Screenwriting

Paul Joseph Gulino

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781628922394
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

The great challenge in writing a feature-length screenplay is sustaining audience involvement from page one through 120. Screenwriting: The Sequence Approach expounds on an often-overlooked tool that can be key in solving this problem. A screenplay can be understood as being built of sequences of about fifteen pages each, and by focusing on solving the dramatic aspects of each of these sequences in detail, a writer can more easily conquer the challenges posed by the script as a whole. The sequence approach has its foundation in early Hollywood cinema (until the 1950s, most screenplays were formatted with sequences explicitly identified), and has been rediscovered and used effectively at such film schools as the University of Southern California, Columbia University and Chapman University. This book exposes a wide audience to the approach for the first time, introducing the concept then providing a sequence analysis of eleven significant feature films made between 1940 and 2000: The Shop Around The Corner / Double Indemnity / Nights of Cabiria / North By Northwest / Lawrence of Arabia / The Graduate / One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest / Toy Story / Air Force One / Being John Malkovich / The Fellowship of the Ring

1

An Introduction
to Sequences

Why Sequences?

The great challenge in writing a feature-length screenplay is sustaining audience emotional involvement from page one through 120. Most writers can dash off a ten- or fifteen-minute script with little planning; as the length stretches to an hour or more, it becomes difficult both to conceive a script in its entirety and execute the individual scenes at the same time. Most professional writers use various tools to solve this problem—writing a treatment, outline, step outline, beat sheet, or using file cards. The function of all of these is to allow writers an overall view of their work while they toil away at the specific scenes.

The division of a feature film into acts—commonly three acts nowadays, corresponding generally to the setup, development, and resolution—is likewise a way for writers to divide the vastness of 120 pages into digestible pieces that can be attacked individually, without the need to be mindful of the overall work.

Even in using the three-act approach, though, navigation through a screenplay can be difficult. Most commonly, the first act is understood to occupy the first thirty pages, the second act the next sixty, and the third act the final thirty. For most writers, it is the sixty pages of the second act—the true heart of the script—that present the greatest challenges, a bewildering descent into a swamp of seemingly limitless choices, replete with the perils of wrong turns down dead ends and quicksand from which the writer cannot extricate the story.

The use of sequences is an important tool that is often overlooked in handling this problem. A typical two-hour film is composed of sequences—eight- to fifteen-minute segments that have their own internal structure—in effect, shorter films built inside the larger film. To a significant extent, each sequence has its own protagonist, tension, rising action, and resolution—just like a film as a whole. The difference between a sequence and a stand-alone fifteen-minute film is that the conflicts and issues raised in a sequence are only partially resolved within the sequence, and when they are resolved, the resolution often opens up new issues, which in turn become the subject of subsequent sequences.

The advantage of understanding that a feature film is composed of a series of shorter films is that it mitigates the problem of a seemingly amorphous second act. In general, a two-hour film will have two fifteen-minute sequences in the first act, four in the second, and two more in the third. Variations on this arrangement can be seen in many films, mostly in the length of the sequences and sometimes in their number, but as a tool for planning and writing a feature film this approach can be very valuable.

In the pages that follow I will explore the notion of sequences in detail—their historical origins, how they are defined and how they function to make a screenplay fulfill its most basic task: engaging a reader/viewer. Since understanding sequences requires understanding of some basic principles of storytelling, I will also examine these, with an eye toward the question of how a screenplay goes about engaging an audience. I will then explore eleven films representing a wide variety of styles and time periods and show how sequences function within each.

Academically, the sequence approach to feature-length screenwriting was taught at Columbia University in the early eighties, and has been taught for the last decade at the University of Southern California and more recently at Chapman University. Its use as a teaching tool grew out of the experiences of Frank Daniel (1924–1996), the inaugural dean of the American Film Institute and later the head of the film programs at Columbia University and USC, who found that teaching the three-act approach to screenwriting resulted in the difficulties discussed above, and so resurrected the notion of sequences to help students write more successful screenplays. One of the films analyzed in this volume, Air Force One, was written by Andrew W. Marlowe, who learned of the technique while studying at USC’s Graduate Screenwriting Program.

In putting this approach down in book form for the first time, my hope is this simple truth—that big films are made out of little films—can be of help to others in conceiving and writing a feature-length screenplay.

The Origin of Sequences

In the beginning was the sequence.

Or more properly, the one-reeler. With the advent of projection of movies in 1897, the celluloid carrying the images was wound up around spools that could hold about a thousand feet. At 18 frames per second, these lasted between ten and fifteen minutes.

By the early 1910s, for reasons both artistic and economic, films were extended beyond one reel. Because most theaters only had one projector, this required the projectionist to stop the projector, swap reels, and start the show again, during which time the audience waited in the dark or, more typically, was regaled by intervals of live entertainment.

Artistically, filmmakers dealt with this interval by making sure the films had a fade-out at the end of the first reel and a fade-in at the start of the second—often marked with a title noting the “End of Act I” and “Start of Act II,”—which in turn required that the narrative be adapted to conform to the constrictions imposed on it by this interruption. This was particularly necessary when—as happened early in the feature film era (1913–1920), the films were sometimes shown in installments—one or two reels at a time over the course of several weeks (much like a serial or modern-day daytime TV drama series) rather than all during the same evening. Each reel thus had to have its own integrity.

Some screenwriting manuals of the time advised writers to structure their work around this division into reels.¹ By the late 1920s, with the full-length feature film coming to dominate the cinema, most theaters had two projectors, and thus the viewing experience became essentially seamless. In this context, formal and rigorous adherence to writing for each reel became unnecessary, but the structure persisted, evidenced by the organization of screenplays into sequences identified by letter (A, B, C, etc.), a practice that lasted into the 1950s.

If the notion of writing in sequences played a role in feature film writing for the decade and a half after 1913, the craft of screenwriting underwent a dramatic change starting in 1927, which saw the advent of the talking picture. Till then, writers had only to script physical action and title cards. With this new innovation, they had to write dialogue, and Hollywood producers turned to the experts to solve the problem—the thriving community of playwrights working on Broadway, which pulled the craft more firmly into the three-part structure first expounded upon by Aristotle (360–322 BC). The result was an eight-sequence structure married to three acts.

In fact, the underlying structure—eight sequences in a feature film—persists to this day, long after its origins and practice have been forgotten. Rather like Monsieur Jourdan in Moliere’s The Bourgeoise Gentleman who is shocked to realize he’s been speaking prose for forty years without knowing it, feature film screenwriters continue to structure their films in sequences—and can get into trouble when they don’t.

The persistence of this arrangement suggests that something deeper is at work than the somewhat accidental arrival of cinema with 1,000-foot reels. The notion of a feature film having eight parts is, like all else in dramatic theory, tied to human physiology. Drama has been a one-and-a-half to three-hour experience for 2,500 years. Apparently, beyond that length, people become restless and uncomfortable, and attention suffers.

The division of two hours into sequences of ten to fifteen minutes each also most likely speaks to the limits of human attention, i.e., without the variation in intensity that sequences provide, an audience may find itself fatigued or numb rather than enthralled by what is on screen.

How A Screenplay Works

This book puts forward and articulates the division of feature films into eight segments. Many discussions of screenwriting begin either with Aristotle’s influential work The Poetics or Syd Field’s more recently influential work Screenplay (1979), which articulate different ways of dividing up a dramatic work. Aristotle described tragedy as a “whole action,” and, to him, a whole is that which has a “beginning, middle and end.” This is the first formulation of drama in three parts, and though he also further broke down tragedy into five parts (“prologue,” “episode,” “exode,” “parados” and “stasimon”) the first three roughly corresponded to the beginning, middle, and end, while the latter two were inserted in the middle, marking where the chorus entered and then sang odes.

Syd Field’s book described a three-act division of screenplays as “beginning,” “confrontation,” and “resolution,” separated by “turning points,” and, though he did not originate the notion of thinking of screenplays in terms of acts, the popularity of his book has helped make the “three act structure” the most common model. Other screenwriting manuals that have been published since 1979 espouse the notion of three acts, and give various insights into what they mean and the function they play in writing the screenplay.

Variations exist, of course. Kristin Thompson, in her thoughtful and informed book Storytelling in the New Hollywood (1999), studied over a hundred films from the 1910s to the 1990s and discerned in them what might be considered four acts, not three (which she terms “setup,” “complicating action,” “development” and “climax”). David Bordwell, in Narration in the Fiction Film (1985), described six parts of what he calls the ‘canonical’ story format: “introduction of setting and characters,” “explanation of a state of affairs,” “complicating action,” “ensuing events,” “outcome,” “ending.”

While much insight is to be gained from these books, aspiring writers may understandably get the mistaken impression that the task of the writer consists primarily in following theorists’ notions or recommendations, and, failing to do so, they will fail.

There was, of course, a group of extremely successful playwrights who did not base their work on Aristotle’s Poetics, or any other known guide or manual of dramatic writing—this group includes Sophocles, Aeschylus, Aristophanes, and Euripides—the playwrights of Greece’s Golden Age of drama—whose plays constituted the body of work that Aristotle studied in order to generate his treatise. And of course for most of the history of movie making, writers did not have access to Syd Fields’s book, and, indeed, screenwriting manuals were comparatively rare during Hollywood’s own “Golden Age” of the 1930s and 1940s.

While the playwrights who flourished before Aristotle, and the screenwriters who did so before Field, worked within the framework of specific conventions and formulae, their basic task can be understood in a way that is more empowering to the writer and more helpful to her in realizing her vision than aiming to conform to a formula and connecting its dots.

In his 1927 study Aspects of the Novel, E. M. Forster (1879–1970) described somewhat caustically the root nature of story: “It has only one merit: that of making the audience want to know what happens next. And conversely it can only have one fault: that of making the audience not want to know what happens next.”²

A decade earlier, in his book Playmaking (1912), theater critic and theorist William Archer (1856–1924), wrestling with the issue of what, ultimately, constitutes the essential characteristic of drama, came to the following conclusion: “The only really valid definition of the ‘dramatic’ is: any representation of imaginary personages which is capable of interesting an average audience assembled in a theater.”³

As to motion pictures, Kristin Thompson has said the following of the emergence of Hollywood as a world leader in the film industry by 1916: “The techniques of continuity editing, set design, and lighting that were developed during this era were designed not only to provide attractive images but also to guide the audience attention to salient narrative events from moment to moment.”⁴

These are three very wide open statements about the nature of the storyteller’s task. Their common thread is focus on the audience. All successful plays and films have been successful first, before considering any other positive attributes they might have, in engaging an audience in this way, and if they did not succeed in this task, they either did not survive, or can be found in the discount bin at Blockbuster. And needless to say, if a screenplay does not succeed in the task of keeping a reader or producer wondering what will happen next, it will suffer a fate even worse—remanded to the reject pile, never to see the light of the projection bulb or the video screen.

A writer who understands this as the basic task—keeping the audience attention on what comes next—is free to go about it in any way her imagination and inventiveness allows. If a writer realizes that whatever patterns or rules she encounters in dramatic theory or in screenwriting manuals (including this one) are to be understood as tools to this end, she will be empowered to employ them in more interesting ways than are possible than when seeking to adhere to “rules” or a formula above all else.

During the course of the analyses that follow, I will in fact examine films that used various combinations of the tools to achieve this end of audience engagement. Included in their number are some that may seem quite unconventional in their approach, but they all have in common success in engaging an audience.

A successful screenplay, then, is a living thing, in the sense that it “works” to create anticipation in a reader, as opposed to being an inert combination of ink, three-holed paper, and brads. The question is: how does it work? This question must be answered before an understanding of sequences can be undertaken, because what applies to features also applies to sequences.

While dramatists and screenwriters have used a variety of techniques over the years, there are, in the main, four basic tools that have been employed successfully to keep the audience attention directed into the future. In order of ascending significance, these Big Four are:

Telegraphing. This is also known as pointing or advertising. It consists of telling the audience explicitly what would happen in the future of the narrative. A verbal example could be one character saying to another “Meet me at Jerry’s Juiceteria at five o’clock” (this is an example of an appointment, one form of telegraphing). A visual example of telegraphing would be a character preparing his motorcycle for a ride. Both suggest the direction the story is going. Both help solve one of cinema’s challenges—its selectivity—what is seen on screen is only a small part of the action. If the audience is told someone is going to meet someone else at a juice bar, we can cut to the juice bar without confusing the audience or providing exposition in the scene explaining to the audience why we’re suddenly there.

This tool can also be used as “false” telegraphing—telling the audience where the story is going and then paying it off in the reverse. A character who makes arrangements to see a Broadway show with his mother but instead gets kidnapped is an example of this, yielding a surprise twist. The surprise twist has been a staple of cinema from its first decades, and such twists only work if the audience is made to anticipate something. A character getting kidnapped in the opening shot of a movie can never be a surprise twist, because no expectation has yet been created.

Another type of telegraphing is known as a deadline or ticking clock. An example of this would be one character telling another: “You have till midnight Friday to bring the Duke back.” It not only tells the audience where the story is going, but it can also put a character under time pressure, which intensifies the audience’s emotional involvement.

Although telegraphing is used mostly as part of the support system of the narrative flow of a story, it has been used in a more profound way. In American Beauty (1999), just after the opening titles, Lester Burnham announces in a voice-over narration, “In a year I’ll be dead.” This (literal) deadline instantly creates anticipation and gives shape to the story. Much later in the picture, Lester informs the audience, “In a week I’ll be dead,” and later still, “Today is the last day of my life.” I suspect that without these three critical lines of dialogue, audience engagement would be jeopardized, for the film has little else to propel audience attention into the future.

Dangling Cause. This tool carries more emotional freight than telegraphing. In the first decade of the twentieth century, Hollywood films came to be dominated by a narrative model consisting of a series of events linked by cause and effect. A man asks a woman to marry him (cause), and she accepts or rejects him (effect)....