“Scenes are the water of screenwriting”

A guest post from screenwriter Tom Benedek (Cocoon) and co-founder of Screenwriting Master Class:

SCENES ARE THE THE WATER OF SCREENWRITING

• The human body is more than 60 percent water. Blood is 92 percent water, the brain and muscles are 75 percent water, and bones are about 22 percent water.

• A human can survive for a month or more without eating food, but only a week or so without drinking water.

A movie can survive for a few minutes with great cinematography, fine actors or movie stars, an interesting story. BUT if the scenes don’t work, the film will not play right. Solidly constructed scenes carry films. Great scenes lift them high, make them mighty.

None of us will ever have thought about scene writing too much.

The director Mike Nichols believed that there were only three kinds of scenes: confrontations, negotiations and seductions. Each of these categories offers a way to shape how a character behaves in a scene. Which of your characters might try always to seduce to achieve a goal, push past an obstacle in their story movement. When would that character opt to confront or negotiate? Confront. Negotiate. Seduce. All active verbs. And great starting points to write your characters’ destinies in any given scenes.

There are many other kinds of scenes. But there may be an element of these three approaches to conflict in every scene you write.

Next week, I will be running an online scene writing clinic starting on Monday, July 18. We will be at all kinds scenes — their uses of conflict, reflective contrast between characters, expository, flashback, indirection, subtext, more. There will be four lectures. Class members each post a scene for feedback and a revision.

Join me next week as we plunge into the waters of your creative imagination!

Here is some background on Tom’s career as a screenwriter and teacher:

Tom Benedek has written screenplays for Robert Zemeckis, Lawerence Kasdan, Lili Fini Zanuck and Richard Zanuck, David Brown, Ron Howard, Martin Scorsese, Sydney Pollack, Richard Rush, Harold Ramis, Lauren Schuler Donner and Richard Donner, Ray Stark, Brian Grazer, Working Title, Jersey Film, Chris Blackwell and many others.

He is a member of the Writers’ Guild of America, West and the Writers’ Branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. He has taught screenwriting at the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts and UCLA. He currently teaches at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor where he is a James Gindin Visiting Artist and at the University of Massachusetts.

Tom knows his stuff. For more information on his online Scene Writing Intensive which begins Monday, July 18, go here.