Screenwriting 101: Stirling Silliphant

“I believe there is a certain preparation the writer should make before he goes each morning or afternoon or evening to his computer or typewriter or yellow pad. It may be the Buddhist in me, but I truly believe that a sort of rite of cleansing is involved here. Certainly, you can’t do your best work if your mind is cluttered with other matters. To clear my thoughts, I simply read a few paragraphs of Harold Brodkey. How was that again? Yep — Harold Brodkey.

I will take a paragraph at random, for example, the following which ends his story ‘Ceil’:

In the tormented and torn silence of certain dreams — in the night court of my sleep — sometimes words, like fingers, move and knead and shape the tableaux: shadowy lives in night streets. There is a pearly strangeness to the light. Love and children appear as if in daylight, but it is always a sleeping city, on steep hills, with banked fires and ghosts lying in the streets in the dully reflectant gray light of a useless significant.

I do not believe there was any justice in Ceil’s life.

And I will read it aloud to myself several times, dwelling on ‘pearly strangeness’ or ‘the dully reflectant gray light of a useless significance.’

How, after reading this kind of conceptualization, can I possibly write a screenplay describing my hero as ‘young and lean’ or a physical movement as ‘he hurries across the room’?

You see what now happens? The talent in you, if you have any, is challenged — and you go to your work DETERMINED to put poetry on the page — for in setting, stage directions, time, place, feeling, the writing in a script should be at the level of a Bergman script, written more as a novella than as a Hollywood blueprint for a director who understands not words but only MTV images and blue light and wet streets.”

— Stirling Silliphant (Village of the Damned, In the Heat of the Night, Charly, The Poseidon Adventure, The Towering Inferno)

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