The Screenplay: The End After the End

A good movie carries on after the final curtain, but what about its screenplay?

Social and Dramatic

A movie like the theater is both social and dramatic. That is: the movie shows us in the audience external or dramatic events only, and we watch it en masse. This creates a sharing of our emotional reactions to the play, or movie. Once an audience starts laughing, things seem funnier than they ‘really are.’ When an audience begins to fret, it squirms and fears a lot more than any one member would if he watched the movie by himself. And when the movie ends and we stand up and walk out of the movie house, and for some time afterward, we talk about the experience we just shared, and reach toward a shared understanding of what the movie meant to us.

This offers the filmmakers the chance to work past the narrow time limits of the film proper. It means that the true end of the movie comes not with the end of the end credits, but sometime after that, when the audience settles finally in our judgment of the movie, when we feel the last feeling toward it, and when the changes these feelings work in us have finished.

A good screenwriter knows this very well, and he structures his screenplay to take advantage of it. The ‘end after the end’ helps the screenwriter no less than the director and editor to overcome the limits of the movie, or in this case the number of pages the screenwriter is allowed.

Not Social Or Dramatic

The problem is that the script will not be read en masse nor will it be dramatic. A screenplay is told in words alone, in a special format designed to evoke something of what the finished movie would be like; it is a plan to the movie, but it can never be the movie. People in the business of making movies gain experience over the years in reading scripts and seeing the movies that are made from those scripts, and have a far more acute sense of the potential movie that the screenplay points to. But even they can’t fully anticipate the effect of the finished movie, and they read alone and silently, without the communication of emotions from others. And when these professionals put the script aside, their first thoughts are practical: who could make this movie, what would its budget be, would it sell, who could star in it, and would it be worth three years of their lives working on it?

The professional screenwriter thus must be aware that he is writing his script for two audiences, first for the professionals who decide whether or not they wish to make it into a movie, and second for the audience who would eventually see the movie, and never one page of the screenplay.

The screenplay must ‘work’ and be effective without the ‘end after the end,’ and yet it will ideally gain greater power when made into a movie and watched by an audience who will then go on to experience the ‘end after the end.’

He must keep both in mind.

To get a sense of how the ‘end after the end’ works, pay close attention to your own reactions to a movie when you watch it in a crowded movie house, and in the hours and days afterwards. Compare the experience to the one you feel when you watch a movie alone on video. Also compare to how the screenplay affects you.

In Other Forms

The ‘end after the end’ is not unique to the dramatic arts, and we can feel something of the sort when we read a great novel, alone, in words alone. But the dual effects of watching in a crowd and sharing the experience and discussing it afterward, make the ‘end after the end’ somewhat different and more powerful than the tale in words can manage.

For those who write their screenplays as proto-drafts with an eye to developing them as novels or other forms, these considerations do not apply.

(Composed on keyboard Tuesday, June 17, 2008)