Constructing Dialogue

Mark Axelrod

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781441108517
• eBook ISBN: 9781441121912
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film Screenwriting

Unlike most screenwriting guides that generally analyze several aspects of screenwriting, Constructing Dialogue is devoted to a more analytical treatment of certain individual scenes and how those scenes were constructed to be the most highly dramatic vis á vis their dialogue. In the art of screenwriting, one cannot separate how the scene is constructed from how the dialogue is written. They are completely interwoven. Each chapter deals with how a particular screenwriter approached dialogue relative to that particular scene's construction. From Citizen Kane to The Fisher King the storylines have changed, but the techniques used to construct scene and dialogue have fundamentally remained the same. The author maintains that there are four optimum requirements that each scene needs in order to be successful: maintaining scenic integrity; advancing the storyline, developing character, and eliciting conflict and engaging emotionally. Comparing the original script and viewing the final movie, the student is able to see what exactly was being accomplished to make both the scene and the dialogue work effectively.

1

Citizen Kane (1941)

Screenplay by Herman J. Mankiewicz and Orson Welles

As with all the films I’m using, the number of scenes to choose from is limitless and what one writer might choose to write about may not be what another writer chooses to write about. But since I’m the writer here, I’ve decided to discuss the projection booth scene. The shooting script of Citizen Kane is dated July 16, 1940, produced in 1941 with a running time of 119 minutes.

The script is written in extreme detail, but we can summarize the opening scenes accordingly. Through a series of ten dissolves in the first 13 scenes, the reader is moved from the space outside Kane’s palatial estate of Xanadu to inside Xanadu and specifically to Kane’s bedroom. There is an increasingly deductive movement from an expansive landscape outside the confines of the estate to a narrower one within the estate leading, finally, to the one main focus, that is, the very tiny light that emanates from Kane’s chambers.

Approximately two minutes into the film we hear the word “Rosebud,” at two-and-a-half minutes, Kane is dead. For approximately the next ten minutes what follows is the “News on the March” segment that is essentially divided into 15 separate, but integral, components that summarize and highlight the entire storyline as follows.

“News on the March” segments

1	Kane’s funeral and Xanadu
2	History of Kane’s news empire
3	Kane’s association with famous people
4	Kane’s first news building
5	Kane’s corporate empire and its holdings
	Kane’s youth
7	Kane’s association with Thatcher, his guardian
8	Assorted Comments about Kane
9	Kane’s marriage to Emily Norton
10	Kane’s marriage to Susan Alexander
11	Kane’s building of the Chicago Opera House
12	Kane’s construction of Xanadu
13	Kane and politics
14	Kane and scandal
15	Kane’s death

Mankiewicz has written an engaging and compelling opening hook and in the first two minutes has clearly alluded to what I’ve written about in previous books: the QBA or “the question to be answered,” which very simply is …

What is Rosebud?

The QBA can be defined as “that implied question posited at the beginning of the script that, in some way, must be answered by the end of it.” In effect, it is the thread that is tied into the storyline, which, in this script, is really a multiple storyline made of four individual character perspectives. Unlike a film such as Rocky in which a character who begins in deprivation and ultimately attains a kind of “hero-hood” at the end while following a single, sustained character arc, Kane’s character arc goes through an alteration that is mediated by the points of view of four different people and those four different points of view make up his overriding arc.

We initially meet Kane on his deathbed and move to how he got there, but not before the storyline is summarized through the “News on the March” segment which, itself, is a linear progression of events tracing Kane’s life from 1895–1940, thus summarizing his character from an impoverished child to a financial tycoon.

Imbedded within the “News on the March” segment is a variety of scenes that comment on Kane’s character and allude to the “secret of Rosebud.” The clearest example of that is when Walter P. Thatcher recalls the journey he took to visit Kane’s family in 1870 and was asked by someone in the room: “Is it not a fact that on that occasion the boy personally attacked you after striking you in the stomach with a sled?” (Kael, 2002, p. 106). The others in the room laugh, but, not coincidentally, this is the first scene that includes any non-Voice-Over dialogue other than Kane’s last word, “Rosebud.” Clearly, if the question were irrelevant why would Mankiewicz have included it as dialogue and the first bit of dialogue to be stated?

But it’s only after these sequences of scenes that encapsulate Kane’s life that one of the most critical scenes is developed; namely, the scene in the projection room. From the script we get the following text:

During the entire course of this scene, nobody’s face is really seen. Sections of their bodies are picked out by a table light, a silhouette is thrown on the screen, and their faces and bodies are themselves thrown into silhouette against the brilliant slanting rays of light from the projection room.

At this point, the dialogue begins that essentially shapes the entire story both in terms of the storyline and in terms of Kane’s character. Someone says it’s difficult to do, “seventy years of a man’s life” Mankiewicz is very careful in his scene directions even though Welles changed it.

But, at this point, there’s a major change in how the scene is developed. From the original script, the dialogue is reduced from four-plus script pages to about two pages. The reason for the revision is quite evident in that the original dialogue tended to retard the flow of the scene and by so doing tended to reduce the dramatic impact of the scene as well as the need to emphasize the content. There were numerous allusions to Kane as having the talent of a mountebank, the morals of a bootlegger, the manners of a pasha and that he succeeded in transforming the noble profession of journalism into something without security. Those Kanesean “virtues” didn’t have any critical impact on the construction of the scene in that they merely repeated a lot of what was seen in the opening of the film.

The question one must ask at that point is: why repeat them? In clear, Aristotelian terms, what would make for a better, more succinct, more integrated scene would be to eliminate the repetitive or redundant dialogue and to establish a scenic arc. By that I mean, the scene should have an opening, middle, and end, and that the end should, in some fashion, integrate with the beginning so that it reveals a completely unified and somewhat seamless scene. Although this was not necessarily done in the script, it was clearly done in the final cut and the results of that revision tend to link the beginning with the end in the manner in which Aristotle talks about in his Poetics.

At the conclusion of the “News on the March” segment we have the scene in the projection room from which the newsreel has been screened and the word “Rosebud” is not only discussed by several shadowy reporters in the projection booth, but also the word becomes the primary focus of the scene. Of course, we have to suspend our disbelief, since there was no one in the room to hear Kane whisper “Rosebud,” and unless the nurse had super-hearing she wouldn’t have heard it either, but the word has significant importance not only in terms of establishing Kane’s character arc, but also in initiating the question to be answered.

At that point, Rawlston, the managing editor of the newspaper, begins his dialogue when he says,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• TOC
• Introduction
• Author’s Note
• 1. Citizen Kane (1941): Herman J. Mankiewicz, Orson Welles
• 2. Casablanca (1942): Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein, Howard Koch
• 3. Sunset Boulevard (1950): Billy Wilder
• 4. North by Northwest (1959): Ernest Lehman
• 5. Jules & Jim (1962): François Truffaut, Jean Gruault
• 6. Lolita (1963): Vladimir Nabokov, Stanley Kubrick
• 7. Goldfinger (1964): Richard Maibaum, Paul Dehn
• 8. The Graduate (1969): Calder Willingham, Buck Henry
• 9. Midnight Cowboy (1969): Waldo Salt
• 10. Chinatown (1973): Robert Towne
• 11. Annie Hall (1977): Woody Allen, Marshall Brickman
• 12. Breaking Away (1979): Steve Tesich
• 13. When Harry Met Sally (1989): Nora Ephron
• 14. The Fisher King (1991): Richard LaGravenese
• 15. Thelma & Louise (1991): Callie Khouri
• 16. Toy Story (1995): Joss Whedon, Andrew Stanton, John Lasseter, Pete Docter, Joe Ranft, and Alec Sokolow
• 17. Good Will Hunting (1997): Matt Damon, Ben Affleck / Ordinary People (1980) Alvin Sargent
• 18. American Beauty (1999): Alan Ball
• 19. Midnight in Paris (2011): Woody Allen
• Dialogue: A Trailer
• Dialogue Exercises
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright Page