The Screenplay: They All Do It

First thoughts on the movie script

Today I thought I would post the first of some essays on the art of telling a tale through a screenplay.

Plan Only

The first thing to observe about a screenplay, or teleplay, or theatrical play, is that it is not the final telling of the tale. It is instead only a set of indications as to how the final telling should proceed, and in between these indications or instructions, and the actual tale as it is told, come so many people, crafts, and work, that it is almost impossible to say that one should simply ‘shoot the script.’ In the first place, we should note that those other craftsmen would not be doing their jobs properly if all they did was ‘shoot the script.’ In the second place, a screenplay cannot indicate everything the finished film will hold, or else it would run to thousands of pages. Even if it did indicate everything in the finished film, the script could not give the same effect that watching the film gives us in the audience, because what we feel and apprehend as we watch a movie is immediate, and depends upon both senses of sight and hearing to work as one and at once.

Thus we can say to the beginning screenwriter, to look upon his script as no more than a blueprint for the final work, or in more writerly terms, the script is a sort of outline for the film.

If a writer compares his outline to the novel he creates based upon that outline, he sees two things:

1. There is much in the novel that was not in the outline
2. The novel’s events often change from the order and nature of the events in the outline.

This every writer can see and understand, but often screenwriters complain when the final film diverges from their script. Even when a movie derives from a novel, we often hear the novel’s author complain that the movie changed things. Sometimes these complaints are understandable, as it sometimes seems as though the producers of the movie bought a story only to film a completely different tale; why, we wonder, didn’t they just commission an original script to their own specifications, and save the option fees on the novel? But there is more to it than that, though the complaint of the novelist in these instances are justified. In many cases, though, we suspect that the source of the original author’s complaints stem from a misunderstanding of how movies are made.

They All Do It

A movie script is revised in order to use the money in the budget most effectively; this means that locations are sometimes changed or combined, and that for almost all movies, the scenes are shot out of narrative order. All the scenes in one location will be shot at once, then the crew will move to another location and shoot all the scenes that take place there. All the location night scenes will be shot, then the day scenes, because the cast and crew can’t work around the clock, 24 hours a day.

A movie will also ‘complete’ the script as the different departments go to work on it. Costume department must design and make the costumes all the main and featured characters will wear; this is a matter not only of understanding the characters, their milieu, and their intentions, but also how the costumes will affect us in the audience, both emotionally as to whether we like the character or not, and intellectually as to how we understand the character and how he will function in the tale. And the costume department must beyond this consider the actual actors who will wear the outfits, and how the color and shape and cut of the costumes will dress the actors’ bodies, and how well the actors will be able to move and perform their parts in the costumes.

The production designer commands set design and props, those parts of the set that can be picked up and moved about by the actors. A general color scheme may be chosen that reflects the tale’s themes, again with an eye to both the intellectual and emotional effects it will have on us the audience. The set is ‘dressed’ even as the actors are.

The cinematographers in camera and lighting then must light the sets with an eye toward the mood of the tale, its general tendency toward one of the poles of realism or expressionism (or fantasy), and the style of the movie. Then the camera department chooses lenses and filters for those lenses, and what film stock to shoot on, and what aspect ratio to shoot the movie in. And then sometimes the camera will be itself a kind of actor in the scene, in the way it moves or zooms in or out on the scene.

The actors go over the lines of dialogue in the script and the lines will sound different as different actors speak them. What sounds good coming from one actor might not sound so good from another; the cast is chosen based on a variety of considerations, among them financial, but let’s think only of the artistic side of things here: the best actor for a role is the one who can best portray the character over the whole of the story, and one or two lines might sound awkward or unintentionally funny coming from this one actor — in which case the lines are better changed. All the actors must not only speak their lines, they must speak them with certain inflections, using great subtlety, and they must speak the lines at a certain pace, timing their delivery and their pauses — the moments in their lines when they are not speaking them. They must also control the volume or loudness and softness with which they speak.

Each scene will be broken down into various camera angles or shots, and each shot will be rehearsed, then filmed one or more times. Each time a shot is performed, the performances of cast and camera will differ slightly, and decisions must be made as to which take is best, over all, for the telling of the tale and its effect on us the audience.

When filming is complete (both principal and secondary), the scenes are assembled in editing and the first rough draft of the tale is now complete. The editor works on choosing which takes to use, which camera angles to use at which moments, and the overall pacing of scenes and movie.

After picture is cut to a reasonably finished form, the sound department cleans up production sound, re-records some dialogue (which even at this point may be rewritten), adds sound effects, ambience, and fine-tunes the volume and the other aspects of sound through various sound filters.

The music composer then composes music to cover and enhance some scenes, arranges it for different instruments, and records it. The music editors then tailor the recorded music for the film scenes.

Any special effects are created and added by the f/x departments. There are effects created on set, to be performed while shooting, and there are optical effects to be added in camera and post-production, and there are digital effects which can be created in advance in a pre-visualization stage, then finished and fine-tuned after shooting. These are cut in by the editors at various stages of post-production, using the first drafts to get an idea of how the effects will work, then the final fully-rendered effects very late in post-production.

Then the sounds are all mixed together to the final version of the film, and titles are designed, filmed, and cut in with their music and sounds.

Finally, the movie will be shown to an audience (to several, in fact, beginning with the producers and a small group of advisers, then to wider test audiences, in many cases) and the reaction is judged with an eye to making any final changes before general release.

Some films are recut after general release, for various reasons. Some films are recut for different national markets and versions.

Not Only One Talesman

At every step along this long road, each of these departments, and everyone in the departments, takes a hand in telling the tale, at least in his small or large part of it. Every one is a talesman, and the talesman or ‘author’ of a movie is the combined aggregate of all these members of the cast and crew.

The movie’s director is often given credit as its ‘author,’ which is acceptable if only because the director more than any other single person, controls the overall telling of the tale, since he is in command of production. But even where the director knows the crafts of all the departments, and takes a very active role in guiding their work, he serves often as the final arbiter, accepting or rejecting the proposals of the department heads, who in turn often work to accept or reject the proposals of their staff.

And all these talesmen work after the ‘final’ script is handed in and approved, and create the final telling of the tale.

(Composed on keyboard Friday, May 30, 2008)