The Screenplay: Major Parts

The basic divisions of the screenplay

The screenplay has two major kinds of parts. First come those that all tales have, second come those particular to the dramatic arts and movies in particular.

All Tales Have Parts

Every tale can be taken to have its parts, but these parts are not inherent in the tale the way a wall is built out of bricks. There the bricks exist in a pile, the mason takes a brick and some mortar, and cements the brick into its place in the wall. With the tale, we look at tales that we’ve heard and try to break them down into constituent parts, conceptual parts.

Because these parts don’t exist before the tale, the talesman doesn’t need to know about them, doesn’t need to use them. Most talesmen don’t, in fact, use these parts with any conscious intent. And it was scores of thousands of years since the first tale was told, before these parts were given names.

All the same, these parts can help us in the audience to understand tales, to see why we liked one tale more than another. And they can help talesmen to understand the tales they are composing, to see what is right or wrong in them, and how they might be bettered.

The parts are, as Aristotle called them, the beginning, the middle, and the end.

Now we must stress that Aristotle defined tales as concerning ‘an action’ and thus he was talking about the tale of the action, not the memorial of the well-remembered man.

These parts are logically inherent with the way we see an action, any action, at least in the West; other traditions have other ways of seeing the world.

The talesman is helped when he sees or senses clearly where the breaks come between the beginning and the middle, and between the middle and the end. In drama these are called curtains because in the theater the curtains will be lowered between acts, so the stage manager and his crew can change sets and props, and the audience can have a break, or prepare their minds to see a new movement of the tale.

In the theater, these curtains make the act breaks clear an unmistakable. And the theater in Europe has not confined itself to three acts only, but will have one-act plays, five-act plays, and plays of other lengths. All the same, we can, like Aristotle, see how a play of any number of acts has its beginning, its middle, and its end.

The beginning tells us in the audience what we need to know about the world of the tale, and its characters, and the problem or ‘predicament’ the hero finds himself in. Having set forth the characters and the problem they face, the tale in its middle tells how the characters deal with the problem. At last comes the end, where the problem, having been solved, is now ‘wrapped up’ and we see the resolution of the matter, where everyone ends up after the goal has been won or lost.

In this sense many critics have said that the beginning starts with the tale’s world in balance; the problem upsets that balance and is dealt with through the middle; the end brings the tale’s world to a new balance.

The tale has other parts as well, parts of these major parts. For example, the start has an Introduction, a Point of Attack; the end has a Farewell or Envoy or Epilogue. (For more on all these basic parts, see these posts: ‘Where Tales Turn 1: the Beginning,’ ‘Where Tales Turn 2: the Middle,’ and ‘Where Tales Turn 3: the End’ from February 17–19 2008.)

Dramatic Parts

In addition to the three great divisions, tales told in movies have other parts that come from the dramatic arts in general, as well as parts specific to film.

Dramatic Parts are the scene, the speech, and the line. They sometimes also include the song or the dance or the musical interlude or the physical stunt.

The Scene is considered either to come when the location changes, or the characters change. In movies the scene changes when the location changes in time or space; one convenient way to look on scene breaks is that they come whenever the lighting must be changed (this is true in the main but not always, since most directors of photography will want to adjust the lights whenever the angle or shot scale changes within what is otherwise considered to be a single scene). This idea of the scene helps the stage manager, the director, the producer, the set designer and the photography and lighting departments. Another way to consider the scene is who plays in it; this is the way Molière broke down his plays, and this idea of the scene helps the actors. When screenwriters compose screenplays, they consider the scene to be when the location changes in time or space.

The Speech is like an aria in drama; it is a long series of phrases one actor will speak, uninterrupted by the other actors, perhaps even alone on stage. It details the character’s inner struggle, some past event he recounts, or his hopes, fears, determination, or philosophy. The Speech is not much used in movies; it seems too ‘theatrical’ and not realistic enough that characters would pause and deliver long lines of well-formed thoughts. (In other words, our civilization no longer contains many civilized humans.) The speech is a powerful tool however when it is used sparingly — say one or two speeches in a feature-length movie.

The Line is a set of words that one character will speak, uninterrupted by any other character. It is usually used in plural in this sense, with the singular ‘line’ meaning one phrase or sentence; but ‘lines’ also refers to all the dialogue an actor will have within a scene or the whole script.

Filmic Parts

There are parts of a movie that are specific to filmed tales. A Shot is any continuous run of film through the camera, either when it is ‘taken’ or photographed on the set, or when it is cut into the edited movie. Shots are usually called by the director on set, and emended in postproduction by the editor. But the screenwriter can conceive the script in terms of shots at times, and these then go into the notion of creating for the script’s readers the feeling of the finished movie. The screenwriter’s call for shots ends up as no more than suggestions for the director.

One place where the screenwriter must think in shots, is when he conceives of a scene as a montage. A Montage is a series of shots that cover a process or protracted period of time; its equivalent in written tales is a transitional sequence. Since each ‘scene’ within a Montage is a separate shot, the screenwriter must call them when he writes the script.

The Sequence is a series of scenes organized around a goal, or action, within an act. The Sequence is a tale part unique to movies, though it has its basis in all tales, and has developed in movies due to a series of industrial circumstances. Traditionally, a sequence will run no longer than 11 minutes; it is based in the end on the first fictional movies, which were one-reel in length (a camera reel of 35mm film projected at 24fps will last about 11 minutes).

More

This is only a brief rundown of the main parts of a screenplay. We’ll look at each part in more detail later.

(Composed on keyboard Monday, June 2, 2008)