A screenplay is a story told with pictures … a screenplay is about a person, or persons, in a place, or places, doing his, or her thing … it is a story told in dialogue and description, and placed in the context of a dramatic structure … each shot [what the camera sees] represents an individual mosaic within the tapestry of the sequence … Syd Field
Scripts … indicate how material could be transferred from the source fiction into an eventual film … [they] plan shooting of the film … John Ellis
Dear friends and readers,
I’ve not written on this blog in a while: I’ve been reading several books at once (and hope to blog on them soon); I also returned to my book on the Jane Austen film canon, and decided to write the opening section on the how screenplays function in film-making and how they may be read as serious literature in a new subgenre, so I’ve been reading well-known practical books on how to write a screenplay plus a number of screenplays, some adapting a book, some wholly literally original. These scripts may be backed up, filled out by companion books which show how to create the illusion of the world of the adapted source; these scenarios can include building up of the context (background stories) for major and minor characters. I’ve also been reading studies of companion books and published screenplays with scenarios when they are published as single or multiple books accompanying a movie or movies.
A good study
There is indeed an underlying paradigm in the case of all sorts of screenplays whose literal content might seem very different, and above is Syd Field’s well-known way of diagramming it.
The first ten pages or ten minutes shows the viewer the main character and central dramatic premise, the contours of the place and dramatic situation; the next twenty pages or minutes (thirty altogether) takes the viewer to the key crux or happening that must be coped with. In a mini-series one finds that the first 30 minutes or 30 pages functions as both introduction and set up. The middle central section, in a 90 to 120 minute movie shows the character in context confronting obstacle after obstacle: the main character wants or needs something (it can be quite complicated or subtle — or not) and he or she is kept from achieving this. The character has a point of view or attitude and to thicken his or her presence a context (family background, history). We watch the character behave visually and act and speak too. The last part — however long — is resolution. Often at the end of the first act there is a “plot point:” plot points move the action forward; when it comes at the end of the first block or act and the second it’s an incident that spins the action and characters into the next act, often in another direction. This is repeated as we move into resolution. (Field says it always spins the action around in a new direction when it comes at the end of the first act and the second.) A pinch-point half-way through each act is an incident which ratchets up the main or minor characters’ difficulties. Say the theft of Louise’s $6000 which she is depending upon to enable herself and Thelma to live and escape to Mexico (someone attempted to rape Thelma and Louise shot and killed him so they must flee as no court will believe Thelma that it was an assault).
This sounds formulaic and childish but if you begin to read screenplays and watch movies you will find this paradigm repeatedly even in the most apparently sophisticated movie designs. Field and others mention the sequence: I know I have been studying films by identifying sequences of scenes that are informed by an idea; they are often identifiable as they are given an emblem and numbered on the DVD as places to begin watching other than the opening of the film. A scene by the way occur when the camera focuses on a specific place at a specific time of day; there is a scene change when we move to another place or time (and the camera moves or changes its lighting). The scene moves the characters from A to B (or the story forward) in the masculinist paradigm.
There are variations on this paradigm, depending on what the mythic story is or if you have a “character-driven” or ensemble script. But alas, or tellingly (showing something centrally signficant about movies which are so influential), not only are most of the time these plot-outlines expressed in the most masculinistic ways; that is, from the point of view of how a man sees his life as linear and with opportunities, climaxes,
not (as women do in their autobiographies) as a cyclical and repetitive experience; alas, I have not found a single diagrammed paradigm that is woman-centered. I asked myself if this masulinist paradigm underlies woman’s movies, that they use this as what sells. I found it underlay Koulli’s Thelma and Louise. I must try some more films where the screenplay is by woman, from a woman’s book, and preferably directed by a woman. If the masculinist paradigm is what the viewer is used to, that can explain why a woman’s movie might be called “boring” if it departs from this paradigm. I admit I have only begun to look at them through the lens of these paradigms so I may be wrong; there may be more woman-centered (cyclical repetitive — going “nowhere” as someone might say) than I think. I must check this out further by watching many more movies with attention paid to the screenplay paradigms.
How to recognize a plot point? from this masculinist activity point of view the plot point is a function of the main character: it’s the spins and turns and twists occurring to the main character. Field and others also have a peculiar way of discussing the main character’s action: he asks what is this character’s need and what are the obstacles in his way? conflict is obstacles getting in the way. Well, who is the main character in Gosford Park? Is it Mary? or Helen Mirren? what is her need? to kill or to protect her son who is coming there to kill Sir William McCordle? No because we are supposed to be watching the needy character confronting obstacles. This is a peculiar way to insistently phrase what turns out to be different permutations of stories.
For my study what I hope to examine literally is how the script relates (gives rise) to the verbal materials transferred from a book to become the auditory-visual elements of a film, which are gone over lovingly with many claims to historical accuracy or verisimilitude in the scenario companion books. Since my subject is the Jane Austen film canon I want then to see how these transferred materials and very different screenplays and intermediary source books (say Death Comes to Pemberley out of Pride and Prejudice) relate to one another (say with Lost in Austen or Bridget Jones’s Diary, to stay with Pride and Prejudice sequels and appropriations).
For me what is great fun and enlightening is to place this material alongside screenplays and scenarios from other costume dramas in the form of romantic comedies or dramatic romances in mini-series or singleton form. Musicals too. Downton Abbey (with no eponymous source outside the screenplay) and Gosford Park are not my only candidates; I’ve been studying Callie Khouri’s Thelma and Louise, Marilyn Hoder-Salmon’s The Awakening, and hope to add not just more women’s screenplays (Laura Jones’s Portrait of a Lady), but men’s too, the scripts directed into a film by Ang Lee (e.g., Eat Drink Man Woman), William Goldman’s Princess Bride, Christopher Hampton’s Atonement, Simon Gray’s A Month in the Country &c&c.
Thus far I have found only one literary-critical study which rises to general principles about published screenplays (a published screenplay is a sub-genre: Julian Fellowes has been doing them for each of his scripts): Miguel Mota’s Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio: The Screenplay as Book, Criticism, 47:2 (2005)215-231; and I have found one on the elements of the scenario (see Downton Abbey: bonding with the heroine): Umberto Eco, ”Casablanca: Cult Movies and Intertextual Collage,” Travels in Hyperreality, trans. William Weaver (NY: HBJ, 1983):197-213.
There are plenty of excellent individual studies on the making of this or that film (a remarkably good one on the development of the different screenplays directed by Hitchcock to make a film Marnie out of Winston Graham’s powerful book). Jaoob Lothe’s Narrative in Fiction and Film; Maire Messenger Davies, “Quality and Creativity in TV: The Work of the Television Storytellers,” Quality TV: contemporary american television and beyond (NY: Tauris, 2011):171-84. And there are really excellently-produced screenplays and companion books for successful and art and some popular films. The intelligent ones reveal the thinking behind the mise-en-scene, the choice of “historical accuracies” and the emphases in the detailed expositions of the screenplays (in boxes you can find citations of analogous films and books).
If my reader can make any suggestions for further studies or where to find screenplays (especially for Juliette Towhidi’s Death Comes to Pemberley, Robin Swicord’s The Jane Austen Book Club, Fielding and Davies’s Bridget Jones’s Diary; Guy Andrews’s Lost in Austen), I’d be very grateful. I have already taken down the script for Lost in Austen (using stenography on sten pads, but as of a year ago I cannot hold my hands and guide my fingers with the requisite exquisite control and quickness to make the symbols legible while taking them down as the actors speak). If no one can help me to one of these scripts, I have to sit and watch the three I’ve not down slowly and type the script as I watch.
Susan Herbert: My Fair Lady (out of Shaw’s Pygmalion)
Ellen
Ellen And Jim Have A Blog, Two 
Excellent post. Thank you Ellen. Max
I suggested off-blog that a film adaptation of a Burney novel or parts of her journals (as newly edited) would be enormously popular.
Tyler replied:
I don’t know anything about writing screenplays, but I would love to see Evelina as a film, and I never have understood why no one has yet filmed The Mysteries of Udolpho with all the interest in the Gothic these days.
Another dialogue with someone off blog about filming Burney; thinking about Burney as not filmable or filmable: It was suggested that Cecilia is really anti-feminist in thrust (all the feminist readings being against the grain ), to which I replied:
They would change Cecilia a lot — and cut it down but some of the stories could be slotted in straight. _Camilla_ would be regarded as hopeless; maybe they’d keep the names of the characters — Austen’s wish the doctor had died would be understood. Some of the situations in The Wanderer might appeal, but again drastic changes.
I was really thinking of the diaries and journals – now there they need not change much as Burney d’Ablay herself. Remember she came back again and again to rewrite and re-arrange so she is F. D’Arblay to use her own signed name as of 1792 and much we have has been re-contextualized since 1792, even some of the very early diaries and journals were “fixed” and much crossed out (but not burnt so retrievable).
Especially the court journals. With the predilection of BBC and PBS to go for “high life” in court, the madness of George III, it would be surprising except the books are just out, it would take knowledge and work, and there is a real tendency to keep doing the same books.
Ellen
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I am not interested in writing a screenplay but only studying them for a film studies book.
More watching of films the last two nights — including Robin Swicord’s The Jane Austen Book Club and a film meant to be about the disability called Autism called Temple Grandin — has made me think I have been too prompt and seen and read too few films and screenplays with this overt recommended paradigm in mind. It is true, for example, that you can find the underlying paradigm in The Jane Austen Book Club, but it’s an abstraction and if you look at the content and context of the acts, what are the plot points and pinches, they are many of them subjective reactions; more to the point the stories move cyclically and repeat. The whole large arch of a soap opera over many episodes is repetitive and cyclical: again individual episodes may conform to this forward moving supposed “gain” this or that paradigm but perhaps they are not what strikes the viewer who likes to watch the arch.
And what is meant by the “woman’s film:” Jeanine Basinger in her book on How Hollywood Spoke to Women, 1930s to 1970s, would have us look sheerly at story, characters, content of scenes, but I have thought it also refers strongly to the kind of structure and movement and intuitively without study Swicord’s Jane Austen Book Club was seen as a woman’s movie. In the audience the two times I saw it were hardly any men. The auditoriums were full because in both cases the theater (owned by a man, independent) put the film in the small auditorium, as it were stigmatizing and framing it as a film not likely to attract a “crowd.”
One real problem I have in my film studies reading is one I go outside costume drama or feminist studies, the films chosen are to me awful, all films I recognize as popular but which you could not pay me to see (Rocky) or which I simply didn’t see out of an intuitive taste. A favorite is Polanski whose films conform, especially say Chinatown. It is true that as in all areas of books it seems the things called film studies in general chose masculinist films (Martin Scorcese a great favorite and I’ve seen but one film by him and that was Age of Innocence — a voyeuristic film). And you can’t elevate the costume drama film adaptation type as those publishing and writing simply ignore this and keep up their deprecating stances.
E.M.
I also liked Syd Fields ‘Save the Cat!’ and ‘Save the Cat Goes to Movies’ with their explanation of screenplays’ structures and examples.
Here is link to script of Bridget Jones’s Diary:
http://bridgetarchive.altervista.org/bjd_script.htm
Thank you for the URL to the script. That’s a help to me. There does not seem to be a book called Save the Cat or Save the Cat goes to the Movies. I take it you’re teasing me.
No teasing, they are real:
I particularly liked the second which explains story structure on movie examples.
It is very hard to find a book on screenplays which analyze them. I got myself one of these _Short Cut_books put out by the British Film Institute called “Scenario” and to my dismay found it to be another recipe book. All these books on screenplays are written as if the person reading them is thinking of writing one him or herself and for money. All the other Short Cuts books I’ve gotten before this (4 — there are many many books in this series) have been serious books, written as analysis, film criticism.
It suggests to me how still screenplays are theoretically despised even if the writers are so well paid and by some the importance of this writing and its high quality sometimes recognized.
Tudor Gates writes one of these How to write a screenplay books too — for Short Cuts, the BFI imprint. Gates also persists like Syd Field in citing masculinist movies and analysizing these, especially again violent ones (Reservoir Dogs for example is a tale of mutual slaughter), and his approach fits in with Field’s.
He too says all good screenplays have premises; all have a single or at most double protagonist who may not be the same figure as the hero or heroine. That premise is acted out and its results resolved by films that succeed (meaning are popular and make money).
So following his lead and thinking about the type of film he too never mentions (except to denigrate — like Terms of Endearment, apparently hopelessly meandering and maudlin):
While the heroine of Gosford Park is Mary, the paid companion who is the sleuth (and her double, Elsie played by Emma Watson), the protagonist is Mrs Wilson, the housekeeper (Mrs Hughes’s equivalent). The premise is evil will be destroyed, it’s so foul. The resolution is that of the typical Agatha Christie movie: an overkill of the really nasty man in the center (Lord Grantham in function but no fairy tale figure).
Of the 1995 P&P the protagonist is Elizabeth; she instigates action by her presence. The premise is first impressions are usually false. We know the resolution. But in the 1979 P&P (by Fay Weldon who labels the film First Impressions in her cartoon paratexts) the premise is you must understand yourself to find happiness, know thyself (in the book I had never known myself until now is the operative phrase). We all know the resolution.
In the 1995 S&S (Ang Lee) the heroine is Elinor but the protagonist is Marianne. Ditto for the 1981 film (scripted by Alexander Baron). The premise: you must govern yourself, exercise self-control or you will self-destruct. The action bears this out.
I am convinced that the 2005 P&P (Joe Wright’s) has an utterly different premise and it’s about sex, Lawrentian; and the 2008 S&S Elinor is the heroine, Marianne is much less the protagonist, the message or premise is to find fulfillment you must be generous with yourself and others.
You can analyse film screenplays and films this way and relate them to their books.
While Gates’s book is not as openly crass and he does not chose as film matter semi-porn matter to salivate over (as Syd Field does), I’m finding his take on the structure of a screenplay is in some ways worse, more limiting. Field does leave blank or up to the writer what the set up, main character and his or her desire can be. It can be subtle. Then when we move into obstacles the character has to get over to fulfill his need (rather like a sex act you see) again he can accommodate subtle and intangible obstacles so in effect you can fit Jane Austen Book Club or Gosford Park or Lunchbox (though not so well) into Field’s schemata.
Once Tudor Gates begins to produce formulas one can see in his mind is over aggression and conflict resolved through some kind of action, even if it’s a morally seen one. In his scenario the protagonist really always has an antagonist and the antagonist provokes the conflict by using the obstacles so we have a scenario of repulse and deflection and what makes for excitement is neither side backs down.
You may say how comical and absurd, but as he goes through several really sterling fine movies — among them Graham Greene’s famous Third Man (with Orson Wells as the infamous Harry [S]lime} and other respected foreign films (including the Seventh Seal) you begin to see he’s not imposing this masculinist structure on these films at least but they are there.
His idea of a premise is also at the level of a 12 year old — he will reduce the idea of the movie down far more simply than Field does.
This book can also as a reminder that unlike novels and plays which appeal to limited audience, usually with some brains, the commodity known as a movie reaches out broadly to a mass of people. That means underlying it if it is to be popular must be some utterly accessible idea. So it teaches one the limitations of the form. Paradoxically his discussion of TV shows suggests that there there is some leeway since cable as the niche audience concept, the short amount of time on the TV, and the fact that advertisers are the ones you turn to for money (not the vast audience itself) can allow them to become more complicated — thus explaining in part why some PBS and BBC and other British TV can be superior.
E.M.
I bought myself another book said to be better than Field or Gates: Robert McKee’s book — or so I thought. I goofed and instead see I got a CD set — so I’m sending them back..
I did get myself to skim Field’s analysis of the screenplay out of the book Silence of the Lambs. The core premise (as Gates would put it) is, I think, male sadists enjoy destroying women and win out. This describes the coming structure much more than what Fields says the premise is. Tellingly — I hope Diane Reynolds is reading this — Field says that when you adapt a novel you take from it a central idea that is your premise and guess what, he finds the premise of The Silence of the Lambs, transformation, that is the heroine takes hold of her life and becomes a person through it. This reminds me of the nonsense said to be the core idea of Breaking Bad — all the idiot male showing off antics are the hero taking control of his life. What’s instructive is how Field then (however wrongly) goes over the plot-design and story elements of the book and ‘shows” how these are re-arranged to fit the new idea. I believe that central to adaptation is the taking of an idea, often different but related to the one in the novel, and re-arranging the plot-design accordingly.
But I’m beginning to have Doubts. Yesterday while writing something I put on the score of the 1995 Sense and Sensibility which I just love. It has nothing of this crude aggressive forward moving structure. I showed a part of Davies’s 2008 S&S film last week at OLLI and thought to myself, Why don’t I just watch this mini-series endlessly, do nothing else, rather like the character in Winter’s Tale who wants only to follow the rhythm of his beloved’s movements.
I’m beginning to think Field and Gates’s formula are underlying paradigms for beginning, middle and end, and if there are writers who follow it, there is in fine movies I like a countervailing structure, a series of patterns that are individual and also cyclical, with the resolution coming differently, not the result of some crass gain against beating obstacles in fight scenario, but from within the characters
If this were not so, I would never want to re-watch movies like these two S&Ss — or Downton Abbey whose structure is that of an ensemble. No one seems to come up with formulas they say are what’s happening in an ensemble movie. They insist it’s still a central protagonist and go about to find one as they pretend that most of the movies they are analysing do not come from books when they do.
E.M.
I have downloaded a bunch of scholarly articles critiquing the “school” of recipe books on how to write a screenplay, also their history. Most say there is no single formula; I’m hoping to find among them though some direction of how to study the transition from script to film. I find beginning to study a movie — I began with Death Comes to Pemberley — that after all that eponymous book however transformed structurally or thematically (Howtidi turns a strictly conservative sequel-as-detective novel into an ambivalent gothic film) the book matters too. The film-makers, actors and all not just doing the screenplay as some aver; they are having in mind the book again and again.
I skimmed yet another of these books I had gotten myself a while back now: very mainstream, James Ryan’s Screenwriting from the Heart. He professes to give the budding screenplay writer advice on how to be deep, how to evoke characters our of your sub or unconscious. I don’t want to make fun as he is in some ways much better than Field or Gate: he is writing about character-driven screenplays and is a lot more flexible than the other two.
But in fact while Ryan often has Field in mind and is writing against him (a screenplay is “not just a story told in pictures”), once he moves into describing plays generally and begins to hand out recipes for what to do with this material you’ve created, he falls back on a structure that is Field all over again. He even uses the same terms. Suddenly we are in a masculinist plot-driven three parter and he’s talking about characters “needs” as desires and how they are overcoming obstacles. A great scene has many conflicts (=obstacles). And when he chooses a film it’s another of these masculine classics: The Godfather. It appears in reality to be his favorite movie. He quotes Robert McKee as a guru.
Like Field and Gates, Ryan also does not admit the huge percentage of film screenplays based on pre-existing novels. So one would not be inventing from sheerly one’s imagination but another text’s characters and story, developing or changing these.
There is no recipe book from a female perspective. None for costume drama or soap operas which are ensemble art in cyclical form. You can find a woman discussing a screenplay and being intelligent about it (as from The Awakening) but no one rises to general principles that make sense. literary criticism of the soap opera and a description of its aesthetics that we and for costume drama too, but nothing on the screenplays themselves, how they function as such.
Ellen