The Poetry of Screenwriting

When writing scene description, think poetry instead of prose.

Unpaid Villain made a comment here about the Andrew Stanton — Walter Hill post here. Screenwriter Larry Ferguson, quoted for today’s Screenwriting 101, has something to say about the subject of stage direction:

I never, ever, ever set up a shot. Furthermore, I think writers make a terrible mistake when they don’t consider who’s telling the story. They apply this stilted journalistic style to the narrative and neutralize it. That’s bullshit.

The first thing you gotta do is sit down and ask, who’s telling this story? Who grabs hold of you and says, Listen I’m gonna tell you something that’ll knock your socks off? He’s a character. He speaks a particular way, sometimes uses profanity, sometimes he’s a poet.

Skeptics say, Hey, you can’t take a picture of that… maybe not, but you know what Don Simpson said to me on Beverly Hills cop II? He said, Jerry and I love the style of your stage directions. We know we can’t shoot them, but we can shoot the tone.

My stage directions are, to me, really, really important. My style has been described as a kind of ‘redneck haiku.’ And I spend a lot of time on stage directions.

There’s that word again — haiku. Stanton said that was what caught his eye about the screenplay for Alien he had read:

His description paragraphs were not your typical paragraphs, they were actually small phrases that were all left justified, almost like a haiku.”

Walter Hill had an eerily similar experience when he read a script by screenwriter Alexander Jacobs:

Hill read Alex Jacob’s screenplay for the Lee Marvin film, Point Blank and considered it a ‘revelation’ in terms of style and format. He decided to tailor his own scripts in that manner, as he described it, ‘extremely spare, almost Haiku style. Both stage directions and dialogue.’ Hill wrote Hard Times, the later drafts of Alien, The Drive, and The Warriors in this style.”

Haiku is a form of Japanese poetry. And I posted previously about poetry and screenwriting, noting how poems have a unique way of immersing the reader in a moment — and what is one of a screenwriter’s primary goals with any scene but to pull the reader into that scene.

Even more relevant is how visual poetry can be — the use and reliance of strong descriptive words in poems and the same applies to scene description in a screenplay. “Maximum impact, minimum words.” One of my favorite writing mantras. The visual requirement of screenplays (remember, movies are primarily a visual medium) combined with our relentless war against page count translates into a simple fact in my book: scene description is much more like poetry than prose.

Moreover, screenwriters are not bound by the rules of grammar, we are free of the scourge of our hag 5th grade teacher screeching, “Subject! Verb! Object!” at us. Rather the only rule a screenwriter has with scene description is to convey as effectively, visually, and emotionally what is going on at that precise moment in that specific scene. Hearkening back to Walter Hill’s screenplay for the movie Hard Times, consider this scene description of a street fight:

Powerful men but without grace.

Brawlers.

Punch.

Kick.

Punch.

Gouge.

It’s effective. It’s visual. It’s emotional. No need to write complete sentences when sometimes a single strong word will do. And that’s more like poetry than prose.

Finally, compare these two sets of description:

“The people in the elevator, they all stare up with the rapt and stupid look of saints.”

“She lies dead, like an extinguished dream. Still beautiful.”

Which is scene description and which is a poem?

The first is a line from a Tom Chandler poem.

The second is a line from a Shane Black script.

Now caveat time: the style we choose for writing scene description has to be chosen in relation to the genre of the story we’re working on. For example, more of a prose approach may be the best choice for an historical drama or period piece. I call that a script’s “Narrative Voice” which can be summed up with this equation: “Genre + Style = Narrative Voice.” But that’s another subject for another time.

The main point still stands: when writing scene description, screenwriters should feel free to write more poetically than prosaically.