Global Scriptwriting

Ken Dancyger

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136048098
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Media & Performing Arts
• Categoría: Film & Video

Global Scriptwriting offers a look at an exciting new phase in screen storytelling, as writers and directors from all over the world infuse traditional forms with their own cultural values to create stories that have an international appeal and suggest a universality among readers, viewers, and listeners. A unique blend of screenwriting technique and film studies, Global Scriptwriting discusses screen stories as they have evolved through the years, focusing first on the basics of scriptwriting, then going on to afford a more sophisticated look at script via different models of scriptwriting: the Hollywood model, the independent model, the national model, and various alternative models. It examines the internationalization of storytelling, and illustrates how particular innovations have helped national screen stories to international success.
This book is the first to incorporate the basics of the classical form with the innovative edge of the last decade, as well the culture specific changes that have taken place outside of North America. It offers readers a view of the enriched repertoire available to writers resulting from the introduction of cultural perspectives into traditional story forms. Specific topics examined include, the ascent of voice, the search for new forms, the struggle between style and content, and the centrality of megagenre.

Part I Universal Elements of Script

1 The Basics

DOI: 10.4324/9780080507422-1

In order to understand the basics of script—premise, character, structure, and all the dramatic properties of film narrative—we need to consider a number of questions whose answers will conceptualize the substance of this chapter. What is storytelling? How does it relate to our lives? And why do certain stories succeed in affecting us, and others fail? These questions are our starting point.

It's best to begin with a central term, drama, a term that is usually associated with the stage and with theater critics. The term itself implies conflict. If Macbeth didn't want to become king, with the sitting king as a barrier to his goal, there would be no conflict in Shakespeare's play. If the warring families in Romeo and Juliet got along, the play wouldn't take the dramatic shape that it does. If Othello weren't as jealous, if he weren't a Moor surrounded by Caucasians, and so on. If the senators of Rome were content to allow Julius Caesar to fulfill his ambition to be Emperor of Rome… well, you get the picture. Shakespeare would not have found the tragedy of Julius Caesar compelling; nor would we.

Not all conflict is a merit from the perspective of the critic. If a drama is over-wrought, the critics consider the story melodramatic or operatic. When they want to suggest that a drama is flat, they describe it as flawed or cheapened. In either case the implication is that when drama is working the level of engagement between the audience and the story is ideal. It has credibility, and it has the capacity to, in a valuable way, invite us into an identification with the actions of the character and with the narrative arc of the play.

Drama, then, is a level of conflict that is shaped, as Aristotle suggests, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. That conflict may be internal, interpersonal, intersocietal, or between man and nature. The consequent clash of goals brings us into an identification with a character. If the character has will and energy, we identify with the drive. If the story positions the character as a potential victim, we fear that the character's will (and ours) will be crushed.

What needs to be said about drama is that it differs from real life. That is not to say that each of us do not have conflict in our lives. Quite the contrary. But the conflict in drama is intensified and structured for a purpose-to entertain or to capture us in a moral swamp where we can swim or sink with a character. And drama offers resolution or catharsis in two hours. Few real-life conflicts hold out such a promise.

Which brings us to the importance of storytelling in the human experience. Whether expressed in a series of cave paintings, a series of tapestries, a sonnet, an epic poem, a novel, a photograph, a play, or a film, all these storytelling expressions have meant so much more than the artifacts now housed in museums or the plays read in high schools. For each generation these communiques from one human being to his or her community have served multiple purposes. On the most basic level, an artifact is an entertainment that might promote laughter or joy from the experience. Cartoons, TV situation comedies, and soap operas have their equivalents in the travelling plays, court jesters, and clowns of former times.

Or the story might have an educational goal. Education is a broad term, and all of us throughout our lifetimes are in the process of becoming educated. New information, moral education, political education, social education—all are the valid educational goals of storytelling. Fairy tales and fables for children, or the more complex education layers of a play such as Arthur Miller's The Crucible, offer different types of education for their audiences.

Whether informational or moral, or educational about the social and psychological dimensions of the human experience, stories educate us in layered and complex ways. The outcome might be to improve us as all education can, or it might simply provide a cathartic experience that helps us cope with demons that would otherwise prove harmful to ourselves or to others.

I'm not suggesting that stories are the panacea for all that ails society and its members. But I am suggesting that storytelling has played an important role in helping societies function. And when those stories are seminal and important, they can have a transformative effect, as all art can. Stories can yield the understanding that brings people together, and in this sense it has and does fulfill a critical function in society.

Imagine for a moment stories told in a form that reaches across societies, across nations, and around the world. That is the power of filmic storytelling. This invention of the late-nineteenth century became the popular art form of the twentieth century. The storytellers of the twenty-first century want to tell their stories in images. Whether in film or video, those stories have become the most important and most powerful story form of our time.

The Visual Versus The Spoken

Storytelling as an evolving form followed two distinct paths—the visual and the aural. Theater today owes much to how far the aural tradition has progressed. And although film owes much to theater structurally and in basic dramatic principles, it is distinctly visual as a medium. Its use of light also owes much to painting and to photography, but its visual character goes beyond those forms. It's best to think of filmic storytelling as a form where every aspect of the form evolves out of this visual character.

Consequently, certain film genres that are particularly visual—the western, the musical, the action-adventure film—are dominated by visual action. That action may characterize, it may advance the plot, or it may simply provide the context for both. But these genres are not exclusively visual, they are simply the most predominately visual.

To illustrate the depth of the visual character of the medium a cross-section of famous and less-famous film sequences will serve. Among the most famous are the shower sequence in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960), the Odessa Steps sequence in Eisenstein's Potemkin (1925), the breakfast scene in Welles' Citizen Kane (1941), the gunfight toward the end of Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1969). Among the less-famous but notably visual sequences, the burial of a child's mother early in David Lean's Dr. Zhivago (1965), a young boy's escape from a tyrannical house-keeper in Carol Reed's The Fallen Idol (1948), the sniper attack in Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket (1987). In this last sequence, many men die on a patrol during the Battle of Hue. They die because of a single sniper. After many losses they kill the sniper, only to discover she is a woman. These sequences are powerful, dramatic evocations presented to us at set pieces.

The medium more often functions with more modest but no less visual aspects. For instance, it may offer insight into character. The visual action of the Marlon Brando character, Terry in Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront (1954), when he's getting to know Edie, a young woman (Eva Marie Saint), is instructive. He is a young man with lots of rough edges; she is a student in a convent school. They sit on swings making conversation. He has taken one of her gloves and as he talks he plays with her glove. From his actions we understand his desire—he wants to get close to this young woman but he doesn't know how. His awkward visual action implies that desire and that awkwardness.

Another example is an early action in Carol Reed's The Third Man (1949). An American writer named Holly Martins (Joseph Cotton) arrives in post-war Vienna, invited and paid for by his friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles), only to find that his friend Lime is dead. A policeman arranges his accommodations and a return to America. Holly tries to punch the policeman for insulting his friend. He is knocked out instead. The scene visually illustrates both the impulsiveness and the naivete of the writer. His refusal to believe Harry Lime is dead leads him to fight and, predictably, to lose.

Characterization in film is almost always visually captured. So, too, is plot. The murder of a brother motivates Wyatt Earp to become the sheriff of Tombstone in John Ford's My Darling Clementine (1946). A case of mistaken identity leads the main character to be kidnapped in Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest (1959). The placement of a damaging item in a gossip column will either move the main character up the ladder of success or lead to his ruin in Alexander Mackendrick's Sweet Smell of Success (1956). The key here is that it is a visual action rather than a described action (in dialogue) that is natural and useful in filmic storytelling.

This idea of visualization should pervade your thinking as you begn to write your screenplay.

Consider visualization as the first writing strategy when faced with characterization or plot advancement. The examples of wordsmith David Mamet, a play-wright, writing for the screen is instructive. In terms of characterization, his screenplay of The Edge (1997) is instructive. The main character Charles Morse (Anthony Hopkins) is a billionaire. He is also an older gentleman married to a young model. He is jealous of his younger rival, Robert Green (Alec Baldwin), the photographer, who will photograph his wife in a natural wilderness setting in Northern Alaska. Charles is portrayed as insatiably curious to understand and control his world. He is deeply knowledgeable about tribal artifacts as well as means of survival—creating fire without matches, keeping warm when wet. But he's never had to act on this knowledge, until he and Robert and an assistant crash land deep in the wilderness. At that point, it's all about survival.

Mamet characterizes Charles continually faced with a life-threatening challenge—a Kodiak bear, a freezing environment, no real compass to guide him to safety. In each case, Mamet visually illustrates Charles' capacity for hope and for intelligence to solve the problem and to save himself and his companions.

The visual characterization and the visualization of plot (the escape to the south) is Mamet's writing solution, his visual solution to the writing problem.

Terms—Useful, Critical

If directors of films think in terms of shots, writers think in terms of premise, character, and structure. These narrative terms, some borrowed from theater and some adapted for film, are the common language of film writing. Practitioners and producers sometimes adapt them according to their experience, so you will encounter variations in how they are used. What I present here are the terms I have found useful to writers to help them write.

Screenplay Format Prose is presented in a novel in sentences and paragraphs. A script is presented in visual detail and dialogue organized in a distinct fashion unique to film. That format is called the master scene format (see Appendix for example). What is most common in screenplay format for film and television films is the master scene format. Although multicamera television uses its own format (visual/audio side by side), as does documentary, the format here described is the master scene script format.

This format is useful because it facilitates the reading of the script as well as the budgeting of the script. The scene numbering changes as there is a location change. This allows tabulation of personnel, cast, crew, and props per location facilitating budgeting.

The Premise We experience a film through the main character. The premise refers to the particular challenge facing the main character. In certain genres such as the thriller, it is an external choice. In The Fugtive (1993), Richard Kimble (Harrison Ford) finds his wife dying and after her death he is accused and tried as her killer. He knows he didn't do it. How will he regain his freedom? In Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) wants to find the Lost Ark. Will he? How, given the obstacles in his way? In these cases the premise is an external rather than an internal struggle.

More often the premise does refer to an inner struggle. In this case, it's best to consider the premise as the two opposite choices facing the main character. In Anthony Minghella's Truly, Mudly, Deeply (1991), the main character has recently lost her lover to an unexpected illness. She is deeply wounded and struggles with overwhelming grief. The premise of the film is whether she will go on grieving for the rest of her life (hold on to the dead lover) or whether she will take up life, in the future, by way of a new relationship.

In Lee Tamahori's Once Were Warriors (1995), the main character must decide between her husband and her children. Although she lives in the illusion of a family life, her husband's attitude and his lifestyle choices (drinking and partying with his friends) are destructive to the her goals for the family. She must make a choice.

Often the premise is worked out through the exploration of two relational choices, in this case, the husband or the children. She cannot have both.

The Critical Moment The beginning of the film story should throw us into the story. If the setup is too gentle or too slow we may not join with the story. The point at which we begin the film story should capture us powerfully. Whether this means a low point in the life of the main character, as in Sydney Lumet's The Verdict (1982), or the accidental, untimely death of T.E. Lawrence in David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia (1962), the beginning, because of its special function of propelling us into the story, is called the critical moment.

This point can be mysterious, or it can be nfe with danger, or it can seem to be a trap or a dead end for the main character. The key here is the conflictual quality this moment has for the main character—it will be a turning point for the character's story.

The Catalytic Event If the film story begins at a critical moment, the catalytic event (sometimes referred to as the point of attack) will propel the main character away from the trap or toward another option. In film noir the catalytic event is when the main character meets the woman who will rescue him from his state of despair. (Quite the opposite happens.) In Lumet's The Verdict, the drunken lawyer who is an ambulance chaser in his profession, is given a case, a “money-maker.” This case will constitute the plot of The Verdict. In Lean's Lawrence of Arabia, the young officer Lawrence is given permission to join Faisal, the leader of the Arab revolt against the Turks (again the beginning of the plot).

Main Character The main character is at the heart of the film narrative. Not only do we experience the narrative through the point of view of the main character, every element of the narrative impacts upon the main character. Consequently the main character is key. This is not necessarily the case in other story forms and their consequent adaptation to film. In the case of the Francis Ford Coppola 1974 adaptation of Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby, the point of view of the novel is Daisy's cousin. This perspective is maintained in the film directed by Jack Clayton. The result is a flawed film narrative because the central or main character of the film story is clearly Gatsby, the man with a past. In the Coppola screenplay, the chosen point of view distances us from what should be the main character. The consequence is respectful but not emotionally engaging.

Examples of more effectively positioned main characters are Margo Channing (Bette Davis) in All About Eve (1950) and Marty (Ernest Borgnine) in the Paddy Chayefsky 1955 film adaptation of his screenplay Marty. These characters are right in the middle of the narrative action in each of the stories.

Character Goals A film narrative works most effe...