A Chapter In The Adventure

I hope that by now you all have gotten to the two readings from William Goldman this week. If you haven't read either of these books and you are at all interested in film, (which I assume you all are or why would you be taking this class?) do yourself a favor and run out and get both of them. It's a fascinating look inside the business of Hollywood movie making, with a focus on how to tell a good story, and then write the screenplay. And Goldman is one of the best in the business. He has a great sense of humor, is jaded just enough to make it an interesting read, but not so much as to scare you off from the business altogether. Anyway, I think it was far more enjoyable than some of the previous texts that we have looked at, so think of it as a bit of a break from the more heady stuff.

I chose these readings largely because I think they are insightful, particularly for those who are still learning the craft of visual storytelling, and I didn't want you to be totally bored at this point in the semester, so I thought you might like a break from the high minded theoretical stuff. The first one comes from his earlier book, Adventures In The Screen Trade, which he wrote in 1983, shortly before writing the screenplay to The Princess Bride. I love this story of how he got started because it is so perfect the way he sets it up, and really is significant for anyone just starting out as you all are. The way he tells it, it seems that for him to have gotten into the film business at all is almost like an accident. It just sort of fell in his lap, and when it did, he was so unprepared for it, that he found himself in an all night bookstore in Times Square in a panic, just trying to find a book, any book that could show him something about writing a screenplay. Hell, he didn't even know what a screenplay looked like, much less how to write one. And 40 some years later, he's still at it, with a pretty nice list of credits to his name.

The second reading, from the more recent sequel to the first book, Which Lie Did I Tell? More Adventures In The Screen Trade, gets into the nitty gritty of what actually goes into the screenplay. This is the more technical part, but I think Goldman does a nice job of not getting bogged down too much in details, and focuses more on plot, character development and structure. We'll be looking at these two scenes this week in class, one from Fargo and the other from Chinatown, so that you can get a better sense of how things translated from the page to screen. I think just from reading you can see how important structure is when trying to lay down not just dialogue, but also the visual cues necessary to actually commit that story to film. I don't want you to concern yourself too much with the specific format of the screenplay when thinking about you own upcoming projects, but I do want you to be familiar with layout and technique so that you can incorporate some aspects in your own writing.

We'll also be looking at a couple examples of short films to give you a better sense of how other filmmakers have managed to tell a compelling story in only a few minutes time. It is a challenge, but it all starts with a good idea. So make sure you are thinking about some possible projects that you might want to do for your short fiction piece.