Classic Hollywood Narrative System (CHNS)

The foundations of screenplay construction were laid in the early days of Hollywood (albeit appropriated from well-established principles of mythology and narrative) and have since remained largely intact. A screenplay tells a visual story in which plot events follow a rigid internal logic of cause and effect so that the audience knows what is happening to whom and why. As discussed in chapter 6, the plot normally pivots around the protagonist, a dynamic central character with clear needs, desires and problems who encounters an antagonistic force while in pursuit of his goals. His attempts to overcome this opposition as he undergoes a life-changing series of events drive the narrative, building to a climax where he emerges victorious but also mindful of how close he came to defeat and of what he learned along the way. Modern variations are surprise, downbeat and/or ambiguous endings, where the protagonist either snatches defeat from the jaws of success, fails miserably or loses so much in reaching his goal that it brings the wisdom of the whole enterprise into question. Syd Field has advised against such endings but when done well they are among the most memorable examples of cinema: Chinatown, Apocalypse Now, Seven, Get Carter, The Long Good Friday, The Vanishing (original) and The Wages of Fear.

 

Art-Film Narrative

Art-film narrative was mainly developed in European cinema as a form of cultural opposition to the dominant Hollywood model; more open to experiment and idiosyncrasy, its appeal is limited to a narrower audience. Examples include A Bout De Souffle, L’Avventura, A Zed and Two Noughts, Last Year At Marienbad and The Idiots. Art-film conventions allow character motivations to be opaque and confusing, events to abandon a cause and effect relationship, narrative strands to be oblique or remain deliberately unresolved, visual artifice and style to take precedence over plot coherence and viewers to arrive at their own understanding of meaning among multiple possibilities. Some of my favorite films ingeniously combine elements of Art-film narrative with CHNS: Blue Velvet, Diva, Subway, Run Lola Run, Barton Fink, The Reflecting Skin, Trust, Toto the Hero, The Fourth Man, Exotica, The Limey, Requiem For a Dream.

 

Three-Act Structure

If the protagonist is the vehicle that carries the reader through the narrative, then structure is your road map for him. The framework supporting CHNS is a three-act beginning/middle/end screenplay (although acts are not formally separated) in which the middle act is roughly twice the length of the first and last acts. Using the principle that one page of properly formatted script equals one minute of screen time, this equates to 30 minutes/60 minutes/30 minutes for a two-hour screenplay.

 

An old Hollywood maxim goes: “Get your hero up a tree, throw rocks at him, and then get him down again”. In his book A Pound Of Flesh, producer Art Linson relates how “David Mamet, in attempting to explain the three-act theory, said that he read a news headline in the New York Post which declared, “Boy Cuts off Father’s Head, Cuts off Parakeet’s Head, Then Cuts off Lizard’s Head. He said the secret is to tell the screenwriter to cut the father’s head off last.”

 

Films within genres that usually run over two hours, like sprawling epics, biopics or adaptations of classic novels, require more acts to underpin the length; Lawrence of Arabia has seven. Films incorporating art narrative may play around with structure; Full Metal Jacket and She’s Gotta Have It have two acts. Ken Dancyger and Jeff Rush contend that Mean Streets has only one. David Siegel breaks 90% of films that have broken the $100 million mark at the US box office into his own nine-act structure. John Truby runs courses based on his 22-step structure. Beware of treating act structure as a formula; it’s not. There is no such thing as a formula for writing a screenplay, merely a suggested form. The three-act model has never met a sustained commercial or theoretical challenge and continues to hold sway, but that doesn’t mean you have to use it. However, as a first-timer, if your screenplay is constructed within an accepted architecture it shows that you have researched the craft in a professional manner. And in the megadollar-driven world of film production, this model has been proven to reach the widest audience and therefore return the largest profit.

 

The timeline for three-act structure looks like this:

 

Opening Sequence

Or, the First Ten Pages. Script readers have developed professional shorthand based around the opening and closing ten pages and dialogue samples, to enable them to cope with the sheer volume of scripts they have to wade through. If your opening is weak, your climax will probably also fail to deliver. If so, your script is dead in the water. I read far too many scripts which open with some character interaction and dialogue, but without any real incident to generate and sustain interest. You must pique the reader’s interest from the beginning. The primary requirement for your script’s opening sequence is to hit the ground running, either liter- ally or metaphorically – Something Must Happen. The Inciting Incident inserts the Hook under readers’ skins, stimulates their excitement and gets them emotionally involved with the protagonist and his problem.

 

The essential elements of a strong opening are: introduce at least one major character (usually the protagonist and/or Antagonist); set the tone (mood/atmosphere); set the pace; and introduce the world of the story via a powerful incident or situation which sets in motion the events of the plot.