Screen Writing What You Say Is What They Get

By Author: Walter Stewart
Total Articles: 37
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There are no rules in screen writing; however, as in jazz, there are certain things that happen a lot. If you want to be a successful screen writer then it is beholden on you to at least be familiar with these rules even if you choose to ignore them. Apropos of nothing, I posted on Twitter recently describing how, whilst cycling around Amsterdam earlier that afternoon, I wandered into a record shop in the Jordaan district where Guatemalan singer Gaby Moreno was performing a solo acoustic set. Now, Gaby is young, talented and original; she has a strong and confident voice in all senses of the word. Her music has elements of pop, soul, Latin and jazz (have a look on YouTube before purchasing an album). Clearly she has these styles under her belt however, the way that they are delivered is original and commanding, and you find yourself wanting to hear more partly because of the elegant interpretation of these styles, but more because of the original stories that are being articulated over the familiar riffs and phrases.
Why mention this in a post on screen writing? Because, dear reader, it's not what you say but how you say ...
... it. It's not the story, but how you articulate it. It is your voice that matters.
Give the audience what it wants, but not in the way they expect...
This is excellent advice from Robert McKee which he typically expands upon in his books and seminars on story technique. Tease the audience with your erudition, and your knowledge of the form and history of film writing, but in the end you have to tell the story. It's not for nothing that McKee focuses on the word story. Story is what we are talking about when we talk about film writing. Other forms of cinema exist, but not in Hollywood and not on the big screen on Saturday night.
What all of the books that I have suggested in the bookstore section of Manifesto Books have in common is a recognition and indeed reverence for the concept of story. Paul Schrader talks about the vital importance of the story telling craft in the context of film writing. It is the fundamental principle that underpins all great or indeed competent screen writing. Schrader talk about camp fire story telling. If an idea is going to work you should be able to tell it as a camp fire story. You can dress it up and switch it round but the core story must be capable of retelling as an engaging, not to say, gripping tale around the burning embers in the dying light of the evening. And this is from a man who wrote about transcendental style in cinema; grasp the theory by all means but tell the story in the end.
Schrader directed The Comfort of Strangers with dispassionate meticulousness but that meticulousness was applied to a perfectly distilled story. Based on a superbly crafted novella by Ian McEwan (of the same name), transformed into a perfect blueprint of a screen play by Harold Pinter the film becomes an essay in audio visual story telling. This vision is of course enhanced by the music of Angelo Badalamenti, the clothes of Georgio Armani, the canals and architecture of Venice and the sublime acting of Natasha Richardson, Rupert Everett, Helen Mirren and Christopher Walken. As you would expect of Pinter the dialogue is crisp and minimal. So we can recall Norma Desmond's prescient line in Sunset Boulevard - "We didn't need dialogue. We had faces." This is why Comfort of Strangers needs this quartet of great actors: they have to tell much of the story essentially with their faces, their body language and their silences. Incidentally, there is a brilliant story where Walken told Schrader that he didn't need to light his face from below to look evil, he could do that on his own.
I mentioned Norma Desmond because it's my contention that Sunset Boulevard and The Comfort of Strangers share much in common in terms of plot structure. Wilder's classic legacy also features a strong quartet performance: Gloria Swanson, William Holden, Erich von Stroheim and the young Nancy Olson. Olson's Betty Schaefer character is a more significant component of the quartet than is immediately noticeable on first viewing. I love the resonances caused by the fact that all four are creative practitioners in the film making process but, significantly, in different ways not at all where they want to be in this creative process at this time in their lives: they are all displaced from their rightful position in the natural order in their own minds. Nevertheless, despite all this cleverness and interweaving of psychological threads it all comes down to a classic whodunit in the end. Watch the two films together and see what you think.
I recommend also watching and reading Chinatown which was written by Robert Towne, directed by the infamous Roman Polanski and stars Jack Nickolson and Faye Dunaway. It is a brilliantly evocative neo-noire masterpiece. It too captures the tawdry yet glamorous luxury and decadence of Los Angeles in all its claustrophobic glory. What is very clever and epitomises Polanski's (and Towne's) consummate cinematic craft is the presentation of this claustrophobia. A lesser director when given these beautiful Southern Californian vistas would have lapped them up. Instead, we are given shot after shot of glimpses through rear view mirrors, through bandages, through rippling pools and through darkened sunglasses. Everything is covered and hidden. Why? To emphasise and resonate the psychological fissures that are building up in the inter-relationships between the characters. This story too, has a resonance with the quartet format mentioned earlier, but to say how would spoil the film for those for whom this delight is still in store. And from a writer's perspective, still, for me, the finest last line in a movie.

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