by Paul Ashton
saying, because on radio music says a great deal. It isn’t just background –
it’s as powerful as a broad vista of landscape is on the big screen.
SOUND
Radio isn’t just about sound. It is about significant sound. Sound that is
intrinsic. Story driven sound. Part of the texture and fabric of your world
rather than just a bunch of SFX. Sound that means something, that says
something, that tells the story – that resonates uniquely in each listener’s
head.
FILM AND THE CINEMATIC CANVAS
THE BIG PICTURE
The arrival of the movies marked a revolution in dramatic storytelling. When
the Lumière brothers publicly screened their first films in the late nine -
teenth century, one in particular caused havoc. A short film of a steam train
arriving at a station – and seemingly heading towards the camera – con -
vinced the audience that it was about to burst through the screen, and they
fled in panic. Whether true or apocryphal, this brilliant moment tells us two
things: a live audience, as in theatre, is a fundamental part of the cinematic
experience; and cinema has the curious, perhaps magical poten tial to make
us believe that what we are seeing on the screen is quite literally real.
‘Cinema’ is an abbreviation of cinematographe, the term coined by the
Lumière brothers which in turn derives from the ancient Greek,
mετακίνηση, and means 'movement'. Cinema is all about movement and
action, from the film run ning through the projector to the momentum of the
story.
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THE THEATRICAL RELEASE
Film, like theatre, is designed to play before a live audience. In cinema, you
can’t change the performance on celluloid, but the audience can dictate the
mood in the room and there are films that truly bring an auditorium to life:
singing the theme tune to Ghostbusters, holding back that teary gulp in
E.T. , collective shock in a horror film, infectious belly laughter in a comedy.
It’s not just that the song is fun, the scene sad, the horror terrifying or the
comedy hilarious; the audience takes it to a whole other level. So make the
most of the potentially full screening-room. The movies can in their own
way be as much a ritual experience as theatre; the audience can seek the
same level of ‘catharsis’, of relief and release.
CINEMA SCOPE
Technically, in CinemaScope, new lenses were developed to expand the wide-
screen image in projection. Cinema is essentially designed to fill the frame,
to occupy your field of vision. Cinema should wash over you. Theatre has an
inherent flexibility; an audience can be seated and moved around so that
spectators are self-consciously aware of one another, and differently aware
of the play before them. But the flat screen and the rows of audience seating
in cinema are designed so that approximately the same view washes over all
of us as we collectively stare up at it.
The writer and director must frame the action for us – that frame, and
the canvas within it, is potentially huge. The scale of ideas, visuals and emo -
tions is potentially limitless. Moreover, special effects and CGI technology
mean the screen can still represent what a camera cannot literally capture.
So be bold. Don’t write glorified TV for a big screen. Write big ideas and big
themes. Fill the frame – dramatically, visually and emotionally.
‘I learned a lot from writing The Road . I finally understood a few
things about scope and scale. The cinema screen is sixty foot wide . . .
You need to fill that with something worth seeing. You do need to think
big. I was raised on small talkie indie films – which I still love. But
I can’t help thinking now that film is a huge, broad canvas – and its
wasted if you think small.’
Joe Penhall
28 THE CALLING CARD SCRIPT
KNOWING YOUR PLACE
It’s fair to say that cinema is a director’s medium. Writers generally speak -
ing have less ultimate influence, control and say in the production and post-
production process (unless, that is, you are a writer-director – although
many directors will have to defer to studio executives). But it’s also fair to
say that the more brilliant and compelling your script is, the less need there
might be to interfere with what you have created.
Film scripts, along with TV scripts, require a level of acquired tech -
nical skill and craft that tends not to come naturally to anyone. Put two
characters together in a moment of conflict or tension, and you have a
dramatic scene. But for the screen, you need to clearly specify interior/
exterior, place, time and employ a range of standard and required format
shorthands that are there not simply to tell the story but to tell a pro -
duction team how to cost, schedule, prepare and set a film shoot in order
that it runs as smoothly and therefore as economically as possible.
The challenge you face is to make this strange format language as
absorbed and second nature as possible, without your script ‘directing’ from
the page with interminable over-writing of scenes and jargon (CU, ECU,
SMASH CUT, TRACKING SHOT, DOLLY SHOT, PAN, LONGSHOT, CRANE SHOT,
PULL BACK ad infinitum). Don’t direct the camera angles from the page –
that is the preserve of director and cinematographer. Direct the action – tell
the character story, show us what the drama is, present what is done and
said.
‘SHOW DON’T TELL’
Everybody will tell you this. And that’s because they are right. Although it’s
a mantra more easily trotted out than put into practice – or done well. It’s
all about remembering that film is a visual form and medium. As they say,
a picture can tell the story of a thousand words. Don’t explain the drama,
story, action, plot, emotions and themes through expository, explanatory
dialogue that is employed solely for that purpose. Show it through visual
storytelling. This basic principle is fundamental in great cinema.
Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout is a brilliant piece of cinema with little dia -
logue and two central characters who are simply unable to communicate
with words. Look also at the bulk of Spielberg’s Castaway, where a man is
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stranded alone on a desert island, with nobody to speak to and therefore
little reason to say anything.
SIGN LANGUAGE
Cinema is the medium in which image can have a particularly resonant
meaning and effect. A pram tumbling down steps in Battleship Potemkin;
the shimmering speck on the horizon of Lawrence of Arabia; the dancing
brown-paper bag in American Beauty; the fertility patterning in Alien; the red coat in Schindler’s List; the shower of frogs in Magnolia; even the train as it enters the tunnel at the end of North by Northwest. You have the
potential to fix a meaningful image (or symbol) in an audience’s vision,
understanding and memory. It takes a smart writer to make image, idea
and story cohere. Is there a visual code that unifies and expresses meaning
in your story without being clunky and clumsy.
UP CLOSE
In close-up on a big s
creen you are able to see, dissect and reach behind an
image. On a big screen you can see every crease and wrinkle that time,
experience and stress have etched into an old face, and you can see the
beautiful unblemished purity of a young face as yet unspoiled by life. You
will see this in much greater detail in film than in any other medium. You
will also see the minutiae and tiny nuances of expressions that tell a story
and express a character without a word being said. But, such things are
extraordinarily difficult to write – there needs to be an action preceding,
following, surrounding, contextualising it. Remember to only write what
an actor can play and show. Asking them to somehow chart the progress
of shock to horror then despair and finally resignation in a single moment/
expression is nonsense (believe me, I have read exactly such ‘action’ in
screenplays). Giving them a small, simple action through which to filter that
progress will give their physical expression an emotional meaning.
In Fargo, Jerry takes a deal to his father-in-law that he believes will
solve all the money troubles he is keeping secret; but Wade won’t just give
Jerry the money he so desperately needs and so he is cut out of the deal.
Jerry walks back to his iced-up car, which sits alone in the middle of a
deserted car park, and begins methodically scraping the ice away from the
30 THE CALLING CARD SCRIPT
windscreen. As he scrapes, he just cannot control his frustration any more
and takes it out with the scraper on the car in a childish fit of impotent
temper. Once the tantrum has passed, he goes back to his methodical scrap -
ing. In that simple act and moment, we see a whole married lifetime of the
frustrations that have left him in a position where his only option now is a
wild, crazy plan that will end very badly indeed.
MONTAGE
A montage isn’t really something you write, it’s what a director and editor
do – a stringing together of shots, moments, pictures, images, symbols,
actions that sum up a section of story or passage of time. It’s narrative
shorthand. What’s important for the writer is the ability in film to leap for -
ward and get to the next significant scene. Writers normally overestimate
how much they need to explain and show in order to orient their audience.
Don’t montage your way out of a hole in the plot or lack of substance in the
story. In fact, you should never need to ‘write’ a montage at all. But
remember how fast, fluid and free you can be in moving your story forward.
Show, don’t tell; but don’t show everything.
THE WHOLE STORY
Fundamentally, cinema works best for the one-off telling of a single story.
Even if it is part of a sequence – The Godfather, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings – each should stand up in its own right as a satisfying experience.
Therefore the skill you must master is that of crafting the single, closed,
complete, coherent, satisfying narrative. There is a big industry around
sequels, prequels, ‘the early years’ and spin-offs because when an idea and
characters work, the audience want to see more and the industry wants to
make a sure bet profit out of it. But the screenwriter doesn’t really master
the art of writing a sequel – only that of a single story (with perhaps the
added bonus of a cheeky open ending). This is why the ‘hero’s journey’ from
Western epic poetry has become the mainstay of film story structure.
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THE COMPLEX SINGULARITY
While the hero’s journey is a universal story shape, it can be played in an
infinite number of ways, and cinema embraces complexity and sophis
-
tication of narrative structure more than any other medium – whether it’s
the playfulness of Fargo, the simultaneously reverse/forward structure of
Memento, the broken flashbacks of Reservoir Dogs, the Act One swerve in
Psycho, the expansive flashback of The Godfather II, the repetition of
Groundhog Day, the fluidity of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the
tripartite form of Amores Perros, the wholly non-linear structure of 21 Grams
or the multi-stranded worlds of Short Cuts, Magnolia and Crash. There’s never a need to be complicated for the sake of it, but if it’s intrinsic to your
idea and story, then the big screen is the most exhilarating place to chal -
lenge the audience with narrative, structural and temporal complexity.
THE KIND OF STORY
Most of the films above are instances of a genre given a fresh take or spin.
Fargo is set up as a ‘thriller’ and ‘true story’ but is neither; Psycho a thriller in which the apparent heroine is killed off before the halfway point; Groundhog Day a romantic comedy in which the first date happens again and
again and again; Reservoir Dogs a heist movie in which we never actually
witness the heist; Memento a detective story in which the detective can’t
remember the information he has just uncovered.
It’s fair to say that film, the audience’s understanding of it and the
producer’s ability to sell it, has a fundamental relationship with genre. It is
often the mark of a strong writer that they understand, embrace and then
challenge genre; it is as often the mark of an inexperienced one that they
resist, fail to understand and fail to master or challenge genre (often,
ironically, while they claim to be reinventing it). Don’t see genre as a
reduction or belittling of your ideas – see it as a way of defining your story
and reaching an audience. The films above are so good that they reinvent
genre while embracing it wholeheartedly. In film, you need to be able to
think in genre terms – otherwise you are unlikely to get your script devel -
oped seriously, never mind produced, distributed and seen by an audience
likely to engage with it. Genre is of course important for every medium –
but it’s especially important when attracting an audience into cinemas.
32 THE CALLING CARD SCRIPT
UNIVERSAL
Great film stories can appeal, travel and translate across languages, cul -
tures, countries, territories and continents. Again, it’s about an audience
being able to understand what kind of story you are telling and quite how
it might connect and relate to their own life and experience. Think about
whether your story, no matter how particular the cultural specifics, has the
potential to reach, touch, engage and speak to an audience anywhere in the
world. Film is absolutely the most universal form – when, that is, the story -
telling is as visual as the story is universal.
‘It’s a weird medium. High art and bubblegum together. Church and
whorehouse all rolled into one. It’s hard to know just how seriously
to take it. If politics is showbiz for ugly people, then film is art for
crazy people.’
Joe Penhall
TELEVISION AND THE RELENTLESS FORMAT
There are two key elements to contemporary TV drama writing: the relent -
lessness of the storytelling and the format in which the story is presented.
The two are inextricably linked and pretty much unavoidable.
Why relentless? Because the way we watch, experience, consume TV
drama tends to dic
tate the constant need to keep us, the audience, hooked.
Why format? Because all TV is format. No TV programme exists that
doesn’t also set forth a format. Soap, classic adaptation, docu-drama, news,
weather update, game show, chat show, documentary, consumer show, sports
coverage, magazine show and every variation in between is a format or sub-
format, a genre or sub-genre, of TV programming.
DISTRACTIONS
In theatre and film we make a date with a story. In radio, the ubiquity of
the BBC means there is little other radio drama to choose from. In TV,
stories constantly vie with one another to grab our attention, each under
constant threat of being turned over, turned off or stored for viewing later.
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In the ritual experience of an auditorium there is normally a collective focus.
In the ritual experience of TV viewing, potential distractions are legion –
the people you watch it with, the people who are doing other things while
you watch, the people who phone you halfway through a programme, the
meal you are simultaneously eating, the ad break, the cup of tea you plan
to make during the ad break, the text message from the friend who is
watching the same show in their home, the text message from the friend who
is telling you there is something much better on another channel, the web -
sites you are simultaneously surfing.
The possible and probable barrage of distractions varies from channel
to channel, slot to slot, demographic to demographic, household to house -
hold, but it never really goes away. And as the volume and intensity of
distractions have increased over time, so too has grown the volume of story
required to keep an audience’s attention above them.
THE MORNING AFTER
It’s not just about the audience and experience on the night. TV broad -
casters and producers examine the overnight audience figures published
the next day. Audience figures are something of a dark art. They comprise
data derived from around 5,000 random homes extrapolated to represent
the range of the 25 million-plus TV households in the UK. Some mistrust
them, but there is little else to utilise, so they are a necessity. They are not