Reading Screenplays Read online

  To analyse thematic conflict try to:

  State clearly in the report what you consider the themes, or potential themes, to be.

  Is it possible to articulate what the story is actually saying about this theme? (e.g. the theme may be ‘fame’, and the meaning of the story may be ‘fame corrupts’).

  Are the ideas in this film likely to resonate with an audience?

  Are there elements of the screenplay that create confusion by undermining the theme/meaning?

  Are events manipulated skilfully to convey the meaning, or is the message delivered heavy–handedly?

  It can be useful to offer a discussion of how the theme works in tandem with the chosen genre. For example, it would be a problem if the film set itself up as a romantic comedy but then became thematically preoccupied with something other than love.

  The last point to consider is whether these themes will resonate with the film’s intended audience. Effectively, the key questions are: what is at stake for the audience, either emotionally or intellectually, in this story, as suggested by the themes? How is the writer intending to engage the audience in the story?

  Should the audience want the character to solve their problem or achieve their desire? And, if so, how is the specific situation of the character made universal? Whilst we may hope that Billy gets offered a place at the Royal Ballet School, the reason that it matters to audiences is because he is talented. That talent should be supported and recognised is a universal value.

  To conclude the section on premise: in essence, is the idea going to take us into dramatically interesting situations and say something thematically interesting about the way people are?

  Kevin Loader

  Free Range Films

  Selected producer credits: Wuthering Heights, Nowhere Boy, In the Loop, The History Boys

  When I use readers I am far more interested in the summary and the judgement – including the reader’s reservations – than I am in getting a detailed plot summary. If the reader thinks the script is worth reading, I’ll read the script. If I want to put it into development or meet the writer, I’ll read the script. There has been almost no occasion I can recall when a (sometimes far too) detailed plot summary is useful. This goes for reporting on books too!

  If I’m reading a script I’ve commissioned then it would have to be a complete car crash for me not to give the writer another draft. If after a second go they still aren’t getting to the vision we all discussed, I’ll reluctantly abandon. But abandonment is such a big step – as is replacing the writer. It should be a last resort. The best thing a writer can do if they realise they are not delivering is to do another draft on their own dime – and quickly!

  Sometimes I pass on a script simply because I don’t want to spend four or five years of my life imagining and living in the world it creates. It’s a huge commitment to make a film, and you don’t get to make many; as I get older, I do increasingly feel that my choices have to be carefully made. On the other hand, I need to pay my mortgage too, so I will consider projects that I think are feasible, even if they’re not necessarily something I’d have thought of, if I like the writer and feel I can do it justice. Time rarely is a factor: we all know it takes years to make a film – there’s often no pressing deadline, unlike in television.

  STRUCTURE

  Once the idea of the story has been assessed, the report moves on to examining how well that story is being told for the screen. The structure isn’t the idea of the story, then; the structure is the order in which the writer has chosen to tell it. And the choices the writer has made should be informed by, and conscious of, the way audiences receive dramatic narrative.

  Many of you reading this book will be familiar with the basic three–act structure model that informs most screenwriting. Some writers vehemently reject all structural paradigms, suggesting that they restrict creativity, and others embrace them slavishly, which brings its own problems. The best advice when analysing structure is to think about how information is given to the audience; or, phrased another way, is the audience given everything that they need to know at the right time in order to be engaged by the story, understand what’s going on and piece together the meaning?

  That said, story structure is complex and, obviously, different genres have different requirements; it is therefore important for script readers and writers to keep studying it. Not to study the theory books but to dissect screenplays that work so as to build up a very solid understanding of how the audience’s response to a story is successfully managed by a good writer.

  There are key structural terms; ‘inciting incidents’, ‘act breaks’ and ‘turning points’, and it is crucial, as a reader, that you know both what they mean and why they matter, which is what this chapter aims to clarify.

  It is important to offer feedback in a report to the writer with the assumption that they understand the structural terms. However, the task of reporting on the structure of the script is not to give an account of where the acts break and where the turning points are. That approach ensures that the report only offers a commentary on the structure rather than an assessment of how effective the current structure of the screenplay is.

  The principles of screenplay structure

  Fundamentally, the three–act structure works because it appeals to the way we receive stories. Film can be understood as part of an oral tradition of storytelling, because we effectively sit at the feet of the storyteller and receive the story in one continuous sitting within a limited time frame. Movies aren’t designed for us to leave and come back to in the way that novels are, or even theatre is, with its literal act breaks. Because of the way we consume film stories it’s imperative that the filmmaker holds our attention, and that’s where the turning points come in – our interest starts to wane and so something more needs to happen to take the story in a different direction, or infuse it with greater tension so that we remain hooked to the end.

  The most helpful way of thinking about structure is to be conscious of what is going on between the story on the screen and the audience. Is the audience being given the information needed to stay interested, to care about characters, to feel the tension and make sense of the story?

  Act one – making it matter

  The job of the first act is to make the story matter, to engage the audience in the character’s predicament and to show what is at stake. It should:

  Establish the tone of the film

  The sooner the audience knows the kind of story they are watching, the quicker they relax and settle in for the ride. This is the reason that action films so often start with an action sequence that stands alone from the main story; its purpose is both to tell us what kind of film we are watching, and to deliver some thrills and excitement, thus buying the writer time to set up the proper story without boring us.

  Scripts that deal in a particular tone, like black comedy, need to establish this quickly, and it can be really helpful for the reader to note the tone – or, more importantly, note where the tone seems to change. Black comedy, for example, often enables the audience to enjoy a story in which we treat death with irreverence, so something has to happen in the first act that signals that death is not being treated with the usual reverence; otherwise the audience won’t be able to understand and enjoy the main story in the way it is intended.

  Set up the world of the story

  Each of the main characters should be introduced in relation to each other and to their world; the main conflict that the story is dealing in should be established and the groundwork for the themes of the film should be laid.

  Contain an inciting incident that kicks the story off

  The best definition of this is ‘the stranger who comes into town’. It should be easy to identify what or who that stranger is, remembering that it can be as simple as a desire or an opportunity, as well as an actual person that upsets the usual order of the story–world.

  And, finally, the first act ends at a turning point at which a dr
amatic question is raised, which should inform the action throughout the rest of the story.

  It is important to remember that the ‘stranger’, whatever or whoever that may be, is not the beginning of the story. The beginning of the story is the decision by a character to do something (which can include not doing anything). What makes this the end of act one is the audience’s understanding that this is a point of no return. It is no longer possible to carry on as things were.

  For example, Lester in American Beauty sees Angela cheerleading and right there and then decides he wants her. He could carry on wanting her for the rest of his life but it would be a fairly dull story. The fact that he calls Angela on the phone, and she and Jane figure out it was Lester, means this fantasy has moved into his real world. It is an irrevocable choice of behaviour and elicits reactions and responses that will need resolving.

  Juno’s situation at the start of the film is ‘pregnant’, so discovering this is not the inciting incident of this story. The inciting incident is the decision not to have the abortion, and the end of the first act is identifying Mark and Vanessa as the parents. A lot more people are about to be involved in this story. Had Juno had the abortion, life would have returned to normal with only Leah and Bleeker the wiser.

  First acts should be as long as they need to be to deliver the relevant information. The basic principle is that it is about a quarter of the film’s length, although different genres will need more or less.

  Most early draft scripts have an overlong first act, and the probable cause is the writer setting up the world of the story in more detail than will be needed to understand the film. An audience only needs to know what is going to be relevant to the main conflict, plus an understanding of what the character is up against.

  By the end of the first act, the audience should know who the story is about, why we are watching them, and they should also be beginning to care about their fate.

  There are three ways that a writer can engage an audience with the character’s situation and help make it matter:

  Empathy

  The writer can generate empathy by placing the audience in the character’s shoes and allowing both the character and the audience to discover what’s at stake together so that the audience becomes emotionally engaged as they do. For example, we’re with Billy when he is first challenged to join the ballet class and we’re with Lester when he first sees Angela.

  Dramatic irony

  Alternatively, a writer can engage the audience in the character’s situation by using dramatic irony – which means that the audience knows more than the character does. This choice often has the effect of making an audience feel protective towards a character – we can’t turn away until we know that they know what we know they’re up against.

  This is routinely the case in some kinds of thrillers, in which the protagonist remains oblivious to the true nature of the threat against them until sometimes as late as the end of the second act, but the tension comes from the audience knowing what the antagonist is doing.

  Intrigue

  A writer can intrigue an audience by showing the character doing something that is not yet clear or understood. However, this is the most risky approach. Curiosity alone is very rarely enough to engage the audience. It is the equivalent of someone saying ‘I have a secret that I’m not going to tell you’. It is hard to sustain interest in that secret for more than a moment. Curiosity coupled with a way of unnerving the audience is more likely to generate engagement. The kinds of stories that do this, and have to do this, are suspense thrillers and political thrillers. Red Road is a great example of this method of story telling.

  In the film Red Road, Jackie works as a CCTV operator. Each day she watches over a small part of her world, watching and protecting the people living their lives under her gaze. The knowledge that Jackie has of the intimate and private way in which we behave when we believe we are not being watched is deeply unnerving; the cleaner dancing, the teenagers making out. This world is suitably intriguing to keep the audience engaged whilst we learn about the reappearance of a man on her monitor that Jackie thought she would never see again, and never wanted to see again. It would be harder to keep our interest in a mysterious past event without this setting.

  Whichever way the writer is choosing to engage the audience in the characters and their story–world, the most important job of the first act is to end by raising a clear dramatic question. A dramatic question is the specific question that this story is going to address. For example, at the end of the first act of American Beauty the dramatic question is raised: will Lester get to live his fantasy and shag Angela? This informs the drama of the second act. However, as this course of action is unlikely to solve Lester’s mid–life crisis, the audience raises another question, which will be discussed shortly.

  The best dramatic questions are active, meaning that the answer will be in the form of a yes or no outcome. Will he get the girl? Will the murderer be caught?

  One of the problems with early draft scripts is that the dramatic question is a passive one. Passive dramatic questions are those that begin with ‘why’. Why did he kill himself? Why does she have to move on? Why does he have to find his real father? The problem with questions beginning with ‘why’ is that it is much harder to make the audience care. The writer, probably without realising, is denying the audience the opportunity to emotionally invest in an outcome. The writer is effectively asking the audience to be the passive recipient of the presentation of a character or a situation.

  When preparing feedback on structure, it is important to write a decent paragraph on each act. Part of the discussion about the first act should consider whether a clear dramatic question has been raised and the report should suggest what that dramatic question seems to be. It is so important because the dramatic question should inform the development of the drama throughout the second act and be clearly answered at the climax of the film.

  Be careful of being too prescriptive or critical about the dramatic question or, indeed, the lack of one. It is very rare for an early draft script to clearly present a good, clear dramatic question – however, as a reader, it should be possible to identify the general territory that the dramatic question is in, and then it can be very useful to write that in the report and indicate how it needs to be clarified. If the dramatic question is emerging as a passive one, it can be useful to pose to the writer the possibility of re–organising the material so that the question becomes active.

  An example of this was a script that opened with a young man going through the increasingly horrifying routine of the things you do when you are going to kill yourself. At the end of the first act, when the character is definitely dead and his mum is about to come home, the writer raised the question: ‘Why has John killed himself?’ So far, in 20–odd pages of screenplay, the events have been a bit distasteful, we haven’t seen anything of John that may endear him to us, nor met his mother, and it is surprisingly easy not to care why John did it. However, a shift in the dramatic question to: ‘Will John’s mother find out why John killed himself?’ does an extraordinary thing. It changes the main character to one who is living not dead, it puts in a mission and a quest and therefore gives the story forward momentum, it creates a pathos because the character the audience is now being asked to relate to is going through something unbearable.

  In terms of structure, the passive dramatic question asking ‘why’ generally requires a lot of backstory to come into the present of the film, which can mean an over–reliance on expositional dialogue or flashback. The active dramatic question should automatically ground the story of the film in the present. So, even though it may throw the writer of a script with a passive dramatic question into momentary chaos, it can be one of the most helpful notes in the script report.

  The other thing to bear in mind is that, whilst the dramatic question should inform the drama throughout the story, and it is important that the script is consistent in exploring that question, the questio
n can be refined as the stakes are raised.

  So, for example, in Billy Elliot the dramatic question is first raised as: will Billy pursue ballet dancing? This later becomes: will Billy audition for the Royal Ballet School in London? It is absolutely fine for later events in the story to refine the dramatic question this way, but there must be consistency in the question. It is quite often the case that a reader needs to work backwards in order to articulate what dramatic question the first act should be posing and where it might be failing to deliver that.

  It is quite useful to pause around page 30 and ask: what does the audience know about this character and the story–world so far? What question is being raised?

  When there is a discrepancy between what the character wants and what the character needs, it is likely that two questions will be raised: one resulting from the character’s actions and decisions and one which the audience supplies.

  As previously noted, the end of the first act of American Beauty is when Lester calls Angela on the phone. In terms of Lester’s desire, the dramatic question is raised – will he get Angela, the object of his affection? However, it is obviously not as straightforward as that. Because, from what we have seen of Lester’s life so far, it is unlikely that shagging Angela is going to solve his problem. His actual problem is his mid–life crisis. The first scene of the script shown in the final cut of the film is of Jane being recorded by Ricky. She says, ‘I need a father who’s a role model, not some horny geekboy who’s going to spray his shorts whenever I bring a girlfriend home from school.’ (Filmfour Screenplay, 2000, p.1)