Aiming                          

By David Terruso

There's a great picture of John Lennon as a young man. It's 1956. His hair is greased and he has thick sideburns. Liverpool's answer to Elvis. At that age, that was who Lennon wanted desperately to be. Lucky for us, Lennon never became Elvis, and instead became Lennon.

But it was important for him to have that role model, that real-life archetype. The same can be said for you and your screenwriting. If you find the right role model, and you've got the talent, you'll write towards him, miss the mark a little, and end up a great writer in your own right.

After you decide what your story is about, one of the first things you do (or should do) when sitting down to write a script is pick a genre. Each genre has a set of rules and audience expectations attached to it. So, if you're writing an action flick, you know that the climax will come down to the wire and will be life-or-death for the protagonist. That's what the audience expects, and you'd better deliver. If you opt for an anticlimax filled with Camusian existentialism, you'll piss off everyone who hoped to see the bad guy fall from a high place and get impaled.

What I'm suggesting is that just picking a genre is too vague. Once you've picked your genre, you need to narrow your scope a lot more. Pick one screenwriter, or even just one of that screenwriter's films. Don't just sit down to write a character-driven drama, sit down to write American Beauty by Alan Ball. I call this aiming.

When I say, "sit down to write American Beauty," I don't mean study the film ad nauseum and then try to copy it by the numbers. If you try to find the magic formula of a great screenplay and then play fill-in-the-blanks, you'll end up with dreck. What you should do is study the script closely and pay attention to structure, style, page count, scene length, and so forth. This is all about the details.

Using American Beauty as our example, if you just count the number of scenes, you'll find that there are around 140. From that, you can tell that Mr. Ball crams a lot of scenes into his scripts, and that those scenes must be short because the movie is about two hours long. That's a wealth of information, and we haven't even read the script yet.

Next, look at the action. Ball uses clipped sentences that briefly give us just enough who-what-when-where-how to grasp the core of the scene. Most of the paragraphs are two, maybe three lines. When he describes something in a lengthy paragraph, it's something visually complicated or emotionally integral to the scene and the overall story.

The dialogue is direct, potent, and often surprising. Everything that good dialogue should be. Ball is adept at quips, ping-pong dialogue, and flowing monologues. The dialogue always comes from the character's core, and when it advances the plot, it does so without causing so much as a blip on the expository-dialogue radar. While all of great screenwriting has an element of elusiveness under examination, dialogue is by far the hardest to dissect. But the more you read it, and reread it, the more you get a feel for the verbal syncopation and the way Ball lets his characters use words as weapons.

I've chosen one great script and one great writer, and only shown you a few main elements to study. You can examine many other things on your own when you sit down with the script you've chosen to aim for: Does the writer have many short scenes in a row and then one long scene, or does he modulate from short scenes to long scenes fairly evenly? How many main characters are there? How much time does the script span? Is there a lot of humor? Does the action convey the tone of the story, or is the tone all in the dialogue? How is the ending prepared for in the story? How does the writer create a sense of pacing on the page? Does the writer break from conventions often, and if so, what is the effect of that break? Each script will bring you to new and important questions.

Gather all this information and keep it in mind as you outline your script. Now you don't just have a genre, you have a template. If you understand the textures of the script you've studied, and how the individual pieces create the overall effect, you can build your own script from the inside out. If you don't get it, you've at least read a great script, and maybe some skill will seep into your subconscious. A truly great script doesn't just show you how to write a great script in its genre, but how to write a great script in general.

Here are some tips on aiming:

1)      Aim high. If you love sci-fi, aim for Gattaca and not Supernova. It also helps if you pick a highly successful writer, because if you aim for them, you're also aiming for their audience.

2)      Read the script and watch the movie. It must be both. Scripts are the cause and films are the effect. You need to look at both to see how the former shapes the latter. Even if you've seen the movie a thousand times, watch it again right after you read the script. You'll be able to visualize the script while you watch the film and see how one sentence became three minutes of riveting film, or how half a page of description became one sweeping ten-second shot.

3)      Recognize your own strengths and style, and find a balance between that and what you hope to emulate from your template film. (For example, Alan Ball uses a lot of narration in American Beauty. I'm not good at narration-- and it's frowned upon in spec scripts anyway-- so I'll avoid it.) Your voice is your greatest tool as a writer; don't lose it trying to be someone else. Emulate, don't imitate.

4)      If you consistently write in the same genre, don't use the same film as your template each time.

So, you try your best to be Allan Ball (or William Goldman or Billy Wilder) and you miss the mark, but in the process you become a better you.

It worked for John Lennon.

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By day, Dave Terruso is a mild-mannered editor at a standards publisher. By night, he's a screenwriter/novelist/actor/director/singer-songwriter who loves separating things by slashes and hyphens. Dave is currently a member of the Philadelphia-based sketch comedy troupe Animosity Pierre. He's working on his third spec script, a romantic comedy set on a college campus.

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