The Visionary Screenwriter - Part One

How many of you believe movies can stay the way they’ve been since the 1940’s? since the 1960’s? since 1980’s? since 2010? Accepting that the movies reflect changes in the way we see the world is one thing, but embracing that movies change the way we see the world is another. Over the years, since I began teaching, the world has changed innumerably, but the screenplay stories that I see from my students have been stuck in the 1980s in terms of worldview and voice. I want to help screenwriters leap into 2015 or even 2020 because the screenplays you’re writing today may not find their way to the screen until then. At the same time, there are structural truths that have withstood the challenges of change and so I am a believer in understanding the essential craft of screenwriting, too.

The audience now has entertainment media readily available. I’ve seen jokes, for instance, on my Facebook newsfeed that are better and about 12 hours ahead of the late-night talk show stand-up. The soap opera that runs on Twitter is as dramatic and fascinating as any story on daytime TV. Conspiracy theories, Magic and UFO sightings are a daily occurrence in threads of discussion forums with a thousand and more labels that are different worlds the user can enter. People may not know their neighbors but still feel they are part of specific communities spread all over the world. This is all free with access to the internet or a smart phone. How can a studio, much less a lowly screenwriter out in the hinterlands hope to compete with so many worthy distractions?

There are going to be gimmicks that, as a screenwriter, you’ll need to consider incorporating into your screenplay. The most obvious and latest craze is 3-D as a value-add. What in a screenplay would make investment in 3-D technology worthwhile? Even the second to last “Harry Potter” installment took a step back from it in favor of a timely release of the movie. First, you have to ask yourself why 3-D is effective as a film tool. Back in the day, Hollywood was looking for a blockbuster film, a film that made the audience want to line-up around a block to see it not just once, but over and over again. Filmmakers like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas somehow inherently understood that going to a film was a two-fold adventure – one being the character-driven hero story, and the other was a visual world that came alive on screen. Combining the hero’s journey with exciting and out-of-this-world action became the standard foundation of a blockbuster film most recently expressed by the 3-D film, “Avatar.”  It is not the hero’s journey that makes a 3-D film work, though, it is the out-of-this-world action that makes it worthwhile. Yet, without the hero's journey the gimmick becomes too obvious. Unfortunately, it may take a while for Hollywood to figure out that you can’t just stick a few action scenes in a movie and make it 3-D. This will cause 3-D to fall into the category of “been there, done that” for many filmgoers. Not every film is a blockbuster film. If 3-D is to survive as a value-add then screenwriters and studios will have to understand what makes it work for the audience rather than just celebrating the fact that they can do it.

However, now look at the world that our audience lives in again. What does the audience experience daily within entertainment that it never had before in a meaningful way? TV shows like “American Idol” call on the viewer to participate in the outcome of the story. These “reality” shows are based upon a belief that if the viewers become invested in the outcome, then they will put aside their time on the computer to come back each week and watch the show unfold. Even YouTube videos incorporate the ability to like, comment and share the films the audience sees.

Films do not offer this kind of interactivity at all. A filmmaker expects that the audience came because they want to invest in another’s point of view and experience catharsis by osmosis. I ask you with complete earnestness, can this possibly stand as the model? Setting nostalgia aside for a moment, can you imagine the children growing up in a world where they interact with technology on a daily basis wanting to go sit in a movie theater for 2 hours or more without expressing their opinions? When those short films come up at the beginning of the film asking for cell phones to be turned off, do you think they actually do that?

The Troubadours and Taliesins of old traveled from village to village singing and telling the news, and stories of their time. Who knows how they interacted with their audiences? Perhaps the event of storytelling, before the advent of writing, was a much more dynamic. Perhaps the story shamans asked the audience to participate. Then along came writing and set those stories on stone and papyrus, and the lasting power was not on the memory of the storyteller or the interaction with the village, but on the interpreter of the writing. Keep in mind that Socrates never learned to write or read and, presumably, his work would not have survived without the writing ability of his student, Plato, but who knows what Plato left out. Works have been commonly revised, including the bible, to fit their time. My suggestion today is that screenwriters must begin to think more flexibly than ever before.  As sure as there was chaos and opportunity in the age when troubadours found themselves replaced by books, there is chaos and opportunity now as we enter the digital age of storytelling but the key to success will be adaptation to change not insistence on the same old, same old.