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Screenwriting — the primer
The only department whose finished work is a set of instructions rather than a piece of the film.
SCR · Development · 185 lessons · 53h 55m
What it actually is
A screenplay is not a book about a film and it is not the film written down. It is a proposal, addressed to about two hundred people who will each read it looking for their own job in it, and priced by the page — one page, roughly one minute, roughly ten thousand pounds of somebody else's money. Almost every convention in screenwriting exists because of that sentence.
This is why the format is so rigid and so strange. A screenplay is a technical document dressed as prose. The capitalisation, the white space, the refusal to describe what a character is thinking — none of it is style, and none of it is there to make the read pleasant. It is there so a first assistant director can break the thing down into a schedule, and so a reader can estimate the film's length by weighing it.
The part that is genuinely hard has nothing to do with any of that. It is that a screenplay has to work as a piece of writing for the people reading it, and as a set of blueprints for the people building it, and these two jobs pull in opposite directions on nearly every line. A description that reads beautifully often shoots badly. A description that shoots perfectly often reads like furniture assembly.
What is still being argued about
Live disagreements between people who know what they are doing. You will find confident advice on both sides of each.
- Whether structure is discovered or imposed — One camp holds that three acts, a midpoint and a low point are observations about how audiences actually process a story — that the shape was found, not invented, and that it turns up in Sophocles because it works. The other holds that the beat sheets sold in books are a sales convention of the late-twentieth-century American studio, that most of world cinema ignores them, and that teaching them to beginners produces a generation of scripts that hit their marks and mean nothing. Both camps have a shelf of films to point at, which is why the argument does not end.
- How much of the film belongs on the page — Some writers put the camera in the script — angles, cuts, movement — on the grounds that they are describing a film and the reader needs to see it. Others treat any mention of the camera as trespassing into two other departments and a reliable marker of an amateur. The compromise most working writers reach is that you may control what the audience notices and in what order, but you may not name the lens.
- Whether it can be taught at all — The teachable half is real: format, structure, scene economy, how to enter a scene late and leave early. The other half is judgement about people, and the honest answer from most people who teach this is that it is developed by reading scripts and writing bad ones rather than by instruction. Be suspicious of anybody selling a method who cannot say which part of it they think is unteachable.
On the day
On the day, the screenplay is the only document that every single person on the crew has read. That is its real power and its real danger: an ambiguity you left on page forty is about to be resolved by eleven people independently, in eleven different ways, at considerable expense.
Where to start
- Story Structure — It is the largest body of teaching here and the one that makes everything else legible. Watch several, from people who disagree with each other — the disagreement is the education.
- Dialogue — The most-attempted and least-taught part of the craft, and the fastest way to make a first script read as a first script.
- Rewriting — Almost nobody starts here and almost everybody should. The first draft is material; this is where the film is.
- The Writing Life — The part about actually finishing things, which is the constraint that stops more scripts than talent does.
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