“What Happens Next”: Lessons from the past

Finally getting around to reading Marc Norman’s book, “What Happens Next: A History of American Screenwriting”. For anyone interested in filmmaking, screenwriting, and the development of the craft of screenwriting, it’s an important read. I’ll be posting excerpts from time to time. Here’s one to start, screenwriter Dudley Nichols writing about the movie The Informer (1935), a collaboration he did with director John Ford:

This was in a certain sense an experimental film; some new method had to be found by which to make the psychological action photographic. At the time I had not yet codified and formulated for myself the principles of screenwriting, and many of the ideas were arrived at instinctively. I had an able mentor as well as collaborator in the person of John Ford, and I had begun to catch his instinctive feel about film. I can see now that I sought and found a series of symbols to make visual the tragic psychology of the informer, in this case a primitive man with powerful hungers. The whole action was to be played out in one foggy night, for the fog was symbolic of the groping primitive mind; it is really a mental fog in which he moves and dies. A poster offering a reward for information concerning Gypo’s friend became the symbol of the evil idea of betrayal, and it blows along the street, following Gypo; it will not leave him alone. It catches on his leg and he kicks it off. But it still follows him and he sees it like a phantom in the air when he unexpectedly comes upon his fugitive friend.

If we are to believe Nichols — “I had not yet codified and formulated for myself the principles of screenwriting” — this script perhaps represents a written text that in essence ushers in the modern approach to screenwriting. If so, what does that say about symbolism — the fog as a “groping primitive mind,” the poster as the “symbol of… betrayal” — and visuality — again fog and poster? Only that in what might be the first ‘modern’ screenplay, the writer is completely self-aware of both narrative elements.

Symbolism. Visuals. Two key aspects of screenwriting. There from the very beginning of a screenplay’s codification.

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