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From Fairy Tale to Film Screenplay
Working with Plot Genotypes
Terence Patrick Murphy
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From Fairy Tale to Film Screenplay
Working with Plot Genotypes
Terence Patrick Murphy
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About This Book
In Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting (1979), Syd Field first popularized the Three-Act Paradigm of Setup, Confrontation and Resolution for conceptualizing and creating the Hollywood screenplay. For Field, the budding screenwriter needs a clear screenplay structure, one which includes two well-crafted plot points, the first at the end of Act I, the second at the end of Act II. By focusing on the importance of the four essentials of beginning and end, and the two pivotal plot points, Field did the Hollywood film industry an enormous service. Nonetheless, although he handles the issue of overall structure expertly, Field falls down when offering the screenwriter advice on how to successfully build each of the three individual Acts. This is because Field did not recognize the importance of another layer of analysis that underpins the existence of plot points. This is the level of the plot genotype. This book will offer you a richer theory of plot structure than the one Field outlines. It will do this not by contradicting anything Field has to say about the Hollywood paradigm, but by complementing it with a deeper level of analysis. Plot genotypes are the compositional schemas of particular stories. They are sets of instructions, written in the language of the plot function, for executing particular plots. This book outlines the plot genotypes for The Frog Prince, The Robber Bridegroom, Puss-in-Boots, and Little Red Riding Hood and then shows how these genotypes provide the underpinnings for the film screenplays of Pretty Woman, Wrong Turn, The Mask, and Psycho. By means of a detailed study of these four Hollywood screenplays, you will be able to offer a much richer description of what is going on at any particular point in a screenplay. In this way, you will become much sharper at understanding how screenplays work. And you will become much better at learning how to write coherent screenplays yourself.
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1
From the Hollywood Paradigm to the Proppian Plot Genotype
Introduction
Long dominated by the Hollywood memoir and the âhow-toâ manual, the art of the Anglo-American film screenplay has a relatively brief academic history.1 In Script Culture and the American Screenplay (2008), Kevin Alexander Boon argues: âLiterary scholarship, while fully absorbed with drama, ignored the screenplay, and film studies, though aware of the screenplay as an interstitial cog in the filmmaking process, only occasionally cast a critical eye toward the written text, which had been the controlling narrative voice in most contemporary American film production for nearly a century.â2 The reasons for this neglect are not hard to discover. Unlike film, the drama of the theatre has strong historical ties to the university, with an academic pedigree defined by Aristotleâs Poetics and the art of William Shakespeare. In contrast, the beginnings of cinematic art and the film screenplay are somewhat shabby. Originating in the peep shows and nickelodeons at the turn of the twentieth century, the cinema, despite its rapid rise to financial importance, was long kept at armâs length by the academy.3 What is more, although a number of prominent American writers, including F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner, did try their hand at screenplay writing, their experience of the sometimes cavalier and usually commercial priorities of Hollywood did not enhance the artistic case for the film screenplay very far.4 Later anecdotal evidence, such as that of the sexually flamboyant Tennessee Williams working with Elia Kazan or the radical English dramatist Trevor Griffithâs experience in collaborating with Warren Beatty on the script of Reds (1979), seemed to confirm the irremediably philistine nature of Hollywood practice.5 The film screenplay was a commodity that could be bought and sold at will; it could be quickly alienated from its original creator; it could be quickly remolded to fit quite divergent ideological or commercial diktats.6
A more serious approach to the question of the screenplay had to wait until the generation of the American auteur cinema and the rise of university film studies in the 1970s. Although film clubs had existed in both the United States and the United Kingdom since at least the 1930s, the university was slow to offer the new dramatic form official accreditation. Indeed, it is probably true to say that a genuine theory of film screenplay structure did not emerge until the rise of the VHS cassette recorder in the 1970s had made repeated screenings of the same movie possible.7 And when it did, film screenplay theory arose first not in the universities of the Ivy League but rather in Syd Fieldâs classes on screenplay structure at the Sherwood Oaks Experimental College in Hollywood. Fieldâs classic text Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting (1979) had been preceded by the first edition of David Bordwell and Kristin Thompsonâs Film Art: An Introduction (1977). Over the years, this textbook was to become an increasingly lavish, color-print, coffee-table moneymaker, heralding the arrival of the serious academic study of cinema. The continued success of Bordwell and Thompsonâs book into the new century demonstrated that film studies professors had won the intellectual argument for studying film as dramatic art. Curiously enough, however, the initial focus on such apparently more sophisticated thematic issues as the jump cut, mise-en-scène and the male gaze also had the curious effect of marginalizing the study of the screenplay as literary art.
The serious academic study of the film screenplay, arguably the major dramatic art form of the last 100 years, is then largely the work of the new millennium. Fittingly, the wife and husband team of Thompson and Bordwell has helped to lead the way. In 1999, Kristin Thompson wrote her influential study Storytelling in the New Hollywood: Understanding Classical Narrative Technique (1999); seven years later, Thompsonâs husband David Bordwell penned The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies (2006). These two works demonstrated an effort to refocus the study of cinema on the issue of filmic poetics, a theory of the combination of word, image and sound within the overall viewing experience. But it is only within the last ten years that a large body of scholarship has begun to focus on the screenplay itself as a form of artistic creation, an artistic form to be treated with the academic seriousness formerly reserved for the poem, the short story and the dramatic text.8
A central debate inherited by the new theorists of the film screenplay is that of plot structure. The origins of this debate are found in the world of theatre criticism, and its first major theorist is arguably William Archer, the friend of Bernard Shaw and translator of Henrik Ibsen. It was in reaction to Archerâs major Aristotelian study Play-Making: A Manual of Craftsmanship (1912) that Lajos Egri penned his own defiantly character-centered polemic The Art of Dramatic Writing (1946).9 Although Egriâs The Art of Dramatic Writing drew most of its textual examples from the theater, its influence on the work of later screenwriters, most noticeably Woody Allen, is well known. With the gradual eclipse of Broadway by Hollywood, first in financial terms, later in artistic ones, the way was increasingly open for a generation of screenwriters and theorists to begin to formulate a theory of the film screenplay.10
In 1979, Syd Field, a writer and sometime screenplay reviewer, wrote his important study Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting (1979). In this book, Field first popularized the Three-Act Paradigm of Set-Up, Confrontation and Resolution for conceptualizing and creating the Hollywood screenplay.11 The success of Field as a screenplay analyst is bound up with his central focus on structure. As he notes, a common fault of many screenwriters is to sit down in front of a typewriter and simply to begin typing with no thought about overall direction. The end result will often be an abandoned incomplete manuscript, the result of the screenwriterâs failure to conceptualize the journey the central character undertakes as one with a beginning and an end, one in which that character undergoes a meaningful change. The budding screenwriter neglects the need for a clear screenplay structure, one which includes two well-crafted plot points, the first at the end of Act I, the second at the end of Act II, to swing the action round in a new direction. By insisting on the importance of screenwriters working out these four essential requirements of the plot, Syd Field did the entire Hollywood dream industry a major service.
Nonetheless, although Fieldâs approach handles the issue of overall structure expertly, it falls down when it comes to offering the screenwriter advice on how to successfully build each of the three individual Acts.
To take one example: What exactly should a screenplay be doing from the initial introduction of the main character to the first plot point?
According to Field, the screenwriter must inform the audience who the main character is, must outline what the dramatic premise is and must sketch in the dramatic situationâthe circumstances surrounding the action.12 Then, in support of his argument, Field devotes a chapter of Screenplay to demonstrating how the screenplay writer Robert Towne succeeds in carrying out these three demands in Chinatown.
How is this done in Chinatown? How is this done in any screenplay? According to Field, the main character takes âactionâ, which causes a âreactionââand this process gets repeated until the screenwriter arrives at the first plot point. Thereâs only one problem with this advice. Itâs not what happens in Chinatown. If you examine Act I of that screenplay, you will see that thereâs not much sense of Jake Gittes taking action. Indeed, most of what he does is precisely the opposite: He advises both his first client and the false Mrs Mulwray not to do anything, not to take any action at all. In other words, Field tells you that your Hero should take actionâand then he analyzes a screenplay in which the Hero does nothing apart from advising his two clients against taking action of any kind.
Why is this? What is the advice that Field gives at this point both vague and misleading? The reason is that there is a deeper level of plot analysis that Field fails to consider: This is the level of the plot genotype.
Introducing plot genotype theory
In evolutionary biology, the genotype refers to the inherited instructions an organism carries within its genetic code. These instructions are important because they can be used to understand how a particular organism is specialized within the group to which it belongs.13
By extension, the plot genotype represents the functional structure or compositional schema of a particular story. It is a set of instructions, written in the language of the plot function, for executing a particular fairy tale plot.14 The major contributor to the theory of the plot genotype is Vladimir Propp, and the key innovation in Proppâs method was his adoption of a functional approach to plot analysis. As he argues, a plot function is âthe act of a character, defined from the point of view of its significance for the course of the actionâ.15
In the Poetics, Aristotle writes that a plot needs to have sufficient amplitude to allow a probable or necessary succession of particular actions to produce a significant change in the fortune of the main character.16 In Morphology of the Folktale, what Propp did was to push Aristotleâs analysis beyond the terms in which he had found them. By offering a list covering each one of Aristotleâs probable or necessary actions, in a sequential order of 31 functions, from an Initial Situation through to a final Marriage, Propp had found a way to negotiate the terms of the entire plot. Flush with the success of his methodology, Propp stated: âI feel that in its present form this study is accessible to every fancier of the tale, provided he is willing to follow the writer into the labyrinth of the taleâs multiformity, which in the end will become apparent to him as an amazing uniformity.â17
In truth, however, Proppâs belief in âan amazing uniformityâ is overstated. Not all fairy tales contain the 31 functions that Propp believed to constitute this invariant structure. Some fairy tales, indeed, exist as virtual hideous mirror images of the Marriage fairy tale on which Propp focuses most of his attention. In sharp contrast to the romantic fairy tales that Propp focused on, these mirror image fairy tales provide the basic plot lines for the horror movies of the Hollywood tradition.
But the fact that Propp got so much right but got the major truth wrong turns out to be a good thing. What it means is this: Not all plots are the same. What it also means is that by a friendly critique of the original model, it is possible to develop a new set of plot genotypes, each with its own accompanying cast of characters. These plot genotypes, derived from the corpus of European fairy tales, can then be shown at work in a range of Hollywood screenplays.
In this book, I will outline the plot genotypes for The Frog Prince, The Robber Bridegroom, Puss-in-Boots and Little Red Riding Hood, and I will show how these genotypes provide the underpinnings for the film screenplays of Pretty Woman, Wrong Turn, The Mask and Psycho, respectively. It is my belief that after a close reading of my book, you will be able to offer a much richer description of what is going on at any particular point in a screenplay. In this way, you will become much sharper at understanding how screenplays work. And you will become much better at learning how to write coherent screenplays yourself.
Using the concepts of plot genotype theory, you will be able to explain how J. F. Lawton sets up the Lack/Entrapment plot point at the end of Act I in the screenplay of Pretty Woman, from the moment Edward leaves the party for Lewis Industries to the moment when Vivian Ward takes her momentous decision to be at Edwardâs beck and call for five days.
Similarly, you will be able to describe the way in which the Donation and Struggle in Act II of Wrong Turn is organized, and you will be able to contrast this with the quite different Donation and Struggle in Act II of Psycho.
In much the same way, you will be able to describe the distinct Difficult Tasks in Act III of Edward Lewis in Pretty Woman and Stanley Ipkiss in The Mask. And finally, you will even be able to state in a clear way exactly how Robert Towne moves his screenplay of Chinatown from the opening to the moment when the real Mrs Mulwray shows up in the office of Jake Gittes.
Criticizing the work of Syd Field
In Screenplay, Syd Field states: âA screenplay is like a nounâitâs about a person, or persons, in a place or places, doing his or her or their âthingâ. All screenplays execute this basic premise. The person is the character, and doing his or her thing is the action.â18
Fieldâs major contribution to the art of the screenplay comes in the form of what he calls âthe paradigmâ, a basic structure that all screenplays of any worth are said to follow. For Field, a screenplay consists of three major Acts: Act I is the Set-Up; Act II is the Confrontation; and Act III is the Resolution.
Act I consists of about âthirty pages t...