“Adventures in the Screen Trade”: Screen Time
I’m re-reading William Goldman’s book “Adventures in the Screen Trade.” He’s got so much insight into screenwriting in it, I’ve started to post the occasional excerpt. The first one is here and dealt with writing a script quickly. This excerpt below gets into the idea of ‘screen time’:
Screen time is a most mysterious thing: The same scene must be written differently depending upon where it comes in the narrative, beginning or middle or end. Because the more information an audience has, the less additional information it requires. And the ladling out of when and where something is necessary is one of the requisite components to skillful storytelling.
As has been said for years, it’s possible to conceive narrative as an endless piece of string. The writer makes two snips, one for the beginning, one at the end, and the placement of those snips may be as important as anything a writer does.
Narrative as I see it has nothing whatsoever to do with what you consider the story. We are moved by different things, interested in different aspects, confident in making different confrontations work. So we will cut the string in no remotely the same spots.
It’s usual to note that in a screenplay, not only do you attack each scene as late as it possible, you attack the entire story the same way. The camera tells you so much so quickly that you are always forced to get on with it.
Jaws began with the shark snacking on the girl, but it didn’t have to; 2001: A Space Odyssey didn’t begin in the future but thousands of years in the past. You could have done the same with Jaws — shot of little one-cell sea creatures and then structures a little more complex and then the tiniest minnow and then a bigger minnow and then a small fish that shockingly bites a smaller fish and then to piranhas and then, all the time with the music building, maybe a barracuda and then a small shark, music very loud now, and then a bigger shark until — climax, crash of cymbals — Peter Benchley’s monster comes roaring at us on the screen.
Might have worked. Sure didn’t hurt 2001.
You must cut the narrative string yourself, with what you emotionally feel is sound. No one can tell you how or when. Because there are no rules.
To try and validate that, let me end this discussion with [a] film directed by… Mr. [Alfred] Hitchcock. More specifically, Psycho, my favorite of his work and a film that a film freak recently referred to as “the greatest splatter film…”
My guess is, when that movie is mentioned, everyone first thinks of the shower scene. Janet Leigh and what happens to her. But when we say “the shower scene” we don’t mean the lady adjusting the water temperature before she lathers up and we don’t mean Tony Perkins doing his household chores later, getting the tub all nice and tidy again. We meant this: the knifing. I don’t know if there are that many more famous sequences in modern films. The impact, the shock, all of it. From first stab to last, it runs seventeen seconds. To repeat: Screen time is most mysterious.
A great book to read on this subject is “In the Blink of an Eye”, written by the movie editor Walter Murch. I posted on “Editing and Screenwriting” here because when we write a story, we ‘edit’ it. And in ‘editing’ it, we manipulate screen time.