So-Called Screenwriting ‘Rules’: Part 2

There are conventions. There are expectations. There are patterns. But the simple fact is… THERE ARE NO SCREENWRITING RULES!

Awhile back, I posted this about an occurrence that happens with irritating regularity in the online screenwriting universe: The contentious specter of so-called screenwriting ‘rules’:

What happens is pretty much this:

• Somebody posts something about how there is a rule against doing this or that.
• That circulates as people bat around the idea.
• Professional writers catch wind of it, then lambaste the shit out of the thesis in question.
• The ‘debate’ fades away…
• Until the next time it arises.
• Again…
• And again…

So it occurred to me, why not just deal with it once and for all! Get every single supposed screenwriting rule out on the table, then go through them, one by one, to see if we can take all the heat that typically gets generated when one of these online snits breaks out and collectively create some actual light.

In other words, let’s make this a real learning experience and hopefully in the process, put some of this nonsense to bed for good.

I asked for your help in aggregating these ‘rules’ and as always, the GITS community responded. I’ve gone through them all, thought about it, and here is my plan: Do a 3-week series on “So-Called Screenwriting ‘Rules’”.

Week 1: As long as we’re going to take the time to go through this stuff, I figured we might as well put it all into some perspective: historical, theoretical, and practical. I’m going to start that process today:

Part 1: The Organic Nature of the Screenplay
Part 2: The Emergence of the Selling Script
Part 3: The Evolution of Screenplay Format and Style
Part 4: There are no screenwriting ‘rules’
Part 5: There are expectations

Week 2: I’ve sorted out five real nuts-and-bolts items which I will analyze and discuss one per day in our second week:

Part 6: We See / We Hear
Part 7: Unfilmables
Part 8: Action Paragraphs — 3 Lines Max
Part 9: CUT TO (Transitions)
Part 10: Parentheticals

Week 3: Readers made several suggestions that are about larger narrative choices, so let’s take those on as well:

Part 11: Flashbacks
Part 12: Voiceover Narration
Part 13: Sympathetic Protagonist
Part 14: Protagonist and Shifting Goals
Part 15: Certain Events By Certain Pages

Before we jump into this, a caveat: Everything I post in this series is my opinion. I think it’s safe to say it’s a pretty well-informed take seeing as I’ve been writing scripts since 1986 and teaching since 2002. But again, I’m simply expressing my perspective. It’s incumbent upon you to sort out your own approach to screenwriting style and the single best thing you can do in that regard is read scripts, especially screenplays written within the last 5 years as they represent the latest trends.

With that, forward into the breach!

Part 2: The Emergence of the Selling Script

Screenplay format and style has four major historical influences, two of which we discussed in Part 1:

• Precedents: Primarily stage plays, then journalism. The former was a natural fit as some of the earliest successful films were plays adapted for the screen, often by the playwrights themselves. Soon newspaper writers like Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur made their way to Hollywood, drawn by the substantial amounts of cash being waved in their direction. In fact, Hecht was lured to Hollywood via a telegram sent to him by Herman J. Mankiewicz, formerly a newspaper reporter himself, which read: “Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots.” This combination of stage play format and journalistic sensibilities shaped much of what evolved in the way of screenplay style in the first decades of the 20th century.
• Technology: In Part 1, I noted how the advent of sound in 1927 resulted in the need for dialogue in scripts, but even before that, we find the impact of technology on the evolution of the screenplay. For example, as audiences yearned to see longer movies, filmmakers had to deal with an interesting problem: Since a reel could only hold between 12–15 minutes of film, what to do when the projectionist came to the end of one reel, then had to stop the movie, unload the first reel, load the next reel, thread the film through, and start up the camera. How to keep the audience occupied for those awkward few minutes it took to swap reels? Writers took to inserting cliffhangers — critical moments with the movie’s characters filled with jeopardy and an uncertain resolution — at the end of each reel to keep the audience engaged with conjecture during reel changes. So as technology evolved, especially in response to the desires of moviegoers, that had an impact on the screenplay.

There are two other influences we have yet to discuss.

• Studios: You have likely never heard of Thomas Ince, but he is an important figure in the history of American filmmaking in that he founded the very first soup to nuts movie studio, known as “Inceville” (located in what is now Santa Monica). In order to maximize control over the process of producing dozens and dozens of movies per year, Ince formalized how writers were to approach the scripts they crafted. This became a pattern that existed throughout the many decades of the so-called studio system era, all the way into the 60s when the rigid control of the studios began to break down. You need go no further than your copy of Final Draft to see a vestige of this system — the Warner Bros. format which is a preset in the screenwriting software. Indeed, when I first broke into the business in 1987, Warner Bros. had a pool of typists who would take whatever script a writer turned in, then re-type it in the format the studio had been using for decades.

Over time, a type of formalism evolved in terms of screenplay format deriving from the exigencies of the studio system. At one level, this makes perfect sense with a factory approach to filmmaking. Here a screenplay is basically a blueprint for producing a movie, used by everybody on the production team — location scouts, set decorators, special effects, budgets, schedules, and so on. In order to facilitate that process, scripts needed to have the same basic format.

But then the fourth influence came into play:

• Selling Script: For most of the 20th century, writers worked for hire, signing short, but often long-term employment contracts with one of the Hollywood studios. Then in 1933, Preston Sturges did something no one else had done: He wrote and sold the very first ‘spec script’ The Power and the Glory. Decades later, William Goldman sold the original script Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. In the 70s, Paul Schrader sold his original script Yakuza. Those and a few others set the table for the 80s where the phenomenon of the spec script really took hold.

This was not only about writers from any walk of life being able to pound out an original screenplay and use that to break into Hollywood, over time it also had the impact of freeing screenplays from the formalism of the studio system era.

Screenplays are still blueprints for making a movie, at the point of production called a shooting script or production draft. But before any of that happens, a screenwriter has to write a script that attracts enough attention to get some financial entity to provide the funds to produce the film.

This we may call a selling script.

A spec script is by definition a selling script. However a selling script need not be a spec script. Any screenplay a writer writes in the development phase — from a pitch, on assignment, a rewrite, adaptation — is in effect a selling script which goal is to generate heat, create buzz, and move the project forward toward production.

Therefore at some fundamental level, our job as screenwriters is to write a story that is so engaging, entertaining and enjoyable, it ‘sells’ the reader on the script’s commercial and aesthetic viability.

During the last three decades, writers have embraced this goal and stretched the boundaries of conventional wisdom in almost every single aspect of what a screenplay is.

In effect, there has been a trend toward what I call a more literary type of selling script. And whether we realize it or not, much of these so-called screenwriting ‘rules’ have emerged as a result of this change.

When you read, “No ‘CUT TOs”…

When you hear about no camera directions…

When you learn about no paragraphs with more than three lines of description…

These are all an expression of this move toward a more literary screenwriting style: selling script less a guide to produce a movie, more a means by which we can engage a reader in our story, not distracted by archaic conventions.

The irony is this: While this literary style is at its core about freeing writers from the formalism of the old approach to screenwriting, whoever these ‘gurus’ are who promote the litany of “Don’t do this” are in essence creating their own type of formalism.

No matter what they naysayers opine about what you supposedly can’t do when writing a screenplay, here is a fact: Screenwriters have never had more freedom to write what they want to write and how they want to write it than right now. And this is largely because of the emergence of the spec script market over the last three decades, affording writers the chance to craft the most compelling and cinematic stories possible in order to grab readers’ attention.

So here we are at the beginning of the 21st century with the screenplay form in flux. Tomorrow I will look at some of the specifics of this shift toward a more literary approach to screenplay style.

If you have any questions or observations, please head to comments. Again, as long as we are taking such a comprehensive approach to this content, let’s do it to the max. I want to hear your thoughts and am glad to make this an extended conversation with a goal of putting this subject into a more helpful perspective.

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