Explaining the Past: Organizing the Evidence

Finding an answer to a historical question may involve both description and explanation, in different mixtures. The techniques of descriptive research are specialized and require a wide range of background knowledge. For example, some experts on early silent cinema can determine when a film copy was made by examining the stock on which it is printed. The number and shape of the sprocket holes, along with the manner in which a manufacturer’s name is printed along the edge of the film strip, can help date the print. Knowing the age of the stock can in turn help narrow down the film’s date of production and country of origin.

Historical explanation also involves concepts that organize the evidence produced by specialized knowledge. Here are some of them.

Chronology Chronology is essential to historical explanation, and descriptive research is an indispensable aid to establishing the sequence of events. The historian needs to know that this film was made before that one or that event B took place after event A. But history is not mere chronology. A chronology stops short of explanation, just as a record of high and low tides gives no hint as to why tides change. History, as we have already seen, centrally involves explanation.

Causality Much historical explanation involves cause and effect. Historians work with conceptions of various kinds of causes.

Individual Causes People have beliefs and desires that affect how they act. In acting, they make things happen. It is often reasonable to explain a historical change or a past state of affairs in light of the attitudes or behavior of individuals. This is not to say that individuals make everything happen or that things always happen as people originally intended or that people always understand just why they did what they did. It is simply to say that historians may justifiably appeal to what people think and feel and do as part of an explanation.

Some historians believe that all historical explanation must appeal to person-based causes sooner or later. This position is usually called methodological individualism. A different, and even more sweeping, assumption is that only individuals, and exceptional individuals at that, have the power to create historical change. This view is sometimes labeled the Great Man theory of history, even though it is applied to women as well. Earlier generations of film historians, for example, were inclined to treat D.W. Griffith as the most important figure in the U.S. silent cinema because it seemed that he invented a number of editing techniques that became widespread. More recent historians have developed a counterargument, thanks to the greater availability of films by other directors and a more comparison-based method. These scholars claim that Griffith developed certain tendencies that were already present, pushing them to a new level of expression. Moreover, his most original techniques were not picked up by others, so in some respects other directors had more influence on standard editing practice. As an individual Griffith remains important, but he is probably not the Great Innovator that people once considered him.

Group Causes People often act in groups, and at times we speak of the group as having a kind of existence over and above the individuals who compose it. Groups have rules and roles, structures and routines, and often these factors make things happen. We speak of a government’s declaring war, yet this act may not be reducible to more detailed statements about what all the individuals involved believed and did.

When we say that Warner Bros. decided to adopt sound, we are making a meaningful claim, even if we have no information about the beliefs and desires of the individual decision makers at the company; we may not even fully know who they were. Some historians assert that any historical explanation must, sooner or later, ground itself in group-based causes. This position is usually called holism, or methodological collectivism, as opposed to methodological individualism.

Several sorts of groups are important to the history of cinema. Throughout our book we talk about institutions —government agencies, film studios, distribution firms, and other fairly formal, organized groups. We also talk about more informal affiliations of filmmakers. These are usually called movements or schools, small assemblies of filmmakers and critics who share the same interests, beliefs about cinema, conceptions of film form and style, and the like. The Soviet filmmakers of the 1920s—Lev Kuleshov, Sergei Eisenstein, V.I. Pudovkin, and many others—are a classic instance of a movement. Despite their individual differences, these men held in common a commitment to editing, often disjunctive editing, as central to a movie’s effects on a viewer.

Less well-defined cases of a movement would be German Expressionist film of the 1920s, Italian neorealism after World War II, and French New Wave filmmaking during the 1960s. In these instances, the filmmakers often insisted that they shared no consciousness of belonging to a movement. Still, historians often find common trends in the films, in the production circumstances, and in the local film culture, and these factors justify treating the filmmakers as a group, even if not a full-fledged movement.

Influence Most historians use some notion of influence to explain change. Influence describes the inspiration that an individual, a group, or a film can provide for others. Members of a movement can deliberately influence a director to make a film a certain way, but a chance viewing of a movie can also influence a director.

Influence does not mean simple copying. You may have been influenced by a parent or a teacher, but you have not necessarily mimicked his or her behavior. In the arts, influence is often a matter of one artist’s getting ideas from other artists’ work but then pursuing those ideas in a personal way. The result may be quite different from the initial work that stimulated it. The contemporary director Jean-Luc Godard was influenced by Jean Renoir, although their films are markedly different. Sometimes we can detect the influence by examining the films; sometimes we rely on the testimony of the filmmaker.

A body of work by a group of directors may also influence later films. Soviet cinema of the 1920s influenced the documentary director John Grierson. The Hollywood cinema, as a set of films, has been enormously influential throughout film history, although all the directors influenced by it certainly did not see exactly the same films. Influences are particular kinds of causes, so it is not surprising that influences may involve both individual activity and group activity.

Trends and Generalizations Any historical question opens up a body of data for investigation. Once the historian starts to look closely at the data—to go through a studio’s records, examine the films, page through the trade press—she discovers that there is much more to explore than the initial question touches on. It’s like looking into a microscope and discovering that a drop of water teems with organisms of confounding variety, all going about very different business.

Every historian omits certain material. For one thing, the historical record is already incomplete. Many events go unrecorded, and many documents are lost forever. Further, historians inevitably select. They unweave the tangles of history and create a more coherent pattern. A historian simplifies and streamlines according to the question he is pursuing.

One principal way historians go about such simplification is by postulating trends. Lots of things are going on, they admit, but “by and large” or “on the whole” or “for the most part,” we can identify a general tendency. Most Hollywood films of the 1940s were made in black and white, but most Hollywood films today are in color. On the whole, there has been a change, and we can see a trend toward the increasing use of color film stock between the 1940s and the 1960s. Our task is to explain how and why this trend occurred.

By positing trends, historians generalize. They necessarily set aside interesting exceptions and aberrations. But this is no sin, because the answer to a question is necessarily pitched at a certain level of generality. All historical explanations pull back from the throbbing messiness of reality. By recognizing that tendencies are “for-the-most-part” generalizations, the scholar can acknowledge that there is more going on than she is trying to explain.

Periods Historical chronology and causation are without beginning or end. The child who incessantly asks what came before that or what made that happen soon discovers that we can trace out a sequence of events indefinitely. Historians necessarily limit the stretch of time they will explore, and they go on to divide that stretch into meaningful phases or segments.

For example, the historian studying American silent cinema already assumes that this period within film history ran from about 1894 to around 1929. The historian will, probably, further segment this stretch of time. She might break it down by decade, treating the 1900s, the 1910s, and the 1920s. Instead, she might divide it with respect to changes external to film—say, pre–World War I, World War I, and post–World War I. Another possibility is creating periods that mark phases in the development of storytelling style, such as 1894–1907, 1908–1917, and 1918–1929.

Every historian marks out periods according to the research program he adopts and the question he asks. Historians recognize that periodization can’t be rigid: trends do not follow in neat order. It is illuminating to think of the American “structural” film of the early 1970s as a response to the “lyrical” film of the 1960s, but lyrical films were still being made well in the 1970s and afterward. Histories of genres often mark off periods by innovative films, but this is not to deny that more ordinary movies display a great deal of continuity across periods. Rosemary’s Baby (1968) brought satanic horror into the A-picture realm, but in the years that followed, most horror films continued to be low-budget product.

Similarly, we ought not to expect that the history of technology or styles or genres will march in step with political or social history. The period after World War II was indeed distinctive, because this global conflict had major effects on film industries and filmmakers in most countries; but not all political events demarcate distinct periods in relation to changes in film form or the film market. The assassination of President Kennedy was a wrenching event, but it had little effect on activities in the film world. Here, as ever, the historian’s research program and central question will shape her sense of the relevant periods and parallel events. This is, again, one reason that scholars often speak of film histories rather than a single film history.

Significance In mounting explanations, historians of all arts make assumptions about the significance of the artworks they discuss. We might treat a work as a “monument,” studying it because it is a highly valued accomplishment. Alternatively, we might study a work as a “document” because it records some noteworthy historical activity, such as the state of a society at a given moment or a trend within the art form itself.

Most historians assume that the films they discuss have significance on any or all of the following three criteria:

Intrinsic excellence: Some films are, simply, outstanding by artistic criteria. They are rich, moving, complex, thought-provoking, intricate, meaningful, or the like. At least partly because of their quality, such films have played a key role in the history of cinema.

Influence: A film may be historically significant by virtue of its influence on other films. It may create or change a genre, inspire filmmakers to try something new, or gain such a wide popularity that it spawns imitations and tributes. Since influence is an important part of historical explanations, this sort of film plays a prominent role in most histories.

Typicality: Some films are significant because they vividly represent instances or trends. They stand in for many other films of the same type.

The three criteria don’t have to combine. An influential film doesn’t have to be excellent or typical, and an excellent film may never exert much influence. The films of Robert Bresson are usually considered exceptionally good, but for a long time they influenced no other filmmaking. But of course in some cases the criteria can combine. A highly accomplished genre film, such as Singin’ in the Rain or Rio Bravo, is often considered both excellent and highly typical. Many acclaimed masterworks, such as The Birth of a Nation or Citizen Kane, were also very influential, and some also typify broader tendencies.

Some Key Questions

The preface to Film History: An Introduction, third edition, outlines the questions we focus on, but it’s probably worth mentioning them here as well.

Although the book surveys the history of world cinema, we could hardly start with the question What is the history of world cinema? That would give us no help in setting about our research and organizing the material we find. Instead, we have highlighted three major questions.

1. How have uses of the film medium changed or become normalized over time? Within “uses of the medium” we include matters of film form: the part/whole organization of the film. Often this involves telling a story, but a film’s overall form might also be based on an argument or an abstract pattern. The term “uses of the medium” also includes matters of film style, the patterned uses of film techniques (mise-en-scène, or staging, lighting, setting, and costume; camerawork; editing; and sound). In addition, any balanced conception, of how the medium has been used, must also consider film modes (documentary, avant-garde, fiction, animation) and genres (for example, the Western, the thriller, or the musical). So we also examine these phenomena. All such matters are central to most college and university survey courses in film history.

A central purpose of our book is to survey the uses of the medium in different times and places. Sometimes we dwell on the creation of stable norms of form and style, as when we examine how Hollywood standardized certain editing options in the first two decades of filmmaking. At other times, we examine how filmmakers have proposed innovative ways of structuring form or using film technique.

2. How have the conditions of the film industry—production, distribution, and exhibition—affected the uses of the medium? Films are made within modes of production, habitual ways of organizing the labor and materials involved in creating a movie. Some modes of production are industrial; that’s when companies make films as a business. The classic instance of industrial production is the studio system, in which firms are organized in order to make films for large audiences through a fairly detailed division of labor. Hollywood’s studio system is the most famous, but there have been studio systems of production in many countries.

Another sort of industrial production might be called the artisanal, or one-off, approach, in which a production company makes one film at a time (perhaps only one film, period). Still other modes of production are less highly organized, involving small groups or individuals who make films for specific purposes. In all these instances, the ways in which films are made have had particular effects on the look and sound of the finished products. An avant-garde film, made on a low budget by an individual filmmaker, is more likely to be a personal expression than a big-budget Hollywood blockbuster.

The ways in which films are exhibited have also affected film history. For example, the major technological innovations associated with the early 1950s — wide-screen picture, stereophonic sound, increased use of color — were actually available decades earlier. Each could have been developed before the 1950s, but the U.S. film industry had no pressing need to do so since film attendance was so high that spending money on new attractions would not have significantly increased profits. Only when attendance dropped precipitously in the late 1940s were producers and exhibitors pushed to introduce new technologies to lure audiences back into theaters.

3. How have international trends emerged in the uses of the film medium and in the film market? In Film History we try to balance the consideration of important national contributions with a sense of how international and cross-cultural influences were operating. Many nations’ audiences and film industries have been influenced by directors and films that have migrated across their borders. Genres are vagabond as well. The Hollywood Western influenced the Japanese samurai film and the Italian Western, genres that in turn influenced the Hong Kong kung-fu films of the 1970s. Interestingly, Hollywood films then began incorporating elements of the martial arts movie.

Just as important, the film industry itself is significantly transnational. At certain periods, circumstances closed off countries from the flow of films, but most often there has been a global film market, and we understand it best by tracing trends across cultures and regions. We have paid particular attention to conditions that allowed people to see films made outside their own country.

Each of these how questions accompanies a great many why questions. For any part of the processes we focus on, we can ask what conditions caused them to operate as they did. Why, for instance, did Soviet filmmakers undertake their experiments in disturbing, aggressive narrative? Why did Hollywood’s studio system begin to fragment in the late 1940s? Why did “new waves” and “young cinemas” arise in Europe, the Soviet Union, and Japan around 1960? Why are more films produced now with international investment than in the 1930s or 1940s? Historians are keen to know what factors made a change occur, and our general questions include a host of subquestions about causes and effects.

Recall our five general explanatory approaches: biographical, industrial, aesthetic, technological, and social. If we had to squeeze our book into one or more of these pigeonholes, we could say that its approach is predominantly aesthetic and industrial. It examines how types of films, film styles, and film forms have changed in relation to the conditions of film production, distribution, and exhibition within certain countries and within the international flow of films. But this summary of our approach is too confining, as even a cursory look at what follows will indicate. Sometimes we invoke an individual — a powerful producer, an innovative filmmaker, an imaginative critic. Sometimes we consider technology. And we often frame our account with discussions of the political, social, and cultural context of a period.

Take, for example, our central question: How have uses of the film medium changed or become normalized over time? This is a question about aesthetic matters, but it also impinges on factors of technology. For instance, conceptions of “realistic” filmmaking changed with the introduction of portable cameras and sound equipment in the late 1950s. Similarly, our second question “How have the conditions of the film industry affected the uses of the medium?” is at once economic, technological, and aesthetic. Finally, asking how international trends have emerged in the uses of the film medium and in the film market concerns both economic and social/cultural/political factors. In the early era of cinema, films circulated freely among countries, and viewers often did not know the nationality of a film they were seeing. In the 1910s, however, war and nationalism blocked certain films from circulating. At the same time, the growth of particular film industries, notably Hollywood, depended on access to other markets, so the degree to which films could circulate boosted some nations’ output and hindered that of others. In addition, the circulation of U.S. films abroad served to spread American cultural values, which in turn created both admiration and hostility.

In sum, we have been guided, as we think most historians are, by research questions rather than rigid conceptions of the type of history we are writing. And what we take to be the most plausible answer to a given question will depend on the strength of the evidence and the argument we can make for it — not on a prior commitment to writing only a certain kind of history.

History as Story

Our answers to historical questions are, however, not simply given in a list or summary. Like most historical arguments, ours takes a narrative form.

Historians use language to communicate their arguments and evidence to others. Descriptive research programs can do this through a summary of findings: this film is Diana l’affascinatrice, made in Italy by Caesar-Film in 1915, directed by Gustavo Serena, and so on. But historical explanations require a more complicated crafting.

Sometimes historians frame their explanations as persuasive arguments. To take an example already cited, a historian investigating the development of sound by Warner Bros. might start by considering the various explanations already offered and taken for granted. Then he might set forth the reasons for believing his alternative interpretation. This is a familiar form of rhetorical argument, eliminating unsatisfactory beliefs before settling on a more plausible one.

More often, historians’ explanations take the form of stories. Narrative history, as it is called, seeks to answer how and why questions by tracing the relevant circumstances and conditions over time. It produces a chain of causes and effects, or it shows how a process works, by telling a story. For instance, if we are trying to answer the question: “ How did the Hays Office negotiate with firms to arrive at an agreement about an acceptable film?” we can frame a step-by-step narrative of the censorship process. Or, if we are seeking to explain what led the Hays Office to be created, we might lay out the causal factors as a story. As these examples indicate, the story’s “characters” might be individuals or groups, institutions or even films; the “plot” consists of the situations in which the players operate and the changes they initiate and undergo.

Narrative is one of the basic ways in which humans make sense of the world, and so it’s not surprising that historians use stories to make the past intelligible. Film History: An Introduction follows tradition in creating a large-scale narrative, one that includes several stories within it. We divide film history into six large periods — early cinema (to about 1919), the late silent era (1919–1929), the development of sound cinema (1926–1945), the period after World War II (1946–1960s), the period running from the 1960s to the 1980s, and the contemporary era (1980s-the present). These divisions reflect developments in (1) film form and style; (2) major changes in film production, distribution, and exhibition; and (3) significant international trends. The periodization can’t be exactly synchronized for all three areas, but it does indicate approximate boundaries for the changes we try to trace.

An alternative organizational pattern is that of the topical history. Topical history treats an idea or theme rather than a story. If you were writing a book-length history of Manhattan, for instance, you might devote one chapter to geography, another to political dynamics, another to social changes, another to the events of 9/11, and so on. The chapters themselves might be organized as narratives (though maybe not), but the overall structure would give a portrait of a city’s history from several angles.

The historian must decide, at various levels, between narrative organization and topical organization. Suppose your question was: “ How did America’s postwar occupation of Germany affect the local film industry and culture?”. Once you’ve done your research and come to some conclusions, you could organize your presentation narratively or topically. That is, your chapters could proceed in chronological order to trace the changes in the industry between 1945 and the early 1950s. Or each chapter could deal with events occurring across the entire period, but in different spheres — production, censorship, journalism, exhibition, and the like. In another topical layout, you could organize the book around key films or film policies that had an impact on different spheres of German life. 5

CONCLUSION

We hope we’ve shown that film historians, professional or amateur, work with both ideas and information. They mount projects within research programs. They don’t simply state facts; they try to ask questions. They don’t just pile up data; they make arguments. The facts and questions, data and arguments combine to make doing film history a fascinating pursuit.

Historical writing about films will probably never be as common as film criticism; most people prefer to comment about films by analyzing, interpreting, and evaluating them. Writing an essay on film history takes a lot more time and effort than writing a review of a current film. Nonetheless, historical study offers unique pleasures. If you want to understand the context of a film that you admire, you would enjoy reading film history. Just as important, a deeper understanding of film history introduces you to a range of new films to enjoy. Finally, if we have any curiosity about the films that captivate us now, we can start to satisfy it by thinking historically. What happens today springs from what happened yesterday. By trying to understand film history, we better understand the movies of our moment. 7

1: This research program is described in Henry Jenkins What Made Pistachio Nuts? Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992).

2: See Lea Jacobs, The Wages of Sin: Censorship and the Fallen Woman Film (1991; reprint Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

3: See, for example, Yuri Tsivian, et al., Silent Witnesses: Russian Films 1908–1919 (Pordenone: Giornate del Cinema Muto, 1989); Charles Musser, Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Tom Gunning, D.W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film: The Early Years at Biograph (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991); and Ben Brewster and Lea Jacobs, Theatre to Cinema: Stage Pictorialism and the Early Feature Film (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).

4: Douglas Gomery, “The Coming of Sound: Technological Change in the American Film Industry,” in Tino Balio, ed., The American Film Industry, rev. ed. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), pp. 229–51.

5: See Jennifer Fay, Theaters of Occupation: Hollywood and the Reeducation of Postwar Germany (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).

6: See David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction, eighth ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2008), 128-130.

7: In our weblog, we often try to put recent films into various historical contexts. See www.davidbordwell.net/blog.

Хрестоматия для самостоятельного чтения по специальности “Драматургия”

WRITING A SCREENPLAY

1 – Motivation & Ideas

 

Motivation

 

What drives us to write? Is it a spiritual desire to create art or a more prosaic need to pay the bills? Whatever the reason is the act of writing demands discipline, effort, commitment and, perhaps above all, motivation. Motivation is the x factor that drives you to sit in front of the computer and move your fingers every day, no matter how much you hate the thought and no matter how badly things are going. If you lose motivation, writing becomes a chore and before long all those odd jobs that you’d put off for years start getting done. You’re only too happy to decorate or mend the shed or wash the car. Daytime television takes on a strange allure. Anything to avoid staring at the damn computer. Writing a screenplay, whether destined to put an Oscar on your mantel or to line a litter tray, requires regular hard work towards goals of self-improvement and sales, and involves careful planning, research and execution. Neglect any of these areas at your peril. The best way to build your confidence and improve as a writer is to plan regularly, research regularly and write regularly. Or, to put it more simply, wise up and adopt a professional attitude. The chief obstacle to motivation is fear: fear of groping around in the dark; fear of not being good enough; fear of embarrassment, defeat, failure. One of the aims of this book is to provide the knowledge you’ll need to conquer your fear and motivate yourself, allowing you to write with confidence and produce higher quality material.

 

Art vs. Craft

 

It’s dangerous for a screenwriter to view himself solely as an artist. A talented student once told me, “I don’t need to learn structure – I want to write a film, not a movie.” He never completed a first draft. If you share this highbrow self-image, maybe you should consider other forms of expression: painting, sculpture, novels or poetry. I’m certainly not denigrating such endeavors, but screenwriting is a synergy of craft and art, in that order. It allows plenty of room for creativity – within the parameters of a flexible structure and inflexible format. First learn the craft and then supply the talent because (unless you are truly exceptional) without the artifice, the art will not be enough.

Discipline

 

If your embryonic writing projects are legion, all once promising but now discarded, or you make good progress until you reach the final straight, you are fleeing the most basic discipline of writing – Finish What You Start. For most of us the reality is that little comes easily. Hard work, hard thought and hard choices are the order of the day, every day. To break through this mental barrier you must develop a disciplined approach that treats writing as the bedrock of your daily life. One obstacle is that writing sometimes doesn’t really feel like work. It’s so easy to duck out of. You’re at home so you can watch TV, get a sandwich, send emails, whatever. Train yourself to treat writing as a job. If you can’t write at home, find office space. If you have a full-time occupation, then writing becomes your part-time one. If you don’t, then write nine-to-five, or if you’re a night owl, nine pm to five am. You alone can decide how much time you can afford. Tuck the writing in comfortably around your commitments, or vice-versa. But be prepared for the possibility that if you simply can’t spare enough time and/or energy, or after months you’d still rather have an enema than turn on the computer then, like anything in life, If you can’t enjoy it you’d probably be better off doing something else. As Quentin Crisp put it,“ If at first you don’t succeed, then darling, failure may be your forte.”

For Whom Do You Write?

 

Something that comes as a revelation to many students is the concept that you write not for an audience, or the director, or yourself but for the reader. Not only a script reader working for a production company but any reader that sits down with your screenplay at any time.

 

People who turn to scriptwriting under the mistaken assumption that it is an easier literary form to master or to sell than a novel couldn’t be more wrong. The attraction is easy to see: novels run to hundreds of pages, while screenplay length is 90-120 pages. Novels maximize, screenplays minimize. Novels tell stories through language, screenplays through visuals. However, the principle of learning the form before trying to produce your best work in it remains the same. You should write with a potential audience in mind but your words must succeed in their own right; they must come alive on the page and entertain anyone who reads them. The fruit of any labor must be of the highest quality to succeed in its market place.

Script Readers

 

Once you submit your screenplay to production companies, it enters the domain of those mythical industry gatekeepers, the script readers. Their role is to provide written ‘coverage’ of your script. In The Guerilla Film Makers Handbook, a script reader describes the content of coverage:“... a brief “logline” which sums up what the script is about in two or three sentences, a “synopsis” of what happens in the script,... a “comment” outlining what the script reader feels the script is trying to do, how well it does it, whether the premise is original and engaging, what could be done to improve it and the sort of audience it is likely to appeal to... Finally, a “verdict” or “recommendation” on the script will indicate whether it should be accepted, rejected or developed.” Readers’ instincts are to find reasons to keep the writer out, for which they are often viewed with suspicion or hostility, but their instincts are based on experience – that this script, like the previous one and the one before that, will contain a host of deficiencies from the same predictable menu. Writers load their scripts with them, making the readers’ job easy. Do all you can to ensure your script is dramatic, tense, funny, harrowing, touching, entertaining, emotional, different; the best art you can produce after researching the craft and the market. Razzle dazzle ‘em – if you can make the gatekeepers laugh and cry, the doors to the inner sanctum will start to open for you.

The Value of Ideas

 

Ideas are your lifeblood. Without them, your writing will be of little interest to you or to anyone else. They can appear from out of the blue, day or night, and you must be prepared to capture, nurture and develop them. If you can do this, they become your best friends.

 

So what is the true value, in hard currency, of a great idea? Most students’ eager replies to this question vary from “a few thousand pounds” to “several million dollars.” They’re often surprised to find that the answer is... absolutely nothing. Think about it. What would you say if a stranger approached you and said “I have a fabulous idea. How much will you pay me for it?” Well, that’s what people in the film business say too. To update the old Hollywood axiom, ideas are a dime a dozen – and then factor in depreciation. It’s always what you do with them that counts and that comes down to talent. If you’re a great writer but your ideas are lousy, your script will be lousy, but you can find material to adapt. If your ideas are great but you’re a lousy writer, your script will be lousy also, and you should consider collaborating with a good writer. Only if you can transform your best ideas into a marketable commodity – a screenplay that is your very best work, contains originality and style, entertains the reader, is carefully structured, features three-dimensional characters, memorable dialogue, is professionally presented using correct format and binding, with correct spelling, grammar and punctuation – then and only then does the prospect of financial reward enter the equation.

 

Every writer has different interests, likes and dislikes, and each should play to his own personality. French writer/ director Francois Truffaut said “... 20% of my material is autobiographical, 20% comes from newspapers, 20% from people I know and 20% is pure fiction. Fiction does not play a major part. I prefer to work from real life.” In contrast, Truffaut fan and media sponge Quentin Tarantino assimilates (some might say plunders) many ideas from films, television, books, comics and other elements of popular culture. In his defense, he makes a virtue of this and wears his influences proudly on his sleeve. The inherent truth of the adage “nothing new under the sun” means that writers who have the talent to put the most interesting and ingenious spins on old ideas will find an audience, and therefore a sale.

Generating Ideas

 

– What if...? Most ideas can be boiled down to “what if?” but try to hit the dramatic core: What if JFK really was assassinated by an FBI-led conspiracy? What if more-than- human off-world ‘replicants’ are loose on Earth and searching for their maker? What if the only man brilliant enough to find a clever serial killer is himself, a cannibal serial killer in a high-security jail? What if, during the most important deal of his life, an East End crime boss has war brought to his doorstep by one of his closest aides’ own disastrous side deal? What if an ordinary woman is hunted by a cyborg sent from the future to ensure that her unborn son never exists?

 

– Stimuli. A photograph, a poem, a piece of music (bizarrely, Luc Besson wrote Nikita in response to the Elton John song), a random stab into a book, anything that stimulates your imagination to respond.

 

– Just write. Stream of consciousness, whatever comes out of your mind. Fill the pages. Any writing process involves reducing quantity to quality.

 

– Always have your antenna twitching. Be receptive to conversations; your own and other people’s. It may look strange to someone if you take notes of interesting things they say, but it’s better than forgetting them, which you nearly always will.

 

– Your own life. Your experiences are a mine of story ideas, as long as you place them in a dramatic framework and don’t expect anyone to be interested in them simply because they’re true. As William Goldman wrote, “Avoid reality”. Reality is mostly uneventful and does not conform to the rules of narrative.

 

– Other people’s lives. Look for individual quirks or traits in people you meet. Model a character on a friend (or enemy) or combine elements of several people into one. In chapter 11, Charlie Harris says, “A writer should consider himself a student of people,” and he’s right.

 

– Invent a character from the soles of the feet up. This is best brainstormed by a group – in my screenwriting workshop I’m indebted to Syd Field for the “Creating a Character” chapter in his book Screenplay. His exercise involves creating a character from scratch in as much painstaking detail as possible, thinking carefully about the ramifications of each factor: place, age, period, parents, siblings, sexuality, class, politics, education, job etc. Whenever I do this two-hour exercise with students, I marvel that when you invent a character, you cannot fail to also invent a storyline for them.

 

– Invent two skeleton characters, known only by profession. Give each a singular trait, then give them a reason for meeting, a place for them to meet and an incident to set up or respond to. In other words, something happens to someone, somewhere. You now have a scene, to which you can connect other scenes and other characters.

 

– Scan news items on TV/radio and articles in news- papers/magazines. Truth is often stranger than fiction, so jot down things that intrigue you and rework them later, or try to incorporate them into other scenarios. Cut out items and keep them in a file, but include a few notes of your first impressions to recapture your interest later. Focus on the universality of these ideas – the essence of their emotional appeal to an audience – because alone they won’t amount to much, and if they’re too personal to you they may not connect with others. Alan Ball’s afterword to his American Beauty screenplay perfectly illustrates this point: ‘I think the idea... first started rattling around in my head during the whole Amy Fisher/Joey Buttafuoco drama [a tragic case in which a young girl shot her married lover’s wife]... it struck me: we would never know what really happened. The media circus had already begun, and the story was swiftly being reduced to its most lurid elements, with a cast of cardboard stock characters acting on their basest impulses. But underneath it all were real human lives that had gone horribly astray... That realization – and an encounter with a plastic bag outside the World Trade Centre – was the basis for what would eventually become American Beauty. ”

 

– Relax. Close your eyes. Clear your mind and let your imagination drift, without external stimulus or pressure to create. After about an hour, make notes of the images, sounds and feelings you experienced (in that order), and use them as potential jumping-off points. They may be very strange and make little sense, but they do reveal some of your deepest concerns.

 

– Dreams. Again, don’t expect logic or linearity, but do use their excess. Dreams are wonderful for conjuring juxtapositions – two or more incongruous elements placed in a surreal connection. Some of my best dreams have included such startling imagery that I’ve been unable to forget them. Nightmares are better still – what frightens you is likely to frighten others. And, yes, always write them down. Watch David Lynch’s films, particularly Mulholland Drive, to see dream/nightmare state ingeniously realised on screen.

 

– Adapt or “borrow”. If you have a favourite novel or play to which you think you could add something, contact the publisher and enquire about the rights. They may be easier and cheaper to secure than you think. Do not adapt as an academic exercise, you’ll only make it worse (example: Scorsese’s histrionic remake of the excellent Cape Fear). Alternatively, rework or update popular works in the public domain – Clueless is Jane Austen’s Emma, Cruel Intentions is Choderlos De Laclos’ Les Liaisons Dangereuses, both updated to contemporary USA.

 

 

2 – Research & Development

 

Research Never Stops

Novice writers often make the fatal mistake of neglecting research. It’s not only about authenticity (e.g. learning the minutiae of criminal investigation procedure for a police thriller, or comprehensive details of Victorian London for a story about Jack the Ripper).It also means learning about the film industry and the market place; the great food chain in which you will be competing with thousands of others for scraps. Research is the pursuit of any knowledge that will help you keep up with, or get ahead of, the game – and it never stops.

 

A significant percentage of students arriving at my screen- writing class confess to almost never visiting the cinema, or never reading scripts, books or magazines about the film industry. It is vital to build an understanding of the industry and the ways in which it operates, and cultivate an informed opinion on what you think works or doesn’t work about each film you see and each script you read. You wouldn’t apply for a job in an industry you have no knowledge of, so don’t expect to write a good script without thoroughly researching the industry and the market, and developing an objective ability to sift diamonds from manure. The more aware you are of the rules, the better your chance of success, whether you use them as a template or a point of departure. When you take your first step toward writing a spec screenplay, you become a self-employed manufacturer. If you don’t quickly learn to think like one, your product will never sell.

 

R & D – the more thorough your research, the greater your development.

 

Know Your Market

If you intend to write for film or television, immerse yourself in those media. Watch plenty of films and programmes, but in an analytical capacity. You are no longer a consumer of moving images. Your desire to write scripts propels you from passivity to activity, and you must comfortably exist on an active plane. Expose yourself to a variety of material that reflects the diversity of today’s market place. The wider the range of films/programmes you normally watch, the less work you will have to do. If you only like horror or westerns or soaps or police dramas, your myopia will cost you. Familiarize yourself with products of different genres and analyze what makes them tick. This common sense imperative often fazes people, perhaps because they aren’t used to the concept of personal study outside of academic environments. It’s something you need to do if you have a serious ambition to sell your work.

 

How will you know whether your script stands a chance if you have no knowledge of the market or its demands? How will you know what to include or to avoid in your script? Or to whom it should be sent and how? Or how it should be formatted? Or what font to use? There are hundreds of elements you need to get right when courting the industry. Sending out an unfinished script containing mistakes of structure, layout and presentation, including typo- graphical and grammatical errors, immediately flags you as unprofessional. Even if you later correct these mistakes, you may find it much harder to progress because of the damage your first efforts have caused.

 

Research Tools

 

Media products are everywhere; we’re bombarded by them on a daily basis. Accessing the means for your research is not difficult. The following list contains the major products and activities you should pursue to maximize your knowledge, and therefore your chances.

 

– Films/TV programmes: Watch and analyze as many as possible. Concentrate on what you like and dislike; what elements work for you or don’t, and always try to explain why. If you like it, exactly what was it that you liked? If you didn’t, how would you do it differently? Treat this as a self- study programme. Narrow your focus to specific areas like character, dialogue, structure etc.

 

– Videos/DVDs: As above. Many DVDs contain valuable extras including behind-the-scenes documentaries, screenplays, commentaries, Internet links etc.

 

– Screenwriting literature: Read a selection of these books! They are vitally important in achieving a comprehensive understanding of the medium.

 

– Film books: There are many excellent books about the film industry which will build your background knowledge and entertain you at the same time.

 

– Trade magazines: In the UK: Screen International (film, weekly); Broadcast (TV, weekly). In the US: Variety (film, weekly); Hollywood Reporter (film/TV, daily).

 

– Screenwriting magazines: Including Creative Screenwriting, Script, Scenario (all US); Scriptwriter (UK).

 

– Film and related magazines: Including Empire, Sight & Sound, Total Film, Uncut, Hot Dog.

 

– Broadsheet newspapers: For daily film/TV news and reviews.

 

– Tabloid newspapers: For daily film/TV scurrilous gossip.

 

– Scripts: In book form (usually transcripts of the finished film) or better still, from the Internet. Go to www.script-o-rama.com for screenplays in various stages from first drafts to shooting scripts.

 

Developing Your Ideas

OK. Let’s assume you’ve found a concept you like and a promising scenario to build around it. You now want to develop it, but what’s the next step? My advice – find out about character and structure. Read chapters 6 and 7 now. Ideas are much easier to develop when they can be situated within a framework, and as you’ll see, characters’ actions are at the very heart of structure. Then, go back to your idea and arrive at your premise.

 

Premise

The premise describes what your script is about; the idea or concept at the heart of your story. Try to summarize it in as few words as possible, to tighten your grip on the central concept and memorize it for ‘pitching’ to interested parties. Form your premise as a question followed by a complication:

 

– What happens when a frail old man needs to travel 500 miles to visit his seriously ill brother – but his only mode of transport is a tractor-mower? (The Straight Story)

 

– What happens when a Cockney hardman pursues his daughter’s killers in LA – and enters the lion’s den with absolutely no fear for his own life? (The Limey)

 

– What happens when a music writer is commissioned by Rolling Stone magazine to go on tour with a famous rock band – but he is only 15 years old? (Almost Famous)

 

High Concept & Low Concept

The term “high concept” now defaults to mean plot-driven, fast-moving action films, but in practice refers to any film with a strong, clear, easily-summarized concept that will find an audience on the strength of its premise alone. The assumption within the industry is, the higher the concept, the easier it is to market:

 

– If James Bond were married, what would he tell his wife he does for a living? (True Lies)

 

– What if living dinosaurs could be created from fossil DNA? (Jurassic Park)

 

– Would you sleep with Robert Redford for $1 million?

 

Low, or soft, concept films tend to have more character- oriented premises which, as Charlie Harris says, rely more on the quality of the end product to attract an audience, and are therefore more risky to potential financiers. Hollywood studio product leans towards high concept, most British and European product towards low concept. Bear this in mind when targeting your market. Write genres for the US and characters for the UK. It’s pointless to try to market megabudget science fiction scripts in the UK; ditto political dramas raising awkward questions about American foreign policy in the US (unless set in the US, with a pro-US twist. A fascinating example is Rod Lurie’s Deterrence – What happens when the US President-elect, snowbound in a Colorado diner when Iraq re-invades Kuwait, threatens a nuclear strike on Baghdad and then has his bluff called?) Remember though that all good scripts contain elements of high and low concept; action and characters combine in a unified premise that addresses and satisfies a wide audience.

 

Genre

The Importance of Genre

Genre is a French word that means “type”. Most people are aware of different broad types of film or television programme. Genre is a shorthand method of categorisation; a buying device that viewers use, consciously or unconsciously, to help them exercise choice over the kind of films or programmes they watch. It is also a selling device for studios and production companies who tend to remain within genre parameters and make the kind of products that have proven popular in the past. Of course, like investments, past performance is no guarantee of future success, but producers wielding multimillion dollar budgets want to give their products the best possible chance of returning a healthy profit for investors (and give themselves the best possible chance of working again).

 

Genre Evolution

Genres do not stand still. They are in constant flux and their boundaries widen as writers and film-makers seek to add new dimensions. Consider the oldest of all genres, the Western: traditionally infused with the American self-image of pioneering spirit, triumph over the adversary (hostile Indians), triumph over adversity (inhospitable landscape), building the new frontier, bringing order to chaos, civilization to the wilderness and law to the lawless, it mutated as different interpretations of the period and place emerged. Sam Peckinpah (The Wild Bunch) and the Italian Spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Leone and others in the 1960s/early 1970s reinvented the genre as a battleground of the seven deadly sins and introduced a new strain of cynicism, black humor and violence. Later, films like Dances with Wolves and

Unforgiven posed uncomfortable questions about the Western myth: was not the triumph over ‘hostile Indians’ in actuality the subjugation and genocide of a people whose only crime was that they were there first? Was the common man not forced to commit acts of savagery to simply survive among the jackals, in some cases with sickening relish? We can see the progression of the genre from rose-tinted heroism through savage realism to social conscience.

 

Genres do not exist in isolation, but always in relation to others. There are also subgenres which further complicate matters; for example Comedy encompasses Black Comedy (with a darker, often unsettling tone), Romantic Comedy (comedy of relationships), Period Comedy (often comedy of manners), Farce (a particularly British humor), Screwball (a particularly American humor), Satire (often ridiculing social structures), Parody (often ridiculing other genres) and so on. Genres can also form hybrids with other genres. Example, as well as Comedy we can have Comedy Science Fiction (Spaceballs, Red Dwarf), Comedy Western (Blazing Saddles), Black Comedy Fantasy (Brazil) and so on.

 

Conventions & Motifs

Each genre contains its own conventions and motifs. Conventions are the way things are usually done; in the Western good guys usually win, bad guys wear black, there’s a final showdown, the protagonist’s motive is based on revenge or imposing law and order etc. Motifs are recurring elements which the audience expects to see. Western motifs include cowboys, Indians, horses, wagon trains, small wooden shanty towns with saloons, livery stables, a jailhouse, six-guns and rifles. Science fiction motifs include spaceships, faster- than-light travel, aliens, silver bodysuits and laser guns. TV soap opera conventions include a community with a hub or meeting place like a bar or coffee shop; storylines focusing on tensions within families or the community; births, deaths and marriages; characters leaving; new characters arriving; a cliffhanger ending to seduce viewers to tune in next time to find out what happens etc.

Using Genre

 

It could be argued that film narrative is itself a form of genre, as it relies on structure, conventions and familiarity. If you want to write commercial film scripts, you’ll need a working knowledge of genre to utilize or, better still, transcend the conventions of the genres you write in. Locate your ideas within a generic framework as well as a structural one, and have fun either using genre conventions, updating them or intelligently subverting them. Analyze films which cross-pollinate genres against the grain – incorporating incongruous elements normally associated with unrelated genres, to offer something unfamiliar.

 

The relocation of the big city cop thriller to the rolling fields of the Amish community in Witness, combined with many elements of the romance genre, is a master stroke of playing with genre conventions. The Coen brothers often create memorable characters against genre: think of “Mad Max” biker Leonard Smalls in Raising Arizona; schizophrenic psychopath Charlie Meadows/Karl Mundt in Barton Fink; or laid-back pregnant sheriff Marge Gundersen in Fargo. Some films begin in one genre and end in another – From Dusk Till Dawn flips from crime to horror without warning. Steve De Jarnatt’s Miracle Mile masterfully segues from romantic drama to Armageddon via the best screen telephone call ever. Hitchcock’s Vertigo begins as a romantic melodrama with supernatural overtones, before debunking the supernatural (almost slapping our wrists for being taken in) then burrowing uncomfortably deep into the protagonist’s mental illness. David Lynch has made a career out of subverting genre conventions; in Lost Highway he goes as far as changing his protagonist into a completely different character halfway through (and includes the second-best screen telephone call ever).

Exercise: The next few times you go to the cinema or watch a film on TV or video, write down what genre(s) you think the film belongs to, and the conventions/motifs you recognize. Try to come up with ways in which they could be extended or challenged.

 

 

4 – Story & Plot

 

Understanding Story & Plot

To understand the function of story and plot, it is important to distinguish between them. Many people refer to one when they mean the other. The difference is a simple, but crucial, one:

 

Story – all of the elements contained within the narrative, in chronological order. In other words, everything that happens to all of the characters placed in a straight line through time.

 

Plot – how the writer chooses to order the story elements; intercutting main plots and sub-plots, and incorporating flashbacks, flash forwards etc., if necessary.