into two pieces of film; it is a moment of magic and mystery, wonder and awe. Such is the power of film.
As a writer-producer for David L. Wolper Productions, a freelance screenwriter, and head of the story department at Cinemobile Systems, I spent several years writing and reading screenplays. At Cinemobile alone, I read and synopsized more than 2,000 screenplays in a little more than two years. And of those 2,000 screenplays, I selected only forty to present to our financial partners for possible film production.
Why so few? Because 99 out of 100 screenplays I read weren't good enough to invest a million or more dollars in. Or, put another way, only one out of 100 screenplays I read was good enough to consider for film production. And, at Cinemobile, our job was making movies. In one year alone, we were directly involved in the production of some 119 motion pictures, ranging from The Godfather to Jeremiah Johnson to Deliverance.
When my boss, Fouad Said, the creator of the Cinemobile, decided to make his own movies, he went out and raised some $10 million in a few weeks. Pretty soon everybody in Hollywood was sending him screenplays. Thousands of scripts came in, from stars and directors, studios and producers, from the known and the unknown.
That's when I was fortunate enough to be given the opportunity of reading the submitted screenplays, and evaluating them in terms of quality, cost, and probable budget. My job, as I was constantly reminded, was to "find material" for our three financial partners: the United Artists Theatre Group, the Hemdale Film Distribution Company, headquartered in London, and the Taft Broadcasting Company, parent company of Cinemobile.
So I began reading screenplays. As a former screenwriter taking a much-needed vacation from more than seven years of free-lance writing, my job at Cinemobile gave me a totally new perspective on writing screenplays. It was a tremendous opportunity, a formidable challenge, and a dynamic learning experience.
What made the forty screenplays I recommended "better" than the others? I didn't have any answers for that, but I thought about it for a long time.
My reading experience gave me the opportunity to make a judgment and evaluation, to formulate an opinion: this is a good screenplay, this is not a good screenplay. As a screenwriter, I wanted to find out what made the forty scripts I recommended better than the other 1,960 scripts submitted.
Just about this time I was given the opportunity of teaching a screenwriting class at the Sherwood Oaks Experimental College in Hollywood. At that time, in the seventies, Sherwood Oaks was a professional school taught by professionals. It was the kind of school where Paul Newman, Dustin Hoffman, and Lucille Ball gave acting seminars; where Tony Bill would teach a producing seminar; where Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman, or Alan Pakula gave directing seminars; where William Fraker and John Alonzo, two of the finest cinematographers in the world, taught a class in cinematography. It was a school where professional production managers, cameramen, film editors, writers, directors, and producers all came to teach their specialties. It was the most unique film school in the country.
I had never taught a screenwriting class before, so I had to delve into my writing experience and reading experience to evolve my basic material.
What is a good screenplay? I kept asking myself. And, pretty soon, I started getting some answers. When you read a good screenplay, you know it – it's evident from page one. The style, the way the words are laid out on the page, the way the story is set up, the grasp of dramatic situation, the introduction of the main character, the basic premise or problem of the screenplay – it's all set up in the first few pages of the script. Chinatown, American Beauty, Lord of the Rings, The Hours, All the President's Men, are perfect examples.
A screenplay, I soon realized, is a story told with pictures. It's like a noun: that is, a screenplay is about a person, or persons, in a place, or places, doing his, or her, "thing." I saw that the screenplay has certain basic conceptual components common to the form.
These elements are expressed dramatically within a definite structure with a beginning, middle, and end. When I re-examined the forty screenplays submitted to our partners – including The Wind and the Lion, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, and others – I realized they all contained these basic concepts, regardless of how they were cinematically executed. They are in every screenplay.
I began teaching this conceptual approach to writing the screenplay. If the student knows what a model screenplay is, I reasoned, it can be used as a guide or blueprint.
I have been teaching this screenwriting class for several years now. It's an effective and experimental approach to writing the screenplay. My material has evolved and been formulated by thousands and thousands of students all over the world. They are the ones who prepared me to write this book.
Many of my students have been very successful: Anna Hamilton Phelan wrote Mask in my workshop, then went on to write Gorillas in the Mist; Laura Esquival wrote Like Water for Chocolate; Carmen Culver wrote The Thornbirds; Janus Cercone wrote Leap of Faith; Linda Elsted won the prestigious Humanitas award for The Divorce Wars; and prestigious filmmakers such as James Cameron (Terminator and Terminator 2; Judgment Day, Titanic) used the material when they started their careers. Screenwriting is a process. What you write one day is out of date the day after. What you write the day after is out of date the day after that. And what you write the day after the day after is out of date the day after that. That's just the way the writing process works; it is larger than you are. It has its own life, its own needs, its own requirements.
Others have not been so successful. Some people have the talent, and some don't. Talent is God's gift; either you've got it or you don't.
Many people have already formed a writing style prior to enrolling in the class. Some of them have to unlearn their writing habits, just as a tennis pro coaches someone to correct an incorrect swing, or a swimming instructor improves a swimming stroke. Writing, like tennis, or learning to swim, is an experiential process; for that reason, I begin with general concepts and then move into specific aspects of screenwriting.
The material is designed for everyone; for those who have no previous writing experience, as well as those who have not had much success with their writing efforts and need to rethink their basic approach to writing. Novelists, playwrights, magazine editors, housewives, businessmen, doctors, actors, film editors, commercial directors, secretaries, advertising executives, and university professors – all have taken the class and benefited from it.
The purpose of this book is to enable the reader to sit down and write a screenplay from the position of choice, confidence, and security; completely secure within himself that he knows what he's doing. Because the hardest thing about writing is knowing what to write.
When you complete this book, you will know exactly what to do to write a screenplay. Whether you do it or not is up to you.
Writing is a personal responsibility – either you do it, or you don't.
Additionally, while writing this guide, I felt a responsibility to address the variety of problems that can confront a writer at any time and I wanted to find some kind of tool that the screenwriter could use in order to recognize and define various problems of screenwriting. But I gradually became aware that I was really writing about the solutions to the problems and not really identifying them. It just didn't work. So I began to rethink my approach. To solve any kind of a problem means you have to be able to recognize it, identify it, and then define it; only in that way can any problem really be solved.
The more I began thinking about the "problem," the more it became clear that most screenwriters don't know exactly what the problem really is. There's a vague and somewhat tenuous feeling somewhere that something is not working; either the plot is too thin or too thick; or the character is too strong or too weak; or there's not enough action, or the character disappears off the page, or the story is told all in dialogue.
So I began analyzing the Problem-Solving process. The only way I could make this book work, I realized, was to recognize and define the various symptoms of the problem, very much the way a medical doctor isolates the various symptoms of his patients before he can treat the disease.
When I approached the Problem-Solving process from this point of view (and it is a process), I began to see that there's usually not just one symptom, but many symptoms. It soon became clear that many of the problems in screenwriting share the same symptoms, but the problems themselves are different in kind; only when you analyze the context of the problem can a distinction be made, and it is those distinctions that lead us on the path of recognizing, defining, and solving. For the truth is that you can't solve a problem until you know what it is.
With that in mind I began to understand that there are only three distinct categories of The Problem; when you're writing a screenplay, all problems spring either from Plot, Character, or Structure.
The art of Problem Solving is really the art of recognition.
You can look at any problem in two ways; the first is to accept the fact that a problem is something that doesn't work. If that's the case, you can avoid it, deny it, and pretend it doesn't exist. That's the easy way.
But there's another way of approaching the problem, and that's to look at any creative problem as a challenge, an opportunity for you to expand your screenwriting skills.
They are really both sides of the same coin. How you look at it is up to you.
"The World is as you see it..." (from Yoga Vasistha)
At certain points in this book, I have provided Problem Sheets.
The Problem Sheet is an abbreviated guide that is meant to be used as an interactive tool. It lists a number of screenwriting symptoms that can help you identify and define various problems. If you have a problem, and you match it with some of the symptoms listed, the information in the pages that follow the Problem Sheet can help you find an answer. Some symptoms listed will be the same for several chapters. That's because the same symptoms are relevant for different kinds of problems; it really doesn't matter whether it's a problem of Plot, Character, or Structure. A problem is a problem, no matter how you label it.
What is a screenplay? A guide, or an outline for a movie? A blueprint, or a diagram? A series of images, scenes, and sequences that are strung together with dialogue and description, like pearls on a strand? The landscape of a dream? A collection of ideas?
What is a screenplay?
Well, for one thing it's not a novel, and it's certainly not a play.
If you look at a novel and try to define its essential nature, you see that the dramatic action, the story line, usually takes place inside the head of the main character. We are privy to the character's thoughts, feelings, words, actions, memories, dreams, hopes, ambitions, opinions, and more. If other characters are brought into the action, then the story line embraces their point of view as well, but the action always returns to the main character. In a novel the action takes place inside the character's head, within the mindscape of dramatic action.
In a play, the action, or story line, occurs on stage, under the proscenium arch, and the audience becomes the fourth wall, eavesdropping on the lives of the characters. They talk about their hopes and dreams, past and future plans, discuss their needs and desires, fears and conflicts. In this case, the action of the play occurs within the language of dramatic action; it is spoken, in words.
Movies are different. Film is a visual medium that dramatizes a basic story line; it deals in pictures, images, bits and pieces of film: a clock ticking, a window opening, someone watching, two people laughing, a car pulling away from the curb, a phone ringing. A screenplay is a story told with pictures, in dialogue and description, and placed with the context of dramatic structure.
A screenplay is like a noun – it's about a person, or persons, in a place or places, doing his or her or their "thing." All screenplays execute this basic premise. The person is the character, and doing his or her thing is the action.
If a screenplay is a story told with pictures, what then do all stories have in common? A beginning, a middle and an end, though not always in that order. If we were to take a screenplay and hang it on a wall like a painting and look at it, it would look like the diagram on page 9.
This basic linear structure is the form of the screenplay; it holds all the elements of the story line in place.
To understand the dynamics of structure, it's important to start with the word itself. The root of structure, struct, means "to build" or "to put something together" like a building or a car. But there is another definition of the word structure, and that is "the relationship between the parts and the whole."
The parts and the whole. Chess, for example, is a whole composed of four parts; the pieces, queen, king, bishop, pawns, knights, etc., the player or players because someone has to play the game of chess; the board, because you can't play chess without it; and the last thing you need to play chess is the rules, because they make chess the game it is. Those four things – pieces, player or players, board, and rules, the parts – are integrated into a whole, and the result is the game of chess. It is the relationship between the parts and the whole that determines the game.
A story is a whole, and the parts that make it – the action, characters, scenes, sequences, Acts I, II, III, incidents, episodes, events, music, locations, etc. – are what make up the story. It is a whole.
Structure is what holds the story in place. It is the relationship between these parts that holds the entire screenplay, the whole, together.
It is the paradigm of dramatic structure.
A paradigm is a model, example, or conceptual scheme.
The paradigm of a table, for example, is a top with four legs. Within the paradigm, we can have a low table, a high table, a narrow table, a wide table; or a circular table, a square table, a rectangular table; or a glass table, a wood table, a plastic table, wrought-iron table, whatever, and the paradigm doesn't change – it remains firm, a top with four legs.
If a screenplay were a painting hanging on a wall, this is what it would look like:
This is the paradigm of a screenplay. Here's how it's broken down.
Aristotle talks about the three unities of dramatic action: time, place, and action. The normal Hollywood film is approximately two hours long, or 120 minutes, while the European, or foreign film, is approximately 90 minutes. The way it works is that a page of screenplay equals approximately a minute of screen time. It doesn't matter whether the script is all action, all dialogue, or any combination of the two; generally speaking, a page of screenplay equals a minute of screen time.
Act I, the beginning, is a unit of dramatic action that is approximately thirty pages long and is held together with the dramatic context known as the setup. Context is the space that holds the content of the story in place. (The space inside a glass, for example, is a context; it "holds" the content in place – water, beer, milk, coffee, tea, juice; the space inside a glass can even hold raisins, trail mix, nuts, grapes, etc.)
The screenwriter has approximately thirty pages to set up the story, the characters, the dramatic premise, the situation (the circumstances surrounding the action) and to establish the relationships between the main character and the other people who inhabit the landscape of his or her world. When you go to a movie, you can usually determine – consciously or unconsciously – whether you "like" the movie or "do not like" the movie within the first ten minutes. The next time you go to a movie, find out how long it takes you to make that decision.
Ten minutes is ten pages of screenplay. This first ten-page unit of dramatic action is the most important part of the screenplay because you have to show the reader who your main character is, what the dramatic premise of the story (what it's about) is, and what the dramatic situation (the circumstances surrounding the action) is. In Chinatown, for example, we learn on the first page that Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson), the main character, is a sleazy private detective specializing in "discreet investigation." And he has a certain flair for it. On page 5 we are introduced to a certain Mrs. Mulwray (Diane Ladd), who wants to hire Jake Gittes to find out "who my husband is having an affair with." That is the dramatic premise of the film, because the answer to that question is what leads us into the story. The dramatic premise is what the screenplay is about; it provides the dramatic thrust that drives the story to its conclusion.
In Witness (Earl Wallace and William Kelley), the first ten pages reveal the world of the Amish in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and the death of Rachel's husband takes her and her young child to Philadelphia, where the boy happens to witness the murder of an undercover cop, and that leads to the relationship with the main character, John Book, played by Harrison Ford. The entire first act is designed to reveal the dramatic premise and situation, and the relationship between an Amish woman and a tough Philadelphia cop.
Act II is a unit of dramatic action that is approximately sixty pages long, goes from page 30 to page 90, and is held together with the dramatic context known as confrontation. During the second act the main character encounters obstacle after obstacle after obstacle that keeps him from achieving his or her dramatic need. Just look at The Fugitive. The entire story is driven by the main character's dramatic need to bring his wife's killer to justice. Dramatic need is defined as what your main character wants to win, gain, get, or achieve during the screenplay. What drives him or her forward through the action? What does your main character want: What is his or her need? If you know the character's dramatic need, you can create obstacles to that need, and the story becomes the main character overcoming obstacle after obstacle after obstacle to achieve (or not achieve) his or her dramatic need.
In Chinatown, a detective story, Act II deals with Jack Nicholson colliding with people who try to keep him from finding out who's responsible for the murder of Hollis Mulwray, and who's behind the water scandal. The obstacles that Jake Gittes encounters and overcomes dictate the dramatic action of the story.
All drama is conflict. Without conflict, you have no character; without character, you have no action; without action, you have no story; and without story, you have no screenplay.
Act III is a unit of dramatic action that goes from the end of Act II, approximately page 90, to the end of the screenplay, and is held together with the dramatic context known as resolution. Resolution does not mean ending; resolution means solution. What is the solution of the screenplay? Does your main character live or die? Succeed or fail? Marry the man or woman, or not? Win the race or not? Win the election or not? Leave her husband or not? Act III resolves the story; it is not the ending. The ending is that specific scene, shot, or sequence that ends the script; it is not the solution of the story.
Beginning, middle, and end; Act I, Act II, and Act III. Setup, confrontation, resolution – the parts that make up the whole.
But this brings up another question: if these are some of the parts that make up the screenplay, how do you get from Act I, the setup, into Act II, the confrontation? And how do you get from Act II into Act III, the resolution? The answer is simple: create a plot point at the end of Act I and Act II.
A plot point is any incident, episode, or event that "hooks" into the action and spins it around into another direction – in this case, Act II and Act III. A plot point occurs at the end of Act I, at about pages 20 to 25. It is a function of the main character. In Chinatown, after the newspaper story is released claiming Mr. Mulwray has been caught in a "love nest," the real Mrs. Mulwray (Faye Dunaway) arrives with her attorney and threatens to sue Jake Gittes and have his license revoked. (This is the dramatic situation: without his detective license, he can't function.) But if she is the real Mrs. Mulwray, who was the woman who hired Jake Gittes? And why? And who hired the phony Mrs. Mulwray? And why? The arrival of the real Mrs. Mulwray is what "hooks" into the action and spins it around into Act II. Jake Gittes must find out who set him up, and why. It happens at about page 23.
In Witness, after John Book has gone through all the lineups and mug shots trying to identify the killer, he is talking on the phone, and we follow Samuel, the young boy, as he wanders around the police station. He stops at the trophy case and examines the trophies lined up inside, and catches sight of a newspaper story pinned up inside. He looks closer at the picture in the article and identifies the man pictured as the killer of the undercover cop on page 10 of the screenplay. Book sees him, puts down the phone's receiver, and walks to the boy in slow motion, then kneels down beside him. Samuel points at the picture, and Book nods his head in understanding. He knows who the murderer is. Now he has to bring him to justice. It is Plot Point I. It occurs on page 25 of the screenplay.
The plot point at the end of the second act is also an incident, episode, or event that "hooks" into the action, and spins it around into Act III. It usually occurs at about page 85 or 90 of the screenplay. In Chinatown, Plot Point II is when Jack Nicholson finds a pair of horn-rim glasses in the pond where Hollis Mulwray was murdered, and knows they belong to Mulwray, or to the person who killed him. This leads to the resolution of the story.
In Witness, after Book learns that his partner has been killed, he knows it's time to go back to Philadelphia and bring the guilty policemen to justice. But before he can leave, he must complete his relationship with Rachel.
When Rachel (Kelly McGillis) learns that Book is leaving, she carefully puts her hat on the floor, then runs to him, and they kiss and embrace and at last give in to their real feelings. This incident completes the action of Act II and sets the stage for Act III, when the killers appear to kill Book before he can tell anyone. The entire action of Act III deals with the shoot-out between Book and the three policemen. It is the resolution of the screenplay. The ending is when Book drives down the dirt road and the final end credits come up.
Do all good screenplays fit the paradigm? Yes. But that doesn't make them good screenplays, or good movies. The paradigm is a form, not a formula. Form is what holds something together; its structure, its configuration. The form of a coat or jacket, for example, is two arms, a front and a back. And within that form of two arms, front and back, you can have any variation of style, fabric, and color, but the form remains intact.
A formula, however, is totally different. In a formula, certain elements are put together so they come out exactly the same every time. If you put that coat on an assembly line, every coat will be exactly the same, with the same pattern, the same fabric, the same color, the same cut, the same material. It will not change, except for size.
The paradigm is a form, not a formula; it's what holds the story together. The spine, the skeleton, and the story are what determine structure; structure doesn't determine story.
Dramatic structure of the screenplay may be defined as a linear arrangement of related incidents, episodes, or events leading to a dramatic resolution.
How you utilize these structural components determines the form of your film. Annie Hall, for example, is a story told in flashback, but it has a definite beginning, middle, and end. Last Year at Marienbad does, too, though not in that order. So do Citizen Kane; Hiroshima, Mon Amour, Dances With Wolves; The Silence of the Lambs, and The Fugitive.
There is only form, not formula. The paradigm is a model, an example, or conceptual scheme; it is what a well-structured screenplay looks like, an overview of the story line as it unfolds from beginning to end.
Do all good screenplays fit the paradigm?
Screenplays that work follow the paradigm. But don't take my word for it. Go to any movie and see whether you can determine its structure.
Some of you may not believe that. You may not believe in beginnings, middles, and ends, either. You may say that art, like life, is nothing more than several individual "moments" suspended in some giant middle, with no beginning and no end, what Kurt Vonnegut calls "a series of random moments" strung together in a haphazard fashion.
I disagree.
Birth? Life? Death? Isn't that a beginning, middle, and end?
Think about the rise and fall of great civilizations – of Egypt, Greece, the Roman Empire, rising from the seed of a small community to the apex of power, then disintegrating and dying.
Think about the birth and death of a star, or the beginning of the Universe, according to the "Big Bang" theory that most scientists now agree on. If there's a beginning to the Universe, is there going to be an end?
Think about the cells in our bodies. How often are they replenished, restored, and recreated? Every seven years – within a seven-year cycle, the cells in our bodies are born, function, die, and are reborn again.
Think about the first day of a new job, meeting new people, assuming new responsibilities; you stay there until you decide to leave, retire, or are fired.
Screenplays are no different. They have a definite beginning, middle, and end.
It is the foundation of dramatic structure.
If you don't believe the paradigm, check it out. Prove me wrong. Go to a movie – go see several movies – see whether it fits the paradigm or not.
If you're interested in writing screenplays, you should be doing this all the time. Every movie you see then becomes a learning process, expanding your awareness and comprehension of what a movie is, or is not.
You should also read as many screenplays as possible in order to expand your awareness of the form and structure. Many screenplays have been reprinted in book form and most bookstores have them, or can order them. Several are already out of print, but check your library or local university theater arts library to see whether or not they have screenplays available.
I have my students read and study scripts like Chinatown, Network, American Beauty, The Shawshank Redemption, Three Days of the Condor, The Hustler (in paperback, Three Screenplays by Robert Rossen, now out of print), Annie Hall, and Harold and Maude. These scripts are excellent teaching aids. If they aren't available, read any screenplay you can find. The more the better.
The paradigm works.
It is the foundation of a good screenplay.
Go to a movie. After the lights dim and the credits begin, ask yourself how long it takes you to make a decision about whether you "like" or "dislike" the movie. Be aware of your decision, then look at your watch.
If you find a movie you really enjoy, go back and see it again. See if the movie falls into the paradigm. See if you can determine the breakdown of each act. Find the beginning, middle, and end. Note how the story is set up, how long it takes you to find out what is going on in the movie, and whether or not you're hooked into the film, or dragged into it. Find the plot points at the end of Act I, and Act II, and how they lead to the resolution.
Some years ago I saw a short film by a French filmmaker. It was about a man who walks into a McDonald's restaurant on the Champs-Elysées and buys a huge order of french fries. He finds a strategic spot in the restaurant and suddenly begins throwing french fries all over; at the people, against the walls, on the floors, on the ceiling, everywhere. The people are furious. (It's a serious comedy.) Many of the patrons challenge him but the man pays no attention and continues throwing the fries. The police arrive. They warn the man.
But as soon as they leave, the man goes right back to throwing french fries. Soon, the entire restaurant is in an uproar. At the peak of their frenzy the man whips out a camera and starts taking pictures. Photograph after photograph is taken, and then in a blazing cut we see these same people as the subject of huge photographs now on display in a prestigious art gallery in Paris. It is only then that we understand that this man is a renowned artist, and the same people who were cursing him at McDonald's are now spending huge bucks to buy these so-called works of art.
Art is freedom of expression. That's the idea behind the film; the idea is dramatized.
The European screenwriter takes an idea and dramatizes it. The American screenwriter takes an idea and builds it into a story to dramatize it. If we took the idea that art is the freedom of expression, we would create a story. So we would search for a visual metaphor, a visual arena, to show our character, the artist, struggling for some kind of new art form, a new expression.
Who is this artist? What is his life like? What are the relationships in his life? Where is he in his career? What is his relationship to art? What about his friends, his family? Is he successful or not?
These questions all have to be answered to create a story. We take this information, the answers to these questions (writing is really the ability to ask the right questions) so we can structure this idea into a story line; we set up the artist's life in Act I, show who he is and what he does. The Plot Point at the end of Act I will be the particular incident or event which finally shows him that, in order to survive, he must change his artistic expression and seek out a new form, maybe even a new medium. We set up a crisis period in his life.
Act II would focus on his struggle to create a new form, and all the conflicts and hardships he has to endure in his professional, personal, and private lives. Gradually, we see him forging his first new form of expression, and then, at Plot Point II, he finds out what he has to do to generate a fusion of environmental and performance art.
Act III would show him executing his new "art form" in the McDonald's restaurant. Which is the entire French film.
Art is the freedom of expression – as seen from the European point of view and an American perspective.
The point to be made is that whether it's a European or American film, the problems of screenwriting are the same; it doesn't matter in what language or culture the script is being written.
A screenplay is a story told in pictures, and there will always be some kind of problem when you tell the story through words, and not pictures.
It seems obvious, but I have had this experience over and over again: some of the writers I've worked with forget that a screenplay is a story told in pictures. They feel that if the characters can explain their particular thoughts, feelings, or emotions, the story line will somehow move forward through the character's dialogue, not the action. Through words, not pictures. They think because the character talks a lot there will be insight and dimension; but the truth is that we must see the character in a situation that reveals his/her personality, no matter what the conflict or obstacle, whether it is an internal, emotional one, or an external, physical one.
Why is this significant?
Because at this period in our history, we are in a major communications revolution, and the screenplay is a form that is constantly evolving, for film is a combination of both art and science. It is a craft that drifts upon the growth of scientific technology. There are times when the screenwriter writes something and science has to create a technology to make it happen. Like Terminator 2: Judgment Day; the special effects had not been created when the script was completed. They hoped the special effects would work, and they did, and because of the science, film took a giant leap forward to making the art of film "more real."
Without the computer graphics created for Terminator 2: Judgment Day, we would not have been so affected by the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park (David Koepp) or the oddity of Forrest Gump (Eric Roth). Or all those morphing commercials that have flooded the television screens.
The computer technology of the nineties literally exploded, creating a global revolution. The Internet, websites, all the on-line systems connect the world. Everywhere people are using the Internet as part of their daily news-gathering ritual, and it is changing the ways we communicate with each other on a global scale. And this revolution is gradually changing the way we see things. We have become a visual society, and are no longer a literate one; the last fifty years have changed all that. No longer do we get our news and opinions from the written word; we get it from CNN, or the local news and the Internet. Our children are computer literate by the age of six, and most of the time they are the ones who are teaching us to use the computer.
This evolution of science and art is creating a new language of film, a more visual way of telling stories for the screen. The language of film is becoming more visual; scripts filled with pages and pages of great dialogue are now considered "too talky." Two people talking in an office or restaurant, explaining things to each other, rarely works any more.
This seems to be one of the most common problems in screen-writing. Over and over again, in country after country, most of the stories unfold through dialogue, not action. The characters talk and talk, and this only leads to a story that is dull and boring, developing through events that need to be explained.
Talking heads.
That's not screenwriting, that's stage writing. An essential part of all screenwriting is finding places where silence works better than words, finding the right visual arena, or image, to tell the story. Today's films are much more visual, the character's emotional arc expressed through the character's actions and reactions. "What is character but the determination of incident?" says Henry James. "And what is incident but the illumination of character?"
How people react to the incidents and situations of the story tells us something about who they are: in other words, what they do is who they are.
When I first saw Forrest Gump, I thought it was a very, very talky film. Most of the story is told through dialogue along with the voice-over narration. Act I reveals who Forrest is, and his voice-over tells us things we need to know, but the dialogue and images don't contradict each other, they complement each other. Forrest tells us he has to wear leg braces because he has "a curved spine," and wearing them will make him "straight as an arrow." At first glance Forrest is dumb, maybe even stupid, as his IQ test states, but "stupid is as stupid does," he says, quoting his mother. And on the surface most people think he's some kind of retard, a "cripple," physically challenged, and this image is shattered when he is chased by the bullies and forced to run for his life. Voice-over and dialogue complement each other, and this technique keeps the story from becoming talky, or dull and sentimental. Forrest is a man who follows his dreams, then makes them come true.
Later, his behavior shows us something else: Forrest Gump is anything but a cripple. Though the words, pictures, and actions are different, they complement each other and move the story forward.
The same with How to Make an American Quilt (Jane Anderson). Before the story can truly begin, we need to know who this character is. So Finn's narration opens the film when she's a little girl, and tells us about the relationship with her mother, grandmother, and quilting friends, and then, in a beautiful cut to present time, visually tells us what her problem is: her relationship to Sam and how anxious she is about getting married. She tells us that she has trouble completing things; she's working on her third master's thesis because every time she's getting ready to complete it, she moves on to another subject and starts all over again. That, of course, is what her mother did with the men in her life. For Finn it is this fear of commitment that drives the story forward. In the end, however, she learns to follow her heart as the crow leads her to her understanding and final acceptance that Sam is truly her soul mate.
Both these screenplays are studies in character, but in order to reveal who the characters are, and what the obstacles are that confront them, we must see who they are, through their actions and their words.
Not through talking heads.
So if you have a problem in that you think your story is being told in words, look for places to illustrate your character's behavior. In Thelma & Louise (Callie Khouri) the title characters are packing for a two-day holiday to the mountains. Here's the way Thelma packs: she grabs everything in sight, then throws and stuffs it into the suitcase. She pulls open her cosmetics drawer and empties the contents into the suitcase. Pulls open another drawer of clothes, dumps it into the already bulging suitcase. And that, we see, is the way she lives.
Contrast this visually to the way Louise packs. They're going away for two days, so she takes two pairs of pants, two blouses, two bras, one bathrobe, two sweaters, two pairs of socks, throws in another pair just for good measure, closes her suitcase, wipes clean the single glass in her spotless kitchen sink, and leaves.
The difference between Thelma and Louise is the difference between night and day, an apple and an orange. The simple illustration of packing the suitcase reveals more about them than dialogue ever could.
Instead of having your characters talk about their situation, let their behavior make the story line unfold in a more visual manner. Action is character; what a person does is who he is. Film is behavior.
It's easy to let your characters' dialogue explain your characters and move the story forward. But a good screenplay is much more than talking heads. It is a story told with pictures, in dialogue, and description, and placed within the context of dramatic structure.
It is the visual arena of action.