Sundays with Sidney Lumet’s “Making Movies”

A series featuring reflections on filmmaking by one of the truly great movie directors.

Roger Ebert said this about Making Movies: “It has more common sense in it about how movies are actually made than any other I have read.” That alone is enough reason to read this book authored by Sidney Lumet.

Known as an actor’s director, Lumet directed 17 different actors in Oscar-nominated performances: Katharine Hepburn, Rod Steiger, Al Pacino, Ingrid Bergman, Albert Finney, Chris Sarandon, Faye Dunaway, Peter Finch, Beatrice Straight, William Holden, Ned Beatty, Peter Firth, Richard Burton, Paul Newman, James Mason, Jane Fonda and River Phoenix. Bergman, Dunaway, Finch and Straight won Oscars for their performances in a Lumet movie.

Among his filmmaking credits are such stellar movies as 12 Angry Men, The Pawnbroker, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, Network, Equus, Prince of the City, The Verdict, and Running on Empty. He also has five screenwriting credits including Q&A and Night Falls on Manhattan.

As I’ve done with Sundays with Ray Bradbury and Sunday’s with Stephen King’s “On Writing,” I will work my way through Lumet’s book focusing on insights applicable to the craft of screenwriting.

Today: From “Making Movies,” Chapter 12: The Answer Print — Here Comes the Baby, pp. 192–193.

Again, a darkened room. How many hours, how many days, have I spent in dark rooms, looking at this movie? Sitting next to me is the timer. He works for Technicolor. His job is to "grade" the final printing of the movie.

Timers are very busy people. This one has flown in on the red-eye, arriving at Kennedy at six-thirty in the morning. We meet in the screening room at eight-thirty. He'll be taking the four o'clock back to Los Angeles.

He has his coffee and a blueberry muffin in front of them. No bagels for these guys. They're all George Gentile. On the console is a notepad. Under the screen sits a footage counter. He will make his notes, reel by reel, using the counter: this shot is too dark, that too light, this too yellow, that too red, too blue, too green, there's too much contrast, too little contrast, it's too muddy (a combination of wrong color and wrong density and/or contrast), and so on. Every scene, every shot, every foot of film is analyzed, reviewed.

The parallel here to screenwriting is the final edit. Before you send the script out into the world, whether to agents, managers, producers, talent, or studio execs, a professional screenwriter will go through their screenplay scene by scene … line by line … word by word.

Every writer has their own final edit process. Here is mine.

• Polish: Go through the script from Fade In to Fade Out, reading every single line. As I read, I keep in mind the three E’s: Is it Essential? Is it Efficient? Is it Entertaining?
• Character Read-Through: Go through the script again, only this time focus on a specific character. Make sure their actions track and their arc, if they have one, flows naturally and doesn’t feel forced. Do this for every primary character.
• Dialogue Read-Through: Aggregate each of the primary character’s dialogue sides and read them back to back to back. Aloud. Look for duplicate sides. Be mindful of distinctive linguistic patterns which may be highlighted to make the character’s language even more unique.
• Verbs: Consider each and every verb. Is there a stronger, more active and visual verb? This is where the thesaurus is your best friend.
• Transitions: Look at every shift from one scene to the next. Do they flow? Does the narrative drive one scene to the next? Are there ways to use devices such as visual-to-visual, audio-to-audio, pre-lap, post-lap, or juxtaposition to make for more dramatic scene transitions.
• Exposition: Look at every single piece of data, facts, information, and backstory. Again the three E’s: Essential? Efficient? Entertaining? If not, can this or that bit of exposition be cut?
• Narrative Voice: Be mindful of whether there is a consistency in how the script handles scene description. If there are ways to make individual lines more entertaining and reflect the personality of the Narrative Voice, make those changes.
• Spell Check / Grammar Check: The computer will not catch these differences: They’re / Their / There. It’s / Its. Your / You’re. It’s up to YOU to catch those. Don’t forget Direct Address. That is include a comma when a character (in dialogue) addresses another character by name, nickname, or pronoun. Hey, Chuck, how’s it going? / You know, sometimes I just you hate you, dude. Attention to such details shows you care about your script.
• Read-Through: Print out the script. Stand up. And read the script aloud. At any moment where an idea for a better verb or description pop up … make that change. Any time I stumble over a line of dialogue, ask myself: Is this a line which an actor would stumble over, too? If so, rewrite the line. Be mindful of this: Do I ever get bored? Do I ever flag in my interest in reading the script? If so, stop. Even at this late stage of the process, if something’s not working, this is the time to fix it.
• Read-Through … Again: One more time. And then another.

Every scene, every shot, every foot of film is analyzed, reviewed.

The movie is going to go through this type of rigorous process. It stands to reason that a screenwriter should put their screenplay through the same type of rigor before turning in the draft.

I grant you, the process can be exhausting. Writing is hard. But think about this. If it were easy, everyone would be doing it.

Come back next Sunday for more of Lumet’s thoughts on story and working with screenwriters.

For previous installments, go here.

For more background on Sidney Lumet’s filmmaking career, go here.

My book The Protagonist’s Journey: An Introduction to Character-Driven Screenwriting and Storytelling is an Amazon #1 Best Seller in Film and Television. Endorsed by over thirty professional screenwriters, novelists, and academics, you may purchase it here.