Tag: Screenplay

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Character reference.

As a writer, I often think I should denounce television and sell my set. I could easily live without watching the box again, and use the time to read stories and work on my own novels.

But on the other hand, I’ve now watched every episode of Fargo season one, and Inspector Montalbano and The Young Montalbano – collectively cited hereafter as Montalbano . In their individual ways, these programmes can teach a writer some valuable skills.

In Fargo, we have distinctive characters. Lorne Malvo, the controlled and self-assured lone wolf who often speaks in allegory. His demeanour directly contrasts with the nervous and uncertain Lester Nygaard who constantly stumbles over his speech. They’re being pursued by the two police chiefs in Bemidji and Duluth, who believe they’re superior both in rank and intellect.

Braun HF 1 television receiver, Germany, 1958
Braun HF 1 television receiver, Germany, 1958 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It’s therefore difficult to mistake one character for another. As such, each earns his or her place in the story. Incidentally, I found it impossible to unravel the formula behind the Fargo screenplay.

Montalbano also has well-drawn characters, but its formula is more obvious when you watch a number of episodes in succession. At the start, the inspector will probably be woken by a phone call; halfway through, a Mafia connection might be made; at the end, it’s likely the suspect will confess then commit suicide. There are a dozen additional common plot points.

This description makes the show sound formulaic, and it is, but formulae exist because audiences react well to them. The writer’s job is to work with the formula in such a way that the structure becomes nearly invisible. In the case of Montalbano it took a good few episodes to see the commonalities. I haven’t read the Andrea Camilleri source novels, but I expect they’re similar.

While we’re here, let’s take a moment to look at so-called reality shows, such as The Only Way Is Essex or The Hills. There is still a formula at work, but the writers approach it in a different way. It’s a technique that was shown to me by a drama teacher long before either of these shows were made.

Instead of a word-for-word script, the cast are told what the scene will be. Each actor is then given a card with his or her individual motivation that the others don’t know, and any information that needs to be dropped into the conversation. This produces dialogue that’s much closer to natural speech than a traditional script, especially if there’s an argument in the scene. The structure for the complete programme is still under the control of the writers.

From these TV programmes, we have masterclasses in structure and character. These are two considerations that have helped me redraft one of my novels that simply wasn’t working.

The first thing I did was to cull some characters. The protagonist worked with five people, and now works with three; his partner’s sister was only there to look at the protagonist disapprovingly, so she’s now been cut out.

Secondly, the structure simply wasn’t working, particularly towards the end. As it’s an adventure story, I looked up possible structures and found one called the Monomyth, a more detailed version of the three-act structure. By following this and using my own variations as the plot demanded, I now have a structure I’m happy with.

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Two-Hour Masterclasses.

Part of me thinks a real writer should sell their television set and denounce anything audio-visual. Yet another part thinks that screenplays are a great way to learn and improve our writing techniques, and I’ve seen many this past week.

The first on my list was Christmas classic It’s a Wonderful Life. There is not a wasted word or action over the whole two hours, and the number of back references is staggering. From the bell at the very beginning to, “I wish I had a million dollars,” to where Mr Welsh punches George Bailey, each one of these is a set-up to a later plot point. A tight script is the accepted Hollywood convention, but Quentin Tarantino is one of the few writers who allows his characters to speak about matters unrelated to the plot.

Dog Day Afternoon runs to a similar length but takes place almost exclusively in one location. Yet there are so many characters interacting that it lends the film a rapid pace and never feels as though the director is padding out the action. It’s also worth a look at the more recent Phone Booth.

2001: A Space Odyssey — Three of the Discovery...
2001: A Space Odyssey — Three of the Discovery One crew are in a state of hibernation, ostensibly to conserve resources for the voyage. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I went to a special limited-run screening of 2001: A Space Odyssey on Saturday. I’m still trying to work out fully what happened at the end, but the journey there was a masterclass in show-don’t-tell. There must have been about 600 pages of stage directions and two of dialogue. It would do little justice to describe it on the page, so try watching even just ten minutes to gain a sense of Stanley Kubrick’s style.

Incidentally, it’s only one of two films I’ve ever seen where the cinema has provided an intermission. I don’t know why these fell out of favour, as it’s quite handy for nipping to the bathroom, and also for the house to make money from bar sales.

As well as the above-mentioned films, I also had an opportunity to see new short films made by 16- to 19-year-olds. The screening was at Dundee Contemporary Arts and made with the assistance of Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design. Each one was inspired by an archive of experimental films from the 1970s to the 1990s, and the one that appealed to the individual the most was played before their piece. Almost all of them, old and new, explored ideas beyond the conventions of ordinary filmmaking, from a lonely girl in a room full of friends and balloons to two musicians swinging guitars by the neck while playing them.

I managed to chat with Scott Funai, the director, producer and star of Road to Nowhere. This short piece is about a schoolboy who doodles on his exam paper, effectively ruining the chances of him finding a job, with the title repeated in voice-over by him and the other characters. He told me he takes the Mike Leigh approach to scripting, preferring improvisation over dictation. Scripts are supposed to be a bare outline and the director fills in the rest, but Leigh doesn’t even begin writing one until he’s confident the actors fully inhabit their characters.

Although the approaches from the above writers may be different from each other, the end result is the same in the sense that the approach works for that particular screenplay. And that principle can be applied to any type of writing, from a 50-word poem where each phrase must have significance to a novel written purely in stream of consciousness. The approach will have a great influence over the result.

Have you considered changing your approach? I said before that I tend to think about my pieces for a long time, then write them very quickly. But when I was about 15, I wrote a fragment of a song lyric. I revisited it over the years and tried to compose the rest of the song, but it wasn’t coming together. It was only when I was twice that age that I decided to treat it as a poem and it slowly came together into six verses. I now consider it a finished work but it was written over a much longer period than I would normally devote to a piece.

Albert Einstein is attributed with saying, “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” As far as I know, he never wrote a screenplay, but he makes a good point.