Why Does the Screenwriter Cross the Road?. Joe Gilford
to eradicate over one hundred years of filmmaking or a tradition of the most visually stirring and beautiful films we’ve ever seen. I’m only trying to clear the brush, eliminate the mush, and call it like I see it.
But first you’ll have to meet me halfway, abandon a few concepts you’re stuck with about screenwriting (and movies altogether), and come along with me for the ride. Let’s admit it: you’re looking for help. Admitting you need help is the first step. Accepting help is your next step. With that, we’ll be off on our journey just like in the movies.
Fundamentally, like a good story, it’s all about change. Ironically, in order to change, you have to give up something to gain something.
I’m starting here because I want things to be clear right from the start. This is (hopefully) a way to view and understand movies and screenplays that will help you write them and write them better.
First, let’s start by doing my favorite thing in writing: making sense.
If film really was a “visual” medium . . .
• Whenever we recommend or criticize a film, we would always talk about how “ugly” or “pretty” it is.
• Cinematographers, film editors, painters, sculptors, photographers, designers, and even choreographers would be the majority of successful filmmakers.
• Some of the greatest directors would not have risen from the ranks of writers and actors.
• Writers would not control every minute of the thousands of hours of television that we have watched and are watching now.
• We wouldn’t sell written screenplays using language, based on a story, dialogue, character, and description. We would probably sell a movie as a graphic novel first.
But none of the above is the case.
And while some of our most gifted directors have in fact emerged from some of these professions such as cinematographers Ridley and Tony Scott, film editor Robert Wise, and even production designer Albert Lewin, the vast majority came from four very important branches of filmmaking:
Acting: Orson Welles, Robert Redford, Jon Favreau
Writing: Billy Wilder, Francis Ford Coppola, Charlie Kaufman
Directing: William Wyler, Martin Scorcese, D. W. Griffith
Producing: Cecil B. DeMille, Alan J. Pakula, Joseph Mankiewicz
Why?
I’m not trying to be crazy. I will say that film uses visual tools to tell its story. We would be nowhere without the whole cinematographic idea of films, its images, motion, and sound; the whole wonderful visceral experience of movies. And I will be the first one to say that Gravity would be nothing if it had never been a film.
But it’s been a long time since audiences were simply held in thrall of the simplest kinographic qualities of film. After The Sneeze (1894) and Train Enters a Station (1895) everyone involved in filmmaking, including audiences, have been asking, “So what else have you got?”
Why?
Because we don’t really go to movies simply because they look good, just as you wouldn’t start a serious relationship with somebody simply based on their appearance (please, humor me!).
Let’s agree that when we go to a movie, we want to feel something even if it’s an avoidance of actual real-life emotional experience. We depend on movies to show us a story — hopefully one with some emotional content.
It wasn’t long after these two early films that the visual tools of filmmaking were applied to drama; to the telling of a story about a character in order to excite the audience. In 1903 Edwin S. Porter released A Day in the Life of an American Fireman and suddenly everything changed. Using something called film editing (or in French, montage) Porter created the illusion of things really happening onscreen — physically, graphically, and emotionally. They were happening right now, in front of our eyes, with a level of excitement, both on screen and off, that had never been experienced before.
Audiences went nuts! (in a good way). Followed by The Great Train Robbery, anyone involved in movies immediately recognized that what had really been accomplished was a method of bringing stories, like plays on the stage, to the screen, but it was different.
While stage drama asks us to suspend our belief in an extreme way (after all, we’re in the same room as Julius Caesar, yet surrender to the belief that he is actually murdered), movies suck us in. Movies conquer an audience like no other medium. For all intents and purposes, movies are real. And strangely, watching live human beings in theater, opera, dance, and the symphony is somehow artificial. Who can explain it?
So what kind of medium is film? We go to films primarily to see characters (played by good actors) get into and out of trouble (usually in that order).
So when taken as this hybrid package, I would say film is:
A STORY medium . . .
. . . where we experience PERFORMANCE of AN ORDEAL (by actors) . . .
. . . moving through TIME.
Those are the three key elements of what makes film a very special hybrid medium. This is what I propose will keep you on track as you work on your script. It will, hopefully, keep you focused on the emotional, and not so much the visual — although, I promise, visuals will be there to use as you wish.
We go to the movies to observe a person in a narrative, which is an account of a human struggle that will excite us in some way. This includes comedies and documentaries. Every movie is developed and sold to the public as a terrific story with wonderful, well-known actors. They are playing characters — not simply striking poses or moving in shapes and rhythms. They are acting out a story that will make us laugh or cry or both.
And let’s not forget the time thing. We mess around with time in movies more than any other medium. Certainly you can contain and manipulate time in novels and plays. But a movie has that special distinction of being able to entertain the audience with its treatment of time.
It’s a wild kind of ride when you actually think about it. You sit there watching a story that takes place “now,” yet it can, if it wants to, travel in any direction in time that’s feasible and yet still have a beginning, middle, and end — and it isn’t normally about time travel at all.
Memento proves this in spades. So does Citizen Kane. And in every way so does any other movie regardless of its treatment of time. As an audience we are utterly convinced that days, months, or years have passed, yet we’re out of the theater in about two hours. Amazing. But that’s not necessarily storytelling. That’s just the miracle of drama.
These days the thing that drives me nuts, especially in teaching screenwriting in various higher institutions is that my students go to see perfectly lousy movies and they come into my class saying, “Hey — I can do that!”
But they’re wrong. I assure you: those perfectly crappy screenplays were born wanting to be an Oscar winner. But a process occurred, almost like raising a sweet little baby who turns out to be a mass murderer, where all those involved took a silk purse and made it into a sow’s ear. Nobody really intended to do it. It just happens. That’s the sad part of our business and our craft. Good stuff gets ruined. Bad stuff gets made. It’s just the way it is.
That’s why when I teach I rarely if ever tell a student, “That’s good” or “That’s bad.” My only criterion is “Does it work?” Like a chair, people have to be able to sit in it. Your screenplay must abide by certain recognizable qualities yet it can’t go around copying every chair either. How do we do this?
It’s funny how if you’ve never played a musical instrument or studied composition and music for years you never feel you could just sit down and write a symphony.
I’m not sure why, but people would never think of picking up a violin and expect to