Really intriguing topic! I'm a screenwriter and my partner is a screenwriter and I will say, George, that we constantly send each other your fiction writing thoughts and spend a lot of time discussing them, and your storytelling advice and approach to creation has been really inspirational and helpful to us.
I think the thing I've had to learn is that at least on the page, screenwriting is more about WHAT is in the story than HOW it's being depicted -- I used to really overwrite action and description in a way that felt much more like prose, and I've had to learn to be much more sparse, and less precious about that (ie, the stuff the audience will never see). But, that said, the best scripts read on the page like a riveting novel -- they engross you and you forget you're reading a script. It's like you're watching the movie in your mind as you read, which I feel like has many connections to fiction.
And yes, it's primarily about structure (which, ironically, is the most aggravating part for most of us who are screenwriters I think -- once I have a story "broken" or at least close to it, I LOVE getting in and writing scenes. Coming up with the structure and the beats of a story is frequently maddening.
But at the end of the day, I also think the absolute best scripts convey the essence of a story in them -- yes, the director and the crew and the actors will be making lots of choices, but the most compelling scripts convey the FEELING of the piece, and impart what the story is ABOUT. That's incredibly rare and very difficult to do, but it absolutely can be done, and when you read those scripts, you feel like you've been picked up off the ground and transported.
That said, I guess the biggest difference between fiction and screenwriting is that having an incredible script isn't NECESSARILY a precondition for an incredible film -- I've read plenty of scripts that seemed kinda bland on the page, and turned out to be pretty decent on screen. But a truly amazing script transcends that, and it's almost like you're living the movie / TV show / short / etc in real time.
In any case, thanks for all of your continued inspiration, George. It is so so meaningful to so many of us.
I’m a director and I’ve learned that sometimes, the scene that you think should’ve been cut, because it doesn’t progress the story, or breaks the rules of start late and get out early, or isn’t that funny/moving/visual… can be the best scenes. You get it on its feet, the actors play, the light is great, the camera is beautiful, sounds lovely and we all smile in the sunshine of a charming scene. It is kind of magic.
It’s a collaborative form. As a director, I get to largely write the film’s sentences, the visual grammar, from the mise en scene, to sound and cut. I get to direct how that cat sits on that mat, and that’s a lot of fun. The script is a blue print. In film we say you make a film three times, when you write it, when you shoot it and when you cut it.
But it’s also incredibly painful to write scripts that don’t get made or even read. In an era where streamers are using algorithms to decide whether to make and fund projects, algorithms based on previous shows and whether they turned a profit- it can be pretty depressing for writers.
I think George’s note on finding your form is the key.
Films: Fellini’s 8 ½, Ozu’s Tokyo Story, Tarkovsky’s Solaris, Bong Joon-Ho’s Parasite, add in some Michael Haneke, Jacques Audiard, Ruben Östlund’s Force Majeure, Mike Leigh’s Secrets and Lies, Jonathan Glazer’s Zone of Interest, Mustang by Deniz Gamze Ergüven … there’s a lot of good films..
I relate so much to what you say here Emma about film being a collaborative form. I am a playwright and I find this to be true also in theatre. And I love your choices of films! I'll add "The Life of Others," which I keep looking up to as a perfect execution of a movie on all levels (writing, acting, directing, editing, lighting, filming, music...)
I write for a late night television show that is filmed in front of an audience of real people, which is SUCH a helpful hack because unlike in, say, a novel, I generally know what the audience has just seen and heard which is incredibly helpful in figuring out what they need to see and hear next. I can picture this specific audience in my head and I've been serving them for long enough (six years) that I have a pretty decent idea of when they need a laugh, when they need a release, when they need to see someone be as angry as they feel, and whatever else. It sounds inelegant, or like I'm using math to do writing, but there's an advantage in looking at the actual page of a TV script, because I know literally how long it takes to perform a page of that script, so I'm acutely aware of how many minutes have gone by since a joke has happened. I'm dogsh*t at writing novels because I always feel lost and find myself asking "How will I know when I'm at the halfway point of this book" WHILE writing it! A TV script, especially ours, has such a clear structure that I know when there's time for silliness and when it's time to wrap up.
Movie screenplays are similar. Obviously they can vary in length, but there are structures, act break downs-- if you know you want a 90 minute movie, you know roughly where the halfway point in your script is. Structure, timing, outlines. Bones.
Before I did this professionally, I'd tape my favorite sitcom and pause it to notice patterns. "Okay, by minute four of every episode of Malcolm in the Middle, the seeds for at least three different storylines have been planted, even if one of the seeds is as simple as 'Francis has a loose thread on his sweater.'" You can turn the rhythm of the show into the math of the show to make the structure of the show. When you know the structure-- of a movie or a show-- you know what's supposed to happen and at roughly what page.
I keep the live audience in my head when working on screenplays, even though there's no guarantee that a movie watcher will be as captive and focused as a live audience, but I can pretend. It's not a novel which they might put down, or where they're picturing my protagonist looking or sounding different than he does in MY head; they just saw a PLANE EXPLODE or the LOVERS KISS or the BABY DO KARATE-- what do they need to see next/
I have come to writing a novel from a background that includes an MFA in Film and several years working on screenplays. I have found the move into writing straight-up fiction to be at once liberating and additionally challenging. I started down this road with an idea for a story that just didn’t fit into the traditional 3 act structure and length of a normal screenplay. Believe me, I tried to make it work. Eventually, I realized that if I wanted to do the story justice, it would have to be a novel.
I have been energized by the opportunity to expand the story to a length that allows it to (hopefully) be told in a more effective way. But I have had to think a lot about *how* I am writing. Screenwriting is very direct, more plot-oriented. You are writing an instruction manual for someone else to develop in a different medium. You don’t need, and honestly shouldn’t, go to great lengths to describe the scene. Eloquence is only required for dialogue. But to write fiction? I am sweating every single sentence. I didn’t realize how deeply ingrained screenwriting style was in me until I was forced to acknowledge my budding novel read like a screenplay with different formatting. It’s made me think carefully about not only what I am saying, but whether or not I am saying it in the most evocative and beautifully written way that I can.
The instruction manual idea reminds me of creating children's picture books; oftentimes the author completes the manuscript, without much in the way of visual instruction, and the illustrator works her own ideas into the book. Most publishers don't want authors to provide scenarios or illustration ideas, beyond what's in the text itself.
Elyse, your comment reminded me of Charles Yu's Interior Chinatown. Somehow Yu is able to take a high-concept, potentially gimmicky premise ("write a novel, but format it as a screenplay") and turn it into something that is moving and heartfelt not in spite of its structural contrivances but because of them. I must admit I haven't seen the series yet; Yu himself helped shape the show. But the novel itself thinks deeply about the impact that stereotypical Asian characters in Hollywood movies and TV have on its protagonist: He's an aspiring actor who dreams of playing, and playing more than, Generic Asian Man on the screen.
Interior Chinatown is amazing. One of my favorite shows on TV in years. I'm really enjoying it and highly recommend. And FWIW, I'm a produced TV writer myself.
I'll just put a few differences here, in my experience. And a few resources.
Novels can be interior. Screenplays cannot. You cannot write thoughts in a screenplay. You have to show gestures, facial expressions, pauses, etc., to convey emotion or intention.
A mostly interior scene in a novel will be substituted or changed for a screenplay to SHOW what's happening. This is why, sometimes, movie viewers are disappointed because their favorite scene is missing from a movie, or characters have been whittled down to just the main characters. Each screenplay page is a minute of the movie, so scenes are precious, and MUST move the story forward.
To be honest, my screenwriting has changed my novel writing tremendously. No longer can I ramble in my novels. I'm super conscious of the possibility of boring the reader. Ha, ha! So, my novels tend to be shorter, no matter how hard I try to relax while writing them.
If you want to straddle both worlds, I'd recommend the book, Save the Cat! Writes a Novel: The Last Book On Novel Writing You'll Ever Need:
Read as a starter book. As you progress, you won't need all the beats in there.
The standard screenwriting (and easiest, I think) software to use is Final Draft. It does all the work for you. Once you get the hang of it, you simply tab in, however many times you need to, for a scene heading, or an action heading, or a line of dialogue. Honestly, it won't take you long to learn!
A great book for learning how to write a screenplay (because it's thorough) is The Hollywood Standard - Third Edition: The Complete and Authoritative Guide to Script Format and Style:
I highly recommend reading scripts--both teleplays (TV scripts) and screenplays (movie scripts). A simple Google search will bring them up. Especially Oscar winners. Especially movies similar to the novels you want to write. There's something about reading the skeleton of a story that's invigorating and clarifying (because, really, a script, is all action and dialogue, when you get down to it). I often write out the beats of my novel first, to lay down a rough roadmap. It's super helpful.
Also, you can Google different screenwriters for their expertise. Aaron Sorkin for his whip-smart dialogue (West Wing, The Social Network, A Few Good Men, Molly's Game, Moneyball, The Network). Craig Mazin for comedy and drama (Chernobyl comes to mind...brilliant!). Aline Brosh McKenna (The Devil Wears Prada, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend). Nora Ephron for relationships (Sleepless in Seattle, When Harry Met Sally). Phoebe Waller-Bridge (Fleabag), Greta Garwig, Spike Lee, Ethan and Joel Coen, Sofia Coppola, the list goes on.
I hope you all can find something useful in all of this!
Another good writing book that straddles both worlds is John Truby's The Anatomy of Story... he uses examples from films and novels -- though it's slightly more geared towards film since he's a screenwriter. Also, there's a Save The Cat for Screenplays, which I think came out before Save the Cat Writes a Novel.
Elissa, you have reminded me why I love reading screenwriter's novels! They tend to have great dialogues and memorable scenes that are full of evocative images, and very little "fluff". I, personally, love subtext, so I always appreciate the space to figure things (information) out for myself.
Yes! Subtext is the best! I feel that indie films do this the best, perhaps because the directors are usually writer-directors making them (?), or perhaps they're given more freedom to do what they need to do (?).
I actually love screenwriting, though I also love writing that depends on rhythm and syntax — they seem to use different parts of my brain — for sure different sensibilities.
As is often said, the screenplay is a blueprint— but I do think one wants to write so that you lead a reader to visualize the story through time. The early Russian silent film directors wrote prose accounts and they are beautiful for the way they order the images you will see—- the street, then dusk falling on the street, then the street lamps illuminated. It’s fun in crafting a scene to consider the order of reporting in service of drama, but also in service of awakening the reader to an echo of the experience she/he/they would have when viewing the film.
Dialogue is, of course, something else— if you look at a script by Todd Solondz it is almost entirely dialogue. Almodovar has lavish notes to himself all through the script, and plenty of descriptive passages— and Horton Foote’s “Tender Mercies” is still, to me, one of the most beautiful scripts in English. So economical and full of heart without being in any way sentimental —- and the heart is on the page.
Thanks so much for mentioning Horton. He is not referred to and given the attention he deserves by a long shot. I had the incredible privilege of participating in a playwrighting workshop with him at Sewanee years/decades ago that included a one on one consult on my play. I get teary eyed typing this. A highlight of my life.
Re your “page a time” exercise: my screenwriting friends and I had an insight back in the 80s that for us was an epiphany. It came because a friend said about a specific moment on a specific page “I don’t know what I want here.” Here being a literal actual point on the page you could put your pencil on. Anyway, we decided here was a rule: In a great script, the writer must have their finger on the pulse of the reader’s expectations for every single inch of text. I broke this down, later on, to what does the reader know here, and based on that, what do they expect. Expectation breaking down further into what do they want to happen, what are they afraid is going to happen? Anyway, when I read your page-at-a-time exercise, I was blown away. Because people talk a lot about how fiction writing isn’t screenwriting, but here was a demonstration that in one very important way, it is. Tracking the audience’/reader’s experience of the work. Moment to moment.
Your side-car is fully functional in screenwriting, is my point.
“We proceed through a work of art, in time, and as each little time-nugget passes by, we decide whether to carry on. (In an earlier post about screenwriting, I referred to this nugget as a “power-conveying artifact” (PCA)).”
With my students, we talk about DWTRT (Don’t Waste the Reader’s Time). Every word had better keep the reader inside the script, because otherwise, the reader (I was a reader decades ago) will throw your script across the room. A script reader has to read at the pace of no less than a page a minute, or they may as well be working at Starbuck’s. Therefore, any time the reader has to puzzle over something, or page back through the script, is time wasted. So it’s like your little gas stations, except with landmines everywhere on the road. You piss off the reader, kaboom. In a novel, there is (I think) the expectation that the reader will happily page back and re-read. In a screenplay, if you are making the reader page back, you failed. And all of your complexity is not “lost on the reader.” It’s just not there. Because the reader must plow ahead (they are on the clock).
“If I wanted to open my book with a man walking through a mall, talking on a cell phone, I’d have to come up with a charming, convincing way (a sentence) to make you see and believe that – make you buy into it. . . .In film, that guy is just there.”
Yes, but, to Maria-in-the-cart this: In the script, the guy is there and the reader thinks, why. If this is the first moment in the script, as you say re Maria, the reader’s mind is a blank slate. Hope springs eternal.
But in screenwriting land, the reader’s mind is not quite blank, because people who read scripts know that most scripts suck. When I was a reader, I read roughly 2000 scripts, and said “maybe” to around a dozen of them. When I was an executive (in charge of a story department, hiring and firing readers), I saw that this was about the right ratio across the board. So the reader knows going in, I have to be on the lookout for gold, but I know this is probably going to be trash.
So the reader sees the guy on the phone and waits to see if it’s relevant. Because it is probably going to turn out not to be. The bond of trust between the writer and reader is unbroken at FADE IN, but it’s so so fragile.
If the reader gets through the script with the bond of trust intact, that reader will remember that script forever. And recommend it to their bosses, and their friends. I still remember those scripts that did that to me, forty years later.
So, your guy in the mall, you put him there, and I’m interested. It’s (as you say in A Swim) all I have to be interested in. But if turns out not to be relevant, then it’s like the guy who says you’ve got a stain on your shirt, and then pokes you on the nose and says "made you look."
“When I’m writing a script, I often get to a place that feels similar to the place I get to when writing music: I feel, somehow, that I don’t love the form enough to make the hardest choices. I reach a decision point and it seems unclear which is the best direction to go.”
Here’s a sad rabbit hole for you. It’s one of the most debilitating things about a career in screenwriting: Writing (or maybe fiction), as you say many times, is the greatest mind-to-mind communication device ever made. Elsewhere, you talk about your imagined reader, which is of course a version of yourself. The debilitating part, in screenwriting, is that your audience – your imagined reader – is not actually yourself as a movie-goer, seeing this script fully realized in a movie theater. It’s a script reader, executive, agent, actor, director, etc. Your script is actually (primarily) cat-nip for all those people. Your script is a great script if it gets those people excited. If it activates their greed.
And if your script actually does get bought and made – almost nobody (none of your imagined audience) will ever read your script again. People will react to the movie as though it’s the script. People in the industry will watch the movie and never read your script again. So, either way, your imagined audience will never read your script.
This is why, for most of the history of Hollywood, screenplays were regarded – literally – as industrial waste. A by-product useful in production, to be discarded afterwards.
“I find myself more often asking, “What is usually done?” and trying to do that, whereas, when writing fiction, I only ask that so that I can swerve the hell away from it.”
I think that’s the screenwriter’s job too. In the face of all the (mostly shitty) screenwriting books, with their formulas everyone is supposed to know and follow, and here on the precipice of the bullshit AI-ification of everything, the premium is now even more (please god) on an original voice telling an original story that keeps you interested. Your gas stations, again. And you get to the end and all the bullshit drops away and you (the reader) say, yes that should be a movie.
To follow up on the George and daughter block building metaphor. If I am remembering it correctly, the blocks in George's metaphor ARE the words in the story. In a screenplay, though, the blocks are MADE of words, but it's the BLOCKS that are arranged to make the meaning. The blocks of narrative.
Maybe this distinction is too stoned by half.
All of this is probably focusing way too much on the stage-directions/scene-blocking and structural aspects of screenwriting. Dialogue does a ton of heavy lifting in a great screenplay.
Oh. I just thought of something. Okay, maybe this is part of what you're feeling, George, in your lack of full-bodied love for the form of screenwriting.
A producer once read a script of mine and pointed to a bit of description and said "This is a great line. It's the best line in the script." I was like, "Thanks!" But it wasn't a compliment. He was saying WTF. He was saying, why isn't this line in the dialogue -- you know, so it's in the movie? He was saying, rightly, that all the great quotable wonderful phrasing in the world is wasted if you put it in the description where, in the movie, no one can hear it.
A producer reads a great line and he wants it to be up on the screen.
Now -- it's not entirely wasted, because if it has an effect on the reader, and the reader recommends the script, and it gets bought, etc. etc.. This connects back to what I was trying to say, in another comment, about the debilitating part of the screenwriting life. It's a bummer to write great sentences that only readers, agents, producers, and executives will read. You want to skip past them to get to your real ideal imagined audience. But when that happens, it's in movie form, and all your beautiful description has evaporated into the ether.
I absolutely LOVE this. 'In a great script, the writer must have their finger on the pulse of the reader's expectations for every single inch of text.' A million thanks for sharing this. Blown away.
What, for you, is the primary difference between fiction and screenwriting?
It's the language and the structure, for sure. Try to write a script like Tarantino or Charlie Kaufman and an agent will take one look at it and throw it on the garbage pile. There's no demand for a "voice" in screenwriting, mostly because filmmaking is collaborative, and the "voice" from a screenwriter dictates too much of the creative expression, from camera placement to physical character description. All that has to be enormously tamped down. "Blueprint" is how I hear screenplays often described. You can't write a novel this way.
Funnily enough, I'm working pretty diligently on a screenplay adaptation for 'The Red Bow.' Even though it the cost a very pretty penny for the story rights, George gave me his blessing some time ago (thanks a billion, George!) I'm trying to take the last few pages of that story and expand them to feature length. In doing so, the structure idea George talks about, "the power, then, moves over to what you choose to do with them, and in what order" was radically brought home for me. Essentially, George did the hard work of creating the characters and action. I have to find new ways for those characters and action to intertwine and open the story up beyond what was given, find ways to make that causality real and "compel by event." It's not easy, but it's a blast.
And finally: what’s the best script, made or unmade, ever written? (Not best movie, necessarily, but script). And…why is it the best?
Unforgiven. My god, what a script. And nearly shot-for-shot the same as the film. This is one to study for "how-to-do screenplay structure."
I will warn that there are probably more experienced screenwriters than I who are reading this and our experiences will all differ but I’ve written and sold lots of things for TV and Film.
I’d start by saying, I tend not to look at a screenplay as a finished document in and of itself. I tend to view it as map so that a film can then be made. Quentin Tarantino famously doesn’t agree with that theory. He thinks of a screenplay as a final document.
What, for you, is the primary difference between fiction and screenwriting?
I find that often when writing fiction, language leads the way. Words come to mind before I know where they lead. In screenwriting, I tend to find that I have an image in mind that I must then translate to words. That process is cumbersome. I often direct or plan to direct what I write. I feel like the real creative act is an imagining in my head of what I’d like the film to look like and then the screenplay is my way of writing it down so that I can reexperience it later and invite other people in on it. A screenplay has two masters, first to the emotion you hope to inspire in the audience, and second to the crew who will help you to make the film real. It contains not just what you want the film to do, but to a certain degree, how you’d like to do it. Often it feels like trying to write page turning instruction manual.
If you are a dedicated screenwriter, when was the moment in your life that sent you down that path? That first, “Ah, I love this” moment?
The moments, more than, a single moment, tend to be the moments that I feel like I’m transcending screenwriting. Where, almost as Tarantino describes, the screenplay becomes its own object, where the writing of it, becomes writing for its own end. I find these moments less frequent than I’d like but they are sustaining when they occur. Many of my “I love this” moments usually happen when I’m on set and watching the thing I’ve imagined become real. (This is maybe why I think of myself as a filmmaker and not a screenwriter, despite making much of my living as a screenwriter.)
Are there methods you can think of, that might help a fiction writer make the leap into screenwriting?
I don’t think screenwriting is a very easy medium to discover a story or world in until you’ve spent hour and hours writing screenplays. I think coming from fiction, I would almost encourage someone not to worry too much about the formatting at first and instead to just write the story in your auditory and visual terms. (Auditory and visual terms because those are the things that can be put in a film.
It’s hard to put, Clarence remembered the day his dad forgot to pick him up from school on film.
It is possible to shoot: We see a close up of Clarence. We hold on it. We cut to a Young Man, sitting on his backpack facing away from the road by a bus stop. Orange Peels sit by his feet. There is no Orange. Cut to, C’s Dad, asleep on couch.
Then, later, apply the formatting. The formatting takes time and is a reflex. At first, especially, formatting takes so much time that by the time you’ve written it properly the creative impulse can have vanished. Honor the creative impulse first, then teach yourself how to communicate that within the accepted form of a screenplay. The format takes time and is unnatural, be kind to yourself when it feels unnatural.
What’s the best advice you ever got or read about screenwriting?
I think Richard LaGravanese gave me my favorite advice, which is that writing is like ironing. You work your way forward, and then go over what you’ve done, and then work your way a little forward again, and then go over what you’ve done, each time pushing a little further. Each scene is built on the last and as long as one connects to the next elegantly, you’ll end up with a film that’s worth watching.
And finally: what’s the best script, made or unmade, ever written? (Not best movie, necessarily, but script). And…why is it the best?
I can’t say the greatest, but I can tell you about four relatively recent ones that I felt I learned something from.
1. The Royal Tenenbaums. Reading that script, having seen the movie, is like watching the film. There’s a level of detail that really speaks to the final product.
2. Magnolia. I didn’t go to film school and instead read this script about two hundred times and taught myself screenplay formatting with it. It breaks all the rules. It’s fast. It’s loose. It’s over the top. So many lines of dialogue feel overwritten but in context of the right music cue, with the right performance, with the right dolly move, with the right light become absolutely transcendent. I think it’s a really good example of how much cannot be entirely articulated within a screenplay.
3. Past Lives. I read that before it was a film and still think it’s one of the finest screenplays I’ve ever read. It’s a living document.
4. Bonus: All is Lost. No Dialogue and an interesting read for that reason.
I’ve read good screenplays that became mediocre movies and afterwards have felt that the screenplays were less good. I’ve also read screenplays that made zero sense to me on the page that then turned into things I’ve loved. (Tim Robinson’s I Think You Should Leave comes to mind. I thought it was actually nonsense on the page and have now watched every episode many times.) A screenplay to me, feels a bit like Schrodinger’s Cat, neither dead or alive. Exisiting in a quantum state, waiting to be observed by the filmmaking to determine its state.
It occurs to me that each of the scripts you mention are written (or in one case, co-written) by the director. (though when Celine Song writes Past Lives she is not yet a director) PTA's scripts have director written all over them. I wonder about this... the effect on the page of directors who write...
I am not a screenwriting expert, but i AM an expert at spouting my opinions. And I see a lot of movies. Last night, I went to a screening of Babygirl, the new Nicole Kidman movie. I see it being advertised as an erotic thriller, but I'll tell you right now it's actually a comedy. Kidman and the movie's director spoke after at a Q and A, and this is why I'm commenting: Kidman mentioned how many scenes had been shot that ended up NOT being in the film. Many, many scenes. She said "and if those scenes had made it into the film, it would have been a completely different movie." So, that is something to keep in mind with a screenplay--a director will change things while filming and the end result may not resemble what was on the page. Scenes end up on the cutting room floor. My husband (career in the movie biz) says it all comes down to the editing. He names a particular actor whom I won't name here who was highly awarded for a film--and yet his on-screen parts were carefully pieced together by the editor, bit by bit, as his performance actually sucked. Another tidbit from my husband is the importance of sound. Watch any movie and notice how the sound directs your emotions. Movies depend on sound. Lastly, I used to work for a company where I attended early focus group screenings. Depending on audience feedback, a movie could see GREATchanges from the original cut. What screenplay? By then, the screenplay was long gone. Okay, that's all of my Hollywood insider info given to you by me, a complete NON Hollywood insider. Casablanca is the best screenplay of all time, hands down. I also love The Graduate screenplay.
(I am shamelessly going to drop in that I got to work with the writers of both of the screenplays you mentioned, both of whom are heroes of mine. . .)
Re the Kidman thing: One of the things that I have seen with my own eyes several times is that when a script is greenlit, drafts get written specifically to attract certain elements. For example, the lead actress might be cast, and it's now time to cast her love interest. A draft will happen where the love interest part is beefed up; some would say, artificially. Because it's not making the script better; it's making that one part bigger. Then they sign the actor they want, based on those added scenes -- then, in post, all those scenes get cut out, and the actor is pissed. This is usually the better outcome. The worse outcome is that the scenes that never should have been there in the first place (the scenes that were cat nip for that actor) end up in the movie and make the movie worse.
This used to happen to Jessica Lange all the time in the 80s. They would beef up scripts for her, she would sign on, then she'd get cut out of the movie, and people would say, for example, <i>why is Oscar-winning Jessica Lange playing "the wife" in Everybody's All-American?</i> And in the press tour, you'd hear her complain all the time that all her scenes were cut.
Thankfully, my two seconds as an extra in a film made in 1999 lives on! (There's almost nothing I like more than a shameless name-drop, John, and that's fantastic that you worked with such geniuses.)
A tidbit you may or not already know: "In 1929, Julius was intercollegiate bantamweight boxing champion and captain of the Penn State boxing team, which won the national championship." Have you been to the Academy Museum yet? I can't heartily recommend going, but there are some good exhibits you might enjoy. The horse's head from the Godfather kind of freaked me out though.
He was. . .a little cranky? I think he barely tolerated young me, to be honest. But I worshipped him (due mostly to What's Up Doc). And my friends who knew him knew him -- not just worked around him briefly like me -- loved him and always said he was lovely. Also, as I'm sure the Hollywood people in this group can attest, nice is overrated. Lots of people are "nice." In all the Buck stories I know, he's never fucking anyone over in any of them. Which, you know, erect a monument.
And he wrote great oddball hilarious whip-smart movies in several decades. Which is not something you can say about many people.
I still think What's Up Doc is one of the funniest movies ever made. That kind of screwball is so hard to pull off as a writer, but rarely gets acknowledged as great writing—it's the director who's great at comedy, the actors who are funny. I could look it up to see if the writers won any awards or got any special notice in this case, but I'm lazy and the main thing I wanted to say is, I completely understand worshipping Buck Henry for creating that complex and incredibly funny screenplay. Also, your comments here have been really insightful. Thanks.
Hi Mary --- I also saw "Babygirl" -- in NYC with Halina Reijn and Nicole Kidman both present for the Q&A. I had the impression from Reijn that the comedic elements in their dynamic (and in the movie's tone) was in the script from the beginning. That marketers latched onto "erotic thriller" to sell the film. Too, she's open about Verhoven's influence --- and "Elle" also has this comedic/absurd stripe.
Yes, it's all the marketing--i guess they think people want a thriller. Lots of laughter at my screening and Reijn said afterward that she thinks of it as an erotic comedy. I liked the movie a lot--her young lover was just adorable. I feel like maybe too much got left on the cutting room floor, but a movie can be only so long. (Sheesh, I just came home from seeing Wicked--the longest movie....) They mentioned that some scenes having to do with therapy (him) were left out.
I am not an expert in screenwriting but possibly an expert in recalling random advice and comments that might someday serve me on "Jeopardy!"
I recall Sherman Alexie describing screenwriting as being akin to poetry. You strip the writing to its essentials. adhere to structure, and let someone else (the director, the actors) interpret it.
I got to spend several years as a volunteer/fly on the wall at the Sundance Screenwriter's labs, with some of the great screenwriters of all time. What I gleaned from them, among other things, was similar to Alexie's advice: You have to find the balance between expressing whatever inner truth you want to convey and leaving more than enough to let others feel like they can express their inner truths as well.
That balance has also evolved over time. If you read Frank Pierson's incredible scripts for Dog Day Afternoon or Cool Hand Luke—one an adaptation and one inspired by true events—they're every bit a work of art as the movies that resulted.
Today's screenplays feel more utilitarian. I did coverage (reviewing submitted screenplays) for Big Hollywood Director/Showrunner for about a year and got to read all manner of scripts. The ones that read the best were the most spare and poetic—you picked up what the characters were feeling from the dialogue and action, not from the writer telling you what they were feeling. Auteur type directors seemed to prefer it this way, too.
Along those lines, I recall reading something from a screenwriter, though I don't recall his name, getting into an argument with Spike Lee about the level of detail to put into a script. Lee, who of course often writes his own scripts, said that he didn't need to put in much extra because he already had the vision in his head of how he would get it from page to screen.
Along both the poetry and the spareness lines, I've read a bunch of Coen brothers screenplays and they're as fantastic, spare, and surprising as their movies.
On the flip side, I recall Colson Whitehead saying that he doesn't get involved with screen adaptations of his work because, if he did, his next novel would never get written, and novels are what he does. So, maybe the lesson there is don't unwittingly make yourself the manager of your intellectual property when what you really should be doing is writing the way you love to write.
Hoo boy. Okay. Here goes nothing. Long time listener, first time caller. Never thought I’d ever have anything to contribute to the conversation, but we’ve stumbled into my sphere of interest and experience, and I’d love to share some thoughts on the matter for anyone interested. Quickly: I’m a screenwriter and director based in LA. I’ve sold screenplays, been hired to write and rewrite them, done some script doctoring. I also teach feature film screenwriting at the graduate and undergrad levels at one of the top film schools here in the US.
First things first. The most significant difference I see between stories/novels and screenplays is that a screenplay is never meant to be read. Not by the ultimate audience, anyhow. It’s first and foremost a technical document, a blueprint. A manual for how to make the movie. The only people who ever need to read the script are those artists and craftspeople involved in the process of making the film. And hot-dog! are there a lot of people that shed their blood, sweat, and tears before a film is ever complete. Thus, the screenplay is simply the beginning of a long and collaborative process. It’s not final, and yet every single word on the page matters so very much.
There are certain formatting functionalities built into screenwriting software that exist solely to make everyone’s jobs easier when the script is run through the various software programs that break down all the technical components for scheduling, budgeting. For this reason, screenwriting isn’t an ideal mode of writing if your’e someone who likes the stream-of-consciousness approach. It’s too clunky and too technical.
This isn’t to say that screenwriting is all technical. Absolutely not the case. But it will require you the writer to be more clever in how you infuse your voice and tone and unique sensibilities onto the page without stepping outside of the “only writing what can be seen and heard” requirement.
By the time you’re sitting down in Final Draft to write INT. NAIL SALON - DAY, in theory, all of the “writing” has already been done and now you’re simply executing your vision and translating it into this hyper-specialized format. The real writing, where we create the characters and craft the story, that all happens before you ever open your screenwriting software of choice. This is where every screenwriter truly gets to develop their own method. I’m big on daydreaming, note-taking, and outlining. I know writers who like to use notecards and bulletin boards to plan their screenplay, and others who write the story in the form of a treatment. But in my own experience and in my years of teaching the craft, I’ve found that it’s best to know what the hell your scene is about and why it exists before you actually write it in screenplay format.
(For what it’s worth, when we talk in the entertainment industry about screenplay structure, we’re most often talking about story structure, not usually the technical formatting you see on the page. Three acts, five acts, eight sequences, take your pick.)
Best case scenario, a good screenplay creates for a reader the experience of sitting in a theater and watching the film on a big screen. A screenplay should only contain what can be seen and heard. My students that come from creative writing backgrounds often struggle with this limitation. Those who come from journalism, or even from physical film production often find the technical constraints of screenwriting liberating. I fall in the latter pool, personally.
My sole mode of writing is the screenplay, never had the itch to write a short story or novel. And I think the reason I resonate so deeply with your approach to teaching the process of writing, George, is that it isn’t geared specifically towards screenwriters. I spend plenty of time (too much, clearly) talking specifically about screenwriting and reading and dissecting and defending and critiquing all of the so-called screenplay gurus who claim to have cracked the code to writing the perfect screenplay that will sell to a studio for six figures and land you a first-look deal at [REDACTED FILM STUDIO] and an invitation to [REDACTED CELEBRITY]’s Fourth of July barbecue. Here at story club, none of that nonsense matters. What matters is the story, stupid.
In both A Swim in the Pond in the Rain and Story Club, what makes my synapses fire on all cylinders is when the discussion boils down to: good writing is the act of reading your own work with a heightened awareness and attention to detail. The act of crafting a screenplay is the act of making a film with words, in real-time present tense. A well balanced page of a screenplay doesn’t have too much action description nor too much dialogue and should take about one minute to read, give or take. Thus, a ninety page script will represent a ninety minute film.
I also think there’s a great lesson to be learned by screenwriters from Mr. Saunders’ approach in regard to leveling with your audience and avoiding condescension. Because of the nature of a screenplay as a real-time experience, it forces us as screenwriters to put ourselves in the shoes of our audience moment to moment. So where I feel a deep connection to all this beautiful discussion of writing stories is right here: in the act of being present in the moment of the experience we’re creating for the ultimate audience who will, god willing, end up on the receiving end of this thing.
I recommend A Swim in the Pond in the Rain to all of my students, friends, basically anyone I meet. It might not make you a better screenwriter, specifically. But it certainly will help you tell a better story. And for a screenwriter, that—in my humble opinion—should be the focus when we teach the craft. I planned on only writing a few paragraphs, and here I am rambling away. I hope it’s clear how much I love all this talk of the philosophies that lead to better stories.
Some truly fantastic resources for those interested in screenwriting but disinterested in the one-size-fits-all formulaic models: Into the Woods by John Yorke. If you’re already familiar with the old standards like Joseph Campbell, Christopher Vogler, Blake Snyder, Frank Daniel, Sid Field, etc. you’ll get far more out of Into the Woods. And if you’re looking for an example of a killer screenplay to read, it doesn’t get much better than Michael Arndt’s Oscar-winning Little Miss Sunshine. I also highly recommend checking out his website Pandemoniuminc.com for some brilliant (and free!) video essays and other such resources on his approach to screenwriting.
I hope this is helpful to anyone out there in Story Club Land. Thanks, George, for inciting this discussion!
Story Club is such a wonderful place, loads of really brilliant people in one Substack! I work with playwrights and I get so much brilliant stuff from you George, and everyone else here, always learning something brand new!
A few things from other people that always stayed with me about writing for theatre:
- The audience can see the camera up close on a character’s face or an important letter in film/tv VS the audience member might be back row of the circle in the theatre. How you give the audience the info in the important letter and how the character feels about it is different if they’re sat 50 feet away (we’ll exclude the likes of Katie Mitchell’s theatre work which does use cameras).
- In playwriting, you’re writing someone’s night out. They’ve had to leave the house, get a babysitter etc. in order to come and watch this particular play. Audiences have expended time, money and thought on a play before it has even begun.
- A story or novel you can read at your own pace, watching tv you can pause or rewind if you missed something, whereas the audience experiences a play live in real time.
Will pick ONE great theatre script, which is Alice Birch’s play ‘anatomy of a suicide’. The story of three generations of women told simultaneously. The way it’s laid out on the printed text is horizontally, in three columns. Alice says about it that she used the form of a “musical round” - so Story 1 has a Hospital scene, then Story 2 has a Hospital scene, then Story 3 has a Hospital scene. Then Party scene, Party scene, Party scene. Then Dinner, Dinner, Dinner. And so on… SO CLEVER! And In a story about generational mental illness, it feels like the perfect marriage of Form and Content!
Interesting - there's a novel by a brilliant former student of mine, Salvador Plascencia, called "People of Paper," that lays out certain sections that way, one column for each character, including one (1) omniscient narrator.
That sounds like a really cool extra layer on top with the omniscient narrator. Will go out and seek that! Discovered Rebecca Curtis through you also - wow, she’s just sensational.
One more play, just for the sheer provocation “how do you stage that?!” - Rafts & Dreams by Robert Holman.
Starts as a pretty standard kitchen sink drama, before the characters discover a rising lake beneath a tree stump in the garden. In the next scene, the world has flooded and the remainder of the play takes place on a “raft” of one of their living rooms.
Holman often referred to as “the playwright’s playwright” in the UK.
Screenwriter and director, currently working toward (hopefully) getting my first movie produced (fingers crossed). I became a screenwriter initially out of necessity; I needed material to direct. But over time, I fell in love with the process, as I discovered that the two mediums are deeply intertwined.
Screenwriting probably has more "rules" than fiction, such as: write only what the audience can see or hear. This rule exists for good reason. If you wax poetic about a character's interior life in a screenplay, how will the audience know that unless they see it or hear it? They certainly won’t be able to read it.
When I was starting out, I followed this rule to a tee. But as I gained more experience as a director, I found it increasingly frustrating. There is so much more happening beneath the surface of a visual image than what we can perfunctorily describe.
Take the following scene from Taxi Driver. Here’s how the great Paul Schrader writes it, adhering strictly to the “what we see and hear” rule:
Travis drops two Alka-Seltzer into his glass of water.
That description hardly does justice to what we’re actually experiencing in the scene. In fact, I’d argue that this might be a moment that calls for breaking the rules—a chance to step away from terse, by-the-book action description and instead wax poetic in a stream-of-consciousness style, akin to Faulkner or Woolf, finding metaphoric connections between the fizzing tablets and Travis’s turbulent state of mind.
This approach, I believe, is one way screenwriters can attempt to convey the “power-conveying artifact” (PCA) through prose. The PCA in this scene is a blend of several elements: the double-zoom effect connecting Travis to the bubbling water, Robert De Niro’s stoic, enigmatic performance, and the sound design—the bubbling water drowning out all other noises except the monotonous banter of the man across from him. These elements combine to evoke a powerful emotional response, one far greater than the simple line: Travis drops two Alka-Seltzer into his glass of water. How do we evoke that same feeling in the text? By bending the rules a little.
My favorite screenplays find ways to break conventions to create an emotional response in the reader that mirrors the impact of watching the scene unfold onscreen. Two of my favorite examples are Michael Clayton by Tony Gilroy and Nightcrawler by Dan Gilroy. I’ll provide links to these below. In both scripts you can feel the PCA leaps off the page through the compelling and yes, rule-breaking writing style:
George, you may not love filmmaking enough to be one of the greats (as you are with fiction), but I think you hit on something true and timeless for all the arts. It's the caring that makes an artist more than a journeyman. The caring makes you dive into the history of the craft, and the history of the craft makes you want to earn your place in it. To do that, you have to steer clear of what's been done before (most of the history), or else do it in a way that's never been seen before. I took a shot at turning my novel to a screenplay and found the work multilayered and fascinating. Now I watch movies with a much fiercer attention.
I’m really enjoying these comments; thanks everybody! George’s piece reminded me of Walter Ong’s book Orality and Literacy, which I found useful in conceptualizing differences between oral and written communication and how they function, but I’m a big giant nerd.
Really intriguing topic! I'm a screenwriter and my partner is a screenwriter and I will say, George, that we constantly send each other your fiction writing thoughts and spend a lot of time discussing them, and your storytelling advice and approach to creation has been really inspirational and helpful to us.
I think the thing I've had to learn is that at least on the page, screenwriting is more about WHAT is in the story than HOW it's being depicted -- I used to really overwrite action and description in a way that felt much more like prose, and I've had to learn to be much more sparse, and less precious about that (ie, the stuff the audience will never see). But, that said, the best scripts read on the page like a riveting novel -- they engross you and you forget you're reading a script. It's like you're watching the movie in your mind as you read, which I feel like has many connections to fiction.
And yes, it's primarily about structure (which, ironically, is the most aggravating part for most of us who are screenwriters I think -- once I have a story "broken" or at least close to it, I LOVE getting in and writing scenes. Coming up with the structure and the beats of a story is frequently maddening.
But at the end of the day, I also think the absolute best scripts convey the essence of a story in them -- yes, the director and the crew and the actors will be making lots of choices, but the most compelling scripts convey the FEELING of the piece, and impart what the story is ABOUT. That's incredibly rare and very difficult to do, but it absolutely can be done, and when you read those scripts, you feel like you've been picked up off the ground and transported.
That said, I guess the biggest difference between fiction and screenwriting is that having an incredible script isn't NECESSARILY a precondition for an incredible film -- I've read plenty of scripts that seemed kinda bland on the page, and turned out to be pretty decent on screen. But a truly amazing script transcends that, and it's almost like you're living the movie / TV show / short / etc in real time.
In any case, thanks for all of your continued inspiration, George. It is so so meaningful to so many of us.
I’m a director and I’ve learned that sometimes, the scene that you think should’ve been cut, because it doesn’t progress the story, or breaks the rules of start late and get out early, or isn’t that funny/moving/visual… can be the best scenes. You get it on its feet, the actors play, the light is great, the camera is beautiful, sounds lovely and we all smile in the sunshine of a charming scene. It is kind of magic.
It’s a collaborative form. As a director, I get to largely write the film’s sentences, the visual grammar, from the mise en scene, to sound and cut. I get to direct how that cat sits on that mat, and that’s a lot of fun. The script is a blue print. In film we say you make a film three times, when you write it, when you shoot it and when you cut it.
But it’s also incredibly painful to write scripts that don’t get made or even read. In an era where streamers are using algorithms to decide whether to make and fund projects, algorithms based on previous shows and whether they turned a profit- it can be pretty depressing for writers.
I think George’s note on finding your form is the key.
Films: Fellini’s 8 ½, Ozu’s Tokyo Story, Tarkovsky’s Solaris, Bong Joon-Ho’s Parasite, add in some Michael Haneke, Jacques Audiard, Ruben Östlund’s Force Majeure, Mike Leigh’s Secrets and Lies, Jonathan Glazer’s Zone of Interest, Mustang by Deniz Gamze Ergüven … there’s a lot of good films..
I relate so much to what you say here Emma about film being a collaborative form. I am a playwright and I find this to be true also in theatre. And I love your choices of films! I'll add "The Life of Others," which I keep looking up to as a perfect execution of a movie on all levels (writing, acting, directing, editing, lighting, filming, music...)
I write for a late night television show that is filmed in front of an audience of real people, which is SUCH a helpful hack because unlike in, say, a novel, I generally know what the audience has just seen and heard which is incredibly helpful in figuring out what they need to see and hear next. I can picture this specific audience in my head and I've been serving them for long enough (six years) that I have a pretty decent idea of when they need a laugh, when they need a release, when they need to see someone be as angry as they feel, and whatever else. It sounds inelegant, or like I'm using math to do writing, but there's an advantage in looking at the actual page of a TV script, because I know literally how long it takes to perform a page of that script, so I'm acutely aware of how many minutes have gone by since a joke has happened. I'm dogsh*t at writing novels because I always feel lost and find myself asking "How will I know when I'm at the halfway point of this book" WHILE writing it! A TV script, especially ours, has such a clear structure that I know when there's time for silliness and when it's time to wrap up.
Movie screenplays are similar. Obviously they can vary in length, but there are structures, act break downs-- if you know you want a 90 minute movie, you know roughly where the halfway point in your script is. Structure, timing, outlines. Bones.
Before I did this professionally, I'd tape my favorite sitcom and pause it to notice patterns. "Okay, by minute four of every episode of Malcolm in the Middle, the seeds for at least three different storylines have been planted, even if one of the seeds is as simple as 'Francis has a loose thread on his sweater.'" You can turn the rhythm of the show into the math of the show to make the structure of the show. When you know the structure-- of a movie or a show-- you know what's supposed to happen and at roughly what page.
I keep the live audience in my head when working on screenplays, even though there's no guarantee that a movie watcher will be as captive and focused as a live audience, but I can pretend. It's not a novel which they might put down, or where they're picturing my protagonist looking or sounding different than he does in MY head; they just saw a PLANE EXPLODE or the LOVERS KISS or the BABY DO KARATE-- what do they need to see next/
This is too many words for my first comment.
LWT rules!!
I have come to writing a novel from a background that includes an MFA in Film and several years working on screenplays. I have found the move into writing straight-up fiction to be at once liberating and additionally challenging. I started down this road with an idea for a story that just didn’t fit into the traditional 3 act structure and length of a normal screenplay. Believe me, I tried to make it work. Eventually, I realized that if I wanted to do the story justice, it would have to be a novel.
I have been energized by the opportunity to expand the story to a length that allows it to (hopefully) be told in a more effective way. But I have had to think a lot about *how* I am writing. Screenwriting is very direct, more plot-oriented. You are writing an instruction manual for someone else to develop in a different medium. You don’t need, and honestly shouldn’t, go to great lengths to describe the scene. Eloquence is only required for dialogue. But to write fiction? I am sweating every single sentence. I didn’t realize how deeply ingrained screenwriting style was in me until I was forced to acknowledge my budding novel read like a screenplay with different formatting. It’s made me think carefully about not only what I am saying, but whether or not I am saying it in the most evocative and beautifully written way that I can.
You are writing an instruction manual for someone else to develop in a different medium.
Perfect description.
The instruction manual idea reminds me of creating children's picture books; oftentimes the author completes the manuscript, without much in the way of visual instruction, and the illustrator works her own ideas into the book. Most publishers don't want authors to provide scenarios or illustration ideas, beyond what's in the text itself.
Elyse, your comment reminded me of Charles Yu's Interior Chinatown. Somehow Yu is able to take a high-concept, potentially gimmicky premise ("write a novel, but format it as a screenplay") and turn it into something that is moving and heartfelt not in spite of its structural contrivances but because of them. I must admit I haven't seen the series yet; Yu himself helped shape the show. But the novel itself thinks deeply about the impact that stereotypical Asian characters in Hollywood movies and TV have on its protagonist: He's an aspiring actor who dreams of playing, and playing more than, Generic Asian Man on the screen.
I have not read any of Charles Yu’s books but Interior Chinatown sounds really interesting. Thank you for mentioning it.
Interior Chinatown is amazing. One of my favorite shows on TV in years. I'm really enjoying it and highly recommend. And FWIW, I'm a produced TV writer myself.
I need to read more Charles Yu. I read his story “Fable” when it came out in The New Yorker and was blown away.
I'll just put a few differences here, in my experience. And a few resources.
Novels can be interior. Screenplays cannot. You cannot write thoughts in a screenplay. You have to show gestures, facial expressions, pauses, etc., to convey emotion or intention.
A mostly interior scene in a novel will be substituted or changed for a screenplay to SHOW what's happening. This is why, sometimes, movie viewers are disappointed because their favorite scene is missing from a movie, or characters have been whittled down to just the main characters. Each screenplay page is a minute of the movie, so scenes are precious, and MUST move the story forward.
To be honest, my screenwriting has changed my novel writing tremendously. No longer can I ramble in my novels. I'm super conscious of the possibility of boring the reader. Ha, ha! So, my novels tend to be shorter, no matter how hard I try to relax while writing them.
If you want to straddle both worlds, I'd recommend the book, Save the Cat! Writes a Novel: The Last Book On Novel Writing You'll Ever Need:
https://www.amazon.com/Save-Cat-Writes-Novel-Writing/dp/0399579745
Read as a starter book. As you progress, you won't need all the beats in there.
The standard screenwriting (and easiest, I think) software to use is Final Draft. It does all the work for you. Once you get the hang of it, you simply tab in, however many times you need to, for a scene heading, or an action heading, or a line of dialogue. Honestly, it won't take you long to learn!
A great book for learning how to write a screenplay (because it's thorough) is The Hollywood Standard - Third Edition: The Complete and Authoritative Guide to Script Format and Style:
https://www.amazon.com/Hollywood-Standard-Complete-Authoritative-Script/dp/1615933220/ref=asc_df_1615933220?mcid=8e57f1264d323e07bee90c3e92089006&tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=693428876523&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=13663118844443745042&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9019798&hvtargid=pla-1004921745358&psc=1
I highly recommend reading scripts--both teleplays (TV scripts) and screenplays (movie scripts). A simple Google search will bring them up. Especially Oscar winners. Especially movies similar to the novels you want to write. There's something about reading the skeleton of a story that's invigorating and clarifying (because, really, a script, is all action and dialogue, when you get down to it). I often write out the beats of my novel first, to lay down a rough roadmap. It's super helpful.
Also, you can Google different screenwriters for their expertise. Aaron Sorkin for his whip-smart dialogue (West Wing, The Social Network, A Few Good Men, Molly's Game, Moneyball, The Network). Craig Mazin for comedy and drama (Chernobyl comes to mind...brilliant!). Aline Brosh McKenna (The Devil Wears Prada, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend). Nora Ephron for relationships (Sleepless in Seattle, When Harry Met Sally). Phoebe Waller-Bridge (Fleabag), Greta Garwig, Spike Lee, Ethan and Joel Coen, Sofia Coppola, the list goes on.
I hope you all can find something useful in all of this!
Another good writing book that straddles both worlds is John Truby's The Anatomy of Story... he uses examples from films and novels -- though it's slightly more geared towards film since he's a screenwriter. Also, there's a Save The Cat for Screenplays, which I think came out before Save the Cat Writes a Novel.
Yes, excellent example! I agree!
Elissa, you have reminded me why I love reading screenwriter's novels! They tend to have great dialogues and memorable scenes that are full of evocative images, and very little "fluff". I, personally, love subtext, so I always appreciate the space to figure things (information) out for myself.
Yes! Subtext is the best! I feel that indie films do this the best, perhaps because the directors are usually writer-directors making them (?), or perhaps they're given more freedom to do what they need to do (?).
A Sea Oak pilot? With Glenn Close as Aunt Bernie?!
Passing on that series should be a federal offense.
Glenn Close as a zombie and with Hughie from "The Boys" in it? I would have renewed my Amazon prime account to watch this.
The pilot is on Prime, and Glenn Close as Bernie is sublime (in a zombiesque sort of way).
Ditto!
I actually love screenwriting, though I also love writing that depends on rhythm and syntax — they seem to use different parts of my brain — for sure different sensibilities.
As is often said, the screenplay is a blueprint— but I do think one wants to write so that you lead a reader to visualize the story through time. The early Russian silent film directors wrote prose accounts and they are beautiful for the way they order the images you will see—- the street, then dusk falling on the street, then the street lamps illuminated. It’s fun in crafting a scene to consider the order of reporting in service of drama, but also in service of awakening the reader to an echo of the experience she/he/they would have when viewing the film.
Dialogue is, of course, something else— if you look at a script by Todd Solondz it is almost entirely dialogue. Almodovar has lavish notes to himself all through the script, and plenty of descriptive passages— and Horton Foote’s “Tender Mercies” is still, to me, one of the most beautiful scripts in English. So economical and full of heart without being in any way sentimental —- and the heart is on the page.
Thanks so much for mentioning Horton. He is not referred to and given the attention he deserves by a long shot. I had the incredible privilege of participating in a playwrighting workshop with him at Sewanee years/decades ago that included a one on one consult on my play. I get teary eyed typing this. A highlight of my life.
I was at Sewanee then, too, though in fiction & so did not have his benefit, but what a wonderful presence!
Oh Sheri, you are so lucky to have studied with him!
Re your “page a time” exercise: my screenwriting friends and I had an insight back in the 80s that for us was an epiphany. It came because a friend said about a specific moment on a specific page “I don’t know what I want here.” Here being a literal actual point on the page you could put your pencil on. Anyway, we decided here was a rule: In a great script, the writer must have their finger on the pulse of the reader’s expectations for every single inch of text. I broke this down, later on, to what does the reader know here, and based on that, what do they expect. Expectation breaking down further into what do they want to happen, what are they afraid is going to happen? Anyway, when I read your page-at-a-time exercise, I was blown away. Because people talk a lot about how fiction writing isn’t screenwriting, but here was a demonstration that in one very important way, it is. Tracking the audience’/reader’s experience of the work. Moment to moment.
Your side-car is fully functional in screenwriting, is my point.
(CONT'D sorry)
“We proceed through a work of art, in time, and as each little time-nugget passes by, we decide whether to carry on. (In an earlier post about screenwriting, I referred to this nugget as a “power-conveying artifact” (PCA)).”
With my students, we talk about DWTRT (Don’t Waste the Reader’s Time). Every word had better keep the reader inside the script, because otherwise, the reader (I was a reader decades ago) will throw your script across the room. A script reader has to read at the pace of no less than a page a minute, or they may as well be working at Starbuck’s. Therefore, any time the reader has to puzzle over something, or page back through the script, is time wasted. So it’s like your little gas stations, except with landmines everywhere on the road. You piss off the reader, kaboom. In a novel, there is (I think) the expectation that the reader will happily page back and re-read. In a screenplay, if you are making the reader page back, you failed. And all of your complexity is not “lost on the reader.” It’s just not there. Because the reader must plow ahead (they are on the clock).
“If I wanted to open my book with a man walking through a mall, talking on a cell phone, I’d have to come up with a charming, convincing way (a sentence) to make you see and believe that – make you buy into it. . . .In film, that guy is just there.”
Yes, but, to Maria-in-the-cart this: In the script, the guy is there and the reader thinks, why. If this is the first moment in the script, as you say re Maria, the reader’s mind is a blank slate. Hope springs eternal.
But in screenwriting land, the reader’s mind is not quite blank, because people who read scripts know that most scripts suck. When I was a reader, I read roughly 2000 scripts, and said “maybe” to around a dozen of them. When I was an executive (in charge of a story department, hiring and firing readers), I saw that this was about the right ratio across the board. So the reader knows going in, I have to be on the lookout for gold, but I know this is probably going to be trash.
So the reader sees the guy on the phone and waits to see if it’s relevant. Because it is probably going to turn out not to be. The bond of trust between the writer and reader is unbroken at FADE IN, but it’s so so fragile.
If the reader gets through the script with the bond of trust intact, that reader will remember that script forever. And recommend it to their bosses, and their friends. I still remember those scripts that did that to me, forty years later.
So, your guy in the mall, you put him there, and I’m interested. It’s (as you say in A Swim) all I have to be interested in. But if turns out not to be relevant, then it’s like the guy who says you’ve got a stain on your shirt, and then pokes you on the nose and says "made you look."
“When I’m writing a script, I often get to a place that feels similar to the place I get to when writing music: I feel, somehow, that I don’t love the form enough to make the hardest choices. I reach a decision point and it seems unclear which is the best direction to go.”
Here’s a sad rabbit hole for you. It’s one of the most debilitating things about a career in screenwriting: Writing (or maybe fiction), as you say many times, is the greatest mind-to-mind communication device ever made. Elsewhere, you talk about your imagined reader, which is of course a version of yourself. The debilitating part, in screenwriting, is that your audience – your imagined reader – is not actually yourself as a movie-goer, seeing this script fully realized in a movie theater. It’s a script reader, executive, agent, actor, director, etc. Your script is actually (primarily) cat-nip for all those people. Your script is a great script if it gets those people excited. If it activates their greed.
And if your script actually does get bought and made – almost nobody (none of your imagined audience) will ever read your script again. People will react to the movie as though it’s the script. People in the industry will watch the movie and never read your script again. So, either way, your imagined audience will never read your script.
This is why, for most of the history of Hollywood, screenplays were regarded – literally – as industrial waste. A by-product useful in production, to be discarded afterwards.
“I find myself more often asking, “What is usually done?” and trying to do that, whereas, when writing fiction, I only ask that so that I can swerve the hell away from it.”
I think that’s the screenwriter’s job too. In the face of all the (mostly shitty) screenwriting books, with their formulas everyone is supposed to know and follow, and here on the precipice of the bullshit AI-ification of everything, the premium is now even more (please god) on an original voice telling an original story that keeps you interested. Your gas stations, again. And you get to the end and all the bullshit drops away and you (the reader) say, yes that should be a movie.
To follow up on the George and daughter block building metaphor. If I am remembering it correctly, the blocks in George's metaphor ARE the words in the story. In a screenplay, though, the blocks are MADE of words, but it's the BLOCKS that are arranged to make the meaning. The blocks of narrative.
Maybe this distinction is too stoned by half.
All of this is probably focusing way too much on the stage-directions/scene-blocking and structural aspects of screenwriting. Dialogue does a ton of heavy lifting in a great screenplay.
Oh. I just thought of something. Okay, maybe this is part of what you're feeling, George, in your lack of full-bodied love for the form of screenwriting.
A producer once read a script of mine and pointed to a bit of description and said "This is a great line. It's the best line in the script." I was like, "Thanks!" But it wasn't a compliment. He was saying WTF. He was saying, why isn't this line in the dialogue -- you know, so it's in the movie? He was saying, rightly, that all the great quotable wonderful phrasing in the world is wasted if you put it in the description where, in the movie, no one can hear it.
A producer reads a great line and he wants it to be up on the screen.
Now -- it's not entirely wasted, because if it has an effect on the reader, and the reader recommends the script, and it gets bought, etc. etc.. This connects back to what I was trying to say, in another comment, about the debilitating part of the screenwriting life. It's a bummer to write great sentences that only readers, agents, producers, and executives will read. You want to skip past them to get to your real ideal imagined audience. But when that happens, it's in movie form, and all your beautiful description has evaporated into the ether.
Glad you broke your silence!
I would be here all the time if I didn't have grading to do. :)
Well, stop grading & come back! Your comment--comments!--is/are enlightening!
I absolutely LOVE this. 'In a great script, the writer must have their finger on the pulse of the reader's expectations for every single inch of text.' A million thanks for sharing this. Blown away.
"the writer must have their finger on the pulse of the reader’s expectations for every single inch of text" - this is great! Thanks.
What, for you, is the primary difference between fiction and screenwriting?
It's the language and the structure, for sure. Try to write a script like Tarantino or Charlie Kaufman and an agent will take one look at it and throw it on the garbage pile. There's no demand for a "voice" in screenwriting, mostly because filmmaking is collaborative, and the "voice" from a screenwriter dictates too much of the creative expression, from camera placement to physical character description. All that has to be enormously tamped down. "Blueprint" is how I hear screenplays often described. You can't write a novel this way.
Funnily enough, I'm working pretty diligently on a screenplay adaptation for 'The Red Bow.' Even though it the cost a very pretty penny for the story rights, George gave me his blessing some time ago (thanks a billion, George!) I'm trying to take the last few pages of that story and expand them to feature length. In doing so, the structure idea George talks about, "the power, then, moves over to what you choose to do with them, and in what order" was radically brought home for me. Essentially, George did the hard work of creating the characters and action. I have to find new ways for those characters and action to intertwine and open the story up beyond what was given, find ways to make that causality real and "compel by event." It's not easy, but it's a blast.
And finally: what’s the best script, made or unmade, ever written? (Not best movie, necessarily, but script). And…why is it the best?
Unforgiven. My god, what a script. And nearly shot-for-shot the same as the film. This is one to study for "how-to-do screenplay structure."
I will warn that there are probably more experienced screenwriters than I who are reading this and our experiences will all differ but I’ve written and sold lots of things for TV and Film.
I’d start by saying, I tend not to look at a screenplay as a finished document in and of itself. I tend to view it as map so that a film can then be made. Quentin Tarantino famously doesn’t agree with that theory. He thinks of a screenplay as a final document.
What, for you, is the primary difference between fiction and screenwriting?
I find that often when writing fiction, language leads the way. Words come to mind before I know where they lead. In screenwriting, I tend to find that I have an image in mind that I must then translate to words. That process is cumbersome. I often direct or plan to direct what I write. I feel like the real creative act is an imagining in my head of what I’d like the film to look like and then the screenplay is my way of writing it down so that I can reexperience it later and invite other people in on it. A screenplay has two masters, first to the emotion you hope to inspire in the audience, and second to the crew who will help you to make the film real. It contains not just what you want the film to do, but to a certain degree, how you’d like to do it. Often it feels like trying to write page turning instruction manual.
If you are a dedicated screenwriter, when was the moment in your life that sent you down that path? That first, “Ah, I love this” moment?
The moments, more than, a single moment, tend to be the moments that I feel like I’m transcending screenwriting. Where, almost as Tarantino describes, the screenplay becomes its own object, where the writing of it, becomes writing for its own end. I find these moments less frequent than I’d like but they are sustaining when they occur. Many of my “I love this” moments usually happen when I’m on set and watching the thing I’ve imagined become real. (This is maybe why I think of myself as a filmmaker and not a screenwriter, despite making much of my living as a screenwriter.)
Are there methods you can think of, that might help a fiction writer make the leap into screenwriting?
I don’t think screenwriting is a very easy medium to discover a story or world in until you’ve spent hour and hours writing screenplays. I think coming from fiction, I would almost encourage someone not to worry too much about the formatting at first and instead to just write the story in your auditory and visual terms. (Auditory and visual terms because those are the things that can be put in a film.
It’s hard to put, Clarence remembered the day his dad forgot to pick him up from school on film.
It is possible to shoot: We see a close up of Clarence. We hold on it. We cut to a Young Man, sitting on his backpack facing away from the road by a bus stop. Orange Peels sit by his feet. There is no Orange. Cut to, C’s Dad, asleep on couch.
Then, later, apply the formatting. The formatting takes time and is a reflex. At first, especially, formatting takes so much time that by the time you’ve written it properly the creative impulse can have vanished. Honor the creative impulse first, then teach yourself how to communicate that within the accepted form of a screenplay. The format takes time and is unnatural, be kind to yourself when it feels unnatural.
What’s the best advice you ever got or read about screenwriting?
I think Richard LaGravanese gave me my favorite advice, which is that writing is like ironing. You work your way forward, and then go over what you’ve done, and then work your way a little forward again, and then go over what you’ve done, each time pushing a little further. Each scene is built on the last and as long as one connects to the next elegantly, you’ll end up with a film that’s worth watching.
And finally: what’s the best script, made or unmade, ever written? (Not best movie, necessarily, but script). And…why is it the best?
I can’t say the greatest, but I can tell you about four relatively recent ones that I felt I learned something from.
1. The Royal Tenenbaums. Reading that script, having seen the movie, is like watching the film. There’s a level of detail that really speaks to the final product.
2. Magnolia. I didn’t go to film school and instead read this script about two hundred times and taught myself screenplay formatting with it. It breaks all the rules. It’s fast. It’s loose. It’s over the top. So many lines of dialogue feel overwritten but in context of the right music cue, with the right performance, with the right dolly move, with the right light become absolutely transcendent. I think it’s a really good example of how much cannot be entirely articulated within a screenplay.
3. Past Lives. I read that before it was a film and still think it’s one of the finest screenplays I’ve ever read. It’s a living document.
4. Bonus: All is Lost. No Dialogue and an interesting read for that reason.
I’ve read good screenplays that became mediocre movies and afterwards have felt that the screenplays were less good. I’ve also read screenplays that made zero sense to me on the page that then turned into things I’ve loved. (Tim Robinson’s I Think You Should Leave comes to mind. I thought it was actually nonsense on the page and have now watched every episode many times.) A screenplay to me, feels a bit like Schrodinger’s Cat, neither dead or alive. Exisiting in a quantum state, waiting to be observed by the filmmaking to determine its state.
It occurs to me that each of the scripts you mention are written (or in one case, co-written) by the director. (though when Celine Song writes Past Lives she is not yet a director) PTA's scripts have director written all over them. I wonder about this... the effect on the page of directors who write...
I am not a screenwriting expert, but i AM an expert at spouting my opinions. And I see a lot of movies. Last night, I went to a screening of Babygirl, the new Nicole Kidman movie. I see it being advertised as an erotic thriller, but I'll tell you right now it's actually a comedy. Kidman and the movie's director spoke after at a Q and A, and this is why I'm commenting: Kidman mentioned how many scenes had been shot that ended up NOT being in the film. Many, many scenes. She said "and if those scenes had made it into the film, it would have been a completely different movie." So, that is something to keep in mind with a screenplay--a director will change things while filming and the end result may not resemble what was on the page. Scenes end up on the cutting room floor. My husband (career in the movie biz) says it all comes down to the editing. He names a particular actor whom I won't name here who was highly awarded for a film--and yet his on-screen parts were carefully pieced together by the editor, bit by bit, as his performance actually sucked. Another tidbit from my husband is the importance of sound. Watch any movie and notice how the sound directs your emotions. Movies depend on sound. Lastly, I used to work for a company where I attended early focus group screenings. Depending on audience feedback, a movie could see GREATchanges from the original cut. What screenplay? By then, the screenplay was long gone. Okay, that's all of my Hollywood insider info given to you by me, a complete NON Hollywood insider. Casablanca is the best screenplay of all time, hands down. I also love The Graduate screenplay.
(I am shamelessly going to drop in that I got to work with the writers of both of the screenplays you mentioned, both of whom are heroes of mine. . .)
Re the Kidman thing: One of the things that I have seen with my own eyes several times is that when a script is greenlit, drafts get written specifically to attract certain elements. For example, the lead actress might be cast, and it's now time to cast her love interest. A draft will happen where the love interest part is beefed up; some would say, artificially. Because it's not making the script better; it's making that one part bigger. Then they sign the actor they want, based on those added scenes -- then, in post, all those scenes get cut out, and the actor is pissed. This is usually the better outcome. The worse outcome is that the scenes that never should have been there in the first place (the scenes that were cat nip for that actor) end up in the movie and make the movie worse.
This used to happen to Jessica Lange all the time in the 80s. They would beef up scripts for her, she would sign on, then she'd get cut out of the movie, and people would say, for example, <i>why is Oscar-winning Jessica Lange playing "the wife" in Everybody's All-American?</i> And in the press tour, you'd hear her complain all the time that all her scenes were cut.
Thankfully, my two seconds as an extra in a film made in 1999 lives on! (There's almost nothing I like more than a shameless name-drop, John, and that's fantastic that you worked with such geniuses.)
Usually when I mention Julius Epstein, people say "who?" Buck Henry, less so. But screenwriters are so rarely name-droppable.
A tidbit you may or not already know: "In 1929, Julius was intercollegiate bantamweight boxing champion and captain of the Penn State boxing team, which won the national championship." Have you been to the Academy Museum yet? I can't heartily recommend going, but there are some good exhibits you might enjoy. The horse's head from the Godfather kind of freaked me out though.
Buck Henry! Was he nice?
He was. . .a little cranky? I think he barely tolerated young me, to be honest. But I worshipped him (due mostly to What's Up Doc). And my friends who knew him knew him -- not just worked around him briefly like me -- loved him and always said he was lovely. Also, as I'm sure the Hollywood people in this group can attest, nice is overrated. Lots of people are "nice." In all the Buck stories I know, he's never fucking anyone over in any of them. Which, you know, erect a monument.
And he wrote great oddball hilarious whip-smart movies in several decades. Which is not something you can say about many people.
He was a champion
His name on Get Smart always made me think There’s that Buck Henry guy again- he must be a genius. Mel Brooks also
I still think What's Up Doc is one of the funniest movies ever made. That kind of screwball is so hard to pull off as a writer, but rarely gets acknowledged as great writing—it's the director who's great at comedy, the actors who are funny. I could look it up to see if the writers won any awards or got any special notice in this case, but I'm lazy and the main thing I wanted to say is, I completely understand worshipping Buck Henry for creating that complex and incredibly funny screenplay. Also, your comments here have been really insightful. Thanks.
Hi Mary --- I also saw "Babygirl" -- in NYC with Halina Reijn and Nicole Kidman both present for the Q&A. I had the impression from Reijn that the comedic elements in their dynamic (and in the movie's tone) was in the script from the beginning. That marketers latched onto "erotic thriller" to sell the film. Too, she's open about Verhoven's influence --- and "Elle" also has this comedic/absurd stripe.
Yes, it's all the marketing--i guess they think people want a thriller. Lots of laughter at my screening and Reijn said afterward that she thinks of it as an erotic comedy. I liked the movie a lot--her young lover was just adorable. I feel like maybe too much got left on the cutting room floor, but a movie can be only so long. (Sheesh, I just came home from seeing Wicked--the longest movie....) They mentioned that some scenes having to do with therapy (him) were left out.
I am not an expert in screenwriting but possibly an expert in recalling random advice and comments that might someday serve me on "Jeopardy!"
I recall Sherman Alexie describing screenwriting as being akin to poetry. You strip the writing to its essentials. adhere to structure, and let someone else (the director, the actors) interpret it.
I got to spend several years as a volunteer/fly on the wall at the Sundance Screenwriter's labs, with some of the great screenwriters of all time. What I gleaned from them, among other things, was similar to Alexie's advice: You have to find the balance between expressing whatever inner truth you want to convey and leaving more than enough to let others feel like they can express their inner truths as well.
That balance has also evolved over time. If you read Frank Pierson's incredible scripts for Dog Day Afternoon or Cool Hand Luke—one an adaptation and one inspired by true events—they're every bit a work of art as the movies that resulted.
Today's screenplays feel more utilitarian. I did coverage (reviewing submitted screenplays) for Big Hollywood Director/Showrunner for about a year and got to read all manner of scripts. The ones that read the best were the most spare and poetic—you picked up what the characters were feeling from the dialogue and action, not from the writer telling you what they were feeling. Auteur type directors seemed to prefer it this way, too.
Along those lines, I recall reading something from a screenwriter, though I don't recall his name, getting into an argument with Spike Lee about the level of detail to put into a script. Lee, who of course often writes his own scripts, said that he didn't need to put in much extra because he already had the vision in his head of how he would get it from page to screen.
Along both the poetry and the spareness lines, I've read a bunch of Coen brothers screenplays and they're as fantastic, spare, and surprising as their movies.
On the flip side, I recall Colson Whitehead saying that he doesn't get involved with screen adaptations of his work because, if he did, his next novel would never get written, and novels are what he does. So, maybe the lesson there is don't unwittingly make yourself the manager of your intellectual property when what you really should be doing is writing the way you love to write.
Hoo boy. Okay. Here goes nothing. Long time listener, first time caller. Never thought I’d ever have anything to contribute to the conversation, but we’ve stumbled into my sphere of interest and experience, and I’d love to share some thoughts on the matter for anyone interested. Quickly: I’m a screenwriter and director based in LA. I’ve sold screenplays, been hired to write and rewrite them, done some script doctoring. I also teach feature film screenwriting at the graduate and undergrad levels at one of the top film schools here in the US.
First things first. The most significant difference I see between stories/novels and screenplays is that a screenplay is never meant to be read. Not by the ultimate audience, anyhow. It’s first and foremost a technical document, a blueprint. A manual for how to make the movie. The only people who ever need to read the script are those artists and craftspeople involved in the process of making the film. And hot-dog! are there a lot of people that shed their blood, sweat, and tears before a film is ever complete. Thus, the screenplay is simply the beginning of a long and collaborative process. It’s not final, and yet every single word on the page matters so very much.
There are certain formatting functionalities built into screenwriting software that exist solely to make everyone’s jobs easier when the script is run through the various software programs that break down all the technical components for scheduling, budgeting. For this reason, screenwriting isn’t an ideal mode of writing if your’e someone who likes the stream-of-consciousness approach. It’s too clunky and too technical.
This isn’t to say that screenwriting is all technical. Absolutely not the case. But it will require you the writer to be more clever in how you infuse your voice and tone and unique sensibilities onto the page without stepping outside of the “only writing what can be seen and heard” requirement.
By the time you’re sitting down in Final Draft to write INT. NAIL SALON - DAY, in theory, all of the “writing” has already been done and now you’re simply executing your vision and translating it into this hyper-specialized format. The real writing, where we create the characters and craft the story, that all happens before you ever open your screenwriting software of choice. This is where every screenwriter truly gets to develop their own method. I’m big on daydreaming, note-taking, and outlining. I know writers who like to use notecards and bulletin boards to plan their screenplay, and others who write the story in the form of a treatment. But in my own experience and in my years of teaching the craft, I’ve found that it’s best to know what the hell your scene is about and why it exists before you actually write it in screenplay format.
(For what it’s worth, when we talk in the entertainment industry about screenplay structure, we’re most often talking about story structure, not usually the technical formatting you see on the page. Three acts, five acts, eight sequences, take your pick.)
Best case scenario, a good screenplay creates for a reader the experience of sitting in a theater and watching the film on a big screen. A screenplay should only contain what can be seen and heard. My students that come from creative writing backgrounds often struggle with this limitation. Those who come from journalism, or even from physical film production often find the technical constraints of screenwriting liberating. I fall in the latter pool, personally.
My sole mode of writing is the screenplay, never had the itch to write a short story or novel. And I think the reason I resonate so deeply with your approach to teaching the process of writing, George, is that it isn’t geared specifically towards screenwriters. I spend plenty of time (too much, clearly) talking specifically about screenwriting and reading and dissecting and defending and critiquing all of the so-called screenplay gurus who claim to have cracked the code to writing the perfect screenplay that will sell to a studio for six figures and land you a first-look deal at [REDACTED FILM STUDIO] and an invitation to [REDACTED CELEBRITY]’s Fourth of July barbecue. Here at story club, none of that nonsense matters. What matters is the story, stupid.
In both A Swim in the Pond in the Rain and Story Club, what makes my synapses fire on all cylinders is when the discussion boils down to: good writing is the act of reading your own work with a heightened awareness and attention to detail. The act of crafting a screenplay is the act of making a film with words, in real-time present tense. A well balanced page of a screenplay doesn’t have too much action description nor too much dialogue and should take about one minute to read, give or take. Thus, a ninety page script will represent a ninety minute film.
I also think there’s a great lesson to be learned by screenwriters from Mr. Saunders’ approach in regard to leveling with your audience and avoiding condescension. Because of the nature of a screenplay as a real-time experience, it forces us as screenwriters to put ourselves in the shoes of our audience moment to moment. So where I feel a deep connection to all this beautiful discussion of writing stories is right here: in the act of being present in the moment of the experience we’re creating for the ultimate audience who will, god willing, end up on the receiving end of this thing.
I recommend A Swim in the Pond in the Rain to all of my students, friends, basically anyone I meet. It might not make you a better screenwriter, specifically. But it certainly will help you tell a better story. And for a screenwriter, that—in my humble opinion—should be the focus when we teach the craft. I planned on only writing a few paragraphs, and here I am rambling away. I hope it’s clear how much I love all this talk of the philosophies that lead to better stories.
Some truly fantastic resources for those interested in screenwriting but disinterested in the one-size-fits-all formulaic models: Into the Woods by John Yorke. If you’re already familiar with the old standards like Joseph Campbell, Christopher Vogler, Blake Snyder, Frank Daniel, Sid Field, etc. you’ll get far more out of Into the Woods. And if you’re looking for an example of a killer screenplay to read, it doesn’t get much better than Michael Arndt’s Oscar-winning Little Miss Sunshine. I also highly recommend checking out his website Pandemoniuminc.com for some brilliant (and free!) video essays and other such resources on his approach to screenwriting.
I hope this is helpful to anyone out there in Story Club Land. Thanks, George, for inciting this discussion!
Insightful & very generous of you---thanks, William!
Thanks. Now I’m going to read A Swim in the Pond again
Story Club is such a wonderful place, loads of really brilliant people in one Substack! I work with playwrights and I get so much brilliant stuff from you George, and everyone else here, always learning something brand new!
A few things from other people that always stayed with me about writing for theatre:
- The audience can see the camera up close on a character’s face or an important letter in film/tv VS the audience member might be back row of the circle in the theatre. How you give the audience the info in the important letter and how the character feels about it is different if they’re sat 50 feet away (we’ll exclude the likes of Katie Mitchell’s theatre work which does use cameras).
- In playwriting, you’re writing someone’s night out. They’ve had to leave the house, get a babysitter etc. in order to come and watch this particular play. Audiences have expended time, money and thought on a play before it has even begun.
- A story or novel you can read at your own pace, watching tv you can pause or rewind if you missed something, whereas the audience experiences a play live in real time.
Will pick ONE great theatre script, which is Alice Birch’s play ‘anatomy of a suicide’. The story of three generations of women told simultaneously. The way it’s laid out on the printed text is horizontally, in three columns. Alice says about it that she used the form of a “musical round” - so Story 1 has a Hospital scene, then Story 2 has a Hospital scene, then Story 3 has a Hospital scene. Then Party scene, Party scene, Party scene. Then Dinner, Dinner, Dinner. And so on… SO CLEVER! And In a story about generational mental illness, it feels like the perfect marriage of Form and Content!
Interesting - there's a novel by a brilliant former student of mine, Salvador Plascencia, called "People of Paper," that lays out certain sections that way, one column for each character, including one (1) omniscient narrator.
That sounds like a really cool extra layer on top with the omniscient narrator. Will go out and seek that! Discovered Rebecca Curtis through you also - wow, she’s just sensational.
One more play, just for the sheer provocation “how do you stage that?!” - Rafts & Dreams by Robert Holman.
Starts as a pretty standard kitchen sink drama, before the characters discover a rising lake beneath a tree stump in the garden. In the next scene, the world has flooded and the remainder of the play takes place on a “raft” of one of their living rooms.
Holman often referred to as “the playwright’s playwright” in the UK.
Screenwriter and director, currently working toward (hopefully) getting my first movie produced (fingers crossed). I became a screenwriter initially out of necessity; I needed material to direct. But over time, I fell in love with the process, as I discovered that the two mediums are deeply intertwined.
Screenwriting probably has more "rules" than fiction, such as: write only what the audience can see or hear. This rule exists for good reason. If you wax poetic about a character's interior life in a screenplay, how will the audience know that unless they see it or hear it? They certainly won’t be able to read it.
When I was starting out, I followed this rule to a tee. But as I gained more experience as a director, I found it increasingly frustrating. There is so much more happening beneath the surface of a visual image than what we can perfunctorily describe.
Take the following scene from Taxi Driver. Here’s how the great Paul Schrader writes it, adhering strictly to the “what we see and hear” rule:
Travis drops two Alka-Seltzer into his glass of water.
And here’s how the scene was shot by Martin Scorsese: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1ECuin_0r8
That description hardly does justice to what we’re actually experiencing in the scene. In fact, I’d argue that this might be a moment that calls for breaking the rules—a chance to step away from terse, by-the-book action description and instead wax poetic in a stream-of-consciousness style, akin to Faulkner or Woolf, finding metaphoric connections between the fizzing tablets and Travis’s turbulent state of mind.
This approach, I believe, is one way screenwriters can attempt to convey the “power-conveying artifact” (PCA) through prose. The PCA in this scene is a blend of several elements: the double-zoom effect connecting Travis to the bubbling water, Robert De Niro’s stoic, enigmatic performance, and the sound design—the bubbling water drowning out all other noises except the monotonous banter of the man across from him. These elements combine to evoke a powerful emotional response, one far greater than the simple line: Travis drops two Alka-Seltzer into his glass of water. How do we evoke that same feeling in the text? By bending the rules a little.
My favorite screenplays find ways to break conventions to create an emotional response in the reader that mirrors the impact of watching the scene unfold onscreen. Two of my favorite examples are Michael Clayton by Tony Gilroy and Nightcrawler by Dan Gilroy. I’ll provide links to these below. In both scripts you can feel the PCA leaps off the page through the compelling and yes, rule-breaking writing style:
Michael Clayton: https://assets.scriptslug.com/live/pdf/scripts/michael-clayton-2007.pdf?v=1729114952
Nightcrawler: https://cjpowersonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/250889715-nightcrawler-script.pdf
Very cool side-by-side example
George, you may not love filmmaking enough to be one of the greats (as you are with fiction), but I think you hit on something true and timeless for all the arts. It's the caring that makes an artist more than a journeyman. The caring makes you dive into the history of the craft, and the history of the craft makes you want to earn your place in it. To do that, you have to steer clear of what's been done before (most of the history), or else do it in a way that's never been seen before. I took a shot at turning my novel to a screenplay and found the work multilayered and fascinating. Now I watch movies with a much fiercer attention.
I’m really enjoying these comments; thanks everybody! George’s piece reminded me of Walter Ong’s book Orality and Literacy, which I found useful in conceptualizing differences between oral and written communication and how they function, but I’m a big giant nerd.
Ong's book was a revelation for me.