The Definitive Guide To Screenwriting - Softcover

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Hollywood professionals consider Syd Field to be the pre-eminent authority in the art and craft of screenwriting in the world today. His internationally acclaimed best-selling books have established themselves as the 'bibles' of the film industry.

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introduction

The origins of this book

"My task...is to make you hear, to make you feel - and above all to make you see. That is all, and it is everything."

-Joseph Conrad

It seems like I've spent most of my life sitting in a darkened theater, popcorn in hand, gazing in rapt wonder at the images projected on a river of light reflected on that monster screen.

I was one of those kids who grew up in Hollywood surrounded by the film industry. While playing the trumpet in the Sheriff's Boys Band, like my brother before me, I was cast as one of the band members of Frank Capra's The State of the Union starring Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. I don't remember much about the experience except Van Johnson taught me how to play checkers.

Yes, I can truly say I was a child of Hollywood.

For the past thirty-five years, I've watched movies as they've become an integral part of our culture, part of our heritage, watched as they have become an international way of life. Once an audience is joined together in the darkness of the movie theater, they become one being, one entity, connected in a community of emotion, an unspoken, deep-seated connection to the human spirit that exists beyond time, place and circumstance.

Going to the movies is both an individual and collective experience, a collection of singular moments standing out against the landscape of time. Watching those flickering images flutter across the screen can bear witness to the entire range of human experience: a moment of wonder and poetry, like the opening sequence of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, or capturing the full scope of human history as a wooden club thrown into the air merges into a spacecraft in Stanley Kubrick's 2001. Thousands of years and the evolution of humankind condensed into two pieces of film; it is a moment of magic and mystery, wonder and awe. Such is the power of film.

As a writer-producer for David L. Wolper Productions, a free-lance screenwriter, and head of the story department at Cinemobile Systems, I spent several years writing and reading screenplays. At Cinemobile alone, I read and synopsized more than 2,000 screenplays in a little more than two years. And of those 2,000 screenplays, I selected only forty to present to our financial partners for possible film production.

Why so few? Because 99 out of 100 screenplays I read weren't good enough to invest a million or more dollars in. Or, put another way, only one out of 100 screenplays I read was good enough to consider for film production. And, at Cinemobile, our job was making movies. In one year alone, we were directly involved in the production of some 119 motion pictures, ranging from The Godfather to Jeremiah Johnson to Deliverance.

When my boss, Fouad Said, the creator of the Cinemobile, decided to make his own movies, he went out and raised some $10 million in a few weeks. Pretty soon everybody in Hollywood was sending him screenplays. Thousands of scripts came in, from stars and directors, studios and producers, from the known and the unknown.

That's when I was fortunate enough to be given the opportunity of reading the submitted screenplays, and evaluating them in terms of quality, cost, and probable budget. My job, as I was constantly reminded, was to "find material" for our three financial partners: the United Artists Theatre Group, the Hemdale Film Distribution Company, headquartered in London, and the Taft Broadcasting Company, parent company of Cinemobile.

So I began reading screenplays. As a former screenwriter taking a much-needed vacation from more than seven years of free-lance writing, my job at Cinemobile gave me a totally new perspective on writing screenplays. It was a tremendous opportunity, a formidable challenge, and a dynamic learning experience.

What made the forty screenplays I recommended "better" than the others? I didn't have any answers for that, but I thought about it for a long time.

My reading experience gave me the opportunity to make a judgment and evaluation, to formulate an opinion: this is a good screenplay, this is not a good screenplay. As a screenwriter, I wanted to find out what made the forty scripts I recommended better than the other 1,960 scripts submitted.

Just about this time I was given the opportunity of teaching a screenwriting class at the Sherwood Oaks Experimental College in Hollywood. At that time, in the seventies, Sherwood Oaks was a professional school taught by professionals. It was the kind of school where Paul Newman, Dustin Hoffman, and Lucille Ball gave acting seminars; where Tony Bill would teach a producing seminar; where Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman, or Alan Pakula gave directing seminars; where William Fraker and John Alonzo, two of the finest cinematographers in the world, taught a class in cinematography. It was a school where professional production managers, cameramen, film editors, writers, directors, and producers all came to teach their specialties. It was the most unique film school in the country.

I had never taught a screenwriting class before, so I had to delve into my writing experience and reading experience to evolve my basic material.

What is a good screenplay? I kept asking myself. And, pretty soon, I started getting some answers. When you read a good screenplay, you know it - it's evident from page one. The style, the way the words are laid out on the page, the way the story is set up, the grasp of dramatic situation, the introduction of the main character, the basic premise or problem of the screenplay - it's all set up in the first few pages of the script. Chinatown, American Beauty, Lord of the Rings, The Hours, All the President's Men, are perfect examples.

A screenplay, I soon realized, is a story told with pictures. It's like a noun: that is, a screenplay is about a person, or persons, in a place, or places, doing his, or her, "thing." I saw that the screenplay has certain basic conceptual components common to the form.

These elements are expressed dramatically within a definite structure with a beginning, middle, and end. When I re-examined the forty screenplays submitted to our partners - including The Wind and the Lion, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, and others - I realized they all contained these basic concepts, regardless of how they were cinematically executed. They are in every screenplay.

I began teaching this conceptual approach to writing the screenplay. If the student knows what a model screenplay is, I reasoned, it can be used as a guide or blueprint.

I have been teaching this screenwriting class for several years now. It's an effective and experimental approach to writing the screenplay. My material has evolved and been formulated by thousands and thousands of students all over the world. They are the ones who prepared me to write this book.

Many of my students have been very successful: Anna Hamilton Phelan wrote Mask in my workshop, then went on to write Gorillas in the Mist; Laura Esquival wrote Like Water for Chocolate; Carmen Culver wrote The Thornbirds; Janus Cercone wrote Leap of Faith; Linda Elsted won the prestigious Humanitas award for The Divorce Wars; and prestigious filmmakers such as James Cameron (Terminator and Terminator 2; Judgment Day, Titanic) used the material when they started their careers. Screenwriting is a process. What you write one day is out of date the day after. What you write the day after is out of date the day after that. And what you write the day after the day after is out of date the day after that. That's just the way the writing process works; it is larger than you are. It has its own life, its own needs, its own requirements.

Others have not been so successful. Some people have the talent, and some don't. Talent is God's gift; either you've got it or you don't.

Many people have already formed a writing style prior to enrolling in the class. Some of them have to unlearn their writing habits, just as a tennis pro coaches someone to correct an incorrect swing, or a swimming instructor improves a swimming stroke. Writing, like tennis, or learning to swim, is an experiential process; for that reason, I begin with general concepts and then move into specific aspects of screenwriting.

The material is designed for everyone; for those who have no previous writing experience, as well as those who have not had much success with their writing efforts and need to rethink their basic approach to writing. Novelists, playwrights, magazine editors, housewives, businessmen, doctors, actors, film editors, commercial directors, secretaries, advertising executives, and university professors - all have taken the class and benefited from it.

The purpose of this book is to enable the reader to sit down and write a screenplay from the position of choice, confidence, and security; completely secure within himself that he knows what he's doing. Because the hardest thing about writing is knowing what to write.

When you complete this book, you will know exactly what to do to write a screenplay. Whether you do it or not is up to you.

Writing is a personal responsibility - either you do it, or you don't.

Problem Solving

Additionally, while writing this guide, I felt a responsibility to address the variety of problems that can confront a writer at any time and I wanted to find some kind of tool that the screenwriter could use in order to recognize and define various problems of screenwriting. But I gradually became aware that I was really writing about the solutions to the problems and not really identifying them. It just didn't work. So I began to rethink my approach. To solve any kind of a problem means you have to be able to recognize it, identify it, and then define it; only in that way can any problem really be solved.

The more I began thinking about the "problem," the more it became clear that most screenwriters don't know exactly what the problem really is. There's a vague and somewhat tenuous feeling somewhere that something is not working; either the plot is too thin or too thick; or the character is too strong or too weak; or there's not enough action, or the character disappears off the page, or the story is told all in dialogue.

So I began analyzing the Problem-Solving process. The only way I could make this book work, I realized, was to recognize and define the various symptoms of the problem, very much the way a medical doctor isolates the various symptoms of his patients before he can treat the disease.

When I approached the Problem-Solving process from this point of view (and it is a process), I began to see that there's usually not just one symptom, but many symptoms. It soon became clear that many of the problems in screenwriting share the same symptoms, but the problems themselves are different in kind; only when you analyze the context of the problem can a distinction be made, and it is those distinctions that lead us on the path of recognizing, defining, and solving. For the truth is that you can't solve a problem until you know what it is.

With that in mind I began to understand that there are only three distinct categories of The Problem; when you're writing a screenplay, all problems spring either from Plot, Character, or Structure.

The art of Problem Solving is really the art of recognition.

You can look at any problem in two ways; the first is to accept the fact that a problem is something that doesn't work. If that's the case, you can avoid it, deny it, and pretend it doesn't exist. That's the easy way.

But there's another way of approaching the problem, and that's to look at any creative problem as a challenge, an opportunity for you to expand your screenwriting skills.

They are really both sides of the same coin. How you look at it is up to you.

"The World is as you see it..." (from Yoga Vasistha)

The Problem Sheet

At certain points in this book, I have provided Problem Sheets.

The Problem Sheet is an abbreviated guide that is meant to be used as an interactive tool. It lists a number of screenwriting symptoms that can help you identify and define various problems. If you have a problem, and you match it with some of the symptoms listed, the information in the pages that follow the Problem Sheet can help you find an answer. Some symptoms listed will be the same for several chapters. That's because the same symptoms are relevant for different kinds of problems; it really doesn't matter whether it's a problem of Plot, Character, or Structure. A problem is a problem, no matter how you label it.