Chapter 9

Writing Techniques for Long-Form Scripts

 

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 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.

Previously, we said that a writer is paid for thinking as much as for writing. We mean by this that the quality of the meta-writing or thinking that underlies the writing determines the quality of the final product. 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 that scriptwriters have to think about and for which they have to execute technically the finished working documents 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 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 discussed in the previous chapter under genre.

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’s creature! 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 American Civil War. The entire Batman series is about a struggle between a protagonist, Batman, and his adversary, the Joker. 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)? 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 defines who they are. Writers have to give character to their characters. They have to differentiate their characters and give them identities that make sense for the story and the world in which the characters 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 (what is their physical appearance?), 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 environments 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 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 informs the audience. Visual narrative is key to writing for the moving picture medium.

In the Godfather (1972), there is a great moment of American cinema that illustrates visual narrative without dialogue and narrative condensation by means of the quintessentially cinematic technique of cross-cutting parallel, simultaneous storylines. It also illustrates one way visual narration condenses action. The master scene is the christening of Michael Corleone’s sister’s baby in a large church. Michael Corleone is going to stand as Godfather to the baby, but during the ceremony will become godfather in the mafia sense as all the rival gang leaders are assassinated and his family’s honor revenged. The sequence intercuts the intricate ritual of baptism with its unguents and intoning of the sacrament in Latin with the ritual preparation for the several assassinations. Priestly actions in the baptism correspond to preparations by the various hit men; applying holy oil to mark the baby’s forehead cuts to a barber applying shaving cream to the face of one of the assassins; or a gesture of the priest corresponds to assembling a weapon. The only dialogue is the Latin ceremonial and the ritual questions put to the godfather. The pace quickens when we cut from the question “do you renounce Satan?” and the answer “I do renounce him” to the targeted victims being gunned down. It is a masterpiece of American cinema because of the writing that organizes the narrative to make Michael Corleone at once godfather in both senses, underlines the meaning of family in both senses, and creates the moral and ethical context in which we see the story as a world of hypocrisy, duplicity, and internecine murder, which leads to Michael alienating his wife and killing his brother.

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—whether in offices, crime scenes 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 stride 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 with a sweeping, fast-moving Steadicam track showing 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. You could sit for days in a police station and be bored out of your wits. 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 between scenes. The words to be read by the audience had to capture key moments, key sentiments that would support the scene of intense looks and silenüy 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 simulating madness to fool his uncle and Polonius.

The danger of dialogue is that you talk the plot. This frequenüy happens in suspense thrillers and murder mysteries in which the audience is kept guessing. There is frequenüy a key scene at the end in which the hero confronts the culprit and then talks through the explanation of how he figured out the truth. The old television series Columbo consistently resolves the crime story in that way, as does Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot in the TV series and movies based on the famous detective novels. You could argue that it was successful and that Peter Falk became a popular television character. Styles change. Now you get it in CSI. Robert Altman brought about one of the great innovations in movie dialogue writing and delivery in 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 expressive. It fits the character. There are other 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 car salesman, a teenager doesn’t talk like an adult, and 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. Because 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 understanding a screenplay. 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 comer 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

As Sam Goldwyn once said, “Our comedies are not to be laughed at.” Writing funny lines as you devise comic situations presents another kind of 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.

Comic Devices

Almost any comic device can also be a tragic device. Aristotle contrasted tragedy and comedy by saying that one makes characters look greater or better than they are in real life and the other makes them look worse. Almost all of them can be found in Shakespeare’s plays. Even the hoary cliché of the comic spectacle of drunkenness is there. See Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Nightand the Watchman in Macbeth.We have comedy inside tragedy—the fool in King Lear.And we have tragedy and cruelty inside comedy—Malvolio in Twelfth Nightor Shylock in the Merchant of Venice.By studying comedy and how it works, we hope we improve our comic writing. It must help to identify certain devices that underlie the comic experience.

The Comic Character as Victim

The comic character can be a physical victim or a victim of circumstance; we can call this the character as victim. Silent film relied on physical comedy, and physical comedy works. In Modern Times (1936) (see the website), Chaplin is selected from the production line to test the new feeding machine that a vendor is trying to sell to the factory owner that will allow workers to eat on the job and put an end to lunch breaks. Chaplin is strapped in and eager to eat, but the machine starts to malfunction and the corncob holder spins out of control until Chaplin stops it with his nose. The soup is thrown in his face. The spectacle of Chaplin desperate to get a bite of this food, which is mechanically delivered too fast or out of range, makes you weak with laughter. The audience empathizes with the hunger, the enjoyment of food and the frustration. Then there is the spaghetti fight in the official dinner in the Great Dictator (1940). In Lost in Translation (2003), Bill Murray is forced to run faster and faster on an out-of-control stepping machine. In the hospital scene in Something’s Gotta Give (2003), Jack Nicholson gets out of his hospital bed and wanders around in a hospital gown that shows his bare butt just as his women friends are arriving to visit. He is oblivious, but we are not.

Verbal Comedy

In Lost in Translationthe Japanese director of the whiskey commercial Bill Murray’s character is making yells cut and then gives a long speech of direction. The American actor played by Bill Murray and we, the audience, wait with baited breath to find out what this is all about. The Japanese production assistant then translates it in a single sentence: “He wants you to turn to the camera.” Then there is another minute of Japanese direction and discussion with the production assistant. And she then turns to him and conveys the direction: “with intensity.” Bill Murray’s character says, “Is that all? He must have said more than that.” The anticipation of what the Japanese means is given a comic anticlimax in the short simple direction. We laugh at the contrast. The dialogue gag enriches the situation, and the dialogue gag works because of the situation. For the most part this bittersweet film depends on the visual irony of putting characters in background and letting us see how alienated they are. The comedy is situational. The alienation and culture shock is a fundamental driver of the plot.So mis-communication because of language, whether it is foreign language or emotional language (between Scarlett Johansson’s character and her husband and between Bill Murray’s character and his wife on the other end of the phone and fax), makes the comedy. The screenplay by Sofia Coppola won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay in 2003.

In The Devil Wears Prada (2006), the tyrannical magazine editor treats her assistants like dirt and the new girl played by Anne Hathaway disappoints her. So she says petulantly something like, I thought I would take a chance on the “smart fat girl.” The deadpan amazement on Anne Hathaway’s face, seen in close-up, is masterful comic acting. The expression validates the line, which is itself hilarious because Anne Hathaway is not fat but amazingly beautiful. Meryl Streep understates the comedy and allows the audience in. It is a good example of a well-scripted line validated by great acting, authoritative directing, and perfectly timed editing.

Running Gag

A running gag is comic setup that because it has been introduced to the audience as a premise for humor keeps working over and over again. The repetition enhances and enriches the comedy. Some Like it Hot (1959), written by I. A. L. Diamond and Billy Wilder, is one of the great movie comedies of all time. You could argue that the premise of the movie is a running gag. Two musicians who unwittingly witnessed the St, Valentine’s Day Massacre in Chicago are pursued by hit men from the mob who wants to eliminate all witnesses. The musicians disguise themselves as women and join an allgirl band going to a gig in Miami. Cross-dressing is a kind of running gag itself and also a mistaken identity device. Every encounter between Sugar, played by Marilyn Monroe, and the musicians, played by Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon, reinvigorates the running gag. They are sleeping in the midst of a railroad car full of women in nightgowns. They want to make out but have to preserve their disguise in the sleeping car. Then in Miami, when a millionaire falls for Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis assumes the identity of the same millionaire to woo Sugar, the gag gets richer and funnier because it is building on what we, the audience,already know. When Jack Lemmon steps into the elevator with Joe E. Brown as the millionaire, we cut to the floor indicator. The door opens again and Jack Lemmon slaps him for getting fresh. The comedic moment depends on this running gag.

The Cover-Up/Impersonation

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day (2008) follows the misfortunes of Guinevere Pettigrew in what is called screwball comedy. A vicar’s daughter, governess, and nanny, who has been fired from several jobs and dropped by her agency, sneaks a job file from the office and meets her new employer, a flighty ambitious American singer masquerading as a star. This character played by Amy Adams immediately recruits her into an elaborate and frantic scheme to juggle her simultaneous relationships with three men. The comedy of the cover-up into which Guinevere is thrust also involves her covering up her real identity as a nanny and pretending to be a social secretary. The excitement of the comedy for the audience is the unpredictable and precarious nature of each scene and its unknown outcome. In this comedy as in most cover-up plots, the truth must out to resolve the premise. Set in period before the outbreak of World War II in London, each character finds a truth and an identity that lifts the coverup. Cover-ups can be plot based or transitory comic devices that drive a scene.

Two cross-dressing impersonation movies—Tootsie (1982) and Mrs. Doubtfire (1993)—deserve mention because the plot of each depends on the audience understanding that the main character is a man pretending to be a woman. In the case of Mrs. Doubtfire, the comedy is also poignant because the character has adopted this disguise so that he can be with his children who are in the custody of the divorced mother.

The Marx Brothers made some great comic films that almost always turn on some kind of cover-up. In A Day at the Races (1937), Groucho plays Hugo Z. Hackenbush, a horse veterinarian who pretends to be the doctor of a sanatorium that is going bankrupt. Groucho doing medical exams is so funny it hurts. A Night at the Opera (1935) was scripted by a major American comic writer, George S. Kaufman.

The plot is too complicated to summarize but involves Groucho masquerading as a business manager Otis P. Driftwood with his accomplices who are friends of two opera singers who they want to help, now enabled by a rich sodal-climbing benefactress that Groucho has seduced. It starts in Milan and unfolds aboard ship where the accomplices and the aspiring operas singers are stowaways. When the stowaways hide in Groucho’s cabin to evade ship’s officers, it is another laugh-till-you-cry scene.This kind of zany whacky comedy seems to be nothing more than a romp, but all comedy conceals a meaning that is, for want of a better word, serious. Very few people are genuine. We all put on faces, behaviors to conform to what we think employers, friends, and lovers want to gain approval, success, or fulfill ambitions. We all masquerade, pretend, and cover-up who we really are.

Disguise and Mistaken Identity

Disguise is a variant of the cover-up. Mistaken identity is when cover-up happens in spite of the characters, and the character doesn’t know. We can call on Some Like it Hotagain to illustrate disguise. The cross-dressing is essentially a form of disguise. It has a wholly different meaning in The Crying Game (1992), in which an IRA defector fleeing to London looks up the girlfriend of the British soldier he had to guard, becomes attracted to her, and finds out that she is in fact a transvestite. In a previous chapter, we mentioned Twelfth Night, which turns on the transvestite disguise of Viola, which then leads to many comic complications. She falls in love with the duke for whom she is the love messenger but cannot reveal her true gender. She is mistaken for her brother Sebastian, which gets her into a sword fight with Sir Andrew Aiguecheek that they both desperately try to avoid. The entire plot of Shakespeare’s early Comedy of Errorsis based on an old premise from Latin comedy of twins being taken for one another and confusing those around them and the twins themselves. It is hard to top Shakespeare.

Burn After Reading (2008) involves a hilarious misunderstanding that the manuscript of a memoir of an ex-CIA agent is a secret document that can be used to get reward money. Every character in this movie misunderstands and mistakes every other character for someone else until finally the CIA agrees to finance Linda Litzke’s plastic surgery makeover if she promises to keep quiet about a train of events and murders that they do not understand. Consider Never Been Kissed (1999), in which Drew Barrymore plays a reporter pretending to be a high school student to do an undercover story, or Miss Congeniality (2000), in which Sandra Bullock trying to be a tough guy FBI agent has to go undercover as a beauty queen to prevent a terrorist plot against the Miss America beauty pageant, or the original screenplay of Dave (1993), in which a character who looks like the president of the United States (who is seriously ill) is persuaded to fill in for him and govern the country. The Master of Disguise (2002) is comedy thriller whose title incorporates the comic premise itself. We’ll finish with a remake of a Humphrey Bogart movie Were No Angels (1989) in which two escaped convicts disguise themselves as priests to get to the Canadian border and freedom.

Dramatic Irony

A simple kind of dramatic irony occurs when the audience knows more than the character or characters in the novel, play, or movie. So their actions or words have a meaning to us that is more complex than it is to them. Again, Some Like It Hotprovides a comic example Because we know that Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon are men disguising themselves as women, we know something none of the girl band knows, but particularly Sugar and the Florida Millionaire. Without this knowledge, the comedy wouldn’t work.

Burn After Reading (2008) also involves dramatic irony in that each character does not know what we know. So we see them working at cross-purposes. Chad, played by Brad Pitt, is shot by the treasury agent played by George Clooney when he discovers him in his closet and assumes he is a spy because he has no identification. So Chad, the innocent gym instructor who thinks he and Linda have found secret documents, ends up being caught up in a CIA drama even though it is all a complete and total misunderstanding on the part of all players. In fact, most comedies depend on dramatic irony that requires the character to know less than the audience about his or her own situation.

Drama

Almost any dramatic device can be turned to comedy, and almost any comic device can be turned to 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 hanging from the hands of a clock. Why? There’s the difference between comedy and drama. In 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, tension, and overreaction. Drama requires tension, conflict, and understatement.

Cover-up/Mistaken Identity

Cover-up and mistaken identity are usually essential to much detective fiction and many crime thrillers. Someone innocent is taken to be guilty. There is even film whose premise, our topic, is its title— Mistaken Identity (1999), also called Switched at Birth, a title that was used three times in the silent era. Two mothers find out that their babies were accidentally switched in the maternity ward. The same premise allowed Mark Twain in Pudd’nhead Wilson to explore the thesis that character and social status derive from conditioning in a story that revolves around the new science of fingerprinting. A light-skinned slave and his master’s son are again accidentally switched in the cradle so that the scion of the plantation grows up as a slave and the Negro slave grows up to be a cruel plantation owner. In Mark Twain’s hands, this premise is a devastating condemnation of slavery and racial prejudice.

Disguise

The Wolf disguises himself as Grandma in Little Red Riding Hood. Almost all the comic book superheroes-Batman, Superman, and Spiderman—go in disguise. Superman disguises himself as reporter Clark Kent, but Batman is a disguise for Bruce Wayne. V (2003) is about a masked avenger. Then there is the old Saturday movie serial hero Zorro, subsequently made into feature films. The Man in the Iron Mask, a novel by Alexander Dumas, which brings the premise into the title, has been made into a movie several times, most recently in 1998. The Mask (1994) again brings the premise into the title with Jim Carrey playing a timid character who finds a mask that transforms him into a daring and powerful character opposite to his reality. Horror films that play with the Halloween theme often use the mask and disguise as a suspense and frightener device: Scream (1996), Halloween: Resurrection (2002) and its predecessors, 2008 (2009) and its predecessors. All vampire movies basically turn on disguise. The vampire looks human and has human form but has another identity that is in conflict with human nature. Interview with the Vampire (1994) and recently Twilight (2008) discovers the disguise for the audience.

Dramatic Irony

Dramatic irony occurs when words or actions mean something different to the audience and the character. Dramatic irony that is not comic in effect but an intensifier of drama, suspense, and tension is central to Little Red Riding Hood. We know that the Wolf knows where she is going. We know that the Wolf has eaten Grandma and is waiting for Little Red Riding Hood. She doesn’t. Every horror film and suspense thriller depends on dramatic irony. We watch knowingly as a character walks into a trap, a situation of danger or sometimes the opposite, a situation of triumph. The most powerful dramatic irony in tragedy is Oedipus. A man unknowingly kills his father and marries his mother.

We were just discussing horror movies. Almost every horror movie you have ever seen involves a key moment of dramatic irony when a character, usually a female victim, walks into a trap or into danger that we, the audience, know is there because of a prior shot of the lurking monster/rapist/slasher. The device is often used in suspense thrillers and caper movies.

The Bank Job (2008), a brilliant script that tells the story of true events, is about a 1971 bank robbery in London that was never prosecuted because the government wanted to cover-up scandalous photos of a member of the royal family that were in the bank vaults that were looted. It is monitored by MI5, the British secret service, who convinces a woman that she won’t be charged if she helps them to recover the pictures. She gets an old flame, a shady car dealer, to put together a gang to tunnel into the bank vault. The irony is not only that they don’t know that they have been put up to the job, but it is heightened when they get off scot-free when caught in the act because the scandal would threaten VIPs in government and the royal family.

In Bruges (2008) involves two hit men who are sent to Bruges in Belgium to wait for orders. Meanwhile they become out-of-place tourists interacting with a range of characters from a dwarf actor shooting a film, to a woman selling drugs, to the people on the set, to a hotel manager. The film ends in a bloody climax in which one of them, in carrying out a hit, kills an innocent boy. The characters are in a world that they do not understand, and they do not even know why they are there. The dark comedy turns into strong suspense because we learn with the characters why they are there and who their controller is.

Doubt (2008) is a title with a double meaning. It refers to the doubt that the Meryl Streep character has after destroying the career of the priest she accuses of pederasty, and it refers to the doubt that we, the audience, experience because we are momentarily receptive to her conviction but finally we are uncertain and left in doubt.

Ambition/Pride

Hubrisis the Greek word for that delusion of invincibility or being in control that is pride, which goeth before a fall. The spectacle of human beings convinced that they are in control of their own destiny or of an ego that cannot give way has an implicit dramatic premise. Tragic characters are deluded into thinking that they are masters of their own destiny. Spiritual teaching, both East and West tells us that “thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory.” Many use the expression “What goes around, comes around.” This is karma, the Vedic understanding that there is a law of cause and effect in the actions of human beings that plays out over more than one lifetime. Drama requires action and consequence to play out in a single lifetime, such as when Macbeth murders his liege lord out of ambition, showing a fundamentally good man who makes a bad choice. Frost/Nixon (2008) explores the downfall of a president who was impeached. There Will Be Blood (2008) explores the ambition of a man who wants to annihilate his competitors and be the king of oil.

Challenge and Survival

Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) is a classic story of greed about a down-and-out American in Mexico who teams up with a prospector who has a gold claim that needs to be worked. Once they mine enough gold to be rich for life, they then have to get it back to town to sell it. They have both inner and outer challenges. But this is also a story of greed for a category we discuss later. La Vie en Rose (2007) is the real-life story of Edith Piaf who basically survived an orphaned existence on the streets of Paris and became a beloved music hall singer. The Wrestler (2008) tells the story of a down-and-out wrestler who has lost his family, his daughter, and his friends and struggles to survive in ignominious jobs until he decides to make a final comeback against all medical advice. He dies in the attempt to claim his only identity. Gladiator (2000) shows us a character who, despite a terrible loss of status, wife, and children, learns to survive and confront his tormentor. Jurassic Park (1993) turns into a drama of challenge and survival as soon as the park structure fails and the visitors are at the mercy of the genetically engineered dinosaurs that inhabit the island. Slumdog Millionaire (2009), which won the Oscar for Best Picture, tells the story of a slum orphan who wins a “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” million by turning his fantastic life experiences into knowledge and insight that enables him to answer the questions. Some survival stories lead to loss and suffering; others lead to triumph. In Dances with Wolves (1990) there is a temporary triumph in the flight and escape of the Sioux and Lieutenant John Dunbar before the U.S. Cavalry, but we know the ultimate fate of Native Americans; so it is a temporary survival.

Greed

Greed is one of the seven deadly sins. The pursuit of money and material things and the craving for wealth is a common denominator that any audience understands. In fact, the other six sins are a pretty good source of drama too: lust, gluttony, sloth, wrath, envy, and pride.

Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) begins with a down-and-out American losing a lottery with his last peso. Later, after becoming rich beyond his wildest dreams with two others up in the mountains, they fall into a paranoid state of suspicion about each other. Each fears that the others will kill him and take his share of the gold. It is based on a classic morality tale in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales told by the Pardoner. There Will Be Blood (2007), based on Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil,is about a ruthless dominating character who cheats people out of their oil rights as he build an oil empire and great wealth. He loses his only son and gains nothing but emptiness and loneliness.

Wall Street (1987) is a classic story of greed. There is the famous line by Gecko, the film’s corporate raider: “Greed is good.” So this film focuses on greed as a phenomenon that motivates ambitious financial operators whom many want to emulate. It is suddenly relevant to the present day in which essentially greed and speculative fever brought down the American and world banking systems and brought about the worst recession since the Great Depression.

Love Gone Wrong

We all know Romeo and Julietas the classic story of love gone tragically wrong. In this case, the world around the two lovers conspires to frustrate their union. Sylvia (2003) is the true story of the love and marriage of the American poet Sylvia Plath to the English poet Ted Hughes, the disintegration of their relationship, and her eventual suicide. The Lover (1992) adapts a novel by the French novelist Marguérite Duras, which is a recollection of a tragic love between her as a teenage girl and an older, wealthy Chinese man. They are divided by culture, race, and class. It is a powerful story of loss that haunts two lives. The lyrics of an old French song express it: the pleasure of love lasts but a moment; the pain of love lasts a lifetime.

Although Doubt (2008) is not about carnal love but spiritual love, it is nevertheless relevant because the caring of the priest accused by the head of the convent school of perverting a young black boy is probably a true expression of love, agapenot eros.The Greeks had a distinction between erotic love and love that does not have a sexual dimension that is precious to human beings: the love of parents for children, of siblings for one another, of children for grandparents, and of friends for one another.

The Duchess (2008) is a biographical portrait of a woman who finds herself in a loveless marriage to the richest and most powerful duke of eighteenth-century England. She must find the strength to bring up children, endure his mistress, and renounce her love of a future Prime Minister of England for the sake of her children.

Desire/Lust

Everyone understands desire. We mentioned lust as one of the seven deadly sins. Whether desire is a sin is a religious question, but it is certainly an inevitable component of human lives and a cause of endless pain and drama as well as a certain amount of happiness. In comedy, we imagine the happy outcome of this force of attraction. In drama, we confront the ways in which this hormonally driven emotion enters our lives and unleashes possessiveness, jealousy, pain, and even hate when love is spurned or rejected. The Lover (1992) expresses truthfully the strength of desire as a driver in human relationships. It is different because the characters know they are doomed. The girl deliberately destroys their potential for love until at the end she realizes that she really loved and was loved. Not many Hollywood films can go the distance with this kind of story. Great works of literature such as Flaubert’s Madame Bovaryor Tolstoy’s Anna Kareninadeal with destructive adulterous love. Anna Kareninahas been filmed for movies and television at least a dozen times. Adulterous love induces an instant situation of conflict, which can only resolve with unhappiness of one kind or another because it can involve up to four people and any number of children. Nevertheless, it happens over and over again in real life and in the movies.

Body Heat (1981), an original screenplay written by Laurence Kasdan, shows how a man can be set up by seduction into killing a woman’s husband so that she can inherit his wealth, even though there is no intention on her part to continue the relationship.

Controversy surrounded 91/2 Weeks (1986), which explores eroticism and desire as a force of attraction and seduction without romance. The film involves a wealthy businessman who captivates a young, recently divorced woman. It tests extremes of trust and goes where most American films don’t go. The most radical exploration of desire as an all-consuming force of almost any film ever made is Japanese director Oshima’s In the Realm of the Senses (1976). Initially banned in North America, it chronicles the true story of obsessive love and desire that leads to sexual mutilation and death by strangulation because the character seeks greater extremes of sexual pleasure. A weaker version of this theme would be Madonna’s role as a woman charged with knowingly murdering a man by causing him to have a heart attack during extreme sex in Body of Evidence (1993). She later seduces her defense lawyer, who then is forced to question the innocence he is defending. Two Lovers (2008) shows us a young man who misses the loving woman right under his nose and whom his family wants him to marry pursuing a more complex, mixed-up woman who is in a destructive affair with a married man. In Elegy (2008), an older man who is a professor makes advances to an attractive female student but does not have the courage to follow through when she responds. Lolita, the novel by Nabokov, was made into a movie twice—in 1962 with James Mason and in 1997 with Jeremy Irons. It tells the tragic attraction that a professor of French has for the daughter of the woman at whose house he boards because she recapitulates his teenage love who died. It becomes an increasingly destructive relationship, initiated by the 15-year-old Lolita. The Reader (2008) explores the initiation into sexual love of a young teenager by an older woman who has him read to her. We find out that she is illiterate. Iin her trial for being a prison guard under the Nazi regime and party to a massacre, she refuses to save herself by revealing her illiteracy. The young man doesn’t speak up to save her. While she is in prison, she learns to read from the audio books he sends her.

Although most movies discussed here are adapted from another 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), written by Herman J. Mankiewicz and Orson Welles, is one of the greatest original screenplays ever written. 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 screenplay. Every screenplay is the work of a writer.

Writing Techniques for Adaptation

Let us reprise a point we made in Chapter 1 while working up an understanding of visual writing, the kind of writing that is special to the screen. We used Hemingway’s novel A Farewell to Arms to show the difference between prose fiction and screen writing by asking how we would translate the opening descriptive paragraph into a screenplay. We were showing the difference between two types of writing, two types of storytelling. We now need to look at a much bigger issue, which grows out of that initial problem of what you represent in a scene when you adapt a source work for filming. We need to deal with techniques of adaptation.

In the entertainment world, writers are frequently called on to adapt their own or someone else’s work, but adaptation also happens to be a really instructive exercise for the beginner; it can help the beginner learn how to write for the screen and discover the art of visual writing. Adapting can be one of the best ways to appreciate what screen writing is and, by the same token, what prose fiction is. If the storyline and the characters already exist, then the writer can concentrate on the problem of key moments and the 2-hour continuum of the movie.

The Problem of Adaptation

Adaptation presents a special problem of translating one medium to another. Shakespeare, the master dramatist, was also a master adapter. Most of his plays drew from existing literary works. The parallel between the new medium of Elizabethan theater and the new medium of film is revealing. Although many great screenplays have been written originally for the screen, it is probably safe to say that most movies that we see are adapted from source works. They can be novels, short stories, stage plays, musicals, epics, fairy tales, and folk tales. You might think that a play is easy to adapt to film because it is made up of dialogue and action, but in a play, action takes place on a stage. A movie cannot just film a stage, although that is how many early silent movies were shot. People thought in terms of watching performance on a proscenium stage. It didn’t take long for someone to figure out that you could move the camera and liberate the actors from painted scenery. Then camera angles were invented, which necessarily led to the art of cutting shots.

Although the original screenplay is, in a way, the glory of the medium, producers and movie studios look to properties that have succeeded with audiences in other media as a form of insurance. Producing and distributing movies is a high-risk business. Producers will look for any way to reduce the odds and increase the likelihood of recovering their investment. A best-selling novel has a readymade audience. A Broadway hit has a prior reputation that helps to sell the movie. Successful new works in the theater or in print come with a price. Getting the rights to a John Grisham novel involves competitive bidding against other producers. So the insurance of buying a pre-sold audience and a ready-made story increases production costs and obliges the producers to share profits with the original writer. Increased production costs then demand the security of box office stars and known directors, what is known in Hollywood as “Alist talent,” which increases the production cost yet again.

For these reasons and because the rights are in the public domain, producers also look to classic works from Homer, through Shakespeare, to Dickens, and other classic writers. Not only are their stories in the public domain and therefore free, but they have withstood the test of time and held audiences’attention for generation after generation. The ready-made audience is proven. The trade-off is that it may be a smaller audience that is educated and literate, rather than the worldwide popular audience that does not read or does not know the great works of literature. The other element that sometimes dampens enthusiasm for these stories is that they are set in the historical past. This does not always appeal to audiences who have an appetite for seeing contemporary life reflected in the movies.

Period movies involve costumes, locations, and props that considerably increase the cost of production. In 1995, Jonathon Swift’s satirical work Gulliver’s Travelswas turned into a television miniseries. The producers took advantage of modern computer-generated special effects. However, they introduced a shell story not in the original, in which Gulliver has a son and a wife who want him back. When he returns and is condemned as a madman, the son saves him by finding some of the miniature animals from Lilliput in their luggage. It tampers with the author’s intention and sentimentalizes the final satire that has Gulliver preferring the company of horses (Houyhnhnms) to humans and going to live in a stable.

In the 1990s, producers discovered the works of Jane Austen and Henry James, two authors whose novels are not mass audience fare. Yet both authors have subtlety and texture that is surprisingly modern and cinematic. Hidden emotional forces in the lives of their characters can be portrayed in the visual language of cinema. Implied sexuality can be more readily understood in looks and gestures. Consider the film adaptations of The Wings of the Dove (1997) and The Portrait of a Lady (1996). Filmmakers can find contemporary values in old stories. Jane Austen’s struggling and independent female characters can make contemporary interest in the changing role of women all the more poignant because of the social strictures of early nineteenth-century England or the conventions of social behavior in Golden Age America. Films such as Pride and Prejudice (1940 and again in 2005), Sense and Sensibility (1995), and Emma (1996) have won Oscars and have been remade several times since the invention of film and television.

Here is the author’s adaptation of a scene from Henry James’ Daisy Miller. Let us look at two versions to see how and why dialogue works and doesn’t work in adaptation.

The fault in the writing is that Mrs. Walker asks two questions. Winterbourne then answers them in series. It would be better to revise it as follows to facilitate the flow of dialogue:

On the other hand, when Mrs. Miller speaks, her voluble aimless recitation is not a conversation. She has no social sense. While she rants on about her health, the camera shows Winterbourne trying to contain his boredom, his furtive glances at Daisy talking to someone else, and the leaping about of the restless Randolph, her 12-year-old brother.

Length

Movies and television play in real time. A minute is a minute on screen. The movie narrative has a time limit. A paragraph or a page has no fixed time value. A novel can condense time and expand time. It can pack into descriptive prose numerous locations and casts of characters that would cripple a movie budget. Also, the novelist can describe characters and express their thoughts by means of the omniscient narrator. So the first problem of adaptation is to find a visual and action storyline that is not dependent on the omniscient narrator. In general, source works are longer than the movie can be because prose narrative is, in certain ways, more efficient than narration in visual media, which depends on action. Short stories and novellas generally make a better transition to the screen. A case in point is the classic western High Noon (1952). The screenplay was written by Carl Foreman, adapted from a Collier’s magazine story “The Tin Star” (by John W. Cunningham), published in December 1947. The film is better than the original story.

Point of View

Some readers might have tried their hand at prose fiction, either short story or novel. It is quickly apparent that the writer of fiction has options that the screen writer does not. The most important of these is the narrative point of view. Prose narrative must have a point of view. Although Melville’s Bartleby, for example, is narrated in the first person from the point of view of a single character and the way he perceives events, the most common style of narration for the novel is usually referred to as the omniscient or third-person narrator. The writer can see everything and know the thoughts of all the characters. The writer can write objective description that sets time, mood, and place without reference to a character’s point of view. Or the writer can describe what a character sees and thinks as well as put lines of dialogue in the character’s mouth. This flexibility is part of the richness of fiction as a form. In some ways it is easier to write fiction because of the versatility of its narrative devices. Writing for the screen means, similar to the theater, confining the narrative to a certain duration. The story must be told within a time frame defined by the medium. We have all seen movies of a book we have read and felt the disappointment that the movie is not as good as the book. A movie can never be like the book because it is a different medium. Parts of the novel have to be left out. A novel can luxuriate in passages of description and describe the inner thoughts of characters in omniscient third-person narrative. For the film adaptation, however, the plot usually has to be tightened up. Sometimes the setting has to be changed. And a novel that one can read in 10 or 20 hours has to play in 2 hours.

The question of point of view is important for movies because the camera must point one way or another for every shot. As an optical recording instrument, it necessarily creates a literal point of view. The viewer cannot see anything other than that which is included in the frame. In some ways, this makes the medium powerful because it is concrete and because it creates emphasis. On the other hand, it also limits what the audience can see and experience by placing a specific image in the viewer’s consciousness and excluding all others.

Narrative Tense and Screen Time

After point of view, the second great variable is the narrative tense. A novel can weave in and out of present time, but a movie camera narrates in the present tense because what we see is necessarily present time.⁶ So screenwriters have to think in terms of seeing and hearing what characters do and say in front of us. We cannot represent their thoughts in the same way that a novelist does. We can only show them by action and reaction in situations. We have to narrate by means of key moments. A novelist can write in the past tense (which is the most common), can write in the present tense, or, to a degree, and with care, can even change tenses, depending on the point of view. This cannot happen in film unless you admit the flashback to be a tense change. Even in a flashback, the camera films in the present tense, as it were, and the viewer experiences the past now.

In some films, the manipulation of tenses of time relative to the main time of the story can become confusing. Viewers know when the story is in the past and when it is in the present. Some films create confusion when playing with chronological order. This is not the case with prose fiction. The signposts are usually unambiguous. This is probably because some of the time shifts in film are created by editing in postproduction. Memento (2000) comes to mind, even though the premise of the film posits a character with short-term memory loss.

Setting and Period

The first issue that comes up concerns setting. Do you do the piece in period? Or do you transpose the story to another time? Is the story attached to its time? These questions came very much to the fore in adapting Bartleby. The question was whether an audience in the 1970s would respond to this story if it were set in a legal office in the New York of a century before. Could the timeless element of the story be transposed to the modern day and thereby reveal a meaning that many would not recognize in a setting of frock coats and quill pens? The passive resistance, the portrait of a loner who would not cooperate with an employer or with social norms, seemed intensely relevant to a post- Vietnam world of political protest and a generation of youth who did not buy into the social contract. The story seemed to be a commentary on the contemporary social phenomenon of the dropout. There were hundreds of Bartlebys. In fact, many people have said to me that they have met or known a person just like Bartleby. So the character seems to be timeless.

There are tremendous risks to transposing the story. A lot of elements change. For instance, a modern law office does not use scribes to make copies of legal documents. Legal secretaries, and now word processing, take care of that chore. So what is a modern equivalent? From my observation of dealing with lawyers and accountants, the answer seemed to be that an accountant’s office, where bookkeepers’ work with figures and balance sheets demands meticulous drudgery, would be the modern-day equivalent. Of course, with a contemporary setting, other details would have to change. However, setting it in London, England, in a kind of stuffy, retrograde British professional, gentlemanly environment seemed to be a perfect equivalent to the mannered stiffness of the New York lawyer of a hundred years earlier. Once you go in this direction, everything changes.

A comparison might be that of changing the setting of a Shakespeare play. It is frequently done in the theater and in movie adaptations. West Side Story, the famous musical by Leonard Bernstein, reworks Shakespeare’s theme of “star-crossed lovers” by placing them in modern New York among Puerto Rican gangs. Think of the recent film of Romeo and Juliet (1996), in which gangs with .45-caliber automatics in a Latin setting substitute for the houses of Montague and Capulet in Renaissance Verona. The emotional truth of the story is largely intact, but the text has to be severely edited for anachronisms. In many ways, that movie idea derives from Bernstein’s musical crossed with Miami Vice. An English movie made in 1995 set Richard III in a ruthless fascist world that recalled Nazi Germany as a way of making the unprincipled villainy of Richard’s political plotting more plausible. A new Hamlet came out in 2000 that set the play in contemporary New York. In it, Denmark is a corporation and the king a CEO.

Dialogue Versus Action

In novels, there is often more dialogue than can be used in a film adaptation.The question is whether the character dialogue that works in the novel will also work in the film. As we know from earlier discussion, it usually doesn’t work to talk the plot. Bartleby’s classic line (“I prefer not to”) can be supplemented with looks and gestures. However, the opposite is true for Frank Capra’s classic movie It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). The short story on which it is based is thin on dialogue.The film script adds a great deal of dialogue that is not in the original story to good effect, dialogue that makes the characters come alive and dialogue that gives the audience information. For example, the angel in the original simply turns up and engages George in talk. In the movie, we get a shot of the sky with voice-over dialogue from some kind of heavenly administration that is assigning duties to angels until we get to Clarence, who hasn’t yet got his wings. The movie opens with an original scene of people praying for George Bailey, which seems to activate the prayer-answering department of heaven:

(See the video dip on the website.)

At this point, we get back to the earthly level of the movie and we get the angel’s flashback of the life of George Bailey as a young boy when he saves his brother’s life. So apart from the comedy of George getting a second-dass angel who gets us on his side, we have inserted into the original story a cinematic device that enables the movie to tell us the story of George’s life free of chronological sequence and to introduce the characters of Bedford Falls. None of this is in the original story. It is the decisive device that makes the movie different from the short story and makes the movie work.

Descriptive Detail and the Camera Frame

In Chapter 1, we discussed the opening of Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms and how the descriptive prose of the novel, if literally turned into film images, would extend the movie to unworkable length and impractical cost. The freedom of the novelist to describe detail presents the scriptwriter with a problem of choice—what to turn into a scene and what to ignore. What contributes to the story? What contributes to the atmosphere that is necessary to bringing that world alive?

Although novels frequently describe appearances or surroundings in detail, there is also a great deal that is left out. Everything that is in front of a camera lens has to be spedfìc and concrete. Although some of these issues extend into production rather than scriptwriting, the screenplay might need to specify things that the novel does not—props or decor that need to be imagined to create a screen image. The novel can afford to develop a character at length by describing the past and by representing the character’s inner thoughts. A movie has to reveal the character in the present and through action or interaction with other characters.

Implied Action

Novels also imply action that a film version might not want to use. For instance, when Melville’s narrator tells us that he finally moved offices to get rid of Bartleby, he doesn’t describe moving. A powerful image suggests itself of movers taking away the furniture and leaving Bartleby standing in a bare office. When the lawyer drops into his office one Sunday to discover that Bartleby is living in his office, what should we see on screen? A novelist can leave it to the reader’s imagination. A scriptwriter cannot. To convey that Bartleby is living in the office, a few shots can show him washing in the bathroom or getting dressed. Melville describes how the lawyer discovers evidence that Bartleby is living in his office. In the novella, there is a paragraph. In the screenplay, three short scenes expand on the prose. We need to see the lawyer arriving, his suspicion, his surprise, and his reactions. It is an opportunity to reveal a discovery in purely visual terms without dialogue. This is what makes movies work. Interestingly, in this case the script expands on the novella: whereas novels have to be cut down in length, short stories usually are expanded.

For instance, the adaptation of Melville’s Bartleby presented a problem in that the novella is narrated in the first person from the point of view of the lawyer who employs Bartleby. He shares his thoughts with the reader. In a movie, you have the choice of rendering this as a voice-over narration or you have to create a situation in which some of his thoughts are revealed by interaction. It therefore seemed reasonable to create a lunch scene with a colleague in which the lawyer tries to rationalize his behavior toward Bartleby. The responses of the colleague spoken from convention and common sense set in relief the obsessional rationalizing state of this Wall Street lawyer. (Read the scene and see the video on the website.) This approach entails risk. You alter the original. Earlier in this chapter, I criticized the TV script of Gulliver’s Travels because it creates a false shell story with a wife and a child. These are extra characters. The difference is that they fundamentally alter the meaning of Jonathon Swift’s satire.

It’s a Wonderful Life

It’s a Wonderful Life is a well-written, well-made, and well-acted film. The story premise (see the website for the script) almost forms a genre—a movie story with recognizable or predictable elements. In this case, it is an angel movie. An angel or two intervene in the earthly drama of a human life with complex plot consequences about time, cause, and effect, and free will. It becomes a device that allows us to look at causality in existence. Everyone is fascinated by the problem of free will. You don’t have to be a philosopher or a theologian. You just have to wonder if your life is fate or your own doing. Everyone, from time to time, has a notion that some greater force controls life’s events, not individual choice. Most people wonder what would have happened if they had married or not married someone, made a different choice of major, job, or profession, or chosen to live somewhere else. There is also envy—some people seem to be getting a better deal in life than others. So the premise of the film, despite the unrealistic, supernatural elements, finds fertile soil in the imagination of any audience in which the plot can grow.

The basic premise of It’s a Wonderful Life is that an angel trying to earn his wings intervenes in the life of George Bailey to save him from committing suicide when his life hits a crisis. The angel fulfills George’s wish that he had never been bom. George then visits the alternate world that results and discovers that his life has made a difference in the world. The moral is that each individual life counts and affects the lives of others. In other words, the universe is affected by our individual existence. Individual destiny is universal destiny. It is dramatically intriguing because it makes the audience into an omniscient observer. It’s a film that has stood the test of time. This is why a number of contemporary television series and movies derive from it or make use of the same basic premise.

Quantum Leap (1989)⁷ built a series on a science fiction premise, that a researcher time travels and finds himself in a different body each week. His only guide is a hologram angel or alter ego who furnishes him with critical, omniscient information about his time and situation. Our hero is desperately trying to get back to his own body and own time. You can see how the premise lends itself to a series.

Groundhog Day (1993) is another variation on this same plot. The main character is a television weatherman who by some fluke is able to replay and relive the same day over and over again. When he catches on that time is repeating like a scratched record (or a dirty CD, for those who don’t remember vinyl records), he takes advantage of his prescience to experiment with alternate choices. In other words, he is able to stand outside of time and see the causality of events and make different choices to have different outcomes for himself and those around him.

Touched by an Angel (1994)⁸ is a popular TV series that explores the premise of angels intervening to teach people in crisis, who are about to make bad or destructive decisions, how to act positively. Poor mortals get the benefit of angelic counsel in the midst of sin and suffering, proving that the universe is benevolent and good can triumph over evil.

Michael (1996) is a feature film that looks at a National Enquirer story in which an angel with wings has come into the world of the owner of the Milk Bottle Motel somewhere in the Midwest. The reporters that investigate have their life problems untangled, and the angel works small miracles to bring lovers together and a dog back to life. The comedy of an angel behaving contrary to expectations is milked for all it’s worth. Again, the plot turns around free will and intervention in destiny.

The television series Now and Again (1999)⁹ explores the fiction that a man who dies in an accident is brought back to life by a secret government agency in a genetically engineered body. His brain, memory, and self-identity remain intact. He is not allowed to make contact with his wife or daughter on pain of termination. He is a fat-slob insurance salesman reborn as a superman. The premise produces numerous comic episodes in which he encounters his wife and daughter but cannot reveal his identity.

The satirical movie Dogma (1999)¹⁰ is based on the plot idea of an alternative destiny that depends on intervention in the lives or actions of characters by supernatural beings. In this case, God is trapped by the devil in a human body, and the whole reality of the universe is at risk unless the good angels somehow manage to avert the contradiction that God’s will is not absolute because two fallen angels are trying to get back into heaven.

Run Lola Run (Lola Rennt, 1998)¹¹ is a film about three different versions of the same scenario that explore alternate outcomes when slight variations in action alter the coincidences and events that follow. We see Lola run to save her lover in three plot outcomes. This makes the audience into the omniscient observer.

A classic exploration of this theme of knowing what is true or what is real lies behind the breakout Japanese film by Kurosawa, Rashomon (1950), which shows us three different views of a rape and murder from the point of view of three different characters. A newer variant is Vantage Point (2008), which narrates the attempted assignation of a fictional American president seen from the point of view of eight characters. We all know that reality can be complex and certain events not what they seem. To put it simply, we cannot know for sure what is real.

All of these variants of the angel/intervention plot illustrate different ways you can construct a movie plot from the same basic premise in original ways. You may be able to add to the list. In Family Man (2000), Nicolas Cage plays the central character in yet another destiny plot in which a rich capitalist bachelor gets switched into an alternative life in which he’s married to an old girlfriend and has numerous children. This genre will continue to thrive on television and movies. Meanwhile, let us return to the granddaddy of them all and, in the process, learn more about the challenge of screen adaptation.

The story The Greatest Gift, on which It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)¹² is based, is shorter and simpler than the movie. George and the angel are the only two main characters. Even George’s wife is a minor character. In the movie, we see George’s life from the time he was a boy to his falling in love with Mary, and we meet a huge cast of supporting characters including his brother and various townspeople, not to mention the savings and loan customers. Of particular importance is his alcoholic uncle who precipitates the ultimate reversal that makes George contemplate suicide. None of these are to be found in the original story. They were invented by the scriptwriters who needed to flesh out the detail of the essential plot idea and make it emotionally convincing in all the detail that brings Bedford Falls to life.

The story kicks off with voice-overs of people praying for a certain George Bailey. Who is George Bailey? This is, of course, a hook for the audience. We want to know who George Bailey is. Then we hear the voices (off-screen) of angels discussing the case and who will be assigned to it. When Clarence, angel second class, who still has not attained his wings, is summoned (this piece of droll invention has no basis in the original story), we are given a potted history of George Bailey by way of a briefing for the angel’s mission. George Bailey is about to take his own life. This briefing takes the form of a flashback story (another device of the screenplay not in the original story) of George’s life that takes us from his boyhood to early manhood. We are introduced to his father, the manager of the savings and loan association that finances the houses of low-income people in the small New York town of Bedford Falls. Mr. Potter, a kind of Scrooge character, dominates these townspeople’s financial lives. George is all set to fulfill his boyhood dream of leaving Bedford Falls on a great trip abroad before going to college.

On the eve of his departure, we are introduced to Mary, the kid sister of his friend, at the high school dance where a relationship is seeded. Their night’s romance is cut short when George’s father, Peter Bailey, has a heart attack. Three months after his father’s death, George, having postponed his trip to keep the savings and loan going, is present at the board meeting where Mr. Potter, the money- grubbing villain, moves to disband the savings and loan. George’s passionate speech in defense of his father’s work and of the importance of the institution for the ordinary people convinces the board to reject the motion and to appoint George to replace his father. Although George insists he is going to leave town to go to college, he stays and sends his kid brother to college with his savings, with the plan that they will trade places in four years.

This is about the ending of Act I. We have met all the characters. George has made a choice to postpone his life. So it becomes a story about small town America and about a community.

In Act II, George’s brother comes home from college married to a woman whose father has offered him a job in his company. The more George tries to break out of Bedford Falls, the more it seems to entangle him. He visits his old flame, Mary who is being wooed by a rival, pushed by the mother. The mutual attraction between George and Mary results in their marrying.

As they are about to leave on their honeymoon, there is a panic run on the banks and the savings and loan during the Depression. Mr. Potter tries to buy the members’ shares at a discount. George uses his savings to pay the depositors, who want all or some of their money, and manages to stave off the collapse of the bank, much to the disgust of Potter. After refusing an offer to work for Mr. Potter, George, always the man of principle, opts to defend the people and their savings institution. He and Mary have four children. World War II turns his younger brother into a fighter pilot and a war hero who wins the Congressional Medal of Honor. His uncle, who is a drinker and has an absentminded character, is taking the savings and loan association deposits to the bank when he runs into Mr. Potter. Showing him the headline about his war hero nephew, the uncle accidentally gives his envelope of cash deposits to Mr. Potter when he hands him back his newspaper. Potter, who now owns the bank, discovers the envelope and is about to return it when he sees his chance to realize a lifelong ambition to destroy or take over the savings and loan. The uncle now frantically retraces his steps looking for the money. At the savings and loan, George learns of the predicament on Christmas Eve. Meanwhile, a bank auditor has to go over the books. Evil is about to triumph over our Everyman hero who faces impossible odds. This is the end of Act II.

Now George must go to Potter and beg for a loan at any price. He offers his life insurance as a surety to cover the missing money. Potter not only refuses but acts to have George arrested for embezzlement and fraud. When George returns home, in despair of finding a solution, his erratic, impatient, and uncharacteristic behavior with his children alerts his wife Mary. After venting his frustration on his family, he goes out to the local bar to drown his sorrows. The children and his wife start to pray.

We have now completed the flashback. Snow is falling. George, now drunk, smashes up his car as he drives to the bridge. When George gets to the bridge over the falls and prepares to kill himself so that his life insurance will redeem the provident society, the angel, Clarence, finally intervenes to stop him. Instead Clarence jumps off himself and appeals to George’s better instinct to save someone else. As they dry off in the tollhouse, Clarence reveals his identity. When George expresses the wish that he had never been born, Clarence seizes upon the wish as the way to teach him. He grants George’s wish.

George goes back into town to find an alternate world in which he does not exist. All the people he knows, including his wife, have lived other destinies, much worse for the absence of George Bailey who has affected so many. This reversal seems disastrous, so George asks Clarence to give him his life back. At this point he returns with joy to his wife and children. The many people whose lives he has affected now turn up with baskets full of money as the word has spread. The crisis has been averted and George reconciled to his wonderful life as the people, affected by his life, sing a Christmas hymn and then “Auld Lang Syne.”

Most of the movie is about George’s growing up and falling in love and his defense of the townspeople from the rapacious banker and landlord, Potter, through the savings and loan created by his father. George never gets to go away and fulfill his youthful dreams. One circumstance after another conspires to keep him in small town America, hopping from decision to decision, which seems the right choice at the time. It leads to the ordinary life of a good man whose heroism is modest and whose deeds consist of doing the right thing. It is a paean to the life of the average American man, who is, of course, sitting in the audience.

Now let us go back to the source work—The Greatest Gift.¹³ The original source turns out to be a short story of great simplicity that turns on the essential plot idea of a man called George in a nameless town who is standing on a bridge on Christmas Eve feeling suicidal. A nameless stranger appears to save him by granting his wish that he had never been born. Skeptical, he then returns to his hometown to find out that it is physically different and that the people in his life have lived different destinies because he, George, had never been bom. After seeing this alternate reality (which poses a few problems in quantum mechanics and entropy), George rushes back to the bridge to find the stranger and have his wish undone. Rushing back into town he is overjoyed to discover his old life restored. It is a basic, simple moral fable about the value of the life of each individual. The big difference between the story and the movie is that the story provides little motivation, at least very general motivation that would not intrigue the audience, when an angel intervenes:

Taken by itself, this is just a bunch of petulant whining. The film script, based on this short story of a dozen pages, has invented and elaborated on huge amounts of detail and fleshed out the main character. The screenplay adds characters and alters the sequence of the story to construct the film as a long flashback.¹⁴ This is why we believe in George’s suicidal urge. When we get to the bridge scene, we have seen George’s whole life; we know him, identify with him, and agonize over his final humiliation and final setback of losing the savings and loan deposit, playing into the hands of his lifelong adversary, the villainous Mr. Potter, who sees the opportunity to destroy George and take over the savings and loan. (See the scene at the bridge on the website.)

Are we worrying about what’s going to happen? You bet! For the entire movie, George has thrown off every setback and disappointment. This ultimate reversal sets up the dénouement. Remember, the Woodcutter, a minor character in the second act of Little Red Riding Hood? In It’s a Wonderful Life, George’s woodcutter turns out to be one of his friends. George Wainright, now wealthy, who offered him a chance to get rich in his youth, hears of the problem and wires funds. All the townspeople contribute their dollars and cents. The dénouement is not just a happy ending, it ties up all the loose ends of the plot, which explain and motivate the actions of all the characters. In this case, the movie is far superior to the source work.

Bartleby

The opposite is, in a way, true about Bartleby because it derives from a small masterpiece of American literature. The film becomes a commentary and a reinterpretation of it. Melville’s story is short enough to read as an assignment. It also presents a number of challenging problems of adaptation.

In 1853, Herman Melville published a novella called Bartleby, The Scrivener (a story of Wall Street) in Putnam’s Monthly Magazine.¹⁵ The story is written in the first person. A lawyer, who remains nameless, hires a new scribe (or “scrivener”) to work in his law office. He describes his law chambers and his employees and recounts the extraordinary relationship with the mysterious and impenetrable character called Bartleby. Bartleby, little by little, refuses to carry out the tasks that are asked of him. The lawyer does not know how to deal with this unpredictable character, his passive resistance to the work contract, and, finally, his refusal to obey instructions. Bartleby gets under his skin. He does not want to get angry. It becomes a psychological battle of wits.

In the end, Bartleby becomes a liability to the business. When Bartleby is fired, he won’t leave the building. Eventually, the lawyer moves his office, leaving Bartleby behind. Then the next tenant comes to his new office to complain about the ghostly presence of Bartleby, who sleeps in the building. Finally, Bartleby is arrested and thrown into prison where the employer feels compelled to visit him and where Bartleby finally dies. The lawyer has gradually assumed a kind of responsibility and even a kind of guilt, early on, for the circumstance of this solitary and obstinate character. One Sunday, he visits his Wall Street office to find evidence that Bartleby is sleeping, eating, and living in his office:

In the shooting script of the film, the scene is without dialogue. (See the website.)

The lawyer rather likes Bartleby: “there was something about Bartleby that not only strangely disarmed me, but in a wonderful manner, touched and disconcerted me.” Later, he comments, “Nothing so aggravates an earnest person as a passive resistance.” Then he rationalizes, “He is useful to me. I can get along with him.”¹⁷ When Bartleby continues to greet every request with the line “I prefer not to,” the lawyer gets frustrated because he thought he could handle Bartleby. He suppresses his anger. This reflective narrative is difficult to turn into film. The solution for this writer was to invent a scene in which the lawyer, now an accountant, has lunch with a colleague. Psychologically, it works to have him try to rationalize his Bartleby problem and to hear an outsider with a commonsense point of view reveal to us how obsessed and isolated the character is becoming.

The scenes extracts the essential conflict the lawyer narrates at length, but which has no fìlmable content. This is the kind of leap of imagination that a scriptwriter must have to adapt a work of literature. At the same time, it violates the sanctity of a literary classic. This is the dilemma. The adapter has to both add and subtract from the original, or find the equivalent. In the jail scene in the book, there is another character called the Grub Man. The film changes the prison to a mental hospital and the Grub Man to an anorexic inmate who is able to speak most of the lines in the original. You will have to judge by reading the 47-page novella, reading the script, and seeing the film. Others have wrestled with the problem and made changes to the characters when adapting the story for the screen in other productions.¹⁸

Some adapters take a novelist’s narration and read it as a voice-over to accommodate the thoughts and comments expressed. This seems to be an evasion most of the time to writing a film equivalent. Two films, however, come to mind in which this technique works. The first is a remake of Nabokov’s Lolita (1997) with Jeremy Irons. The second is a superb adaptation of an autobiographical novel of Marguerite Duras, the French novelist. The voice-over narration for The Lovers (1991) is delivered by the throaty world-weary voice of Jeanne Moreau. The other tactic of the filmmaker is to make the camera narrate visually and to frame close-up detail that reveals the emotional intention of the narration. When the two lovers meet, we see their shoes. He is an elegant dandy. She is a teenager, learning to walk in heels, unsure of herself but wanting to explore her emerging womanly allure. There is a wonderful moment as they board the river ferry and we see their mutual looks, the detail of their clothes and gestures. Their attraction now leads on to a tragic love affair.

A lot of Melville’s characters are outsiders and social misfits. As a writer he explored the intersection of normal and abnormal behavior and the experiences of people at the edge of conventional society but engaged in real-world activities. He shows us how a slight shift in circumstance, character, or point of view alters everything. Moby Dick and Billy Budd, Foretopman have attracted filmmakers.¹⁹ Adapting a literary masterpiece is a dangerous undertaking. The source work has a huge audience and lives as an independent work. The Greatest Gift, however, was bought as a story and was not even published until after the film had established itself as a classic.

Bartleby fascinated me because it was a psychological story and because, before its time, it seemed to explore the anonymity of modern urban life. It seemed to document a forgotten population whose lives are dominated by economic and social conditions that marginalize them. I had met people of my generation who had dropped out. They lived in the same environment I did, but they had no Social Security number, no health insurance, and squatted in abandoned houses. Some of them were just disoriented, but others were politically articulate and consciously rejected the social economic roles that are forced on us. Bartleby seemed to speak to the post-Vietnam world. It probably still does. The idea was to reveal the character in our own day. As soon as you decide to change period and setting, multiple problems arise.

One of the reasons why the story has cinematic potential is that it leaves a lot to the imagination. It also has a narrative point of view. Could you adopt that first-person point of view for the film? Possibly! One could imagine a film that explores the lawyer’s perception of the character. It would make a very claustrophobic visual narrative. It seemed to me that if you were going to do it, you should explore both characters with the camera and invent scenes that visually define the psychological space in which the character moves.

So I wanted to reveal Bartleby as a loner in a crowd, in the world but somehow not of it. The urban landscape behind him of impersonal buildings and concrete spaces helped to make his character plausible without necessarily getting behind his impenetrable mask. His words are few. We see him as the anonymous commuter in the tube train. He rises on the escalator like a damned soul coming back from the underworld to redeem himself and to allow others to redeem themselves. When he sees the massed starlings in the square on one of his walks, we see that these birds live in spite of the urban landscape just like he does. The sights that he sees and the camera records for us legitimize his character. Instead of having him put in prison, implausible in our own day, he is committed to a mental institution. The through line of the character is the same, but the universe through which he travels changes color and texture compared to the original.

All literary classics have a rightful place in our cultural imagination. Adapting them for the screen risks alienating those who know and love the original. Then the audience that sees the film without knowing the original might get an experience of a great story but may not ever know the truth of the original. It is an interesting phenomenon that movies sell books, even literature, just as they sell the music of the film. Most entertainment conglomerates have a book publisher somewhere in their empire. When the movie is an original screenplay, media companies often commission a novel of the movie to gamer the sales in their publishing market. When the source is a classic in the public domain, they also reissue the classic and sell the source story on the back of the movie release. One powerful reason to adapt a literary classic has to do with copyright. Many great works that have great cinematic potential, such as the works of Melville, Jane Austen, and Henry James, are in the public domain. That means no one owns the copyright. Any book or story that is copyrighted remains in copyright for the author’s lifetime plus 70 years.

Henry James wrote a brilliant novella, a story of manners called Daisy Miller. It tells the story of a nouveau riche American family on the grand tour of Europe. The beautiful and wealthy young Daisy, her mother, and her small brother have no idea of manners and society. They are seen through the eyes of Winterbourne, a cultivated American who is attracted to Daisy but too cowardly to declare his love because of his social snobbery about this wealthy but gauche American family. When the family arrives in Rome, Daisy scandalizes the ex-patriot American community by socializing with an Italian who is married. The story is full of comic situations and colorful visual locations. It would make an excellent exercise for adaptation even though it has already been made into a film by Peter Bogdanovich in 1974.

Conclusion

Film writing seeks 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 2 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.

Adaptation involves the translation of narrative from one medium (novel, play, or true story) into another, the motion picture. Writing a screenplay that adapts a source work usually involves compromises to make the story work in the new medium. The most basic problem is length. Films usually have to shorten the story and dispense with descriptive and reflective prose. Film narration depends on visual action in key scenes and sparse dialogue. A film must work on its own terms that can alter the proportions of the original. Some films, such as It’s a Wonderful Life and High Noon, improve on the original story. The chances are that lesser-known, short works make better films than long, complex novels.

Exercises