The Screenplay: Swipes and Apes

Learn by copying

To paraphrase Robert Louis Stevenson, he learned his craft by ‘playing the sedulous ape’ to the writers he most admired. He would try to rewrite them; cut up their texts and try to restructure them; copy them out longhand.

The same strategy is best to learn the first things about screenwriting.

Plans not Buildings

A screenplay to its movie is like the blueprint to a finished building. Just because you can see a building doesn’t mean you can read its plans, and so we shouldn’t think that just because we have watched a lot of movies we should be able to write screenplays — or even know how to put together a screenplay.

The movie assaults our senses with waves of information. The screenplay represents only a thin skeletal line of that mass.

So I would invite any learning screenwriter to try these strategies:

1. Read Screenplays especially of those movies you enjoy. See where the movie ‘came from.’ One caveat here is that many published screenplays aren’t the screenplay that they took into production, but is a ‘cleaned up’ version of it, that conforms to the finished film. You don’t want that; you want to see what the screenwriter(s) made before the first shot was taken.
   There are many screenplays available online. Try to find version in Adobe Acrobat’s pdf format, to see the layout preserved.
2. Write Screenplays of movies you have seen. Do this before you read the screenplays themselves, if you can find them. This is an exercise in seeing just how much of all the film contains is to be found in the screenplay. Dialogue won’t, probably, differ much, but in the approach to description, and how much is too much, you’ll find a world of difference between what you as a beginner will put down, and what the pros who got paid for the job did.
3. Look to the Past for scripts of old movies. The form was a lot different in the studio era, when the screenwriters knew it would be produced (at least they had fair odds) and didn’t write ‘on spec’ with the aim of catching a producer or star’s eye with their flashy prose. The old ‘masters’ also were much more succinct than today’s screenwriters, both in terms of the scene level and the level of the film as a whole. Movies were shorter back then, and screenwriters knew how to condense and pack in their information.
4. Read Adaptations of novels and plays that have been turned into movies. Watch the movies and read the screenplays of those movies, and read the books and plays too. This will teach you a lot about condensing and rearranging material. When you write your own screenplays, you will produce some that have structural problems. The adaptations are a guide for how to do it. Characters will be added, dropped, or combined; major subplots will be dropped.

(Composed on keyboard Wednesday, June 11, 2008)