From the couch to the screen Screenwriting advice
Can’t find anything to watch on streaming platforms? Maybe what you’re looking for doesn’t exist because you haven’t written it yet. Now could be the right moment to stop surfing shows and start staring at the blank page. The guy with the mullet and big cats can wait until later.
The screenplay, script, or teleplay is the rudimentary building block for almost all films and television shows. Feature films tend to fill up about 120 pages and, generally speaking, far fewer words than in a 200-page novel. Coupled with the big money bonanza that accompanied the Hollywood screenplay market in the 1990s, it’s not surprising that writing screenplays became the preferred activity of caffeinated Angelinos. They can be written in weeks or months and have the potential to make serious cash.
Their brevity, though, can be deceiving. Scripts are nuanced pieces of art that demand competent, stylized prose and an understanding of how films and television shows are assembled.
I caught up with Santa Fean Kirk Ellis for some writing advice. The Emmy Award-winning writer of the HBO miniseries John Adams says to ignore some of the standard books. Ellis says it’s safe to pass on Syd Field’s Screenplay: The Foundations of
Screenwriting. He calls the book “rubbish for any serious writer who thinks screenplays are something other than simple page-math equations.” Ellis also wrote in the email that you don’t need to worry about William Goldman’s book either. Goldman is best known for writing the screenplays for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Princess Bride .He wrote a memoir about Hollywood entitled Adventures in the Screen Trade: A Personal View of Hollywood and Screenwriting. His book, though, is “wonderfully chatty and sometimes instructive, but his style is so singular it doesn’t really have wide applications.”
Instead, Ellis has a clear favorite. “The only book on writing for the screen worth the paper it’s printed on is On Film-Making: An Introduction to the Craft of the Director, by Alexander Mackendrick, the director of The Ladykillers and Sweet Smell of Success. It’s compiled from lectures he gave while teaching at CalArts [California Institute of the Arts]. The first half is devoted to story construction and is far and away the best and most lucid exposition of film structure I’ve ever read.”
Ellis also doesn’t mince words when it comes to the length of a screenplay. “The lesson you learn and keep learning as a writer for film and television: less is more. Economize, economize, economize. Some of the best movies ever made often ran just over an hour. Now every story goes on forever. It ain’t an improvement,” he wrote.
Developing screenwriters can learn a great deal from consistently watching films and television shows. Ellis’ current favorites include Better Call Saul and Babylon Berlin on Netflix, and The Plot Against America and Our Boys on HBO. All are currently available to stream.
It’s also wise to keep track of current events, not just to be informed, but also for research purposes. Ellis keeps up with The Economist, The New York
Times, and Last Week Tonight With John Oliver on
HBO.
There are plenty of resources for help with the basics of screenwriting. Applications like Final Draft, Movie Magic Screenwriter, and Fade In are easy to find and can help with rudimentary formatting.
Most screenplays adhere to some basic rules of pagination and paragraph organization. Typically, feature film screenplays are broken into scenes. Each scene begins with a slug line, or heading with time and location, immediately followed by a description of the action, and then dialogue broken into paragraphs for each speaking character. Of course, no rules of organization are hard and fast, but most screenplays are further organized into three acts — a beginning, middle, and an end.
The most sure-fire way to know if your writing is any good is to read it aloud. Or have the family read with you. Tell them it’s more entertaining than Tiger King. — Jason Strykowski