Screenwriting is a Craft, not Art

Why do people go to the movies, anyway? Terentius Publius said the purpose of oratory was ut docere, ut delectate, ut movere, to teach, to delight, to move. Although the filmmaker may make his film as propaganda, hidden or otherwise, people rarely go to the movies to be moved to do something. They go to be delighted, and to be taught.

Films delight when they take you somewhere you haven't been before and introduce you to people you either haven't met before, or would like to be with, or would like to be. They also delight when they put you vicariously in a situation where the stakes are much higher than they seem to be in your own life.

Films teach when they explain the inner workings of other people - by making their characters transparent, they give you insight into the real people in your life - maybe even give you insight into yourself.

A film that delights or teaches, or preferably both, is moving in the other sense: it pulls your heartstrings. It reminds you of what's important. It raises the stakes in your own life, or rather, helps you remember what the stakes really are. Everybody dies, and almost everyone's afraid of death, but most people live as if they're just trying to get through life. The heightened reality of a film brings out the hero, the lover, the magician, the child in your heart.

If your screenplay isn't delightful and doesn't give insight, it's a waste of trees. In theory everybody knows that, but too many screenplays, pale mimics of movies we've already seen, don't take you anywhere you haven't been, introduce you to people you've already seen too many times, and don't give you any insight. There's also evil screenplays. Bad screenplays just mimic movies the writer has seen, he or she figuring, they made it into a movie once, maybe they'll pay me to make it into a movie again. Evil screenplays, like the evil movies they become, lie about human nature, present false insights, paint the world as a meaner and nastier place than it is, and so teach people to be meaner and nastier to each other.

As a more positive rule of thumb, never write a screenplay unless you're aching to see the movie yourself. You can fool yourself, but you won't fool the audience.

My big secret criterion: Is it a Movie?

Is it a movie?

The question boils down to a gut reaction: do I see this appearing in a movie theater? Do I see crowds of people paying $8 a pop to see it?

You would be amazed how many projects flunk this test. And yet it is all important. I have read any number of scripts that were well executed, whose characters were likable, that had plot and pacing, that I just could not for the life of me imagine in a movie theater. In a lot of cases they were fundamentally novels. In some cases their story was fundamentally internal, and no amount of acting and directing could bring it out.

So how do you tell if it's a movie? Hopefully you have your own gut reaction. But if you're unsure ...

Query First

Well, say what you will about discovering the screenplay as you write it, but you'll get a lot more mileage if you query first. Find out if people actually want to read a screenplay with your premise. If you tell the basic concept to a half dozen people and they aren't excited about it, either stop there or figure out what what you think is exciting about the idea isn't coming across to them, and reformulate the pitch. If, no matter how you reformulate the pitch, people still aren't jazzed about it, the odds are you don't have a good hook. Stop there. You have now saved six months.

If the pitch works, work out the story first, and tell it to people. If they are not excited, rework it until they are. If you can't get them excited about the story, they won't be excited about the script, either. Execution rarely improves a so-so idea into a great script; and from a point of view of sale, your idea is what will get it read.

Now far be it from me to suggest that you actually pretend you have a screenplay and send a lot of queries out, or call a few agents and/or producers and ask if they want to read it. I wouldn't dream of suggesting that, if they like it and you "forget" to send the screenplay because you haven't actually written it already, they will soon enough have forgotten that you were going to send it, and you can tell them six weeks later that you have a "new draft." That would be wrong. Wouldn't it?

But you should pitch your project to a few trusted friends. If you can't get them interested in reading your script before you write it, don't write it. Some questions to ask are: "would you pay good money to go see this movie? Would you take a date to this movie? Would you get a babysitter in order to see this movie?"

The guys who wrote While You Were Sleeping pitched their story idea for five years before they finally wrote it. That's how long it took them to figure out that it should be the guy who was in a coma, not the girl.

Obviously if you have an agent and you can get out to pitch your screenplay before you've written it, then it's ideal, because you might actually get paid to write it, but you will at least create awareness of the project ("tracking"), hopefully short-circuiting other people who might be thinking along the same lines, and it's an excuse to meet people.

Or, just write screenplays for the sake of great artistic achievement and hope that lightning strikes. Or write for your own enjoyment of the process.

Why is pitching so important? Because the concept is the most important commercial aspect of most mainstream screenplays. A concept is what sells the project, unless you already have name talent attached, or your script is based on a bestselling novel or play. Bear in mind that your project has to be sold over and over again in order to get bought, let alone made into a movie. It has to be sold to the producer's reader, the producer's development person, the producer, the studio reader, the studio development exec, the studio "development team," the production exec, the agent's assistant, the agent's reader, the agent... and none of them wants to open a script without already knowing that the concept is worth the time they'll spend reading the script.

A producer would rather have a badly executed script with a great hook than a well written script with no hook. That's because he can always hire another writer to rewrite the bad script, but there is nothing you can do to fix a script whose concept does not cry out to be made into a movie; unless, again, it has bankable talent attached or is based on a well-established "property" such as a bestseller, comic book or smash hit play.

The essential elements of a movie

A high concept spec thriller basically wants three things: a great hero, a great villain with a great scheme, and fresh, high stakes.

I find that stakes fail more often than characters. Everyone knows they have to have characters and conflict. But often the conflict is not al that important, and the dread question "who cares?" pops up. What fails most often is the hook.

What is a great hook?

Not all great movies had great hooks. Some were based on well-loved popular novels (Forrest Gump, The Three Musketeers), comics, or plays; in a sense, that's the hook. Some had characters with a radiance about them that you just wanted to be there with them (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid). But nearly every script sold by an unknown screenwriter had a great hook.

Ask yourself, How is your premise different from other movies in the same genre? How is it fresh? What did you put in your movie that has never been seen before? A character, a situation, a natural or artificial phenomenon we've never seen?

At the same time, sheer novelty can kill a project. The other question you must ask yourself is, "Is this a movie?" Can you really see this opening at the multiplex? Would you, your friends, your enemies, the cute girl at the Dairy Queen, your high school teacher, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, her arch-nemesis Spike, go see this movie? If not, no matter what the merits of your story and your writing, you are likely writing a film that will never get bought or made.

Think about the audience for your picture. Are there substantial numbers of people who want to see a picture like this? If you write, for example, a drama set in space, you must ask yourself, is there an audience for science fiction drama? Have there been any successful science fiction dramas? (Is Frankenstein a drama? Arguably, the unsuccessful Branagh version was, although it had its thrills; the successful Boris Karloff one was a monster movie with drama.) If not, you are running a big risk that, no matter how much people like your script, they won't be able to figure out how to get it made. If they can't figure that out, they won't give you money for it, not to mention it won't get shot.

The First Reel Contract

You can't be dogmatic about what makes a contract and what doesn't, but a few points are obvious. An action movie has to open with a big action scene. A comedy needs a good laugh in the first three minutes. A drama had better get inside the skin of at least one central character. A horror movie better have something creepy or horrifying happen. And so on. If you haven't made a contract with your audience by page ten, you've wasted the first reel.

Pitch Your Movie

One of the most powerful tools, I have found, is to pitch your movie. It's frightening and exhausting and I try to avoid it. I procrastinate. I avoid. I evade. But if I simply pitch my movie to someone, step by step, I find myself restructuring the story on the fly. Cutting out confusing stuff. Adding and subtracting beats.

Personally, I enjoy working on paper more. I feel safer. I can control words, they do what I want, and if they don't, I can change them before someone reads them. But what seems to work on paper, once told on the fly, often sounds stupid or confusing or far too complicated, or sounds like it's coming in at the wrong place. You have a natural sense for how to tell someone a story, but often it doesn't trigger when you're struggling with characters and dialogue. Pitching the story to someone forces your brain to invoke your natural story telling ability.

The ideal person to pitch your story to is not someone in show business. They'll want to make improvements. As good as these may be, they are not your improvements. What you want is to see if your story sounds interesting to yourself as you pitch it, to see in the listener's eyes where he or she is bored or thrilled, see where you're confusing yourself.

Most writers are shy, so you may have trouble working up the energy to do it. If you don't want to pitch the story to someone else, at least run through the plot in your head while you're driving or walking somewhere. The parts where you can't remember what comes next may be the parts that need the most work. If you can't remember what gets you from one step to the next each time you tell yourself the story, odds are you're not seguéing smoothly. There is probably no very strong connection or sharp juxtaposition between one scene and the next, and you need to make your transition stronger.

You will also want to write your "pitch" down on paper in five or six pages. This is not an outline. The point isn't to go from step to step, as such, but to sell the story. A written pitch is not as good as a spoken pitch, though, because you can convince yourself of things on paper that you would never get away with in person.

One of the most valuable benefits of telling your story out loud is it will immediately become obvious when your movie is not worth its effect on global warming. Say you've come up with one of those gangster / lowlife / serial killer movies that people write because they think the market wants them, but that they don't really believe in their hearts. You start to tell it to your friend, and you suddenly realize that you'd rather be talking about a movie you just saw.

Good. Now you don't have to write that script. It was a dumb idea anyway. Strictly from hunger.

Once you've pitched and pitched and pitched your idea, you'll have it down pat, and you can write it down. Then when you've written your script, go back and see if you've delivered the goods the pitch promised. If not, rewrite until it does. But if you've really done the work of pitching your story, odds are you will have an extremely clear idea of the goods you're promising to deliver, and you'll have done your best to deliver them.

Cast Your Movie

Basically, as you imagine the scene, imagine it with a star playing the role.

What this buys you is consistency. Once you know Redford's playing the part, you can instantly see that certain lines of dialog are just wrong. Redford's character would never say something coarse, or cruel, or pretentious. Cast Redford in your mind, and the coarseness, cruelty or pretentiousness of certain lines will suddenly jump out at you, even though they seemed fine before. Similarly, certain actions become impossible. Redford's character would never pick a fight, nor would he betray a friend.

You're not really using the star, of course. You're using their screen persona. Some actors have several. For example, Harrison Ford's characters are always fundamentally good people who stand up for what's right, but in his earlier work, he played wise-asses (Han Solo, Indiana Jones) and later on, grown-up boy scouts (Jack Ryan, Dr. Richard Kimble). Some actors have created such a powerful persona you can use it after just one movie. Sharon Stone's ice queen from Basic Instinct can come in handy. Travis Bickle, the borderline psychotic from Taxi Driver, could easily show up in your story.

The key, of course, is making sure you're casting the right character. I once wrote a space opera "starring" Harrison Ford. The problem was, he was supposed to be a dirty cop, a weak man who found himself in a situation where his innate decency forced him to side with the rebels even though it was suicide and he had better offers elsewhere. We weren't supposed to know which way he would jump. Somehow the lines seemed mushy. I should have known better: Harrison Ford is never dirty or weak. The problem fixed itself when I "recast" with Kurt Russell, whose screen persona is shadier: someone you like, but don't necessarily trust. The lines started to give themselves an edge. The character opened up. You didn't know which way he'd jump.

You can also, of course, use your own friends or enemies, people whose reactions you will know.

Do not tell anyone you've cast the movie. Let the lines speak for themselves. If you've done your job right, everyone will know who they'd like to see play the role.

Casting your movie is not taught in schools, I guess because teachers fear it might kill your originality. Casting your movie is a technique of craft, not a technique of great art. But to my mind, it is easier to arrive at great art through craft than through raw art. Picasso studied traditional painting before he invented new ways of seeing. Without going through a phase of mimicking the old masters, he would not have been able to control his Cubist paintings. Later on, Picasso would periodically whip out a perfect traditional portrait of someone, just to remind people he knew what he was doing. Once you know how to cast a role in the mold of a star, you can break that mold when you choose, not merely by accident.

Note, however, that you cannot depend on your casting of the movie to make a character interesting or likeable. We, your readers, do not have Harrison Ford in our mind when we start reading. We will not start out caring about your lead character. You have to make him so compelling that we would care about him even if he were played by, say, Jim Belushi. In fact, if you cast an absolutely uncharismatic and neutral star in your mind's eye, you can easily see if your dialog and situations are truly effective enough to make us care about him.

Remember, however, your hero needs to be compelling, but not necessarily likeable...

1. we don't know enough about the characters
2. we don't like the main character
3. the dialog is flat
4. the plot is episodic
5. the concept isn't fresh and unique

The most obviously dangerous comment is "the dialog is flat." Obviously, there is bad dialog, and one kind of bad dialog is flat, bland, listless, undistinguished dialog. But snappy dialog that jumps off the page is only one kind of good dialog, and it is only appropriate for certain characters and certain scripts. If you're writing Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, your dialog better be crisp, snappy and bouncy. But if you're writing anything like A Fistful of Dollars, Sergio Leone's first masterpiece, then your dialog wants to be spare and minimalist. Spare dialog can easily be accused of being flat, because the development executive is reading your script in bed late at night, exhausted, her eyes blurry, a pile of scripts on her night table, with her boyfriend snoring resentfully at her side. She is not putting anything into reading your lines, so if they don't do the work for her, she will think them flat.

On the other hand, the actor will put thought, passion and talent into the lines, and the silences between them, and so your "flat" dialog may in fact be good.

"Your dialog is flat" means your screenplay is not working, but it probably means that your characters are not coming through as rounded people we care about. Fix the characters, and the dialog will fix itself.

Another dangerous comment is "your concept is not unique." Most production companies don't want unique concepts. They want great hooks, which is not the same thing. If you do something really unique, the odds are they will reject it as "too different." After all, how many "unique" pictures do the studios make? If you do something mildly original, however, and your plot and characters don't hold the reader's attention, you may well hear the criticism that your concept isn't unique. Fix the plot and characters, and the "uniqueness" of your concept will fix itself.

The issues of character and plot are less simple to unravel.

The "rubber ducky" is my phrase for when the hero or villain, at a lull in the action, explains that he is what he is because his mother took away his rubber ducky when he was three. It is always a nice scene, well acted, beautifully lit, with a powerfully written monolog that the writer spent days on.

The character's past may be important to your story, Batman being a good example. But if it is, that past generally demands more attention than one scene. It often gets several flashbacks, and sometimes explodes into the climactic scene itself. It may be the only thing rooting an action movie in any emotional reality at all, or it may reveal information that is critical to the outcome of the movie, each of which The Terminator is a good example for. But if all you're talking about is giving your hero more emotional depth, you are running the risk of awakening the Rubby Ducky.

As an example of a powerful movie in which the Rubber Ducky makes no appearance, in A Fistful of Dollars, when the Man with No Name risks his life to rescue the little family of three from the crossfire, the husband asks, "Mister, why are you doing all this for us." The story goes that in the script there was some godawful long speech explaining the Man with No Name's backstory, and Clint Eastwood asked Sergio Leone, "Can't I just say, 'Cause once there was a family just like yours ... and there was no one to help'?" So we never got to hear about his rubber ducky.

Would it have improved the movie if we had?

When readers / development execs / actors haven't bothered to read carefully and ask the question "What sort of person is this character, based on the way he reacts to the situations in the script?," they feel that the character is flat, and they ask for a rubber ducky. Then if the picture becomes a go, actors get very attached to the rubber ducky scene, because it shows they can Act. So the ducky stays in the picture.

But beware: if they're asking for the rubber ducky, the picture isn't working for them. The solution may be wrong, but the problem is still there. There's something missing.

How we know about character

Actions speak louder than words. What people do physically and what they do by talking to other people, is far more telling than what people tell us about themselves.

If you do not want to fill our ears with a sad tale of woe, then make sure that the character does things - little or big things - that show us who s/he is. In The Fugitive, Dr. Richard Kimble's habit of putting himself at risk of being sent back to jail in order to help strangers, makes us care about him more than any story he could possibly tell could.

This technique is harder to use than the rubber ducky, but often more effective, and it doesn't stop the story's forward motion.

Note that I am not against telling the character's backstory. Often a character will tell about his past in order to explain to another character why he needs to do what he's going to do, or to get the other character to do something. That's merely good drama, using speech to get results. What I'm arguing against is the comment "we don't know enough about him," which is so often a red herring.

The pat-the-dog scene

Pat the dog scenes are easier than doing the hard work of making the story so compelling, and the segues from scene to scene so seamless, that the reader never has a moment to wonder why he likes or doesn't like the main character.

But it's not necessary. In All That Jazz, for example, Joe Gideon is not a likeable guy; in fact he's a shit. But he's honest about what a shit he is, and he really does care about creating. Instead of a PTD scene, give your hero a dream, something s/he really wants to do but can't because of his/her circumstances. Dorothy dreams of a place "over the rainbow."

Or a driving goal. Dorothy needs to get back home to Kansas. In Dog Day Afternoon, Al Pacino's character holds up a bank in order to get his gay transvestite lover enough money for the operation to make him a woman. A weird goal, but a driving one.

Or, give the hero a big problem that makes us care about him. In Lethal Weapon, Riggs puts a gun in his mouth every morning and tries to think of a reason not to pull the trigger. Dorothy is going to lose her dog Toto. Rick Deckard has to kill five replicants, even though he wants to quit blade running.

Or, as above, give the hero things to do, say and feel that are integral to the story that make us know him for a hero. Villains, it is generally thought, should be fun to be around. Richard III is a gas; he's really whooping it up being a rat bastard. Darth Vader is cool, in a horrible way. Likewise, the sheer intensity of a hero or antihero can carry him through the "likeability" hurdle - see Night of the Hunter - although don't hold your breath for the "Look Back In Anger" remake.

The danger in this technique, as I see it, is that your audience can only know what is actually on the screen. The reader can only learn what is on the page. If there is something we need to know and it's not in the screenplay, how do we know it?

The argument is that the knowledge somehow seeps into the character as you write him or her. Somehow, your secondary character takes on a greater fleshiness by virtue of your knowing him or her better.

Well, whatever works.

It is certainly true that actors must know their characters better than the audience does, or they will not seem real. They should know what the character was doing before the scene began, what he would be doing if the scene never happened, what the character's goals in life are, and so on.

Personally, I like to discover things about the characters as I write what they say and do. I let them say things, and then I say to myself, "Wow, I didn't know that about Gail, that's great, I can use that!" I can also give my characters backstory that is convenient to the screenplay at the drop of a hat. I also can't sucker myself into writing bland ordinary characters whom I think are exceptional because of the wonderful offscreen life I have created for them.

The risk with my approach is that characters may seem well-wrought but no more than functional. If I'm not careful, they will only do things that are relevant to the screenplay. They won't have the depth of life, the sense that if the movie weren't happening they'd be off doing something they liked better.

The flip side of that is that the audience does not always want truly deep secondary characters, or heros for that matter. A good stock character can be great fun for the audience. The obnoxious store clerk. The befuddled grandfather. Do we really want to know about their angst? No, they wouldn't be as enjoyable. Take Alan Rickman's over-the-top Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves. Did we want to know what made him the way he is? Like fun we did. We wanted him pure unadulterated evil. Any explanation would have made him less fun.

This is true not only of schlock, but of great literature. Take Shakespeare's Sir John Falstaff, who was so well enjoyed in Henry IV and Henry V that the Bard brought him back for his own play, The Merry Wives of Windsor. Do we know anything about his childhood? Did Shakespeare? He is a fat, drunken coward prone equally to bursts of hilarity and melancholy. It is what he does onstage that makes us love him.

Roger Zelazny, a marvelous science fiction and fantasy writer, has an interesting approach that might prove useful, though. Just for himself, he writes a scene with his character that he does not put in the story. Not a whole backstory, but a scene. He then makes a reference in the story to that scene. That gives the audience the feeling that the character has a life of his own. (Terry Rossio refers to the same idea, quoting Obi-Wan Kenobi: "He fought with your father in the Clone Wars," although we never do learn what the Clone Wars were.)

But note how this is different from a backstory. What makes this technique meaningful is an allusion to the scene which is made in the movie, but never explained to the audience. Don't overdo it, but it may be worthwhile for your characters to refer to events outside the story. You don't have to pay off every set up.

"It's Episodic"

In some scripts this is hard to do, and one wants to say, "I know the Scarecrow episode doesn't make the Cowardly Lion episode inevitable, but I like it that way!" But when development execs are looking for reasons to reject (which is all the time unless their boss already likes the project), they'll use the term "episodic" to describe their not being caught up in the unfolding events.

If it is in the nature of your story that new elements cause surprises in the second and third acts, for example if your characters are on the road, meeting new people and having new adventures every reel or so, a strong dramatic motor may fix the problem. In other words, the human relationships between the characters, or the development in the protagonist's character arc, will provide sinew to hold together what may otherwise be an episodic skeleton.

Note that a screenplay must have inevitability and yet surprise. This is not really a contradiction. The genre and the "contract" often tell us what the eventual outcome of the movie will be. But we don't know how we'll get to that outcome. We know James Bond won't get killed, but we don't know that when he skis off the cliff, there's a parachute in his backpack, or there's a plane waiting to catch him. We don't know how.

Similarly, in a drama, we need to be able to look back and see how the eventual outcome was "inevitable." But we can't know it's coming until it's arrived. We have to feel unsure which way the story will go, knowing that it will go the way that will satisfy us.

From scene to scene, there can be simultaneous surprise (we got here) and satisfaction (of course we got here, it's the only place we could have got).

The other reason you get this comment is that we don't care enough about the protagonist. If we care about the hero, we will follow him through your episodes. If we don't care, they will seem to just pop up one after the other.

Easy? No, of course not. That's why they pay so much to have it done right.

The Myth of Three Act Structure

For those of you who just got off the plane from Omaha, the idea is that there's a first act, where you get your hero up a tree; a second act, where the hero tries to get down the tree but gets more up the tree; and the third act, where the hero knocks the tree over on the bad guys, crushing them to death. Books on screenwriting (generally by people without a writing credit on a produced picture) often go so far as to state that the first act ends between page 25 and page 35; and that the third act begins between pages 85 and 95 in a 120 page screenplay. At the end of each act is a "turning point" where the hero's situation changes, his desires change, the flow of the story turns. Dorothy is whisked away to Oz. Before, she wanted to save Toto; now, she wants to go home.

Howard Suber also notes a "flex point" around page 60 where the stakes are raised and the pace intensified. When you watch the latest high-concept thriller (e.g. The Specialist), these turning points and flex points will often leap out and bite you in the ass. They work, sometimes very well; but they can also become crutches, and make the movie boring.

Only maybe half of all truly great movies have three acts; and in some of them, you have to stretch to figure out what the act breaks are. Where are the act breaks in Hard Day's Night? All that Jazz? How about Spartacus? Forrest Gump? Apollo 13? Annie Hall?

For an exercise, try to explain what effect the act breaks, if there are any, have in Sleepless in Seattle and LA Story. Or how about The Wizard of Oz? Does the third act begin when the Wizard sends Dorothy after the Wicked Witch of the East? Or when Dorothy gets home to Kansas? If it's the former, then how is the third act any different from the second? If it's the latter, then the third act is no more than epilogue.

Typically, thrillers set up the main character in a short first act - really a precipitating incident - and then pursue the main character through a huge second act which, rather than turning into a third act, just keeps picking up the pace until the bad guy's had it and the hero/ine wins. There may be an epilogue (the hero testifies in front of Congress, or goes home and kisses his wife, etc.); but there's no real third act. In Alien or Predator, there is no qualitative difference between the second and third acts. A shrinking band of humans is fighting a monster. In these cases you can arbitrarily say the third act begins when the monster kills off the hero or heroine's last ally, or when the hero or heroine finally starts to turn the tables on his or her enemy, but then you are only finding a second turning point because you are looking for one.

My point is, three act structure is overrated. Sure, there needs to be a beginning ("get your hero up a tree"), a middle ("he tries to get down the tree but gets further up") and an end ("the tree falls down"). But the important thing is to tell a good story and deliver the goods on your premise and for your genre. In comedy, if you keep them laughing, they'll forgive you anything. In adventure stories and thrillers, tell a good yarn, and you can chuck the turning points out the window. On the other hand, be prepared to put up with knee-jerk comments about structure from development execs when they don't like your script.

Remember, too: just because they're wrong about why they don't like your script, doesn't mean it's good. It's up to you to figure out what's broken and fix it; if you do, odds are all those comments about structure will go away.

The Clock

Humor in Non-Comedy Scripts

This generally indicates one of two problems. Your hero may be taking himself terribly seriously. In a popcorn movie, self-importance in the hero is not as bad as self-pity, which is deadly, but it is a big weight on the movie. Think of how much better comic book movies like Judge Dredd and Blade could have been if the hero deflated himself with humor, or if the screenplay deflated him for us. On the other hand, look at Zorro, and how much more we enjoy Joaquin Murietta (the young Zorro played by Antonio Banderas) because he makes a fool of himself from time to time. In action movies, humor is an essential bit of leavening. That's why Stallone movies can get so dreary (he seems to me to be less willing to let movies make fun of him) while Mel Gibson's action movies are so much fun.

Or, you may not have given enough oomph to your dramatic scenes. If the screenplay hasn't made us care about the hero's goals, visions, pain and love, we don't care about him. We start hoping for some humor. Humor won't fix this problem, though. You need to look at how to make us care more. Then we won't need humor.

That said, even the heaviest drama can use humor, because people tend to crack jokes in the face of death; and if you lighten things up a bit, you allow the audience to catch their breath before you go even deeper into gut-wrenching tragedy.

But "Megaera" won't necessarily seem scary to a reader without a classical education, which is most readers. For example, I once called a place "Iblis," which is not only Arabic for "despair," but the name of the chief djinn, an angel who was ejected from heaven after he refused to reverence Adam, saying, "And shall I worship a lump of clay, I whom Thou didst shape out of smokeless fire?" The exec on the project, an extremely bright and talented woman who had, unfortunately for me, not read the footnotes in Richard Burton's translation of The Thousand And One Nights, did not think "Iblis" sounded scary enough.

I changed it to Kadesh, which I vaguely recall might be the Hebrew for one of the Ten Plagues in Exodus, or then again, might not be. But it sounds good.

I include the anecdote just to point out that you should do whatever you need to do to tell yourself what the character means, if that's important to you. But be sure you're also scoring with a reader who has not read as many books as you have. Even readers who have read as many books as you have will assume that the audience won't get the allusions they do. Smart, educated studio executives -- there are more than you would expect from the stories -- regularly assume that the audience is uneducated, intellectually lazy, and scared of anything deep, and that they will resent anything over their heads. They are regularly proved wrong by the success of deep, intelligent, difficult movies. But no one ever got fired for underestimating the audience, and most executives live in fear of being fired during all months with vowels in them.

There is another danger in using clever names. Your readers will periodically understand them perfectly well. They'll know why you named a character "Janus" and will figure out he's two-faced before you want them to; or they'll just be slightly irritated at you. You never want anything that alienates your reader from imagining the movie unspooling in his head.

Point of View and the Central Character

The standard approach is that of a detective story. We see things unfold as the detective does; we see flashbacks only when he figures out what happened. From time to time, we might see something he doesn't; that heightens suspense. For example, in Vertigo, we discover the girl's secret; Jimmy Stewart's character doesn't learn it until the final reel.

The same is generally true for drama. In Casablanca, we see the story unfold almost entirely from Rick's point of view. There are a few vignettes -- the Rumanian girl offering herself to Captain Renault, Renault's conversation with Strasser about how to deal with Viktor Laszlo -- but these are things Rick could have guessed or heard about. The flashback is his -- even though we see Ilsa Lund's eyes when he doesn't, there's nothing in the scene he didn't know or figure out shortly after.

However, when the central character is someone we can never truly entire into the mind of, often the point of view through whom the story is told is another character. A good example is Moby Dick. The central character -- the man the story revolves around -- is Captain Ahab. But he is a maniac, obsessed beyond reason with vengeance. He is in a state we can (hopefully) never go to; we can only see the outward face of it. Melville tells the story, instead, through a narrator who is practically a nonentity. The man we are supposed to call Ishmael does practically nothing except escape to tell the tale.

Cinema is a literalistic medium. I mean that you have to put something concrete up on the screen. You can't reproduce visionary experience except by indirect means. For example, the Monkees film Head (written by none other than Jack Nicholson, as I recall) attempts to reproduce an LSD trip. The Monkees go through surreal escapades; everything almost seems to make sense, but not normal sense. But it's nothing at all like an actual LSD trip.

Cinema can't reproduce paranoia except by making the world seem threatening, for example through high contrast photography and wide angle lenses. We're so used to an expressionistic style being used to indicate paranoia that we start to think that's what it's like. But a paranoid person sees the same facts you do; he just interprets them in an entirely different way. The camera can't draw conclusions for you; it can only present facts that demand a certain conclusion.

House of Cards and Rain Man have autistic characters at their center. But Rain Man was a more successful movie partly because it didn't try to get inside the mind of Raymond, the autistic savant. He is in a place we can never go, thank God. The camera can't enter there. But it can show the outward face of autism -- or, more precisely, an actor's illumination of autism.

That doesn't mean don't try to find a way to show us the mind of a crazy person. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is a scary movie partly because it succeeds in putting us inside the mind of a crazy person; and Jacob's Ladder comes close to succeeding in doing something similar. But both have to use visual metaphors for things that can't be represented directly in film the way they can be written about directly in a novel. The mind of a computer, a nonhumanoid alien, an insane person, a god, a demon: either come up with a really amazing visual metaphor, or filter the story through a point of view we can grasp. Point of view can be a subtle thing. Two scenes can be written with identical dialog but whose emotional point of view belongs to different characters. It may be something as subtle as who you show reacting to the dialog. It may be even subtler. Do you say:

CARRIE frowns.

which merely shows us her facial expression -- suggesting that the emotional POV is with the other character seeing it; or

CARRIE frowns, troubled.

which gets us into Carrie's head just enough for us to feel we're with her emotionally, without going so deep into Carrie's head that the camera can't follow, as this bad example does:

CARRIE frowns, troubled, remembering the morning's news.

In a monster movie or thriller, there are going to be times you want the camera to show things the hero isn't there to see. Sometimes the camera will take the visual POV of the monster or stalker.

But you can still keep the emotional POV with the hero (or victim). Show us only (a) what the hero can later deduce, and (b) what directly affects the hero. When a stalker is inexorably making his way to the victim's house, the emotional POV can still be with her if we know he's heading there. On the other hand, if the stalker takes a detour to have some ice cream with some little kids we've never met before, then the emotional POV leaves the victim and goes to the stalker. It leaves the victim, because she's got nothing to do with the kids; but it would not necessarily leave the hero if he or she is a homicide detective who will later discover their bodies or talk to them if they survived.

In Kenneth Branagh's vastly underrated movie Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the emotional POV leaves Victor von Frankenstein for an extended stretch when the Creature finds shelter in the shed of the peasant family, and there learns to speak and read. But once the Creature, ejected from his refuge, swears revenge on von Frankenstein, he becomes Nemesis, destroying all those von Frankenstein loves. We are no longer in the Creature's emotional POV; we see everything from von Frankenstein's point of view. When the Creature captures von Frankenstein and asks him why he was made, the scene is played from von Frankenstein's point of view.

I'm using horror movies and thrillers as a handy example, but the same is true in a drama. When someone walks into a room, do you follow them into the room (their perspective), overhearing the conversation inside the room, or do you start with the conversation and then see the person walk in (other people's perspective). Even so simple a choice as this can dramatically affect how we feel emotionally about the characters. Look at the POV difference in these two moments:

The rest of the scene plays the same; but because the opening of one is Carrie's, and the opening of the other is Nick and Sara's, the dramatic force of the scene is different in the two versions. The movie I wrote the scene for stars Carrie; but I had unthinkingly written lots of it from other characters' perspective. Yet I wasn't prepared to make her a truly mysterious character. So I had the worst of both worlds: an unmysterious character whom we know only from an external POV. In rewriting it, I had to choose between keeping the emotional POV external and making Carrie more of a mystery, or putting the movie into Carrie's emotional POV by rewriting the scenes, which is what I did.

As a counter-example to all the above, there are excellent movies that are totally voyeuristic -- they not only don't take you into any character's mind, but they don't tell you everything any one character knows. Wild Things is an excellent paradigm for this. We see the movie primarily from the point of view of the detective (Kevin Dillon) and the teacher (Matt Dillon), but we don't know everything either of them knows. In the end, the story turns out to have been entirely motivated by another character, whose machinations have been mostly kept from us.

Wild Things works as a voyeuristic thriller. The audience may be coming for steamy eroticism (and it gets it!) but the goods the picture delivers is the cunning manipulation of the audience. In other words the audience is paying for the thrill of being led around by the nose. Just be aware that if you play games with the audience, your film is going to be emotionally cold. It's only by getting us to identify with a character -- to see the world through her eyes, whether cinematically or emotionally -- that you can emotionally move the audience.

The Principle of Economy, or another application of Occam's Razor

Similarly, if you are going to have a MacGuffin, you should only have one. The Wicked Witch wants Dorothy's shoes, and will stop at nothing to get them. An exception is the caper picture where, for example, in order to rob the train, the villains need four keys, and the getting of each one is a mini-story in itself. But there, each mini-story is about getting one thing.

How to adapt a book (Hitchcock Method)

Once you've decided, write your step outline as you would any other movie. Don't go back to the source material until you've got an outline you're happy with. If it didn't stick in your head, it shouldn't be in the movie.

Editing your scenes

If you don't write (in German) or (subtitled) every time the character speaks, unfortunately, the reader will quickly forget the dialog is in a foreign language, so you lose the nuance.

I read a script where the writer put asterisks around the dialogue, which is essentially the same idea. It worked as far as I'm concerned. You did not have to read carefully in order to know which dialogue was in Japanese; it was obvious.

However, if there are not going to be subtitles, i.e. we're not supposed to understand what the Nazis are saying, then try to give the dialog in the actual language, or a reasonable approximation, if you can. This is far better than the alternative, which is writing the dialog in English and then telling us in the description that the characters are speaking Spanish. Most readers skim and many ignore description, which renders this technique useless -- they will read it as if the character is speaking English. Even if they are careful readers (ha!), though, your objective is, again, to duplicate the effect in the reader's mind that you want the director to create in the audience's mind. If the audience isn't supposed to understand the foreign language dialog (unless they happen to be bilingual), then the reader shouldn't, either. If you can't fake the foreign language, or just as an alternative, write what it sounds like: "Helmut screams briefly at the soldier, who mutters something apologetic and runs off."

I would love to hear from any experienced screenwriter with another really good way to deal with foreign language dialog, or an opinion on the best way to represent a telephone conversation.

Know your genre

What's genre? It's not just the section of the video store your movie gets shelved in. It's the goods you've promised the audience you'll deliver.

For example, suppose you have a movie about a cop trying to find a killer. (A unique idea, I know, but I'm giving it away for free.) There is a spectrum of drama, suspense and action you'll find in cop movies, from the pure silly action of the later Lethal Weapon movies or John Woo's extravagant ballets of gunplay with their thirty-minute climactic gun battles, to slow, intense dramatics of Seven. Any drama has some action, and every good action movie has some good drama. They all have suspense. So how do you tell what genre you're in?

Genre is the goods you've promised to deliver the audience. The action audience comes to see action. Your action better kick ass if you've written an action movie. The drama is there to provide emotional underpinnings for the action; the suspense is there to give pacing to the action.

On the other hand, if you're writing a drama, the audience wants to see the inner life of the characters. Your characters need to undergo dramatic stress. They will have to change and confront their inner demons. The action is there to provide opportunities for the characters to test themselves and each other.

So, for example, Saving Private Ryan has a twenty-two minute opening action sequence. But it's there to define the characters' world, to show the hell they're living in, that they bravely embrace. The audience is not there to enjoy it for action's sake. The main issues are dramatic: is it worth risking eight lives to save one? Is it possible to remain good in the middle of a war? In The Dirty Dozen the 20-minute finale has just as much action, but it's there for action's sake; the rest of the movie is there for us to come to care about them deeply, so that when they die heroically, we care. The main issue is about action: will the Dirty Dozen wipe out the Nazi officer's club?

Suspense is in the middle. It defines a thriller. In The Negotiator, the two characters going head to head are trying to manipulate each other. One is trying to discover who murdered his partner. The other is trying to get the hostages out. One wrong move and people get killed.

Neither character changes or confronts their inner demons, so it's not a drama. The action is brief and explosive. We don't enjoy it for its own sake; it makes everything more tense. We're there to enjoy the suspense and its resolution.

To get fancy for a moment, drama, suspense thrillers and action movies are all in functional genres: genres where what happens defines them. Comedy, romance and horror are genres of affect. You come to a comedy to laugh, to a romance to be inspired with romance, and to a horror movie to be scared out of your wits.

Even in the most tragic picture there can be moments of hysterical comedy. Even in the funniest comedy, someone may die. But in a comedy, the tragedy is there to add weight to the comedy; we don't laugh if we don't also care. In any other genre, the humor is there to add humanity to the events.

Similarly, there may be horrific moments in any genre, but only in horror do we plunk down our eight bucks specifically to be horrified, and go home grumbling if we weren't horrified enough. And so on for romance.

It's important to know what genre you're writing in, because screenplays go wrong when the writer is at odds with his or her genre. It's important, too, because you are asking millions of real people to pay their hard-earned money for your vision; you better give them what they came to the movie for, whether it's laughs, or thrills, or poignant moments or absurdism.

I recently read a science fiction screenplay where the writer really wanted to get into the head of an ambitious doctor who had perfected a technique to cure blindness, but created a monster. The problem was, it was at heart a drama; but the monstrous elements belonged to a horror movie. The drama audience isn't looking for monsters; the monster audience isn't interested in the subtle inner lives of ambitious doctors.

The remaining genres are genres of environment: science fiction films, fantasy films, westerns, and historical pieces -- so-called "period pieces." I say "so-called" because only unsuccessful are "period pieces." Successful movies are in their proper genre. Sense and Sensibility is a romance. Braveheart is an epic action-adventure. Rob Roy was a period piece. Obviously in a technical sense these genres can be said to mix. Alien is a science fiction horror movie. Unforgiven is a Western drama.

All genres have their audiences. I, for one, will go see practically any science fiction movie, no matter whether it's a drama, thriller, action movie or comedy, unless the reviews say it really sucks the big weenie. I will be very upset if the science fiction in the movie does not satisfy me. I will be very happy if the movie creates a convincing future world and shows me how people live in it. The movie has to have all that other good stuff, laughs, whammies, tears, but if I think the SF is lame, I'm miffed, no matter how good a movie it is. I was really miffed at Universal Soldier for passing off a contemporary action-adventure piece as SF, and I was miffed at Static for pretending to be metaphysical when it was basically a contemporary drama. Similarly, if nobody in Unforgiven had fired a six-gun, if there had not been a saloon or a prairie, the Western fans would have gone away mad, even though the movie was perfect. Fortunately, Clint Eastwood is no fool. The movie wasn't really about saloons or prairies, it was about redemption. But it had all that good Western stuff for the fans.

Don't Kill Animals On Screen, and Violence in General

You can, if you must, kill your animals off screen, but personally, I prefer a movie in which the pets have the sense to snarl at the vampire and run away.

While it is perfectly all right to have an undead creature strangle the department store Santa to death under the neon lights, less cartoonish violence, especially when directed against the weak (women, children, pets) often throws the reader and the audience out of the movie. So, for example, if you have a physically abusive husband who's going to get his just desserts later on, you do not show him beating his wife on screen; you show her bruises later. You don't show a rape on screen. You never show someone hurting (as opposed to frightening) a child on screen. It is classier and emotionally more effective to show the aftermath of extreme violence than the violence itself. In Conan the Barbarian, a fine film not otherwise noted for its understatement, we don't see little Conan's mother get her head whacked off by Thulsa Doom. We see little Conan's face as he holds her hand; the sword swings; her hand lets go of his; and he looks up at her with a child's incomprehension.

The main exception is where the abuse or rape is the subject of a drama, for example The Burning Bed or The Accused. Generally the filmmaker will try to show the horrible events in quick cuts, or behind a curtain. You can write a scene so it is clear that we will not dwell on what is too painful to watch. It is also much easier to see realistic violence on the tv screen than in a movie theater.

Science Fiction and Fantasy

The next most successful science fiction movies create a future very similar to our own, but warped by one major science fiction element. Blade Runner is set in a film noir LA not far removed from modern Tokyo or Bangkok, except that (sf element) there are superhuman androids on the run and Deckard has to retire them. Outland is High Noon on (sf element) a mining colony on Ganymede.

As you can tell from the examples above, these movies also fall back on familiar genre plots and characters. We may not be personally familiar with the Old West, but we recognize Sean Connery's character in Outland from a dozen westerns.

What novice writers love to do is create a whole world full of things named the Vogon and the planet Utapau and the Journal of the Whills and the Bendu of Ashla and so on. These movies never get made, because only the science fiction audience loves to plunge wholeheartedly into a different world with a different social structure, different laws of physics, different history, and deeply meaningful names that you never heard of before.

... these movies almost never get made, I should say. The above names were all invented by a novice writer named George Lucas for an early draft of something called The Star Wars. However, I must point out that for many, many years no one would touch the script, because it was (in the draft I'm referring to) practically unreadable. Fortunately for all of us, American Graffiti convinced Alan Ladd, Jr., then boss of 20th Century Fox, that George Lucas could do anything he believed in... and then no one believed the picture would make money, even up to the first preview screenings.

There are no rules, but you break them at your peril.

I believe that a science fiction script set in this world wants to have no more than one science fiction element, one which can be summed up in a few words. Dinosaurs can be cloned from fossilized DNA. An alien child is left on Earth by accident. An electronic intelligence takes over the computers on a science ship. You don't want to have two. For example, if you have aliens in your contemporary movie, don't have intelligent robots, and vice versa.

Once you've established that sf element, the farther away from our reality you take the picture, the less effective it is going to be. An audience becomes alienated when one thing after another takes them out of their reality. Instead, keep the rest of the story as real as possible. If dino cloning exists, what will people do with it? Try to make money off it, is what. In other words, the standard for realism and believability is higher in science fiction, not lower. If someone in a romantic comedy does something wildly unpredictable, I'm not worried,that's just the character. If a character in a science fiction thriller does something unrealistic, my suspension of disbelief starts to get sore.

If your story takes place in the future, or in a fantasy world, then your job is slightly different: make sure that the world is internally consistent, and make sure that the characters in it are compelling and believable within their own world.

I like a fantasy or sf movie to have a moral or metaphysical theme. I believe that's what grounds sf and fantasy in present reality: what we are seeing is not literally true, but it is emotionally and morally true. An sf or fantasy piece that has no metaphysical theme, to me, is less real to me than one with one, because it has no connection with my reality.

Using hindsight, I would argue that Star Wars worked because it cribbed a lot of genre conventions, but from an unexpected genre: the universal hero legend made famous by Joseph Campbell in The Hero With A Thousand Faces. It has a legendary theme with which we are familiar. (Supposedly it is based on Akira Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress, but the similarities are only in the plot.)

Obviously, there are successful fantasy movies which create whole worlds. But they are rarely successful unless they are based on bestselling books, e.g. Conan, Princess Bride, Interview with a Vampire, or legends everyone already knows, e.g. Excalibur, Company of Wolves, or monsters we love, e.g. Dragonslayer, An American Werewolf in London. One could argue that Willow, Legend, Dragonheart, The Dark Crystal, Labyrinth and many other major fantasy pictures flopped because the audience had to learn too many new facts about their world during the course of the movie.

By the way, the rules for science fiction have their corollary in thrillers. Thrillers are about extraordinary things happening to ordinary people. There should really only be one extraordinary thing happening in the a thriller, and out of that arises all the other extraordinary things. Don't have two or more unlikely things in your premise. Everything should flow in plausible, logical directions from the premise.

What grounds a science fiction or fantasy script in reality? I believe it is the emotional or moral truth at its core. A horror movie may violate the laws of physics, but if it speaks to a moral truth that we all have to deal with, it feels real. For example, we all think we're good people, and yet we are possessed from time to time by urges that cause us to hurt those we love. That is the essential moral truth at the heart of the werewolf genre; the only difference is that when the werewolf gets these urges, he's furry on the outside. The seductiveness of death is at the heart of the vampire genre.

If your science fiction script is about someone feeling excluded because they're an alien, then we can all relate to its emotional truth, because we've felt like an alien and been excluded.

If your science fiction script has neither an emotional truth nor a moral truth at its center, then you have Starship Troopers, and you better hope you have state-of-the-art special effects or no one is going to come to your movie.

Some thoughts on Period Pieces

Get the details right. The audience doesn't know, but it knows when you get it wrong.

However, the piece isn't about the details, it's about the people. The audience shouldn't have to know much about the period to appreciate it -- no more than can be put in a title crawl ("Long, long ago, in a galaxy far, far away ...").

The hardest thing is getting the dialogue right. People in the 16th Century did not speak in archaic English, they spoke the very latest up to the date modern 16th Century English. To get the same sense of modernity, don't be afraid to use contractions, sentence fragments, just like now.

You can and should use slang, but it must be modern slang that could have existed then. "Dude" is unacceptable. "Poxy whoreson dog" is period-accurate, but audiences won't know if them's fighting words or just kidding. But "son of a bitch" is a timeless sentiment.

Look at how well the dialog works in Braveheart: "My Father says he can get me out of this ... but he's pretty sure you're fucked."

The key to a great period piece is to show real people we'd want to be with who operate in a world that is different from our own, where honor is worth fighting over, and men were brave and women were pure ... or however you see it. The people are timeless; their goals and the obstacles in their way are of the period. D'Artagnan is a romantic adventurer (timeless) who wants to save the Queen's honor (period -- these days he'd want to elope with her). Wallace is a romantic adventurer (timeless) who wants to liberate Scotland from an evil English king (period).

Same goes for period dramas, period tragedies, period anything. The period is no more than a background to a human drama. The period makes for a richer cloth, but the weaving must still be passions, vices, lies, hopes, frustrations, greed, love, pride and mercy -- the stuff that dreams are made of.

A brief rant about readers.