Screenwriting Fundamentals

The Art and Craft of Visual Writing

Irv Bauer, Vimi Bauer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317214137
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film Screenwriting

Screenwriting Fundamentals: The Art and Craft of Visual Writing takes a step-by-step approach to screenwriting, starting with a blank page and working through each element of the craft. Written in an approachable anecdote-infused style that's full of humor, Bauer shows the writer how to put the pieces together, taking the process of screenwriting out of the cerebral and on to the page. Part One of the book covers character, location, time-frame and dialogue, emphasizing the particularity in writing for a visual medium. Part Two of the book focuses on the narrative aspect of screenwriting. Proceeding incrementally from the idea and story outline, through plotting and writing the treatment, the workshop-in-a-book concludes with writing the First Draft.

• A unique emphasis on the visual elements of storytelling because the camera is always present—the screenplay must act as a guide for the director and the editor.

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• A "workshop in a book" approach that walks the reader step-by-step through a screenplay—focusing on character, location, time frame, visual components, and transitions—with plenty of exercises that generate material for the narrative writing process.

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• A process-oriented approach, combined with a lighthearted tone and approachable style, that allows the reader to ease into the daunting task of writing a First Draft and takes them all the way through to the end— First Draft in hand.

Part I

The Gathering Phase

One
Character, Location, Time Frame

When you are working in the real world, you may start with a rough idea. You may start with a situation that seems worthy. You may start with a commission for a story and be given the premise. If you’re lucky, you’ll start with a character that has tickled your interest. Whatever the case, when you find your character, you will find your story—not the other way round. Character is of prime importance because it is the characters of our imagination that we evolve, that we create, that carry OUR ideas … our ideas, alive, to the audience.

These characters deliver our message, make our arguments, present our puzzles, and give voice to the humor, drama, perplexity, and mystery of what it means to be human. Our characters allow us to make our, the writer’s, concerns and insights theirs, the audience’s. Creatures of our imagination and human research, they are our representatives, our conduits. As such, they must be believable, interesting throughout, and do what we need them to do so the audience will understand, in the way that we want them to understand, our reference points, at any time in the story. They are going to walk around and say the things that we put in their mouths to say. If the audience cares about your characters, you will engage them and they will follow you for two hours. If your characters are weak, no matter how dynamic the action on the screen is, the audience may follow you, or leave you, but they certainly will not care.

So character will lead you to story—not the other way around. A lot of writers take the opposite approach, and the script reflects it: a situation, pieced together, with no emotional logic running through it. Plot-heavy to justify an idea without the underlying driving force of character that audiences can connect to. We are humans, so we respond to humans: humans within situations, human beings within a story. It is the people, the characters in a story, that we respond to. Their trials, their emotions, their pursuits, the complications in their lives. Our own lives are full of those things, so why not our characters’? Makes sense. We borrow from ourselves and from those around us all the time to write our characters.

For the purpose of learning the craft, which is what we are doing now, we are starting from a blank page, no previously thought-of ideas. I caution you because I know how tempting it can be. However, bringing preconceived ideas with you will only get in your way and impede the learning process. If you have ideas, which no doubt you do, set them aside for now. After you have learned the process, you will have the tools and know what to do with those ideas, how to fulfill them. You can never have too many ideas.

We writers all have different backgrounds. Different educations. Different likes and dislikes and personality traits. We have different family backgrounds. Some of us are outgoing; some of us are quiet. We are different, and out of that difference comes our own individual work. Our own inner being is our best guide, and it is what distinguishes one writer from another. Trust it. Respect it. Train it. Begin to train that inner being to bring out the best writer in you. Later on you will recognize how your own individuality feeds and enriches your work.

The Arbitrary Character

So how do you begin? How do you begin a character sketch? How do you approach the idea of “character”? What do you have to know? What should you think about?

I am asking these questions so you will then know what to ask yourself. What should you be concerned with when contemplating character? What do you write down? Very important.

I mentioned the American novelist Joan Didion in the Introduction, quoting her husband John Dunne, also a novelist, saying, “Making a note as and when it comes to you is the difference between writing and not writing.” You are writers. Writers write. Yes, you play in your head. But you write it all down on the page. So what do you have to write down to let your character, the character you are now going to write about, live and breathe and speak and function in his own or her own inimitable way?

Writers I’ve worked with have often asked me, “Irv, do you do the exercises that you give us?” That’s a fair question. My answer is, “Sometimes.” Sometimes I do them, depending upon the needs, depending upon the material. And sometimes I don’t do them. But always … I always do the character exercise.

To introduce you to the specifics of character, I’d like to tell you about something that happened to me a few years ago in Los Angeles. There was a major entertainment-film lawyer who had been kind to me. He liked my work. He had written a few letters for me, drawn up a contract for me, he hadn’t charged me the going rate, sometimes he didn’t charge me at all, and he’d introduce me to people. He called me one day and said, “Irv, I need you. I need you to help me with a client.”

Now the circumstances of that moment were interesting because I had just come back from Seattle where I had been Playwright in Residence at the University of Washington. I took that job for six months because I didn’t know anybody in Seattle and I knew that the phone wouldn’t be ringing. There was a play I had been working on that I had done my prewriting phase for over a long gestation period and was now ready to write. It was a play that, as a playwright and being Jewish, I knew I had to write one day. It was about the Babi Yar massacre of 34,000 Jewish men, women, and children by the Nazis on the outskirts of Kiev during WWII. I knew that I needed focus and concentration, and my whole work commitment in Seattle was two workshops: an undergraduate Playwriting workshop and a graduate-level Adaptation workshop. So I wrote this play. It was probably one of the hardest things I ever wrote in my life. The day I finished the play, I was overcome with a flood of tears that wouldn’t stop.

As I mentioned, I had just got back to New York from Seattle, and this lawyer called from California and said, “Irv, ya gotta help me.” He gave me a rough idea of the subject matter and sent me material. The subject matter was Josef Mengele, the infamous SS doctor who performed medical experiments in the death camps in Auschwitz during WWII. I knew I couldn’t go there again. The producer had announced it in a full back-page ad in Variety. Barbed wire, chimneys, bayonets, babies. Mengele’s demonic face, the ugly face of the Holocaust, glaring at us. I responded with an immediate “No.”

The idea was like an itch at the back of my mind. There was a job from another producer that was waiting for a green light but looked precarious at best. Like everyone else, I had bills to pay. I also knew that the project my lawyer had called about would end up in the hands of another writer and would likely become “The Holocaust in Disneyland.” I thought through how I could approach the subject and called my lawyer in LA and told him I’d do it. “But, I won’t do the concentration camps, I won’t do the experimentation on babies, I won’t do all of that stuff. What I will do is: I’ll frame it as an action/adventure. I’ll frame it as five people who go to Uruguay, Brazil, wherever, because there is an old man there that they think may be Mengele. They’ll bring him out to the World Court …” What I would write is the story of why these five people go on this mission to find this old man. All of their logic and all of the emotional and dramatic reasons that compel each of the five characters to go on this mission. We learn of their private journeys as a parallel to the adventure of getting the old man out. The lawyer put the producer in touch with me. He had been told of my conditions. The producer called, and I said, “If you want to do it the way I see it, then I’ll do it.” And he said, “Oh, yes, yes!” Truth is I could’ve said, “We’ll do it on a basketball court …” and he wouldn’t have blinked an eye. He was a fellow with money, smitten by movies, but hadn’t a clue.

Character Leads to Story

Now, I had nothing to go on. Nothing at all. All I had was five disparate people. Nameless, identity-less people. Five characters in search of a story. So to start, I did the character exercise, the way I always start working on a project. Contractually, I had three months. It took me six weeks of the three months to do all five character sketches, and by the end of that prewriting period, I had the whole story. I had 5, 10, 15 pages for each character. Character took me to story. By the time I had investigated and fleshed out each of the characters to that degree, I was pointed in the direction of story.

I tell you this because it proves out the way that I have worked and what’s been successful for me. The other reason, and the relevant one, is that in working on that particular character exercise, a scene materialized that I hadn’t really thought of as a scene while doing the exercise. As an exercise, it was a laundry list. The fact is that when I got to the point in writing the script where a particular character comes into the narrative, the character laundry list suggested a scene that was an appropriate and engaging way to get the information out. That is when I decided to use it, and I built around the exercise that was written as a laundry list. The scene effectively illustrates what is necessary in creating a character.

There are five characters that make up the group that go to South America. There’s also another man in London who is the Control. He’s the person who puts the team together. He’s the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• EDITOR’S NOTE
• FOREWORD BY MICHAEL RADFORD
• INTRODUCTION—ON BEING A WRITER
• PART I The Gathering Phase
• PART II The Narrative Arc
• PROTECTING YOUR SCRIPT
• NOTES TO MY WRITERS
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• INDEX