So far we have outlined the broad process of developing and writing without going into the craft of how you do it. Many good books are dedicated to writing for the movies and for television that expound on techniques and share the tricks of the trade. This chapter is just an introduction to basics on which the student must build. In other words, if you have never written a screenplay or tried to conceptualize a narrative in a visual medium that lasts for an hour and a half or two hours, here are some of the issues you need to think about.

At the beginning of Chapter 3, we said that a writer is paid for the quality of thinking as much as for the writing. Writing screenplays is not about putting words on paper so much as thinking out storylines, visualizing scenes, and imagining characters. Although we can identify elements of the screenplay form, singly, none of them will make a screenplay. Put together, they pretty much cover those issues the scriptwriter has to think about and for which he has to execute technically a finished working vehicle that will manifest in actors’ performances and directors’ shots. We are talking about creating a complex structure that you can travel through or examine from a number of different points of view. Let’s start with character.

Characters and Character

Every story must have at least one character whose identity is clear and whose destiny is engaging. Otherwise, we, the audience, have nothing to relate to and identify with. Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea pits one man against the sea, the elements, and the great fish that he struggles to bring in. We identify with his struggle, his hunger, and his fatigue. Herman Melville’s Moby Dick is a more complex story of Captain Ahab against the white whale. The genre probably goes back to heroic, mythical stories such as the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf and St. George against the dragon. A more recent version of this archetype is Jaws (1975), in which the animal adversary is replaced by a Great White shark. This has spawned a host of similar beast and monster movies based on the premise of a confrontation with an outsize animal opponent such as an alligator or a giant squid.

Normally, we assume characters to be human, but in this genre the animal is a character in the story with personified characteristics of will, motive and intelligence. Don’t tell me animals are not characters! A whole franchise, as they call it nowadays, was built around a sheepdog, Lassie. Dozens of Lassie movies were made, and a television series of the same name ran for many seasons. Don’t tell me characters have to have lines! Lassie barks, no lines. Think of Frankenstein! There’s another character without lines and also a variation on the theme.

Most stories need more than one human character. They need a protagonist and an antagonist, or a hero and a villain. The struggle between them is typical of archetypal stories. Think of Achilles and Hector in Homer’s Iliad, Julius Caesar and Brutus, or Octavius Caesar and Cleopatra, or Grant and Lee in the Civil War. There are usually two points of view or two sets of values that define each character. In its most commonplace and generic version, we have the cop and the criminal. Then there are the hero’s friends, lover, parents, children, and all those possible relationships that fill out the plot. The list of characters makes up the cast.

What makes characters interesting to an audience? A character has to be someone the audience can identify or with whom the audience can identify. What’s the difference? Who identifies with Hannibal Lector in Silence of the Lambs (1991)? On the other hand, you recognize him as a fascinating psychotic personality, but you identify with the vulnerable young FBI agent, Clarice, who must navigate the mind games of the imprisoned cannibal for clues to capture a serial killer. This identification has nothing to do with gender. Her problem—to pluck knowledge out of danger—involves the audience, and makes them feel concern for her predicament and want her to succeed.

The more subtle idea of character has to do with characteristics—the inner and outer nature of a person that define who they are. A writer has to give character to his characters. He has to differentiate them and give them identities that make sense for the story and the world in which they live. The audience has to believe in the characters. A writer has to create that believable reality in act and speech. To do that, a writer has to think about the name of the character, the character’s background and life story, so that he or she comes to life on the page and on the screen. That means hearing how the characters speak (what voice do they have?), seeing how they walk, and imagining their hopes and fears.

Dialogue and Action

The two engines of story are dialogue and action. Dialogue must not drive the story; rather, the story must drive the dialogue. When characters speak, they define who they are. Their words can also give forward momentum to the story. Dialogue spoken by characters must be essential to the plot and essential to their character. So when George Bailey makes his impassioned speech at the board meeting in It’s a Wonderful Life,¹ he expresses himself as a right-thinking, ethical character and sets in motion his own appointment to the Manager’s position of the savings and loan of Bedford Falls and the second frustration of his lifelong dream to travel, this time on his honeymoon.

The unit of composition in a screenplay is the scene. It has unity of time and place. Each scene must contribute to the necessary structure of the story. In the economy of the screenplay, a scene has to be a key moment. If it is not, it is not necessary and should not be there. If a scene can be defined as a key moment in the story, then the dialogue should be only what is necessary to carry the scene. It is no trouble to put words into the mouths of characters. Before you know it, your character is talking the screenplay and what is worse, talking the plot. As a rule, avoid having characters explain the plot; rather, let them speak from within the fiction. This goes back to Aristotle’s criticism of the deus ex machina as a device. If characters talk about the plot, it destroys conviction. This is a common fault in suspense and mystery dramas, which can only be resolved by someone explaining the ambiguities that result from tying the story in knots.

Characters interact with their environment or with other characters by making choices and doing things that have consequences. In fact, It’s a Wonderful Life turns on the choice to live or not to live (Hamlet’s “to be or not to be”). This moves the story forward. Events in nature or in history act on characters such that they must change or perhaps die. The action that takes place is not dependent on dialogue. In the best writing, dialogue complements action. Dialogue creates the understanding of action. Action creates the context for dialogue. Dialogue must advance the action or plot. They work together. Sometimes, dialogue is more important, sometimes action. In film, the narrative must be told by visual events as much as by the words characters speak.

When a character does speak, the dialogue must define something about the character, or at least be consistent with the character and appropriate to the moment. This brings us to a question of realism. Most people can write down words and phrases that are a plausible representation of the way people speak. The trouble is, the way people speak is usually long-winded, rambling, disjointed, repetitious, and boring. To check this out, take a tape recorder into the cafeteria. Listen to people conversing on a bus or subway. Listening in on a telephone conversation (cell phones sometimes give us no choice) reveals speech that is the opposite of film dialogue. It goes nowhere. So strict realism is going to kill the screenplay.

Dialogue in films and television has to be realistic, not real. That means characters have to speak in character, have to be believable, and have to sound as if they are real. In actual fact, such lines are carefully crafted and edited to carry the plot and to convince the audience from moment to moment that the illusion is reality. We expect a doctor in ER to talk like a doctor, or a nurse to talk like a nurse. We do not, for the sake of a moment, want to spend a day in a hospital hearing all the inconsequential utterances of an intern or ward physician. You can hang around a hospital emergency room for days and not experience anything that would be exciting enough for a television show. Perhaps you have had the misfortune to have to go to a hospital emergency room either for yourself or with someone else. It is really dull. To make an interesting television show about a hospital, you have to graft many separate moments together. You have to create an interaction of characters that will bridge imagination and reality. You exaggerate; you heighten; you intensify. If characters still get to say ordinary things, they do so while racing down the corridor with a gurney or answering the phone while looking at a lab workup on the patient.

What does movie dialogue do for the plot and the character? Compared to novels and even stage plays, movie dialogue is sparse. The reason should be apparent from the experience of going to the movies. The most successful way to tell a story on screen is by showing characters in situations or doing things that explain implicitly what is going on in the story, rather than showing characters jawboning with one another. When they do speak, the exchange has to be necessary to the moment, to the plot, and to the revelation of that character. So dialogue explains character, advances the plot, and clues in the audience.

One mistake beginners often make is to have characters make set speeches. Another is to gum up the forward motion of the movie with tedious small talk. It may be realistic and just the way people talk, but movies are not realistic. They condense life into key moments. Total realism would be unbearable. People have to sleep, eat, and go to the bathroom. They have to ride the subway, take a bus, or drive for half an hour to get somewhere. No one is going to pay money to see a truly realistic movie. Remember that Andy Warhol made an 8-hour movie of someone sleeping. That’s realism. You could not survive without sleep, but sleep is not entertainment. In fact, it is the opposite. We all use the expression, “puts me to sleep,” to register that something is the opposite of entertaining.

What we feel to be realistic is a true representation of a moment of human experience. We accept the moment of fear, the moment of doubt, the moment of emotional expression, or the embarrassment of a comic predicament as convincing. So from moment to moment, the prevailing style of movies is to craft dialogue to sound natural and to show characters in offices or homes that are plausible. If you analyze the moment, it is a key moment stripped of excess action and dialogue so that we understand in that moment what went before and what consequences are likely to follow. Most of what we are saying applies to television as well, with the exception of sitcoms.

On the other hand, the drive to condense plot and make dialogue as dramatically efficient as possible leads to a number of recognizable clichés. For example, detectives striding purposely through a building issue serious sounding orders, while another character enters and delivers a realistic comment about what forensics found out about the murder weapon, all shot in a sweeping, fast-moving Steadicam shot with background action that tells us we are in a police precinct. We end up in an office. The character grabs some coffee. The phone rings. A psychotic serial killer calls in a taunt. Trace that phone call! Or a new piece of information is delivered to set up the next stage of the plot. Rewrite the same cliché and we are in a hospital corridor going into emergency, going up the steps of a courtroom, striding through an office at the Pentagon, tracking into an airport disaster room, at a fire—you name it. That is not how it really happens. It is a movie and TV convention for condensing the action and the dialogue.

Think how movie dialogue writing evolved. It began as title cards for silent movies interspersed with images of characters or action. The words to be read by the audience had to capture key moments, key sentiments that would support the scene of intense looks and silently moving lips. From the beginning, movies had to reduce dialogue to the essential. If you compare older movies with today’s product, you generally find that they are verbose. With the invention of synchronized sound, the “talkies” seemed to lean on the theatrical tradition again. Actors who looked good, but couldn’t deliver a line, were replaced by actors capable of delivering dialogue, often trained in the theatre. Writers could go to town on the dialogue because hearing actors speak in lip sync while seeing them on screen was a novelty that exploited the new technology. Writing dialogue is an art. The words a character speaks can be ambiguous, nuanced, and mask who he or she really is. Such is the dialogue of Hannibal Lector, for instance, as is the dialogue of Hamlet.

The danger of dialogue is that you talk the plot. This frequently happens in suspense thrillers and murder mysteries in which the audience is kept guessing. There is frequently a key scene at the end in which the culprit is confronted and the hero talks through the explanation of how he figured out the truth. Columbo, the television series, consistently resolves the crime story in that way. You could argue that it was successful and that Peter Falk became a popular television character. Styles change. One of the great innovations in movie dialogue writing and delivery was brought about by Robert Altman through his movie, M^∗A^∗S^∗H (1970).²

Later, that movie was spun off into a television sitcom. Until M^∗A^∗S^∗H, characters spoke in turn. In real life, people hesitate, interrupt one another, talk at the same time, and overlap one another. Altman broke the old convention, and movies have never been the same since. We now hear more realistic speech with interruptions, half-finished thoughts, and speech fragments. We also get uninhibited vernacular speech that includes four letter words that were formerly anathema.

Filmmakers soon learned that it was more interesting to tell a story through action and images rather than theatrical speech. Early scriptwriters got the point.³ By contrast, in television soaps, most of the narrative is conveyed by duologues between two characters in medium shots and close-ups. They never stop talking. Talk is cheap. It just needs a few basic sets and a team of writers compared to movie locations and special effects, stunts, car wrecks, and exploding buildings. In the contemporary Hollywood movie, dialogue must carry its weight in describing character and advancing the story for the audience. This is particularly true of action films. Classic novels by writers such as Jane Austen and Henry James that are adapted for the screen usually allow lengthier dialogue. One reason is that green berets and kung-fu masters are not prone to extensive verbal communication, whereas a nineteenth-century lady or gentleman with an education is more eloquent. It fits the character. Then again, there are exceptions like Woody Allen films, which thrive on verbal interaction between characters. The Woody Allen talk is part of the character.

It’s easy to write dialogue. It’s hard to write good dialogue. Almost anybody can string together an exchange between characters. The difficult part is to develop an ear for the way words will play so that a character speaks consistently, so that an audience will believe in the character, and so that the lines don’t slow down the movie. Remember that words take up time. Lots of words take up lots of time. What is your character doing while speaking? The dialogue has to fit the action and the circumstance. It has to fit the character so that a college professor doesn’t talk like a shoe salesman, a teenager doesn’t talk like an adult, a Boston banker doesn’t talk like a Southern farmer. Not everybody can find the words that sound right. You have to be observant of people and develop an ear for speech. Since most stories involve conflict, struggle, love, revenge, mistakes, or comic embarrassment, dialogue often expresses emotions. Writers have to find the words that fit the emotion.

Plot or Storyline

The plot seems to be the mechanism that most of us see as the embedded structure of the screenplay and movie. It is somewhat like a skeleton. By itself it can’t stand up. It needs muscles and ligaments and a life force to animate the total organism. So the plot or storyline is one way of looking at the animal. What happens in what order? The way you arrange the sequence of scenes determines the way the story unfolds. That is important.

A plot is really the sequence of actions that traces out a progression of events. This constructed sequence distills the essence of life and shows us something about the way life works. When Polonius hides behind the arras or curtain to eavesdrop on Queen Gertrude’s meeting with Hamlet, he creates a circumstance that leads to Hamlet reacting defensively to stab him through the curtain, thinking or perhaps hoping that it is his uncle Claudius, murderer of his father. Because it is Polonius, the plot intensifies and complicates things for other characters. Laertes now has to avenge his father’s death. Hamlet has killed the father of the woman he probably loves but cannot acknowledge, Ophelia. Hamlet himself is now in greater danger because of his risky action. Claudius is very much alive and now fearful of Hamlet and therefore much more dangerous. So one action sends stress lines into every corner of the play. The tension is heightened. More action must follow. Choices and actions in life are usually less dramatic but the choices of yesterday lead us to where we are today. Even if characters are not tomb raiding, saving the world form asteroids, or trying to defuse a bomb, they are always making choices. The choices they make spring from their values and their nature as characters, which then lead to consequences, another scene, and so the story moves forward.

Comedy

Writing funny lines as you devise comic situations is another challenge. Comedy depends on action as well. Even if it is not slapstick action, it requires physical situations in which characters have to confront embarrassing situations and act in outrageous ways. Comedy requires conflict as much as tragedy. Whereas the tension that arises from conflict in tragedy is released in violence and suffering, the tension that arises from comedy is released in laughter. Silent film developed a visual vocabulary for comedy. Obviously, the slapstick traditions of vaudeville translated to film. The difference is that film had to develop stories not stage acts. The master of this new form, Charlie Chaplin, was writer, director, and star. In The Gold Rush (1925), the tramp is trapped inside a cabin in a snowstorm in Alaska with a huge, ugly fat man. They have no food. You could just as well imagine this premise as a survival drama. You have seen dozens of them on film and television. The big man starts seeing Chaplin as a meal, hallucinating that he is a large chicken. Chaplin sets about his own survival. He boils his boots for dinner and makes us laugh while he treats the shoelaces as spaghetti and sucks the nails like chicken bones.

Situations of physical danger lend themselves equally well to suspense that is dramatic and suspense that is hilarious. Later in The Gold Rush, the cabin is teetering on the edge of a cliff where it has been blown by the storm. The movement of the occupants threatens doom at every moment, obliging them to cooperate in order to escape. Some of you may have seen the Harold Lloyd silent comedy in which he is clinging to the hands of a clock on a clock tower. As the hands move, he is in constant danger of falling, but he miraculously avoids it. The line between comedy and drama is sometimes thin.

Drama

How many times have you seen a nail-biting scene in which the hero or heroine is hanging by one hand from a building or stuck in a wreck about to fall over a bridge or cliff? Then they slip and fall to the next ledge, or the rescuer seems like he cannot hold on. The scene is milked for suspense, but you don’t laugh like you do at Harold Lloyd. Why? There’s the difference between comedy and drama. Such a scene is written and played for tension and suspense. The premise is identical to the premise for comic disaster. Drama means conflict, high emotion, and usually action. Suspense drama turns heavily on plot. The consequences of action are critical for life and death, success or failure, so that we worry about what will happen. In comedy, the consequences of action are also critical, but we are allowed to laugh at the victim who represents all of us faced with the indignities of life. Although the premise of comedy and drama may be similar, the outcome is always different— happy as opposed to serious. How is the writing different? Dialogue and character weigh heavily in pushing the concept one way or the other. Comedy requires gags and overreaction. Drama requires tension and conflict.

Although most movies are adapted from some source work, the glory of the medium is the original screenplay. Writing directly for the screen is a great craft and difficult to do well. Citizen Kane (1941) is one of the greatest original screenplays ever. It was written by Herman J. Mankiewicz and Orson Welles. Lawrence Kasdan is an accomplished writer/director. His Body Heat (1981) is a flawless murder-mystery thriller. Jane Campion wrote and directed The Piano (1993) to international acclaim. One of the true talents of movie writing in America is Paul Schrader. His writing and directing credits are numerous and include the original screenplay for Martin Scorsese’s classic Taxi Driver (1976).⁴ My favorite is Mishima (1985), about love and honor in a cross-cultural love affair in Japan involving an ex-GI. Don’t forget to read William Goldman’s original screenplay of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), published in Adventures in the Screen Trade,⁵ which tells you a lot about working realities for writers in Hollywood.

When you go to the movies, you should watch the screen credits and see who the writer is. See whether it is an original screenplay. Pay attention to the writer and to the writing talent that makes movies possible. Don’t be one of those vulgarians who walk out as soon as the credits come on. Although the audience remembers the actors, whose lines we write, maybe the director, whose story we create, they rarely remember the writer. The basis of every movie is a script. Every script is the work of a writer.

Conclusion

In conclusion, film writing wants to exploit the large screen and the impact of surround sound and to narrate through action rather than dialogue. Writing visually is essential to good film writing. You compose narration out of images. Your story, its characters, and its world live for two hours through the collaboration of vast numbers of talented people in front of and behind the camera who bring the script to life. Film scripts are composed of scenes. Whether films are viewed on the big screen, television, video, or DVD, the experience is not exactly the same. Although films are shown on television all the time, other types of entertainment programming are produced for television only. Writing for television has its own issues and requires its own chapter. Before considering television writing issues, we should look at the problem of adaptation. It is an important way to understand scriptwriting and an important way to learn how to write for the screen.

Exercises

1. Write a three-to five-minute scene without dialogue that tells the audience that one character is in love with another. You can explore variations such as one character being in love, but the other rejecting that love.

2. Write a three-to five-minute scene that builds suspense and anticipation.

3. Write a three-to five-minute scene in which no character is allowed more than one line of dialogue.

4. Record a real conversation in the cafeteria or some other public space. Transcribe five minutes of it on paper in screenplay format. See what realism is. Now try to edit the dialogue down to one minute.

5. Edit and rewrite the dialogue you recorded in Exercise 4 to create comedy.

6. Edit and rewrite the dialogue you recorded in Exercise 4 to create drama.

7. Find a novel that has been made into a film and write an analysis of how it has changed for better or worse in the film medium.