by Ben Brady
The Understructure of Writing for Film and Television
BEN BRADY & LANCE LEE
University of Texas Press,
Austin
Copyright © 1988 by the University of Texas Press
All rights reserved
Second Paperback Printing, 1990
Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to Permissions, University of Texas Press, Box 7819, Austin, Texas 78713-7819.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Brady, Ben.
The understructure of writing for film and television.
Includes index.
1. Moving-picture authorship. 2. Television authorship. 3. Playwriting. 4. Drama—Technique. I. Lee, Lance, 1942– II. Title.
PN1996.B715 1988 808.2′2 87-25508
ISBN 0-292-78514-3
ISBN 0-292-78515-1 (pbk.)
ISBN 978-0-292-75958-9 (library e-book)
ISBN 978-0-292-79182-4 (individual e-book)
DOI 10.7560/785144
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Part One. Getting on Your Feet
1. Your Dramatic Heritage
2. What Is a Dramatic Conflict?
3. What Is a Scene?
4. Camera Language and Format
Part Two. Developing Character and Conflict
5. Introduction
6. Establishing Character and Conflict
7. Developing Character and Conflict to Crisis
8. Achieving Crisis and Climax
9. Handling Dialogue, Theme, Values, and Moral Urgency
10. Writing the Miniscreenplay
11. A Last Word
Appendix: The Market
Glossary of Film Terms
Index
Preface
No one can teach another to write. Being able to write is a gift—you have it, or you don’t. But creativity is much more widespread than generally thought. It can be guided. It can be provoked. It can be inspired. Students can be challenged to test their own resources as writers.
These thoughts have guided the development of the very successful writing program in the Radio, Television and Film Department at the State University of California at Northridge. Some semesters have seen more than three hundred students enrolled in sixteen sections of the beginning writing course for television and film and another seventy relegated to waiting lists.
The course takes the student over the ground of preparing and writing a half-hour television script. A textbook grew out of this practical experience, The Keys to Writing for Television and Film, now in its fourth edition and adopted by more than forty colleges and universities here and in Canada.
Nothing stands still. The continued growth and experience of the program at Northridge has led us to believe that students could use more writing experience than one introductory course offers before they go on to more ambitious projects. The professional staff that teaches this course has developed a more fundamental course that strengthens the excellent results already achieved.
We emphasize this emergent development so that you will see that this new text has grown out of the experience of teaching hundreds of students the fundamentals of writing for television and film. Our belief, already translated into practice at Northridge by instituting the new course this new text reflects, is that requiring students to write a variety of scenes leads to an ever-deepening awareness of the development of character and conflict, gives additional practice in using the screenplay format, and provides a much more substantial groundwork for developing longer scripts.
Any decent education of a writer has to insist on the sheer practice of writing. The principal objective of this text is to provide that necessary exercise through a progression of scenewriting assignments, culminating in the writing of a minidrama of 10–15 pages (longer if an instructor chooses). Our experience has been that beginning students clearly enjoy the greater freedom to test their wings as well as the challenge of dealing with multiple subjects in individual assignments.
Anything and everything a writer must accomplish in a long drama must also be accomplished in each of its scenes, namely, structuring beginning, middle, and end; introducing and developing character; establishing conflict and developing it to crisis; handling climax and resolution; coming to grips with elements of the back story; and using exposition in a dramatic way. Individual assignments emphasize each of these elements in turn. To illustrate these points, we have richly supplemented the text with sample scenes drawn from the screen repertoire. And since all plays—TV, film, and stage—have the same spine, an occasional notable example from the stage has been included.
Beginning writers would be ill educated were they not made aware of the common heritage playwrights share in the techniques that underlie the separate media for which a play can be written. There is a repertoire of dramatic techniques that go all the way back to the scenic spectaculars and costume shockers used by Aeschylus.
Although we concentrate on a progression of scenes, the book culminates with a simple explication of preparing and executing a miniscreenplay, taking the student through the necessary steps of developing a brief premise, a treatment, and a stepsheet.
When reading the analyses of the scenes included in the text, keep two points in mind: first, no two authors will write the same dramatic situation in the same way, and no author will write the same dramatic situation, like a love scene, in the same way twice; second, everyone is likely to have a different interpretation of the same material. Our analyses of the scenes included in the text are intended to provide the beginner with a model for an increasingly thorough analysis of dramatic structure, reality, and motivation. They also try to make clear why a given scene succeeds or is to some extent compromised. There is never the intention to imply that a scene can be written or interpreted in only one way. Yet scenes finally are written in one chosen way, the variants having been tried and sifted out by an author in the writing process, and those final choices are what we must examine. If an author succeeds, he imparts the feeling of a certain inevitability to a scene, and any analysis must deal with that inevitability. But it must be remembered the author has created that sense of inevitability as part of the illusion of reality he set out to create from his original, rough intentions. We hope when you differ with us you will do so with increasing confidence in using the analytic model we provide for your own creative ends.
Bear in mind that there are sophisticated variations to screenwriting as there are to other traditions. We have incorporated work from Aeschylus, Henrik Ibsen, and Ingmar Bergman in part for that reason. Drama and its cinematic variant are international. Dramatic fundamentals know no boundaries and must be dealt with whatever the writer’s nationality, politics, or philosophy. Nonetheless, this text is meant as a practical introduction to American screenwriting traditions, to the world of professional practice prevalent in this country now. We believe that the student who masters its contents will be well positioned to tackle halfhour, hour, or full-length scripts for American markets with confidence and sophistication. But basics must come first, just as they have for other screenwriters.
Last, a word on language. The use of the pronoun he for both men and women in the body of the text is done so for the sake of brevity and simplicity of expression to support the learning process.
Acknowledgments
We gratefully acknowledge the following for permission to quote from their works: Columbia Pictures and Robert Benton for Kramer vs. Kramer, Larry Gelbart for Tootsie, John Huston for The Treasure o
f the Sierra Madre, New American Library for A Doll House, New Directions and the Tennessee Williams Foundation for A Streetcar Named Desire, Buck Henry for The Graduate, Pantheon Books for Fanny and Alexander, Paramount Pictures Corporation for The Godfather, Budd Schulberg for On the Waterfront, and Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company for The Keys to Writing for Television and Film, by Ben Brady.
Part One: Getting on Your Feet
1. Your Dramatic Heritage
When you sit down to write a screenplay, a teleplay, or a stage play, you are functioning as a playwright, as a dramatist. There are many differences in the possible treatment of a play because it is affected by (a) the type of theatre that is available for its production, (b) the use of a camera to make a film for theatrical release, or (c) the nature of a particular television show. Nonetheless, different though they may be in treatment, the underlying dramatic art of the play remains the same. Even the impulse to spectacular special effects, or spectacle, remains much the same, whether we are talking about the classics—plays written by eminently practical men of the theatre of their time—or contemporary achievements with the camera.
There is an immense gap in time between the opening of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon 2,500 years ago and the filming of the long, full shots of wilderness that open Stanley Kubrick’s modern science fiction classic 2001. But the dramatic impulses in the ancient playwright and popular contemporary filmmaker are alike—the only difference is in dramatic structure and technology.
Take, for example, the opening of Aeschylus’ play in which the Watchman is looking for a signal to indicate that Troy has at last fallen and the long Trojan war come to an end.
SCENE: Argos, before the palace of King Agamemnon. The Watchman is posted on the roof of the palace.
WATCHMAN
. . . Now let there be again redemption from distress, the flare burning from the blackness in good augury.
(A light shows in the distance)
Oh hail, blaze of the darkness, harbinger of day’s shining, and processionals, and dance, and choirs of multitudes in Argos for this day of grace.
Ahoy!
I cry the news aloud . . .1
Aeschylus was the first master of special effects. Since his story was staged outside and began at dawn, it is not inconceivable that “the flare” turned out to be the rising sun. It is an effect we can still admire! Or take Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers in which he costumed the Greek chorus with such reality as Furies, the ancient vengeful goddesses with snakes in their hair, that his audience thought the real Furies had appeared, snakes and all, and recoiled in horror—just as we recoil today when Willie, in Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, creeps across a bug-filled floor with insects in her hair to reach into an insect-filled slimy crevice to release Indiana from the chamber of descending knives. Today the camera brings us immediately and closely in on the action, but the distance between the audience and the event has always been defined less by technical resource than by emotion. In short, we the audience must have our emotions aroused in order to be involved, something ancient and contemporary playwrights have regarded as absolutely necessary for writing effective drama.
So as you begin to think dramatically, you will be learning an art that was virtually created by Aeschylus, practiced by Shakespeare and the polite dramatists of the eighteenth century, turned to his own use by George Bernard Shaw, and redefined by Henrik Ibsen for the modern era. Now that the art has been divided further by cinema and television, the list of practitioners includes men like Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, Ingmar Bergman, François Truffaut, Paddy Chayefsky, Robert Towne, and your own particular favorite. In short, there is an immense repertoire of drama all written by practical men and women waiting for your exploration, a body of work rich in precedent and full of suggestion for you for almost any dramatic experiment you may want to try.
Now then, dwell for a moment on a word—playwright. It is an odd word with that wright in it. A wright is a craftsman, someone who makes and assembles things, a practical man par excellence. Drama has always had to appeal to a wide taste, to please many different tastes at one time. It is competitive. It has had to win prizes or celebrate divine virtues to justify itself or to make money to support the companies creating it and the theatres displaying it. Even when patronized, it has had to be popularly successful. For thousands of years people have gathered to witness a play performed. They assembled in the open theatres of Greece and Elizabethan England, in the court theatres of baroque Europe, in the public theatres and first small experimental theatres in the nineteenth century, and now in our own modern theatres and cinemas. Television has expanded these audiences into the millions. So public and responsive an art must be practical; therefore, the playwright is the most practical artist within the great arts.
There is much to be said about the mechanics of the practical, down-to-earth nature of drama. Most of this text is largely devoted to that end. Never forget that drama happens before our eyes, on a stage or on a screen, as a visual, immediate, real experience, dependent on the presence of an audience whose attention it must hold and whose expenditure it must justify, or it is a failure as a drama.
That said, no playwright ever made his mark who was not also a man of vision. The central, most difficult lesson for a playwright to learn is how to embody his own vision in a practical play for stage or screen or television. Without such vision, there’s not much reason to present or attend a play. This is true whether we are talking about a Saturday afternoon adventure flick or the premiere of a new drama on the stage of a resident theatre.
Consider the popular action-adventure science fiction Star Wars trilogy by George Lucas. He had a vision of what a film would look like, what new special effects could achieve, and he revolutionized the film industry by bringing it into the computer era. But such effects alone would not have held our attention through three films. Sooner or later we would have asked ourselves what they were all for, if they helped tell a story or just got in its way. Lucas knew this, and using computerized special effects and the disguise of a science fiction thriller, he presented in Star Wars a spectacular vision of failure and redemption in which an abandoned son redeems a fallen father.
Note
1. Aeschylus, Agamemnon, trans. Richmond Lattimore (New York: Modern Library, 1942), p. 42.
2. What Is a Dramatic Conflict?
Drama comes from the Greek word dran, which means action. Our word actor literally means someone who carries out an action. Agony is derived from another Greek word, agon, which means contest. Plays are stories about people involved in a contest.
A dramatic story is an action. It is action on the part of your protagonist to overcome a difficult problem or go down swinging in the attempt. A dramatic story is a series of doings, of happenings, of events caused by the protagonist trying to solve his problem: it is not a thing of words, but behaviors. Dramatic action has a structure—a problem appears for the protagonist and worsens until a point of crisis is reached, which leads in turn to a climactic moment or sequence. The climax sees the ending of the problem for the protagonist one way or another.
You are going to construct a screenplay. That is, you are going to write a dramatic story for the screen structured in what is called a plot. You are not writing for a single individual next to a lamp with a book on his lap, but for people gathered together to see and hear your story. All you have is one and a half hours of their patience for the typical full-length screenplay.
It’s not just filmed. It is enacted. It is lived. The audience will see people (your characters) going through actual experiences at the very moment they are having them. Your story will be made up of these immediate experiences. You will not only engage the conscious level of their identifications with your characters, but their unconscious mind, too, as it is affected by color, costume, scenery, sounds, movement, and spectacle as your characters attempt and succeed or fail to do something that they feel a great, immediate need to do and have a diff
icult time in actually doing because of some opposition to their needs. It is impossible to overemphasize this need for immediate, crucial action.
You will certainly want to entertain the audience, too. You won’t have your characters doing familiar things in familiar ways. You will want to inform with original thought and ideas; you’ll want to please by enlightening through the way your characters respond to their problems.
Since your story has a BEGINNING, MIDDLE, and END, it’s not shapeless, not simply an accident or an incident like this:
Sally, a solid young woman of 28, an Olympic skier, crosses a street against the light and is hit by a car.
That’s too bad, and it is a news story, but not a dramatic story. But look at it this way:
BEGINNING. Sally, a 28-year-old Olympic skier, is hit by a car and taken to a hospital. She can’t move her legs. Her physicians fear paralysis.
MIDDLE. Sally refuses to accept paralysis. She works steadily in therapy, trying to regain sensation and movement. Even her parents think she is asking too much from herself. But Sally won’t give up on herself and decides to go on trying to recover until something happens to make it appear hopeless.
END. Unwilling to give up, she one day gets a twinge in a toe. Soon she is confounding everyone with her progress. She’s a long way from being able to ski again but that, she asserts, as she takes her first free steps, is just a matter of time.
That’s a dramatic story, though a very simple one. And it brings us face to face with the nature of dramatic conflict. Something happens to someone, to your main character, your protagonist. Sally is hurt. This is not just any kind of hurt, but one your protagonist needs to correct. It makes your protagonist do something in reaction. Here Sally struggles to regain her health. But your protagonist can’t solve the problem easily, or the story is over immediately. So you have given Sally a problem that is very hard to solve and that requires a long struggle to overcome. And as Sally shows, your protagonist is a fighter. No matter how bad things get, she doesn’t give up, even though her parents give up on her. Finally, your protagonist reaches some point of resolution. Sally makes it or fails to make it.