The Screenplay: Its First Use

The first uses of the screenplay are purely practical

Who Gets It First

The first person to get a completed screenplay is usually the producer. The producer is a businessman who is interested in the screenplay for purely practical reasons (though of course ‘art’ does enter into it). These are the things he wants to know:

1. What kind of movie would it make?
2. How long would the movie run?
3. Who would star in the movie?

The sum of these three questions is: Who can I sell this to and for how much? Producers rarely finance their movies out of their own pockets; they hedge their risks by trading with other companies and investors, money or participation for a piece of the profits.

The answer to the first question, What kind of movie? gives the producer an idea of which studio or market would be interested in the movie that would be made out of the script. This has implications for how much money, in the end, the movie may reasonably be hoped to bring in. The answer to the second question, How long? gives the producer an idea of the total costs of the movie (this comes in conjunction with whatever effects and locations show up in the screenplay). The answer to the third question, What stars? gives the producer an idea of what actors might be interested in starring in the lead roles. Actors all have their own production companies and, depending on their perceived appeal, if the stars want to make the movie, their participation can help persuade a distributor to fund the production. Bigger stars mean bigger expected returns, which in turn mean a bigger production budget.

What Kind?

The script tells its reader a few things about what kind of film. It tells the genre, and mood or attitude towards its subject matter: the tone of the movie. It tells about the characters and how well-developed they are, how complex, how sympathetic they are. It tells about the world of the story, and it tells about the nobility or meanness of the subject.

How Long?

The script is formatted in a certain way that comes out of the standard Underwood typewriters that were used in the 1930s and 1940s. The font is Courier 10-pitch, or 12-point in typographer’s parlance. That means ten characters, numbers, spaces or punctuation marks will run one full horizontal inch, and twelve lines will run one full vertical inch. It is typed (printed out, today) on US Letter-sized paper, 8-1/2 inches wide and 11 inches high. The page has standard margins.

All these formatting standards were developed so that, on average, each page of a script would run one minute when the movie got made and cut to finished form. So, as a general rule, a script that runs 120 pages would make a 2-hour-long movie. (Later on, when the producers get some serious money committed and are going to make the movie, they will hire consultants who are experts in timing scripts. These folks will give a more precise estimate of final running time than the rule-of-thumb of one page = one minute.)

What Stars?

The commercial film business settled a long time ago (in the 1920s) on a ‘star system’ which, even after the collapse of the studio system, persists. To me this indicates that there is something inherently useful in the star system. Movies are hung as vehicles for their stars, because when we the audience think about paying to watch a movie, we tend to prefer to see our favorite stars. There are varying reasons why we like some stars over others. Sex appeal, or screen persona, or the pleasure we felt in watching past movies the stars acted in; acting styles, character styles; the look of the face, the sound of the voice; and sometimes it comes down to identification, the magic of some actors to persuade audience members that they represent the audience onscreen.

Pitching the Draft for These Questions

With these questions in mind, the screenwriter knows how to go about writing his screenplay. The actors who read the script want characters they think they can play and would enjoy playing, or characters they think will advance their careers in the industry. It helps, sometimes, to write the script with certain stars in mind; this can make the characters flesh out in the writer’s mind.

The tone and mood of the screenplay are buried in the prose. The people who read scripts have little time to bother with the author’s deathless prose, none of which, being outside the dialogue, will be in the movie anyway, and all of which adds to the page count, and both the time it takes to read the script, and the apparent length of the final movie. And yet the tone and mood are vital to helping the producer, director, stars and other crew members to get a feel for what the final movie will look like and sound like.

For Non-Screenwriters

Some of these considerations won’t matter much to those of us who write screenplays as developed outlines or proto-drafts of tales we mean to turn into novels or other forms. Some of them do, though.

The tone or mood of the screenplay is something that is a test or trial for the final written piece. Since the screenplay will only run 100 to 200 pages, we can work through it fairly quickly, and try out one tone or another, to see how well it will sound to us, or to our readers. It’s easy enough to tweak as well.

Characters can be developed and fleshed out in the screenplay stage as well, because they will appear in scenes of their full ‘arc’ — the passage from what they are like when they first appear on the page, to how they end up in their last page appearance. Giving them real words to say, and actions to perform in between those lines of speech, we have to see them in full and final form, and we’ll have a much better idea of whether and how well they ‘work’ as characters in the tale, when we can see them sharply as they open and close their parts of the tale.

(Composed on keyboard Sunday, June 1, 2008)