An excerpt from SCRIPT PARTNERS: What Makes Film and TV Writing Teams Work (Michael Wiese Productions, Feb., 2003)

Shrek screenwriters Ted Elliott & Terry Rossio did most of their early writing at a CoCo's coffee shop in Orange County. "Big table, no distractions, pretty waitresses refilling our coffee - okay, minimal distractions - all for about five bucks," Elliott says. They sat across from each other, writing in long hand, passing a single pad of paper back and forth. 

"While we worked from an outline, we hadn't yet discovered the importance of really nailing the structure before we wrote FADE IN," he says, "so there was a lot of tearing out and crumpling up and staring blankly at each other, wondering how we're going to pay for the coffee on the miserable salaries from our real, full-time jobs." 

Gradually they discovered what Elliot calls "the real craft of screenwriting: structure." They started outlining until they got it right, until they set the major story moments, and sometimes until they figured out the structure of individual scenes. "We can now divide up the scenes and sequences and work independently," Elliott says. "Sometimes we're in the same room, on separate computers, sometimes not." 

"SCREENPLAYS ARE STRUCTURE," shouts William Goldman in Adventures in the Screen Trade. "The essential opening labor a screenwriter must execute is, of course, deciding what the proper structure should be for the particular screenplay you are writing." 

This, he believes, is "the single most important lesson to be learned about writing for films... Yes, nifty dialog helps one hell of a lot; sure, it's nice if you can bring your characters to life. But you can have terrific characters spouting just swell talk to each other, and if the structure is unsound, forget it." 

In The Screenwriter's Workbook, Syd Field seconds Goldman. "Structure is the most important element in the screenplay. It is the force that holds everything together; it is the skeleton, the spine, the foundation." 

While Goldman is careful to say that your first job is deciding what "the proper structure should be for the particular script you are writing," and describes in great detail his own struggle to find the right one for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Field tells you flat out what it should be: a strict three-act structure he calls "a paradigm." If you've spent any time on the planet Hollywood, you can probably recite it in your sleep: Act One, setup, thirty pages, then Plot Point I throws the story into Act Two, confrontation, sixty pages, then Plot Point II throws the story into Act Three, resolution, thirty pages. 

In Hollywood, first and third acts have gotten shorter, especially in comedies, and we've been down the green mile of more than a few three-hour-plus movies, but for the most part, Syd Field remains the industry standard. Many have complained that Field's ubiquitous paradigm has spawned generations of predictable screen stories. They're right, it has. Far too often stories are forced into it whether they fit or not - the narrative equivalent of Cinderella's sisters cramming their feet into the glass slipper. But this has more to do with the write-by-number nature of Field's paradigm and the assembly-line mentality of Hollywood than it does with the three-act structure itself. 

"Hollywood is schizophrenic because it is a corporate culture that deals in an art form," Marshall Brickman explains. "Risk is not encouraged, it is frowned upon. If you have a toaster that works and sells, you do try and make as many of them as you can and keep them on the shelves. If you have a formula for a kind of film, or enough elements of a formula (i.e., star) to feel comfortable, then you try and go with that. It's risk vs. investment strategy, and the prudent investment strategy has pretty much won, the irony being that after a while the stuff gets so repetitive and predictable and lacking in originality or personality that what happens is, well, look at the movie section of your local paper and see how many 'mainstream' movies you really want to go and see. Thank God for independent cinema and - God help me - Showtime, HBO, Lifetime, A&E... But don't get me started." 

Brickman assures us, however, that there's nothing wrong with the three-act structure per se. "The three-act structure is not a 'formula' any more than a rectangular canvas is a formula for a painting. Just a very general framework into which you can put your ideas." 

It's ancient as Aristotle, who said in his Poetics that "tragedy is an imitation of an action which is complete and whole," adding that, "'Whole' is that which has beginning, middle, and end." 

Movies might be more original and less predictable if we replaced Syd Field's strict paradigm with Aristotle's more organic guidelines. And some of the more original movies like Citizen Ruth seem to be the result of writers doing just that. "We never tried to cram this story into some kind of a Syd Field notion of how a script should be, how a story should be told," Jim Taylor says in Scenario. 

"It had more to do with whether it felt right or not: that was really our only criterion - that it had some shape to it, however small." 

But Scott Alexander & Larry Karaszewski acknowledge the importance of using the more traditional Hollywood structure, especially when creating less traditional stories. 

SCOTT: You can take Syd Field's paradigm and shove it down our Larry Flynt script, and it works. You can say, page 10, he starts Hustler. Page 30, he gets arrested for the first time. Page 60, he gets shot and paralyzed and goes crazy. Page 90, he gets locked in the loony bin, and Jerry Falwell sues him, and Larry decides to go to the Supreme Court. Climax of the screenplay. And it fits into that formula. Now it's a completely ridiculous movie! I mean, it's dealing with a lot of strange characters and issues you don't normally see in a Hollywood star-driven production. But it has a normal form. 

LARRY: We always joke that our form is very studio-friendly; it's our content that tends to be odd. Usually, when you see a more independent kind of movie, the form is odd and the content is odd. We manage to take this strange subject matter you don't usually see in a movie, and by putting it into that Hollywood form - I think that's the reason why our movies have been made by studios instead of independently - they feel comfortable. They do look at that structure. 

Because they're "really trying to tell a normal movie," Alexander & Karaszewski look for their structure first. The characters in their biopics are already essentially established, so the challenge is deciding what part of that person's life they will tell, so they don't end up with a ponderous, all-encompassing "cradle-to-the-grave" story. 

LARRY: We try and look for what's important. We try and figure out what's the happy ending. I think a lot of biographies aren't successful because they end with the guy dying. Man on the Moon ended with the guy dying, but - 

SCOTT: But that was the joke. 

LARRY: We say, "How do we take this person's life and go out on a victory?" It doesn't have to be a traditional kind of a victory. It just has to be, "What was the success for themselves?" Like Ed Wood - his greatest success is that he made the worst movie of all time. With Larry Flynt, it was that he beat Jerry Falwell in the Supreme Court. With Andy Kaufman, it happened to be his death. His death was his greatest work of art. 

By answering those questions - "What part of the whole story are we telling?" and "What events are significant?" - they find their structure. 

These are important questions, too, for fictional stories. Matt Manfredi & Phil Hay carefully consider "point of attack" when they're creating the foundation for a script. "It's always in terms of, 'Why are we starting the story here?'" Manfredi says. "'Why didn't this happen yesterday? Why didn't this happen tomorrow? Why is this movie  occurring right now? Why are we coming into the story at the point we're coming in at?'" 

They acknowledge the importance of structure in their writing ("the first thing after character is structure," Hay says), but they don't follow Field's paradigm as closely as Alexander & Karaszewski. 

When scripting crazy/beautiful, they had firm ideas of what the acts were, but for them and director John Stockwell, it wasn't the kind of movie that falls into the paradigm of turning points punctuated by big events. 

"The story couldn't exist as a - Bam! First act ends! Bam! Here's the end of the second act!" Hay says. 

"I think it's a movie that takes a little more time getting to know its characters," Manfredi adds, "getting to know this world and setting the tone. I think if you took out ten minutes in the beginning, it might fall into a very conventional structure, but I think it would lose something in that, too. It would seem a little rushed." 

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