A silent film … a screenplay without sound…
It was held of old (say, in the 1930s) that directors would watch cuts of their movies with the sound turned off. They wanted to see whether the movie made sense and its story could be followed strictly by watching the visuals. Doing this trained them to pay more care about what the camera was showing us in the audience while the actors were talking. (Dialogue is the area of the soundscape that carries most story most densely.)
The same trick could be played by screenwriters, especially those learning the craft.
Try to imagine your screenplay as if it were a movie, but turn the sound off in your imagination. Now you are watching the movie, but you can’t hear what anyone is saying, and you can’t hear any sound effects. Then alter what you see, and what the actors are doing physically, visually, until the sense of the tale is readily apparent. (By the way, this gives you a further trick, that of going the other way: make the visuals ‘lie’ as to what is going on. So that the audience, both seeing and hearing, is taking in sounds that tell one tale, and pictures that tell another.)
‘But isn’t this just writing a treatment?’
No.
A treatment is a prose version of the story the screenplay will tell. It has no dialogue (or only a few lines in its whole extent) but it does indicate the topic of conversation, in indirect discourse:
Then John sees Ernest. Ernest asks where John has been and what he’s been up to. At first John is evasive; this makes Ernest only more suspicious, and he angrily confronts John and calls him out. Only then does John admit he was with Magda in her apartment, and that the two of them have been hooking up for the past two weeks.
A treatment is also shorter than the screenplay that will come of it, though treatments can vary in length from 10 pages to 75.
By contrast, this ‘silent version’ would end up being just as long as the script, and possibly longer. It can also be formatted with standard screenplay formatting rather than the paragraphed, prose format of a treatment.
John looks behind him.
Ernest is coming in through the door. His look is serious.
John looks for some way to leave.
Ernest grabs John’s arm and says something.
John smiles, though the smile looks fake. He says something and tries to leave, but Ernest doesn’t let him go. Ernest frowns and says something else. John laughs and Ernest grabs him by both shoulders and shakes him…
In this (poor) example, we can see one of the weaknesses of the approach. Trying to make the characters’ attitudes plain, I have forced the actors to indulge in ‘indicating’ or expressing their positions in overt, obvious gestures. I asked the actors to be hams, in a word. And of course when the movie is made, much of this will be changed by the director and actors, though perhaps they will keep the essential actions, and have John still trying to make it out the door, and Ernest blocking his way.
But even this weakness forces me to try again, looking for some other way to symbolize approach and evasion.
In this regard, a scene from Rouben Mamoulian’s The Mark of Zorro occurs to me: the Spanish governor is plotting his moves to exact wealth and squeeze the territory; this he symbolizes by spinning a large globe. But Capitan Pasquale (played by Basil Rathbone) is intent on finding out what to do with this rascal Zorro. He stops the globe spinning, and barks his question. The governor fumbles an answer, and sets the globe spinning, retreating into his fantasies. Once more the capitan stops the globe and asks what the governor means to do about Zorro.
The business with the globe may well have been invented by Mamoulian and/or the actors, but it could also have been dreamed up by the screenwriter John Taintor Foote.
(Composed on keyboard Wednesday, June 18, 2008)
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