Screenplay

Screenplay:

Writing The Picture

Copyright

Copyright © 2012 by Robin Russin and William Downs

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any

manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except

in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

ebook ISBN: 978-1-935247-48-7

Cover design by Wade Lageose

Silman-James Press

www.silmanjamespress.com

Los Angeles, CA

Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Acknowledgments

FADE IN

Note on Ebook Version

Preface

PART ONE: THE BASICS

1 How to Impress a Reader

Who Are Those Guys?

What Are They Looking For?

Writing in Style

Final Thoughts

Exercises

2 Format

Formatting and Formatting Software

Setting Up Your Script

Exercises

3 Theme, Meaning and Emotion

Full of Sound and Fury, Signifying Nothing (Yet)

Themes All Right to Me

Write from the Heart

Papa, Don’t Preach

How to Reveal the Theme

Some Consequence Yet Hanging in the Stars

Final Thoughts

Exercises

4 The World of the Story

Through the Looking Glass (Story and World)

The Right (Wo)man at the Right Time in the Right Place

(Character World)

Laughing past the Graveyard (Contrast and Irony)

Show and Tell (World and Exposition)

Been There, Done That (Research and Consistency)

Final Thoughts

Exercises

5 Character

Which Came First, Honey of the Bee?

Geez, You Act like You’re in a Movie

What on Earth Is He Doing Here?

What’s the Situation? (Character and Context)

Turn On the Spotlight (Character Elements)

The Arc or the Covenant (Character Arc vs. Catalytic Character)

Write You Are (Building Characters)

A Piece of Sugar (The Shorthand of Dogs, Cats, Children and

Tucking in Blankets)

Final Thoughts

Exercise

PART TWO: STORY STRUCTURE

6 Historical Approaches to Structure

Structure Strictures

Aristotle and Poetics

Plotto and Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations

Lajos Egri and The Art of Dramatic Writing

Joseph Campbell and the Hero’s Journey

The Three-Act Structure

Automated Story Development

Final Thoughts

Exercises

7 Power and Conflict

May the Force Be With You (Power and Conflict)

The Orchestration of Power and Conflict

Types of Story Conflict

Final Thoughts

Exercises

8 Beats, Scenes and Sequences

Follow the Beat

Making a Scene

Sequences

That’s Another Story (Subplot Sequences)

Final Thoughts

Exercises

9 Scene Cards

It’s in the Cards

Final Thoughts

Exercises

10 Entering the Story

The Terminator: Man vs. Machine

Big Night: Soul vs. Success

Exercises

11 The Structure of Genres

A Moving (Picture) Experience

Courage

Fear and Loathing

The Need to Know

Laughter

Love and Longing

Final Thoughts

Exercises

PART THREE: WRITING

12 Narrative

Keep It Moving!

Write Only What We Can See or Hear

Describing Characters

Describing Locations

Exercises

13 Dialogue

The Role of Dialogue

How Can I Say This? (Dialogue Techniques)

I Was Born in a Log Cabin I Built with My Own Hands...

(Exposition)

Technical Do’s and Don’t’s

For Crying Out Loud!

Final Thoughts

Exercises

14 Rewriting

It’s Great! Now Let Me Fix It

Taking It Apart and Putting It Back Together

Final Thoughts

Exercises

PART FOUR: MARKETING

15 Marketing the Script

The Writers Guild of America

Representation

Where to Find an Agent

Production Companies

Networking

Film Schools

Final Thoughts

Exercise

16 The Pitch

To Pitch or Not to Pitch

Getting in the Door

Final Thoughts

Exercises

PART FIVE: ALTERNATIVES

17 Writing for Television

Writing a Spec

Sitcom Format Guide

Writing Comedy

You Need an Agent

L.A. Is Where You Want to Be

Pitching for Television

A Life in Television

Final Thoughts

18 Writing Webisodes

Webi-Premise

Webi-Structure

Webi-Characters

Webi-Pilot

Webi-Cheap

Webi-Format

Webi-Talent

Webi-Scripts

19 Writing for Video Games

You Are There

First Things First

The Real World: Breaking and Entering

Final Thoughts

FADE OUT

Final Thoughts on Becoming a Screenwriter

Appendix A: Templates

Appendix B: Suggested Reading

Appendix C: A Few Clichés to Avoid like the Plague

Appendix D: Graduate (MFA) Screenwriting Programs

Glossary

About the Authors

Acknowledgments

Lew Hunter, Howard Suber, Richard Walter, Hal Ackerman, Bill

Froug, Stirling Silliphant, Jerzy Antczak and all the others at UCLA

film school, for showing us the way; Steve Peterman, for putting up

with our asking him how to be funny; Derek Burrill, Jeff Kunzler and

Patrick Seitz for helping us navigate the mysteries of video gaming;

Val Stulman, John Shannon and Rob Rinow for being great students

and now teaching us a bit about writing for the web; Lou Anne Wright

for her long months of editing and advice; Todd McCullough for

letting us use his webisode script; Sandra J. Payne, Ken Jones,

Cathlynn Richard Dodson and Rich Burlingham for their careful

reading of the manuscript and thoughtful suggestions, which helped

make this a better book. Barbara Rosenberg, David Hall and Matt Ball

for getting us into this mess in the first place; Michelle Vardeman for

making sure we cleaned it up; and lastly to Gwen Feldman and Jim

Fox at Silman-James Press, for seeing the merit in this book and, more

importantly, publishing it.

R. U. Russin

W. M. Downs

Robert and Adele Russin, for raising me with the belief that I could

live the life of an artist, because they lived it themselves; Sarah Russin

and my kids Olivia and Ben, for putting up with me no matter what;

James and Cookie Goldstone, for being my first and dearest film-world

mentors; my colleagues at the University of California, Riverside; and

Milah Wermer, patron saint of all that is dramatic, ecstatic and

“marvelous!”

Robin

Lou Anne Wright—the love of my life.

Bill

Note on Ebook Version

Be aware, that formatting may vary in the ebook version of this book

dependent upon your reading device and/or your user settings. This

may affect screenplay format examples. The fixed image below is an

example of correct screenplay format, and is detailed in Chapter 2 and

Appendix A.

Preface

“What’s all this business of being a writer? It’s just

putting one word after another.”

—Irving Thalberg

Welcome to the second edition of Screenplay: Writing the Picture.

What’s new? Well, a lot is the same; the principles of great

screenwriting remain the same. We’ve also kept references to classic

films that we consider worth your checking out if you don’t know them

already. But we’ve trimmed references to things that no longer apply

(or exist, for that matter), and included dozens of revised and updated

examples. Newly included are chapters on writing webisodes and

video games, but we no longer include a playwriting chapter because

we’ve now written a complete guide, Naked Playwriting (also

published by Silman-James), which we modestly believe is the best

book on the subject out there, and which should answer all your

playwriting questions.

As we said before, this book is not written by screenwriting gurus.

We are not trying to sell you special formulas, secret methods, tapes,

computer programs or gung-ho three-day seminars. We are not going

to show you how to write a screenplay in twenty-one days or twenty￾one steps. Nor are we going to tell you there is only one true path to

success; we offer no easy how-to formulas. Rather, this is a down-to￾earth guide written by two writers who came from the heartland of

America, moved to Hollywood, were lucky enough to get into UCLA

film school, struggled for years, made many mistakes, wrote every day

and in the end, against all odds, succeeded. Both of us are “produced”

writers (something akin to being “made men” in the Cosa Nostra),

meaning we’ve actually sold screenplays and had movies or television

shows produced from them, and we’ve both made our livings as

writers. And we preach only what we’ve learned and practiced

ourselves—every day. There are no shortcuts in screenwriting, no

magical recipes besides talent, an understanding of the basics and

then some very, very hard work. We wrote this book to help you find

your talent and understand the basics. The hard work is up to you.

We will not cheerlead or sugar-coat how difficult it will be for you—

for anyone—to succeed in writing for “Hollywood.” In fact, we have

some good advice for anyone who isn’t absolutely driven to write

movies or television: think long and hard before you commit yourself

to it. To paraphrase a line from Scent of a Woman, it’s just too damn

hard. Writing itself is too hard; or as Gene Fowler (journalist,

screenwriter and author of the John Barrymore biography Good

Night, Sweet Prince) put it, “Writing is easy. All you do is sit staring at

a blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead.”

And writing for Hollywood is worse. Movies and television are the Big

Game for writers these days, and everyone wants to play. Not that

there aren’t enormous satisfactions and rewards, both artistic and

financial, if you do succeed. There are. But only a tiny fraction of you

will make it. That’s just a fact, and anyone who says different couldn’t

give you directions to Warner Brothers Studios if he were standing on

Warner Boulevard. Of course any- thing really worth doing is hard,

success in any truly challenging endeavor is a long shot, and the fact of

the matter is that you’ll never know whether or not you have what it

takes if you don’t try.

Do you have the talent to succeed? Only time and hard work will

tell. Talent is something neither you nor we have any control over,

anyway, so forget about it. Focus instead on the various techniques

that screenwriters must master in order to write exciting, entertaining,

well-structured screenplays, so that if you do have talent, you can

make the most of it.

That’s what this book is all about. We’ve included detailed chapters

on techniques and fundamentals that many screenwriting books and

gurus gloss over or skip completely. We’ve divided it into five easy-to￾use sections so that you can treat it as a textbook, a reference guide, or

something to read from cover to cover. The first section covers the

basics: who is going to read your script and how to impress them. If

you can’t get by the readers in Hollywood all your effort is for nothing.

You impress readers by giving your script a proper, professional

format, choosing interesting themes, finding the world and developing

effective characters. We’ll show you how.

The second section tackles structure. Rather than trying to sell you

on one theory or approach, we examine storytelling methods from

Aristotle to modern computer programs. We take you through the

principles of power and conflict and how they grow from scenes to

sequences to a well-structured screenplay. We include chapters on

how to design your screenplay using scene cards and how to structure

the beginning of your screenplay so that it grabs everyone’s attention.

We finish the structure section with an advanced chapter on genres.

Each genre arises from certain emotional sources and expectations,

and each has its own unique demands. Identify these and you’ll solve

many of your structural challenges before you begin.

The third section reveals the nuts and bolts of writing the script.

We detail techniques to help you write strong, visual narrative and

powerful dialogue. After you have pounded through the first draft,

what follows naturally is rewriting. How do you know what needs to be

fixed, saved or thrown away? How many drafts are needed? How can

you test what you’ve written? When is your script ready for the

market? We give real-world methods and advice to answer all these

questions.

Marketing is the fourth section of the book. It’s a sad fact, but most

screenplays that are submitted—after the months of brain-wracking

effort that went into writing them—get rejected. Once your screenplay

is done, you must plunge into the market and self-promote. We show

you how to approach agents and producers, take meetings, do pitches

—in short, how to start the process of becoming a professional. Is any

of it easy? No, it’s all really, really hard. But we’ll give you the tools you

need to attempt it.

The last section of this book covers related fields, including writing

for television, webisodes and video games.

In short, this book is intended to help you choose, develop, and

perfect your stories, avoid common mistakes, and get you up to speed

as a professional screenwriter so that you’ll look like you’ve already got

a dozen screenplays under your belt rather than only one or two.

What’s more, you’ll have some idea of what to do next. It is said that

people make their own luck by searching out opportunity and being