Introduction

In 1956, Albert Lamorisse wrote the screenplay for “The Red Balloon,” the classic film about the friendship between a boy and the magical balloon that he finds on the streets of Paris. The film runs 34 minutes. It contains exactly nine words of dialogue. It received an Academy Award in the category of Best Original Screenplay.

Forty years later, Kenneth Branagh wrote the screenplay for Hamlet. The film includes every syllable, in more or less original order, of Shakespeare’s four-hour play. Branagh was nominated for an Academy Award. Shakespeare was not.

Thinking about these films, you can draw one of two conclusions. One, when it comes to screenwriting, the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences are a confused lot. Or, two, there’s more to screenplays and screenwriting than appearances may first suggest. (Hint: Number two is right.)

What Is a Screenplay?

At its simplest and most obvious, a screenplay is the written basis for a film. Looking for a definition that offers something more in the way of insight, many filmmakers turn to metaphor.

Some filmmakers speak of the screenplay as a road map. This is useful because it encourages people to think of film stories as journeys, literal or figurative, which they usually are.

Others speak of the screenplay as a blueprint. This architectural image is helpful because it emphasizes structure, the idea that a film is something designed and constructed.

Still others speak of the screenplay as a sales prospectus for a future product: the finished film. This somewhat mercenary view has reality on its side. Making your film requires money, and the way to acquire that money is by giving investors and benefactors a clear idea of the story you intend to tell and the way you intend to tell it.

Not coincidentally, each of these metaphors—road map, blueprint, prospectus—is a guide or a plan for something else, suggesting the provisional nature of the screenplay. So in defining this thing called a screenplay, you can first say that, even when the writing stops, the script is never completed in the way that a novel or a poem is.

A novelist may revise obsessively, and, even though the language and the story may improve, the work remains a collection of words, sentences, paragraphs, and chapters. The same can be said for a poet and his poem, measured in feet, lines, and stanzas.

A screenplay is different. However brilliant, it’s always in a state of becoming, forever on the way to being something else—a film. You can admire a cocoon for its marriage of function and form, but ultimately it’s the butterfly that will make its way in the world.

What’s Important in a Screenplay?

Judging from the success of Albert Lamorisse and “The Red Balloon,” dialogue isn’t at the top of the list, although nearly every screenplay contains some of it and some contain a lot of it.

The relative unimportance of dialogue might surprise some audiences because dialogue is often the aspect of a film that people remember most. Who hasn’t walked out of a movie theater, saying, “Wasn’t that line great when she said...?” Some lines of dialogue are so memorable that they become a part of the cultural landscape. (Oh, behave!) The relative unimportance of dialogue might also surprise more than a few professional screenwriters, who regard dialogue as their one and only opportunity to communicate directly with the audience.

Alfred Hitchcock, a director who had more than a passing knowledge of film narrative, once said, “Dialogue should simply be a sound among other sounds, just something that comes out of the mouths of people whose eyes tell the story in visual terms.” In other words, dialogue is secondary to the main business of film: visual communication.

This leads to the second point that you can make about this thing called a screenplay. It’s primarily an exercise in visual storytelling.

But visual storytelling isn’t simply a matter of shot selection and composition. In fact, for the screenwriter, it’s anything but that. Only the most inexperienced screenwriter includes camera directions in a screenplay because such things are the responsibility of the director and the director of photography once the film is in production. Stories whose meaning is largely conveyed through images, and scenes whose impact is achieved within an interesting visual context, are both the core of the screenplay and the focus of the screenwriter’s craft.

The fundamentally visual nature of film narrative has led to an interesting paradox. The screenwriter must fully imagine the film that he’s writing. But—and here’s where the paradox comes in—only a small part of what the screenwriter imagines should actually appear in the screenplay, which must evoke a sense of place and character rather than catalogue it down to the minutest detail. What’s more, only a small part of what appears in the screenplay will ever make it to the screen in anything like its original form. Locations, casting, performances, editing, and cinematography all conspire to create a film much different from the one that first plays in the screenwriter’s head.

The Screenwriter’s Skill Set

A novelist writes novels, a poet writes poems, a playwright writes plays, and a screenwriter writes...screens?

Well, as a matter of fact, yes. Unique among writers is the screenwriter, someone whose work has less to do with applying lessons learned in English Composition I than with translating cinematic ideas into words. To accomplish this, a screenwriter, like any writer, needs a facility with language. But that’s not the most important tool in the screenwriter’s toolbox.

A screenwriter must above all be a storyteller. In our world today, there are many kinds of storytellers: novelists, playwrights, journalists, songwriters, even advertising copywriters. What separates the screenwriter from the other storytellers is a clear visual sense, an understanding of the power of images, which in turn fuels the cinematic imagination.

Of course, putting a story across to an audience requires more than images alone. There must be a cohesive plot and compelling characters. For that, a screenwriter must have a command of screenwriting technique.

Technique comes from a combination of talent and knowledge—knowledge of people, knowledge of narrative, knowledge of film history. Among the best ways to deepen your knowledge of film history generally and cinematic narrative specifically is to study the great films.

Unfortunately, too many aspiring filmmakers are interested in only recent films—recent American films, to be exact. This is extremely limiting, resulting in a kind of artistic inbreeding. The work of any artist in any artistic form is ultimately an amalgam of influences. The wider the sphere of influences, the more interesting the work.

Finally, screenwriters must have a collaborative spirit. Filmmaking is a partnership of a large number of people working with some fairly complex machines, and the responsibilities of each member of the production team can often be fluid. If in blocking a scene, for example, a director adds a line or two of dialogue not in the original screenplay, is he directing or writing? If the screenwriter creates a scene that, in its limitation of space and time, can be shot in only one way, is he writing or directing?

For professionals involved in film production, such distinctions are academic. As the screenwriter and director Robert Towne observed, “You call the writer the writer, the actor the actor, and the director the director. But they are really working together in a way that melds their respective jobs.”

For a production to succeed, people do what needs to be done when it needs to be done. This takes flexibility and “film sense”—an intimate familiarity with the filmmaking process. It also takes quick-wittedness, especially when the camera is waiting to roll and egos and money are at stake. At times like these, the screenwriter must be a “down range thinker.” (That’s range as in artillery.) He must be someone who can remain composed and creative, even as the world seems to be exploding around him

As an aspiring writer, you have to ask yourself if you’re truly comfortable with the layers of technology and levels of interpretation that come between the work that you do at your computer and the final product that the audience sees on the screen. If not, if you’re looking for a more direct relationship with your audience, there are many forms of writing other than screenwriting that permit a one-on-one relationship. If, on the other hand, you’re willing to accept the challenges unique to writing film, you’ll have the opportunity to tell stories found in no other art form and at no other time in history.

Of course, you may consider yourself not only an aspiring screenwriter but also an aspiring director, producer, or cinematographer—or perhaps some combination. Well, for you, the demands of film, as well as its power, are already very clear. Still, before you can direct or produce or shoot your movie, you first need to write it.

So let’s get started.