Update: 10 October 2009

UNIT THREE-LESSON NINE: WRITING
hamlettobe.jpg (8319 bytes)
Kenneth Branagh as Hamlet
Writing for Film. . .  To Be or Not To Be. . .

Assignment List.   Recommended time to complete Lesson Eight: 9 hours.  You may be interested in these video clips from You Tube about writing for the screen.

WEBLECTURE  #9
To Be or Not To Be. . .
If the ultimate film is to have any significant content, throwing some new glint of light on life, it is the writer who will have to create it. –Dudley Nichols

A mediocre director with a great script will still come out on top, but a brilliant director with a poor script will inevitably fail. –Billy Wilder

TABLE OF CONTENTS
 Introduction | Dialogue | Literary Adaptation | Metaphor | Point of View | Screenplay | Script |
Script Treatment | Shooting Script | Storyboard | Writer | Writing and Literature |
Websites on Screenwriting and Screenwriters

WRITING AND LITERATURE.  Literature is the art of arranging words to express or create ideas, feelings, experiences. Artfully arranged words are also necessary for film, particularly for narratives and documentaries; even in the avant-garde cinema, which may omit dialogue, words are needed for the descriptions to guide the filmmakers. Words also are needed to sell the idea so the story can get made, and maybe even the distributed and exhibited. Ideas for original stories or adaptations of narratives or dramatic material are presented in the form of script treatments or screenplays. Such written works are presented most often through an agent who helps to find people to read the screenplay who have some power to get the written work made into a film—a studio executive, for example, or a popular or talented performer who can bring in the financing, or an independent producer. The agent will also help to negotiate contracts between screenwriters and producers.

In his book, Movie Anecdotes, Michael Day recounts the Clifton Fadiman story about Hollywood agent Leland Hayward, who in the 1940s, before he became a producer, was representing so many people that he sometimes forgot what was what:

Ginger Rogers complained to Hayward that she had been sent a terrible script. The agent stormed into the offending producer’s office: "How can you insult Ginger with such drivel?" he demanded.// "Get out of here before I throw you out," the producer roared back at him. "You sold us that story!" (148)

Hundreds and hundreds of screenplays are in constant circulation among moviemakers, particularly in active film centers like Hollywood. Many go unsold and fewer still go unscreened. Luck and pluck has a lot to do with which screenplays get sold and produced. It helps to know how to pitch. (For more information, go to the Websites on Screenwriting and Screenwriters, particularly the Writer’s Guild of America site.)

Writing for film is different from writing novels, poems, short stories, or even plays—as Robert Kolker (University of Maryland) puts it:

Most writers who go into the [screenwriting] business know that it will be a collaborative event and that egos and romantic myths about independence and control won’t work. Perhaps more important, a screenwriter stands to make a great deal of money. A quarter-million dollars is not unheard of for a first effort, millions for an established screenwriter, someone like Robert Towne (the writer of Chinatown) or Joe Eszterhas, who was paid three million dollars for his script for Basic Instinct. (in Film, Form, and Culture, 156)

SCRIPT, TREATMENT, SCREENPLAY

If a scene does not play well in rehearsal, I will change it. If an actor has a good idea, or even an electrician, I can add it. But you must first have something to add it to. –Billy Wilder

SCRIPT. A script is a written work giving details of story, setting, and dialogue. A script is the text of a play, a broadcast, or a motion picture. A script may take the form of a screenplay, shooting script, lined script, continuity script, or a spec script to provide the written directions or specifications for the production of a motion picture. Depending on its form, a script will include settings, action, camera coverage, dialogue, narration, music, and sound effects. We often use the word "screenplay" for movie scripts, to distinguish them from scripts for live plays, or "teleplays" (scripts for television broadcasts). A "shooting script" is a final script followed by the performers and director during the shooting stage of production. A "continuity script" is written after the film has been produced, after the completed film has been screened—and includes descriptions of cinematic techniques so the reader who has already screened the film can be reminded through visual memory of what has already been experienced.

An aspiring screenwriter will work to turn a first-draft screenplay into an agent-ready spec script.  (A "spec script" is a screenplay written "on speculation" that it might sell - in other words, written with no promise of compensation.)  Help is available to generate log-line, two-minute pitch, and query letters. Screenwriting firms and organizations like the American Screenwriters Association offer script consultations, make recommendations for professional representation, and help writers develop "spec scripts." The American Screenwriters Association site (<http://www.asascreenwriters.com/>)   says, "Finding an agent or other professional to guide you can be even tougher than getting audited by the IRS."

TREATMENT. Insiders can strike production deals without laying out the scenes or writing out the dialogue—but by presenting a general summary of the plot (using present-tense verbs), a description of characters, a description of the setting, and an idea of the genre and theme (the content and/or emotional appeal). A script "treatment" ranges from three to thirty pages (a "thorough treatment" may run 60-70 double-spaced pages) and is ideal for situations when the story itself (characters, plot, settings) and cost of production is more important than filmmaking technique. Most screenplays begin with a treatment—an outline or synopsis, a very short written account of a film in general terms, a preliminary summary that serves as a guide to the development of the writing project. Treatments are sometimes sold to someone who will write the screenplay.

SCREENPLAY. A screenplay (a "play" for the "screen") is a script for a film, the pre-text for the final shooting script.  At around 90 to 120 pages long, the screenplay is the dramatic literary work which communicates the story through words providing the dialogue and describing the people, places, and actions. Like a play (a literary drama), a screenplay is meant not to be read as a complete entity—but as a literary guide or scaffolding upon which the movie will be built. Shakespeare’s Richard III is written only as a guide to the actors, directors, and producers to guide them in the dramatic presentation of the words. Pacino’s Looking for Richard is based on a written script, a screenplay, which also serves to guide the director. The artistic works in their completed form are the theatrical production or the film; these are the fruits of literature—they are dramatic or cinematic productions, based on literature.

A screenplay also serves as a product in the commercial deal-making enterprise of the film industry. If you want to sell a film idea to busy people who can help you transform the written word to the screen—then you really must have a screenplay. As Thomas and Vivian Sobchack put it, in An Introduction to Film, the screenplay

will undoubtedly be read by a variety of people looking at it from different perspectives: performers looking for a strong role to play, directors looking for an interesting and complex narrative to film, producers looking for a generic category into which the story can be pigeonholed and easily sold and at the potential cost of its production. Thus, although the screenplay must be dramatically written, and must be detailed enough to convey a unified vision throughout a complex process of collaboration, it must also be easy to read—uncluttered by the writer’s ideas about its potential visual realization. (23)

The screenplay, written at the initial stages of the production process, is different from the script that emerges through production and through to the publication stage after the film has been completed and screened. The initial screenplay will emphasize dialogue and action, will provide the structure of the main scenes in the narrative, and will include brief descriptive prose to give information about settings and characters. The screenplay will generally not show camera setups, camera movements, lighting effects, or other filmic elements or techniques (the director is responsible for this part of the storytelling—see "shooting script" and "storyboard" below), unless these elements are necessary to the forward motion of the plot or the development of character (e.g., cut to a shot of the bomb ticking away out of sight of the children playing in the sandbox, close-up on the clock showing 30 seconds left).

To be "bankable," a script generally needs to suggest particular stars or successful actors; often character types are mentioned, certain looks and values. Clichés and stereotypes may be  used, and allusions to other successful films, to enhance the salability of a script. But it’s the narrative itself, and its dramatic potential, that make or break the deal for agents, actors, producers, directors, and investors. Investors like security and so are more likely to back conventional stories, plots, and characters. That’s why we see sequels and copy-cat films; the investors figure, "Hey, So-and-so made money on this and so can we." And the writers and idea-people pitch the movies with this need for safety of the familiar in mind. I recommend two contemporary films that reveal this deal making process: Robert Altman’s The Player (1992) and Tim Burton’s Ed Wood (1994).

The Sobchacks write that "an off-beat screenplay may be difficult to sell, but the occasional commercial (and critical) success of an eccentric film like Terms of Endearment (James L. Brooks, USA, 1983) means that the unconventional screenplay is at least potentially worth a reading" (25).

A script is often optioned (borrowed for possible production) at one price, sold for a higher price, or produced as a movie for a higher price still. An agent might negotiate separate terms for different kinds of use of the script. For example, a sale may be described as "$100,000 against $250,000," where the writer gets $100,000 up front, and is then paid an additional $150,000 when the movie is produced. Sometimes the first payment is called an "advance." Book writers often make similar deals for advances, and then for royalties based on sales.

The story of George Lucas shows how it pays to be persistent. When United Artists and Universal refused to pick up their option to produce Star Wars (1977), it was bought by Twentieth Century-Fox over the objections of some directors of the board who hated "that science movie." The deal gave Lucas only $50,000 as the writer and only $100,000 as director. However, Lucas retained a large percentage of the merchandising and licensing rights, considered by the studio lawyers at that time to be "garbage" terms of the contract. As Michael Day puts it in Movie Anecdotes, "The garbage eventually brought Lucas untold sums" (151).

Though it might be construed as a literary form in its own right—the circumstances of collaboration in the filmmaking industry make it difficult for the screenplay to be seen as a literary form in itself. Though it’s an important early step, indeed a crucial initial step, in the filmmaking process, a screenplay is never as finished a product as a play written for live theater (even though plays also undergo some revision in the process of going into production). A screenplay is never as complete a thing as a play. Says Dudley Nichols, Hollywood screenwriter who penned such John Ford films as The Informer and Stagecoach, "the filmwriter must be a film-maker at heart" (in Richard Dyer MacCann’s Film: A Montage of Theories, 76).

SHOOTING SCRIPT. The screenplay comes to the director, often rewritten several times as the producers have been in the pre-production stage, with scenes numbered chronologically and with dialogue and description either alternating down the page or provided in a split-page format with dialogue on the left and visual and aural descriptions (including music and sound effects) on the right.

The director’s job is to create the shooting script: a breakdown of the scenes into separate shots, indicating camera distances, angles, movements and performer movements, lighting effects, and other special effects. This shooting script (sometimes called a "scenario") provides the avenue for the director to begin work as the film’s auteur.  By transforming the screenplay into a visual and auditory experience, a director can infuse the story with her own narrative vision.

The director also manages the shooting script to facilitate the collaborative process, to move the film along so that it will be completed and then distributed and exhibited. One of the director’s trickiest jobs is to keep her producer happy. To keep his producer happy that filming was on schedule when in fact it was behind by a day, Director John Ford asked Samuel Goldwyn when he visited the set, "Sam, how many script pages do you reckon I should be shooting a day?" Goldwyn said without skipping a beat, "About five." At that point, according to Peter Hay, Ford called out for a script and ripped out five pages of the unfilmed part. "Okay, we’re back on schedule." (Movie Anecdotes, 142).

But in this consultation process (with screenwriter, cinematographer, art director, major performers, and other people with important roles in the filmmaking process, including the ever-watchful producer), the director always keeps an eye on a vision of the film in its realized narrative form, or shooting script. It is the director’s job to transform the literary work into a film work. Through conferences and rehearsals in the pre production stage of the filmmaking process, the shooting script is created and refined with the help of the Script Department, Script Supervisor, and Script Editors.

In his essay, "Film Has Nothing To Do with Literature," Ingmar Bergman writes,

I have often wished for a kind of notation which would enable me to put on paper all the shades and tones of my vision, to record distinctly the inner structure of a film. For when I stand in the artistically devastating atmosphere of the studio, my hands and head full of all the trivial and irritating details that go with motion-picture production, it often takes a tremendous effort to remember how I originally saw and thought out this or that sequence, or what was the relation between the scene of four weeks ago and that of today. If I could express myself clearly, in explicit symbols, then this problem would be almost eliminated and I could work with absolute confidence that whenever I liked I could prove the relationship between the part and the whole and put my finger on the rhythm, the continuity of the film." (MacCann, 144)

Shooting scripts, showing the director’s choices concerning such matters as the physical point-of-view of the camera, are available in special film library collections, sometimes even with directors’ marginal comments and notes on lighting, set detail, performance, camera movement, angles, and so forth.

At a Writer/Director seminar, Paul Schrader (writer of Taxi Driver, The Last Temptation of Christ, and Raging Bull, director of Cat People and Affliction), who had just written his fourth script for Martin Scorsese, told his audience that he doesn't remain past a certain point on Scorsese's projects. He said, "Usually come rehearsal Marty likes the writer to bail, because that's where he begins to assert himself. But he will bring back a writer to play good cop-bad cop. When necessary, I can play the temperamental writer who won't tolerate an actor changing something in my script." (http://www.insidefilm.com/screenwriting.html--archives)

STORYBOARD. Some directors have a storyboard made by the production illustrator to assist in the visualization of shots. A storyboard, which looks a bit like a comic book, consists of separate drawings showing the film’s look and visual coherence. Alfred Hitchcock and Satyajit Ray relied on  storyboards consistently (indeed Hitchcock claimed that after he’d done the storyboard, the film was completed as far as he was concerned, and so he instructed his cinematographers to follow the storyboard and claimed he didn’t need or desire to look through the camera lens himself to check a shot). George Lucas, a lover of special effects, also uses storyboards to help in the visualization process.

In the actual production stage, the shot-by-shot visualization really pays off for efficient use of resources and reduction of costs. Scenes can be shot out of chronological sequence and grouped based on location, performers, equipment needed. Here, the director, cast, and crew work together to prepare shots that will be the raw materials the editor will use to construct the final scenes in the film.

But not all directors use storyboards. When the great cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs (Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, Shampoo, New York New York, Ghostbusters, Mask, etc.) was asked, "Do you think storyboarding is a useful tool?", he replied:

Up to a certain point, I can see the value of storyboarding, especially in an educational situation where film may be a totally different language. In dealing with film students, you have to force them to think visually. So storyboarding can be very useful for that but afterwards you have to drop it. . . .//Students want to know why directors don’t use storyboards. They think it’s a sign that the director doesn’t know what he wants to do. Lack of a storyboard doesn’t mean that at all. He knows what he wants to do in his heart and mind already. But he’s not going to totally know it until tomorrow morning when he and the actors come onto the set. He’s going to get everybody moving and see how the actors feel. He’s not necessarily imposing anything on anybody; he’s waiting for suggestions and ideas. He wants to see what the actors will bring to it. He’s not going to go home the night before and draw out a floor plan. No. You have to wait until the human elements come in and the actors start creating the characters. Real artists, whether they be directors, actors or cinematographers, realize that they are dealing with human beings and their emotions. The actors are creating what we have come together for. The performance brings the characters alive. Good actors bring fabulous ideas to the film. They come up with things that aren’t on any storyboard." (in Dennis Schaefer and Larry Salvato’s Masters of Light: Conversations with Contemporary Cinematographers, 187)

SCREENWRITER – SCRIPTWRITER
"If you would be a reader, read; if a writer, write" – Epictetus

Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade, just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself -- Truman Capote

Bernard F. Dick (Professor of Communications at Teaneck, New Jersey) defines screenwriting as an art,

an art that film history, which emphasized the development of film as a medium, the studio system and the stars that came out of it, and the role of the director in the filmmaking process, has tended to ignore, perhaps because the script is prefilmic. Even though most narrative films start with a script, the script recedes into the background as it changes from a verbal to a visual text, so that by the time the film has been completed, the words have been translated into images. Thus, moviegoers associate dialogue not with the writer but with the actors speaking the lines or with the scenes in which they are spoken. Still, a serious student of film will always look for the screenwriter’s name in the credits. (220)

Screenwriters (AKA script writers) produce the stories, the treatments, and scripts for the movies. Tools at the disposal of the writer include dialogue, metaphor, and point of view. But as Dudley Nichols suggests, there are no secrets to screenwriting:

There are certain prescribed forms, but the forms are not final. Others will come along and do better work as we come to understand more clearly the peculiar demands of cinema. Meanwhile, those people who may become interested in screenwriting as a vocation must study the best examples of screenplays available and then have a try at it themselves. . . . It is the writer who is the dreamer, the imaginer, the shaper. He works in loneliness with nebulous materials, with nothing more tangible than paper and a pot of ink; and his theatre is within his mind. He must generate phantoms out of himself and live with them until they take on a life of their own and become, not types, but characters working out their own destinies. If the ultimate film is to have any significant content, throwing some new glint of light on life, it is the writer who will have to create it. Yet it is the director who has always dominated the field and will no doubt continue to dominate it, for various good reasons. It is the director who must realize the imagined people on film, who must know all the technological processes, and command the extravagantly costly tools of film art. Writing costs are negligible by comparison. The film-writer can afford to bow to the director; and if it be one of the world’s few great directors, he can do so with pride and gratitude. For there are few satisfactions to match seeing a story you have created, or even re-created in terms of film, come to a powerful life on the screen—a new creation with all the writing washed invisibly away. (from Nichols’ "The Writer and the Film," in MacCann, 86-7)

DIALOGUE. To write plays and films, you need a good ear for dialogue. One of the most delightful parts of the North by Northwest film experience is the witty dialogue created by Ernest Lehman (Oscar nominee for Story and Screenplay, written directly for the screen). Indeed, some people have held that without the wry wit, the character of Roger O. Thornhill (played by Cary Grant) would have been uncomfortably close to the "O" of his middle name. Giannetti, however, writes that the excellence of Lehman’s screenplay "consists not of its literary distinction so much as its clearly defined actions, providing the director with the raw materials for the shots of the movie." (Re-read the long excerpt from the screenplay, a "Reading Version" of North by Northwest in Giannetti, 8th edition,  369-75.)

Most screen dialogue seems fragmentary compared to literary dialogue because the film medium encourages a more naturalistic or realistic form of speech, where sentences are often unfinished and where phrases stand in nicely for complete sentences in conversations. To check this point, compare the dialogue from a film with that in the novel on which it is based; you’ll see that screenwriting requires effective economizing on language. As screenwriter Tony Gilroy (Dolores Claiborne, Extreme Measures. The Bourne Identity), puts it: "Real people have to say the words. I mean. . . bad dialogue goes down a lot easier in a novel than it does on the screen." (As of  20 October 2008, the source Website for this quotation, www.flf.com/scr2scrh,  was not accessible; but see the resource list at the end of this section for links Tony Gilroy's IDBM site and his script for The Bourne Identity.)

In a seminar entitled "You Looking at Me? Dialogue as Insight Into the Character," at the Austin Film Festival’s fifth annual Heart of Screenwriters Conference—Paul Schrader was joined by John Landis (director of Animal House, Trading Places, and Coming to America and co-writer/director of The Blues Brothers), Andrew K. Walker (writer of Seven) and Brian Helgeland (writer of L.A. Confidential). The Website for the seminar summarizes their discussion as follows:

Helgeland first tackled the topic by indicating that the trick is to get dialogue to sound authentic but not banal as real everyday conversation, to which Walker joked, "Most of what I write is inherently banal."// The panel recounted tales of the challenges they had faced in creating dialogue. Brian Helgeland said he once wrote a script about Vikings and had to figure out how Vikings would talk. He was amazed when people read it and said it really sounded like "authentic Vikings." This prompted John Landis to relate the famous story of Roy Walston having a fit on the set of My Favorite Martian: "I'm telling you a Martian would not say this!"// Andy Walker talked about the way a good actor can make mediocre dialogue come alive. When watching Seven he was "struck by how badly I'd written that scene where Kevin Spacey rants in the car for twenty minutes. I was stunned and incredibly appreciative that Kevin managed to save it and keep it interesting in spite of my writing." (See Inside Film site below for more of the article.)

During the same screenwriters’ conference, Bill Broyles and Rita Hsiao spoke at another seminar entitled "Loquacity vs. Brevity: Keeping it Simple." (Broyles, founding editor of Texas Monthly and once editor-in-chief of Newsweek, co-created China Beach and co-wrote Apollo 13. Hsiao wrote Mulan and Toy Story 2.) The Website gives this summary:

When asked to discuss their approaches to writing the first draft, Hsiao responded, "I'll write whatever comes to mind then go back later to find more creative ways to say it. I just motor in on the first draft and try not to get hung up on anything. I may leave a blank space with a note: 'Joke to come here.’" // Broyles wisecracked, "I stare at my computer then make a note: 'Brilliant script to come here.' I go away and come back but nothing is ever there. Maybe there are writers who can sit down and write a compelling story with brilliant subtext and tight dialogue in the first draft, but I'm not among them. Sometimes you don't even know the potential depths for your script the first time through."

Broyles went on to say that he considers dialogue to be the least important part of the movie. "It comes last. You have to understand the dramatic forces in each scene and really know your characters before you know what they would say and how. Dialogue is the last thing, but the most dangerous thing because it's so easy to be dull and lengthy."// Hsiao agreed and added, "A character can't go off on a monologue in an animated film. Kids get bored by constant yakking, so I try to do it visually." Broyles felt that also pertained to non-animated films. "Adults are bored by monologues, too, with a few rare exceptions such as Christopher Walken in Pulp Fiction." He is proudest of scenes he writes which have little or no dialogue. "If you're a writer who really loves to write dialogue-rich scenes, you should be a playwright or novelist. Some of the most moving moments in film have no dialogue at all. The scene in King Vidor's Big Parade, in which the soldier meets a French girl and tries to communicate with her, always makes me cry and there's not a word in it. In Apollo 13 the lift-off and landing scenes are silent but powerful as we switch back and forth between mission control and the astronaut's home."

Hsiao said it was easier to write dialogue when you know who will speak your lines. "When I knew I'd be writing for Eddie Murphy I watched all his films to get a feel for how he sounded which was really helpful in coming up with his dialogue." And it is also useful to hear them speak the lines. "With animated films, you sit in a recording studio and listen to actors say your words five or six times. Often you realize you don't really need some of the lines. When Harvey Fierstein came into the recording studio I saw that he was a really playful kind of guy, so I re-wrote a scene to show that aspect of him."// Broyles asserted that "the better the actor, the less dialogue you need. Tom Hanks is always cutting his lines down, or giving them away to others."// Both panelists warned against expository dialogue. "Actors like to be saying one thing and actually doing another. It's much more interesting to the audience, too," said Broyles. But he added that sometimes you can make on-the-nose dialogue work, "Such as with Kay, who doesn't speak much at all in The Godfather before she delivers the powerful on-the-nose lines: "It was a boy child, Michael. I killed it."   (See Inside Film site below for more of the article.)

Good dialogue is vital to a good story and a good film—but beautiful dialogue can be replaced by elegant use of lighting, camera, action in film. Peter Schaffer’s tells a story about working with Milos Forman on his award-winning Amadeus (1984). Apparently, Schaffer had a beautiful speech in the script about "I hate God, God why have you done this to me and on and on." Forman’s response was an immediate, "No-no-no. Cut the speech. We take a cross. We throw it in the fire." At some point, then, a screenwriter wants such an exacting director. A screenwriter knows that what may have been the most beautiful speech in the script cannot be matched in cinematic power to a vivid image in a realized film.

METAPHOR. In literature, figurative language helps a writer express what might otherwise be ineffable. Through figurative comparisons (symbols, allegories) and other devices (like allusion), writers have a short-hand for bringing in ambiguities and mysteries as well as knowledge from other sources. Let's use the term "metaphor" as a general term for all the ways in which a writer/screenwriter compares something concrete (for example, a clock) to something more abstract (for example, the concept of time); metaphors help writers explain or clarify something vague or something not commonly experienced or known by referring to something specific and generally well known or commonly experienced.  In a metaphor the two things being compared are in entirely different conceptual universes. 

Allusion as Metaphor.  An apple, for example, is a nourishing fruit that most people know something about--it is the fruit of a tree and is categorized commonly as a food item.  A writer may want to convey something beyond and different from an organic product that can be eaten; maybe that writer wants to use the apple to represent the hunger for knowledge hoping her audience "gets it" because she understands the allusion to the Western creation story of the Garden of Eden, where the forbidden fruit eaten by Adam and Eve is traditionally shown as an apple.  The fruit called "apple" is obviously not in the same conceptual universe as is the abstraction called "knowledge'" (knowledge doesn't grow on trees, can't be tasted or smelled or measured in any physical sense); however, if the image of the apple is used repeatedly, emphatically, or in the context of the idea of desire and hunger for knowledge in a given story, we as readers or viewers are being invited to remember that story from Genesis and to "see" the apple metaphorically, as a kind of symbol for knowledge.  (The apple in this context can also be a metaphor for what is taboo or forbidden.)

Symbol as Metaphor.  In Hitchcock's Cold War film North by Northwest, the Mount Rushmore setting, a tourist attraction located in Rapid City, South Dakota—is first of all a real mountain that would pose danger for anyone attempting to climb down, or up, the faces of four U. S. Presidents (George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln) carved on its cliff side .  In Hitchcock's film, Mount Rushmore—like the edifices of Madison Avenue and Washington, D.C.—serves also as a symbol of the United States itself, the battleground where Roger and Eve risk their lives to protect and preserve the American way of life being threatened by the enemy.  Mount Rushmore itself, of course, is not in the same conceptual universe as the United States itself or as American values or as the American way of life; but in Hitchcock's film, we are invited to "see" the carved cliff faces as equivalent to the values of democracy, capitalism, and individualism that are endangered by the Soviet Union, America's enemy in the Cold War.

In film, metaphors are most commonly created through spoken language itself, through music or sound effects, through photography (the camera angle, lens, shot-type, lighting may suggest the comparison), and through editing (juxtaposition of images, particularly double-exposures or fade-in/fade-out edits, will show the things to be compared). As with interpretation of literary works, it’s always best to glean the literal meaning in films before you go after the metaphoric or symbolic import (even though symbol-hunting is great fun). Clues to a writer’s or filmmaker’s desire for metaphoric or symbolic interpretation are these:

In a 1959 interview with the great film maker Federico Fellini, Gideon Bachmann, asked about the ring motifs and the symbolic import of the image of the piazza at night with a fountain, or the image of the seashore: "Is there a conscious intention on your part in repeating these images?" Fellini replied:

It is not intentional. In choosing a location, I do not choose it for its symbolic content. Things happen. If they happen well, they convey my meaning. Concerning the specific examples you mention, I’d like to say that all my films to date are concerned with people looking for themselves. Night and the loneliness of empty streets, as shown in the shots of piazzas you mention, is perhaps the best atmosphere in which I see these people. Also, it is quite possible that the associations which make me choose these locations are based on autobiographical experiences, for I cannot remove myself from the content of my films. Possibly what is in my mind when I shoot these scenes is the memory of my first impression of Rome—when I had left my hometown of Rimini and was in Rome alone. I was sixteen; I had no job, no idea of what I wanted to do. Often I was out of work, often I didn’t have the money to stay in a hotel or eat properly. Or I would work at night. In any case, it is quite possible that the image of the town at night, empty and lonely, has remained in my soul from those days. (from "The Road Beyond Neorealism," in MacCann, 378)

Fellini started out in Rome as a cub reporter getting hospital and police stories. Then he wrote sketches for radio, toured Italy with a small traveling musical show, and became a rewriter ("I used to add gags to the scripts of dull comedies"). By the 1940s Fellini was writing scripts, mostly comedies, and mostly all produced. After World War II, he worked with Rossellini on Open City and Paisan, and not long after began to direct films himself. "When one really loves films, one cannot stop at the written page," he said (McCann, 379). Other writer-directors (like Woody Allen, Spike Lee, Nora Ephron, to name a few) would agree.

POINT OF VIEW. As Giannetti puts it "point of view in fiction generally concerns the narrator, through whose eyes the events of a story are viewed. The ideas and incidents are sifted through the consciousness and language of the storyteller" (381). One way to shape the story materials is to choose a particular vantage point from which to tell a story. The storytelling "voice" in literary fiction becomes further mediated in film by the camera "eye."  In film, camera eye mediates the story, and therefore serves as the "literal" storyteller in cinema.  The camera lens ("eye") itself is the cinematic narrator, because we see everything only from the perspective of the camera.  In cinema, the most common point of view is omniscient; commonly the narrative vantage point tends to be some hybrid form of literary point of view.

First-person narration. This point of view is common in fiction written since the late nineteenth century, but it is extremely rare in film.  In literature, first-person narration means there is an "I" narrator who tells the story either as a key actor in his or her own story ("This is mainly what I did, felt, and thought"—for example, Celie in Alice Walker’s novel, The Color Purple)—or there is witness-observer to or witness-participant in someone else’s story ("This is what I saw, this is what I heard, this is what I think and feel, but this story is mainly about someone else, not me) —for example, Nick Carraway in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, The Great Gatsby) .  First-person narration in literature is different from first-person narration in film.  In literature, the narrator is a voice telling the story; in film, the narrator is always the camera. 

In novels like The Color Purple and The Great Gatsby, the point of view is first-person.  However, in their film adaptations, the point of view that may seem to be first-person invariably shifts to some form of third-person point of view, either omniscient or restricted.   

When the "voice" of the literary narrator is transformed into the "eye" of the camera in a script that is made into a film, the separation between writer and audience narrows—because film viewers tend to identify with the lens, the perspective from which events and people are perceived (seen and heard). For this reason, actual first-person narration is very rare in film because it would require that the camera actually stand in as the narrator (and as viewers we would never see the narrator unless s/he appeared in a reflected image (as in a glass or a mirror). This is frustrating for filmgoers; we want to see our heroes and villains. Further, in the "literal" first-person cinematic point of view (where the camera itself takes on the "body" of the narrator), other characters must talk right into the camera; and if a character must kiss the narrator, the actor playing the kisser part would have to "kiss" the lens of the camera! "Literal" first-person films are just about doomed to fail. See Giannetti for a brief discussion of the first-person failure entitled The Lady of the Lake (383). 

In film, the point-of-view shot is inevitably the one given by the camera rather than by the sound track. As members of the audience in the darkened room, we tend to become whoever it is that the camera becomes—walking in his direction, looking where she is looking, becoming the one identified with the camera itself.  Some films seem to have a first-person narration because the main character tells his or her own story; but check it out: usually you are given shots or scenes where that main character may not even be present (unless these shots or scenes are giving us a glimpse into what that character sees in his or her mind, they are clear indicators that the film point of view cannot be first-person).  Take the award-winning 2007 film The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, directed by Julian Schnabel.  This film starts in first-person; in fact for much of the first part of the film you never even see the main character (Jean-Dominique Bauby, a young once-vibrant editor of the style magazine called Elle) except through being in his mind and "seeing" what his mind is seeing.  It's quite brilliant to get to experience what it might be like to have suffered a major stroke and then to wake up and see things hazily, momentarily, but not be able to move anything but one eye.  One of the most memorable scenes of the film shows you what it would be like to have your eyelid sewn shut - you see it from the inside - and it's excruciating.  Eventually, though, the filmmaker knows his audience wants to break away from that first-person point of view; the audience wants to see what this man looks like lying there helpless in his hospital bed.  And so, eventually, the film's point of view shifts to third person (a restricted type of third-person, where the audience views the world mostly from the main character's perspective).  So if you were asked to identify the cinematic point of view of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, you'd be wrong if you said first-person, even though this really seems so much like a first-person narrative.  What you can say is that the film is told from the first-person for so-many-minutes and then switches back and forth from the mind and perspective of the main character to the view of him from the outside but still from his experience of life.  To be considered totally first-person narrative, the "eye" of the camera cannot break, even for one shot, away from the "eye" of the character.

Third-person narration: Omniscient, Restricted, or Objective. This narrative vantage point is removed from or not identified with the action and characters to a higher degree than with first-person narration. There are generally three levels of intimacy with the characters:

LITERARY ADAPTATIONS. All movies start with a script of some kind. Many movies are adaptations of a literary source already in the public domain—a novel, a play, a short story.

Shakespeare, of course, is a favorite worldwide.  After the books of the Bible,Shakespeare's writings are the most frequently translated of literary texts. In her essay "Adapting Shakespeare to Film," Gail Feldman writes that "in the last 97 years there have been no fewer than 275 film and (later) television adaptations (and our list may not be comprehensive)," including 16 King Lear’s, 24 Romeo and Juliet’s, and 40 Hamlet’s! Actors and directors the world over are lured by the challenge of Shakespeare, considered by many to be the greatest writer in the English language. Kenneth Branagh, for example, has played roles in live Shakespearean theater and has starred and directed filmed adaptations, his most recent being Hamlet. As Branagh puts it:

It all gets back to Shakespeare in the end, you know. He's the one responsible for [the literary adaptation craze], and we all ride on his coattails. (See more of the Feldman essay at the site listed below.)

Not all filmmakers agree on the value of adaptations of literary works. Igmar Bergman, for example, writes that

we should avoid making films out of books. The irrational dimension of a literary work, the germ of its existence, is often untranslatable into visual terms—and it, in turn, destroys the special, irrational dimension of the film. If, despite this, we wish to translate something literary into film terms, we must make an infinite number of complicated adjustments which often bear little or no fruit in proportion to the effort expended.//I myself have never had any ambition to be an author. I do not want to write novels, short stories, essays, biographies, or even plays for the theatre. I only want to make films—films about conditions, tensions, pictures, rhythms and characters which are in one way or another important to me. The motion picture, with its complicated process of birth, is my method of saying what I want to my fellow men. I am a film-maker, not an author." (In MacCann, 145)

 ADAPTATION ANECDOTES. From Movie Anecdotes by Peter Hay (Oxford UP, 1990):

Some people get into great fights advocating the literary work over the film adaptation or vice-versa. You’ve heard them: "The book was soooo much better. They just ruined it!" is a common complaint. But it’s important not to get the things confused! It’s important not to get stuck comparing apples and oranges. As Peter Hedges says of his experience adapting to the screen his own novel, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?:

You’re called to tell this story, to take it further. A lot of novelists don’t want to write movies, can’t write movies. You’ve got to remind yourself, It’s a movie. It’s not a book. If it’s a great book, the movie will probably disappoint you. Even if it’s a masterpiece because a great novel that you’ve immersed yourself in, that you’ve memorized, it’s gonna. . . . you’ve made your movie, and it’s about 40 hours long, and it changed your life! . . . There is a point [as a screenwriter, not a novelist] when you have to say, I don’t care what’s in the book. I have to reinvent this story. (<http://www.flf.com/scr2scn/>, as of the last check, this Website was not accessible; but see below for more information.)

What is more fun is to examine the literary work and its cinematic adaptation as two different works altogether, and to assess them using the criteria appropriate to each art form. What they may have in common is the element of story or theme or character; but what they each do well, as literature or as film, is best appreciated and understood in their respective artistic contexts.

SCREENWRITING: CODA

A screenwriter’s work—whether she is writing an original screenplay or an adaptation from a literary work—will inevitably change in the course of transforming the world of words on a page to the world of images and sounds on a screen. For example, as John Brodie writes in his essay entitled "Boston Uncommon," published in the January 1998 issue of Premier Magazine:

Getting Good Will Hunting into production was less of a party. The script, director, and studio would all change before it reached the screen. The plot at the time of the sale was more of a thriller, with Will's mathematical powers attracting the unwanted interest of evil government agents. In the beginning, Affleck and Damon also talked about such movies as Ordinary People, Searching for Bobby Fischer, and Midnight Run as touchstones. Castle Rock partner Rob Reiner told them to lose the thriller element and concentrate on the relationship between Will and his psychiatrist. William Goldman, a sachem of the screenwriting trade, coached them as well. Even reclusive director Terrence Malick (Badlands) came out of his shell for a meeting and suggested ways in which Will's love interest, a Harvard med student named Skylar, could become a catalyst for his decision to leave Boston (essay is no longer available online, as of March 2009 check) .

So, when you screen a film, what you experience is different from what you would experience if you had simply read the screenplay delivered by the person who gets the screenwriter credit. Debra Hill, writer/producer of Halloween and co-producer of The Fisher King, described the evolution from script to final film at the Austin Screenwriters’ Conference: "There's the version written for the studio execs, there's the shooting script version, the version that gets shot and then the version that comes out of the editing room." Paul Schrader responded, "Don't forget there's the movie that gets marketed." Someone else added, "Then there's the special edition director's cut that comes out years later," and then Kirk Honeycutt, reporter at The Hollywood Reporter, concluded, "And now there is the after-death version, in which Orson Welles finally gets his director's cut." (See below for link to Austin Screenwriting Festival site.)

Print references used in this lecture: Dick, Bernard F. Anatomy of Film, 3rd Edition. NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. || Hay, Peter. Movie Anecdotes. NY: Oxford University Press, 1990. || Kolker, Robert. Film, Form, and Culture. Boston: McGraw-Hill College, 1999.  || MacCann, Richard Dyer, Ed. Film: A Montage of Theories. NY: E.P. Dutton, 1966.  || Schaefer, Dennis, and Larry Salvato. Masters of Light: Conversations with Contemporary Cinematographers. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. || Sobchack, Thomas and Vivian. An Introduction to Film, Second Edition. Boston: Little Brown, 1987.

SCREENWRITING. Click here if you are interested in screenwriting, and for more information about screenplays and adaptations.

UNIT TWO:  Lesson 6: Acting | Lesson 7: Drama | Lesson 8: Story | Lesson 9: Writing | Lesson 10: Ideology, I  | Lesson 11, Ideology II - and Critique
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Created 18 October 1998. Revised 10 October 2009.
Gloria Floren, Letters Department, MiraCosta College, One Barnard Drive, Oceanside, California 92056.
Contents Copyright 1998-2009 Gloria L. Floren. All rights reserved. U.S.A.
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