Why do some screenwriters today *hate* books on screenwriting?
Can’t screenwriters use our entire brain like everyone else?
But what about fine art and painting? Surely the Italian Renaissance wasn’t the result of classes and teachers? Well, actually, painting and fine art has always had instructors. Giotto di Bondone, the father of the Italian Renaissance, was a shepherd whose drawings interested Florentine painter Cimabue enough to make Giotto his student and teach him the art of painting. Though the young artist had raw talent (and seems to have been a class clown) he was given instruction in advanced techniques which allowed him to better use that raw talent. That was somewhere around 1270, and there have been painting teachers and classes in all of the years since then. You can’t teach talent, you can teach techniques. Raw talent is refined with instruction.
I’ve never understood why screenwriters in particular seem to think they are exclusively “right brained” (creative) to the point of being anti “left brain” (analytical)… can’t we use our entire brain like everyone else? There are screenwriters who are vehemently anti research! What’s up with that? I ran into this when I was doing my two U.S. Navy cooperation movies for HBO, and we were given a submarine tour and aircraft carrier tour and were allowed to question the crew… but most of the other projects from producers in our “group” were rejected because the writers refused to research their screenplay.biz/top-screenplays/" 786 target="_blank">screenplays first. No aircraft carriers for you! Many of these films were never made, because you can not buy access to U.S. Military equipment, but you can get it for free with a well researched screenplay. Ignorance is expensive! Why not just read a couple of books?
The same is true for screenwriting: reading a book or two doesn’t harm creativity any more than the research I’ve done on murder investigations forces me to kill people. Instruction does not kill creativity, and this book from 1920 contains all kinds of great lessons that many writers attempting to enter the business back then needed to know. In fact, many (if not most) of those lessons still apply today!
Which is why scanning and then cleaning up the “scannos” and republishing this book was a worthwhile project. You not only get a snapshot of screenwriting in the past, there are also some valuable lessons that professional screenwriters from the past can pass on to those of us reading this book 95 years later. But first let’s look at the writer of this book, Anita Loos, and the rise of the woman in Hollywood and America.
From Toddler to Titan: A Screenwriter’s Growth
So, is what you sit down to write exactly what gets distributed on the set Not really. You write a screenplay and you send it to an agent or producer for consideration. If the screenplay is accepted and plans are made to shoot the film, your screenplay will be modified into a “shooting script,” or scenario. By the time a director and actors see the screenplay, it is in the form of a shooting script.
“When I sit at my table to write, I never know what it’s going to be until I’m underway. trust my inspiration, which sometimes comes and sometimes doesn’t. But I don’t sit back waiting for it. I work every day.” –Alberto Moravia, one of the leading Italian writers in the twentieth century.
The shooting script retains all of the information included in the screenplay, but it goes into much greater detail. In other words, the shooting script has all the dialogue and description plus extensive technical notes like various camera directions.
Most often, the director or director’s assistant will include the directions, like CUT, C.U., PAN, ZOOM, and so on. Beginning writers love to insert those directions into their screenplay, thinking that it makes the screenplay look more professional, but don’t do this because it actually creates the opposite impression. Unless you are specifically writing a shooting script, leave the detailed directions alone.
Most shooting scripts have the scenes numbered and rearranged in the order in which they will be shot—not necessarily the order of how the movie will be put together. So, if you need to film two scenes at the same location that are supposed to take place six months apart, they may appear together in the shooting script. For example, let’s say at the beginning of the movie the hero is standing outside the law courts in London, waiting for a woman. Six months later, he’s back at the same location, this time with a different woman. In spite of the time difference, those two scenes would be numbered sequentially and would be shot one after the other.