“Without the Art of Screenwriting, Hollywood’s Greatest Movies Would Not Have Been Great”
Screenwriter Irving Belateche gets a H/T for this, emailing me a WAPO article with the provocative title “Without the Art of Screenwriting, Hollywood’s Greatest Movies Would Not Have Been Great”:
On the surface, “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” and “The Hurt Locker” might deserve to be mentioned in the same breath. They’re both explosive action thrillers hitting screens this summer. Both feature young men on a physically grueling quest in the desert, and both even feature robots as their heroes’ unlikely aides-de-camp.
But viewers who happen to see both films will no doubt feel and think radically different things upon leaving the theater. In the case of “Transformers,” directed by Michael Bay, they’re likely to feel pummeled and punched by the movie’s loud, relentless action, not to mention confused by what all the sound and fury was about. Something to do with an ancient robot race extinguishing the sun by way of a sharp metallic dingus in an Egyptian pyramid? Whatever, let’s go grab a Super Gulp and play Grand Theft Auto.
Upon seeing Kathryn Bigelow’s “The Hurt Locker,” the audience is more likely to leave in a rattled but also reflective state, eager to talk about what they just saw. The story of an elite bomb squad in Iraq that follows a reckless soldier (Jeremy Renner) as he walks the fine line between bravery and hubris, the film is a powerfully immersive experience, at once a classic rock-’em, sock-’em war movie and a fascinatingly contradictory profile in courage.
Conventional wisdom would lay the difference at the feet of the films’ directors. Bay (“The Rock,” “Armageddon”) and Bigelow (“Near Dark,” “Point Break”) are each well known for delivering high-octane genre pictures, albeit with profoundly divergent approaches. Clearly each film reflects its director’s distinct visual sensibility and aesthetic judgment. But in both cases the essence of what the movie is — a big, dumb, incoherent car wreck on the one hand and a taut, visceral work of art on the other — can be traced to its founding document: the screenplay.
“The essence of what [a] movie is… can be traced to its founding document: the screenplay?” Excuse me for my verklempt moment [dabs eyes].
Even the tiniest visual details in a film — choices viewers might assume a director or editor made — were written in the screenplay. The pink underwear Scarlett Johansson wore in the opening shot of “Lost in Translation”? Specified in the script. The hamburger phone in Juno’s retro-tastic bedroom? Written into the script. The cut from a lit match to a sunrise in “Lawrence of Arabia”? Credited to editor Anne Coates, but originally written by screenwriter Robert Bolt.
In short, it’s the screenplay that, when it’s well written, makes a world come to life with plenty of vivid detail and, in creating characters with just as much singularity, makes the audience care. And it’s precisely that emotional investment that, by way of enlightened direction and superb performances, creates an indelible cinematic experience.
Yet another reason to provide key specifics in scene description: So your script will get lauded by the occasional ode to screenplays by the mainstream media.
Not only must characters be authentic and fully formed in order to be brought to life on screen, but the writer must convey them as quickly and economically as possible. Think of the line, “I was misinformed” in “Casablanca,” and how those three little words conveyed the character of Rick Blaine. Or, more recently, the opening sequences of the animated features “WALL E” and “Up,” in which viewers came to care deeply about a trash-compacting robot and a grouchy old man in the course of a few dialogue-free but richly detailed, visually expressive scenes. In both cases, before any image was drawn, the scripts had gone through several painstaking rewrites at Pixar. “We will stop production if we have to, to get the story right,” said Pixar’s chief creative officer, John Lasseter, at the Cannes Film Festival in May. “It takes four years to make a movie at Pixar, and 3 1/2 of those years are spent on story.”
Okay, Lasseter’s comment really does want to make me want to weep with joy.
Economy and detail are key in writing characters, says Phil Alden Robinson, who wrote “Field of Dreams” and represents the writers branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. But when assessing a screenplay, he says, “I always begin where the writer begins, which is: Is this a good idea for a movie? And did it deliver what it promised it would deliver? The engine of a movie is fueled by surprise.”
Toward that end, Robinson adds, “The main contribution that the writer makes is the choice of how much information to divulge at any given moment, and when to hold back. . . . If you reveal too much, then there’s not enough at stake and you lose the audience. And if you hold too much back, they’re never with you.”
Robinson points to Robert Towne’s screenplay for “Chinatown” as a textbook example of the crucial structural work that goes into a script. “Every scene reveals something that changes how you perceive the movie,” he observes. “He’s constantly peeling back the layers of the onion. If a scene doesn’t advance the story in some way, move the plot forward or reveal something about a character or set something up that pays off, it shouldn’t be there. And ideally it should do more than one of those things at a time.”
Two things on this: (A) Again notice how important the underlying story concept is: “Is this a good idea for a movie?” (B) “The main contribution the writer makes is the choice of how much information to divulge at any given moment.” This is an interesting way to frame what a screenwriter does. Each scene represents a series of choices — what type of scene it is, what characters are in the scene, how to stage the scene, what the scene’s beginning, middle, and end is, how much information to reveal. As I’ve said before, what you choose to not put into a scene can be as important as what you put down on the page.
Do yourself a favor: Read the article. You’ll feel good about what you do as a screenwriter — and challenged to do it better.