Reading Screenplays Read online

  PREMISE

  Having done the hard work of figuring out the story in the synopsis, the question for the premise section is: will this story make a good film? Is the idea or the concept strong enough for a feature film?

  What does all drama need? The answer is conflict.

  Conflict is the reason we engage with stories. As human beings we tell stories to make sense of the world, to find order in chaos, to process experience. Without conflict there is no story, simply an account of events. So whatever else can be said about the script, like the originality of the setting or the vibrancy of the characters, the one thing the success of the idea hangs on is the conflict. In every film there is something at stake that the audience can care about and identify with. This can range from something as huge as the survival of the species to something as personal as being understood.

  Most screenplays play out the conflict through the experiences of one character, the protagonist. Protagonist is derived from two Greek words:

  Protos – meaning ‘first’

  Agonistes – meaning ‘a combatant, a person who acts’

  From this comes the implication that a good film protagonist is one who takes action. And from that idea has developed the theory that all protagonists should have a goal. However, it is my contention that this has led to lots of confusion and lots of very bad screenwriting.

  Goal implies a conscious choice, or an active desire, or a mission, and is true for films like Billy Elliot, where the character discovers they want or need something, and spends the rest of the film pursuing it.

  However, in many screen stories characters find themselves caught up in situations that aren’t consciously of their own making. They aren’t proactively pursuing a desire but rather are dealing with circumstances that they didn’t choose to be in. This is the case in Juno. Juno did not plan to be pregnant.

  It is also the case that, often, what a character thinks they want is very different to what they really need. That gap between what a character is actively pursuing and what they learn along the way forms the central conflict to most rites of passage and road movie films. In American Beauty, Lester wants to shag his daughter’s best friend. What he really needs, however, is to accept the stage of life he has arrived at and learn to be a good father to Jane. Which he does, just before he dies.

  Similarly, in Little Miss Sunshine the Hoover family’s outward goal is to get Olive to the beauty pageant so that she can have her chance to compete. But what they really need is to adopt Grandpa’s view that it’s not the winning that counts but the trying, so that when Olive stands on that stage and clearly isn’t a beauty queen destined to win the crown of Little Miss Sunshine they can give her the support that every seven year old deserves and so protect her from being destroyed by failure in the way every other member of the family has been.

  In more morally complex films, quite often the situation is set up so that what the character wants is actually directly at odds with what they also know that they need – a lot of good detective thrillers put the protagonist in that position, so that they are constantly getting more desperate, looking for an impossible way out of their predicament. An example of this is Dirty Pretty Things, where the main character Okwe wants to put a stop to the organ trafficking he uncovers in the hotel he works in illegally, whilst still needing to remain under the radar of the authorities.

  When reading and reporting on scripts it can therefore be much more helpful to define the protagonist as a combatant, someone who is engaged in a struggle or fight, someone who is living out conflict. And that conflict isn’t necessarily the desire to reach a defined goal. It may just be a problem.

  It might not always be obvious to the character that they are engaged in a conflict – for example, victims in thrillers, or even the protagonist in a drama, might not consciously process the opposition to what they are trying to achieve, but it should be clear to the audience/reader.

  In reporting on the premise in the script report there are three main tasks:

  Identify and articulate what the main conflict is

  Assess the dramatic strength of that idea

  Assess the thematic strength of that idea

  How do you articulate the central idea or conflict?

  The first questions to ask are: who is the protagonist? What conflict is this character facing? What do they need or want to achieve and what is standing in their way?

  It can be really helpful to know that there are only three sources of conflict in the world of films:

  Internal, where the character’s problem is made worse by aspects of their personality such as shyness, or a lack of confidence, or excessive arrogance

  Situational/environmental, where the character’s problem is made worse by the world in which they inhabit, such as intemperate climates, the lack of anonymity in small communities, or a poltergeist in the walls

  Interpersonal conflicts where the character’s problem is chiefly manifest through the other characters; such as a parent disallowing certain activities or a stalker that wants to steal your identity

  In most film stories all three types of conflict should be evident, but in order for the story to be meaningful it needs to be informed by one clear idea and so the first task is to articulate the central story idea in terms of one main conflict. Start the premise section with a sentence or two that encapsulates the main story and expresses the conflict.

  For example: Billy Elliot

  This is the story of 11–year–old Billy Elliot who wants to audition for the Royal Ballet School in London but he comes from a Northern mining town where boys learn boxing not ballet. Set against the backdrop of the 1980s miners’ strike, this is a story about true talent emerging where it is least expected and defeating the class barriers that would hold it back.

  Conflict is never original; they have all been done before. So an important element of defining the story idea or the dramatic conflict of this particular screenplay is the setting. It’s the world of the story that will make it original or will give it a reason to be told again by offering new resonance to a familiar issue.

  Billy Elliot has a very clear, simple conflict (which is possibly why it continues to resonate with audiences around the world to this day). It is more likely that a script will not have such a clear idea informing it and these are some of the problems that are very common:

  The conflict starts late

  In some scripts the main conflict doesn’t become fully clear until later in the story. Often that can indicate a problem with the story design and, if this does seem to be the case, it is helpful to state that the conflict could inform the story earlier. However, be careful not to try to define the problem too early or decide that the first thing that the character seems to be pursuing is the main conflict and wilfully disregard everything that comes after.

  The conflict is inconsistent

  In some scripts the conflict is inconsistent, meaning that the main problem the protagonist is dealing with changes over the course of the screenplay. This usually happens when the protagonist resolves their problem and then moves on to another one. If this is the case then the premise section is the place to offer a discussion of the competing conflicts and which of them, potentially, could be developed and extended most effectively.

  The wrong protagonist

  It is really hard to articulate the main idea if the protagonist is not the character who is living out the most conflict. This often happens in stories with a child protagonist where the child is in fact getting to do what he or she wants, and it is the people around them that experience the conflict. (It isn’t possible to tell the story of Little Miss Sunshine as Olive’s story as it would go something like this: Olive wants her chance to compete in the Little Miss Sunshine beauty pageant, and she does.)

  Not enough conflict

  There are two types of instance of not enough conflict. The first is reasonably straightforward. There just isn’t enough at stake to ensure that the reader/audience
cares about what happens in the end. Or, quite commonly, the writer has convinced themselves that the problem is really hard to solve, because it is for their character (due to their personal hang–ups or circumstances), but, actually, in terms of recognisable human behaviour, it’s really not that difficult.

  Overly involved with the main character

  This occurs when the story is about one main character (such as films like Fish Tank or An Education) but the writer hasn’t discerned which particular aspect of the character’s life the story is most interested in. In trying to tell everything about a character, the character becomes unknowable and the effect is to make the story feel crowded and not universally relevant.

  Once the main conflict is articulated, the next task is to assess whether it is a strong enough idea to carry a feature film. If the main conflict isn’t yet clear because of one or more of the problems outlined above, the report should assess whether the idea is strong enough once the specific problem is solved.

  The most useful way to phrase the question is to ask if it offers enough dramatic potential. By which we mean: does the idea suggest that it will generate interesting events and keep the audience engaged in discovering the outcome?

  Then there’s the other side of the dramatic conflict…

  The forces of antagonism

  Dramatic potential is suggested by the depth of the conflict and the literal number of obstacles and antagonists that the character has to negotiate in the story. The first and most important point to restate is that antagonism/conflict is manifest only in those three ways – internal, situational/environmental and interpersonal, so the antagonist or forces of antagonism are not always human. In fact, there can be a problem with human antagonists in that they need to be convincingly motivated and we generally don’t have archenemies in real life! However, we do have people who may stand in the way of what we want to achieve because, somehow, it is in conflict with what they want to do.

  If the story does have a traditional antagonistic character, that character should have compelling motivators; things like jealousy, power, money and revenge, as well as your basic psychos. If the story dramatises internal conflict through relationships with people, exploring more normal situations, it is important to assess whether those relationships demonstrate recognisable behaviour, like parents restricting freedom, or children demanding their needs be fulfilled, or the boss requiring commitment, etc.

  If the main source of antagonism isn’t another character but the situation the protagonist finds him/herself in, then you need to ask whether the rules of the protagonist’s world, and the way they have been set up, sufficiently restrict them from easily achieving their goal or solving their problem? Is the internal or situational conflict complex enough and strong enough to sustain the drama required in a feature film? Good examples of this kind of premise can be found in 127 Hours and Buried.

  Based on a true story, in 127 hours Aron Ralston falls down a crevice, miraculously surviving without injury, although his hand is trapped under a boulder. There is no way of freeing it, and very little chance that anyone will find him. This is sufficiently restricting to completely engage the audience in the outcome. Similarly, Buried is the story of Paul Conroy, a US truck driver in Iraq, who awakes one day to find himself buried alive in a coffin, with only a cigarette lighter and a phone – enough to offer a glimmer of hope that this nightmare may end, but sufficiently restricting and horrifying to keep the audience engaged in the outcome.

  In assessing the dramatic potential of the idea the main sources of antagonism should be both clear and clearly restricting. If this is not the case the ‘Premise’ section is the place to offer this comment and it can be appropriate to also offer suggestions about strengthening the conflict. However, be careful not to rewrite the story!

  It can be helpful to consider how the conflict is layered as this is often the way that the drama is generated.

  To illustrate this point clearly, consider the layers of conflict in Billy Elliot:

  Billy Elliot is the story of a boy from a northern mining community who wants to audition for the Royal Ballet School in London.

  That simple description indicates that there are some very obvious potential conflicts here: he’s a boy, dancing is generally considered for girls; he’s working class whilst ballet is primarily the domain of the middle classes. And he lives up North and wants to go to school down South in London.

  So, in the basic assessment of the idea, it is clear that there is plenty of potential conflict, but potential conflict doesn’t automatically generate drama. Billy is clearly going to find it tough but it is actually the detail with which his world is set up that makes it tough enough for this to be a dramatic story.

  Looking a bit more closely at the world of Billy Elliot, this is what we know: Billy comes from a working–class background, but specifically he comes from a family of miners during the miners’ strike of the 1980s. This generates two key areas of conflict in the story:

  The family has no money, food is hard to pay for let alone ballet lessons and auditions.

  Billy’s father and brother have a very strong sense of working–class pride, and loyalty to the cause is considered more important than personal needs and ambition. Billy’s ‘poofy’ ballet dancing is seen as an affront to the dignity of the working man.

  And in this setting, where that dignity is under threat, it’s a much more emotive value and stops the antagonism towards Billy’s dancing being simply inverted snobbery or chauvinist ignorance. And it’s important that we do have sympathy for Billy’s dad, and that would be much harder to achieve in a different setting.

  These masculine values are bolstered by two further details about Billy’s life: that boxing is a family tradition; and that Billy’s mother is dead – without the female influence, the family is governed entirely by masculine values, and any support she may have given Billy is removed.

  Finally, Billy is 11, an age at which he is still dependent on his family and therefore cannot pursue his dream without their support. If he were 15, then this would be a film about him running away to join the ballet. But, at 11, he is dependent and also at an age when he is on the cusp of developing his sexuality, so his interest in ballet triggers concern that he might be gay.

  When watching the film or reading the script, all of this should just seem like character detail, none of it competing with the main conflict in the story, which is the class issue. But it is the detail that actually provides the drama: the obstacles that Billy will have to overcome in order to realise his dream.

  In summary, the main conflict in this story is that Billy comes from the wrong class to be a dancer. The details of his character, situation and world enable the writer to dramatise the conflict in these ways:

  Billy’s internal conflict is his initial perception that dancing is for girls. He gets over this pretty quickly, but it is important that this argument is set up, as it will become the main objection of Billy’s father, Jackie.

  More importantly for Billy, his other internal conflict is his struggle with his sense of family loyalty versus his need to express himself and he’s deliberately set up as a kid who is not particularly rebellious.

  The situational conflicts in the story are the lack of money, the fact that the world of ballet is completely foreign, and that it is literally far away from home. And Billy lives in a community in which cultural pursuits are not valued.

  Finally, Billy’s interpersonal conflicts are with his father and brother, both of whom consider dancing to be for girls or ‘poofs’. He therefore becomes dependent on his ballet teacher, a woman from whom he feels culturally distanced.

  In other words, the writer has maximised the opportunities offered by the idea to provide the internal, situational and interpersonal conflicts that will make it as hard as possible for the character, in this case, to achieve their goal.

  In reading scripts you are looking for the specific details that the writer has used which can gene
rate the drama that the character will have to navigate to achieve their goal, solve their problem or learn their lesson.

  Analysing and developing screenplays requires an ability to assess whether there are enough layers of conflict in the story and, further, that they do feed into one clear central conflict. Quite often they don’t. The protagonist may have many different problems to deal with, but the obstacles and antagonism do not add up to anything consistent.

  Once the dramatic premise has been considered, the next element of the premise section is to think about the thematic conflict in terms of what the story means. It seems that readers are generally happier talking about theme because it’s a discipline we are used to from studying literature and it’s much easier to talk generally about ideas than assess whether those ideas are played out well dramatically. Therefore, it is important to think about the dramatic premise first to stop the temptation to become immersed in the theme and meaning; to do that will fail to address the specific dramatic conflict of the story.

  Thematic conflict

  The story exists in order for the writer to express a view, or several views, on the world. No film can exist without a viewpoint on its subject matter. And it is in the establishment of theme that a film has resonance. It is imperative that the script report questions and analyses what a script is actually about, so that the writer becomes fully aware of the emotional, intellectual and visceral impact of their story. Themes emerge from the conflicts explored within the story, and the meaning of the film is derived from the resolution of the conflict. If the main conflict in the screenplay is unclear, it is likely that the writer’s intended meaning will also be muddled. A film’s meaning can be expressed as a universal ‘truth’ (e.g. love conquers all), personal beliefs or statements of emotional intent. These statements are often disarmingly simple, even for the most intelligent and seemingly complex films.