Screenplay: the foundations of screenwriting pdf download

Numerous electronic books and tablets are driving paper versions out of the market. Books in pdf and other formats are very convenient to read. When reading, you can choose the font size, set the style of the paragraphs, headers, and footnotes. In addition, electronic devices show time, allow you to make notes, leave bookmarks, and highlight the quotes.

Internet Archive's 25th Anniversary Logo. Search icon An illustration of a magnifying glass. User icon An illustration of a person's head and chest. Sign up Log in. Web icon An illustration of a computer application window Wayback Machine Texts icon An illustration of an open book.

Story and Character 74 6. Endings and Beginnings 89 7. Setting Up the Story 8. Two Incidents 9. Plot Points The Scene The Sequence Building the Story Line Screenplay Form Writing the Screenplay Adaptation On Collaboration After It's Written That is all, and it is everything. Though it was not really a book about screenwriting, but playwriting, the principles laid out were precise and clear. At that time, there was no real distinction made between the crafts of writing for the stage and writing for the screen.

Screenplay changed all that. It laid out the principles of dramatic structure to establish the foundations of screenwriting. It was also the first book to use well-known and popular movies of the time to illustrate the craft of writing for the screen.

And, as we all know, screenwriting is a craft that occasionally rises to the level of art. When it was first published, it became an immediate best seller, or "an instant sensation," as my publisher labeled it. Within the first few months of publication it went through several printings and became a "hot" topic of discussion. Everyone, it seemed, was surprised by its meteoric success. Except me.

Hundreds of people flowed thorough my course on screenwriting, and it soon became clear that everyone had a story to tell. They just didn't know how to tell it. Since that day in the early spring of when Screenplay first arrived on bookstore shelves, there has been a tremendous upsurge in the evolution of writing for the screen.

Today, the popularity of screenwriting and filmmaking is an integral part of our culture and cannot be ignored. Walk into any bookstore and you'll see shelves and shelves devoted to all aspects of filmmaking. In fact, the two most popular majors on college campuses are business and film. And with the dramatic rise of computer technology and computer graphic imagery, the expanded influence of MTV, reality TV, Xbox, PlayStation, and new wireless LAN technology, and the enormous increase in film festivals both here and abroad, we're in the middle of a cinematic revolution.

It won't be too long before we make a short film on our telephones, e-mail them to our friends, and project them on our TV. Clearly, we have evolved in the way we see things. Take a look at the epic adventure Lord of the Rings all three parts , or the portrait of the modern family illustrated in American Beauty, or the emotional and visual impact of Seabiscuit, or the literary presentations of The Bourne Supremacy, Cold Mountain, Memento, Rushmore, Magnolia, The Royal Tenenbaums, or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, compare them to any films of the '70s or '80s, and you'll see the distinctions of this revolution: the images are fast; the information conveyed is visual, rapid; the use of silence is exaggerated; and the special effects and music are heightened and more pronounced.

The concept of time is often more subjective and nonlinear, more novelistic in tone and execution. Yet, while the tools and technique of storytelling have evolved and progressed based on the needs and technologies of the time, the art of storytelling has remained the same.

Movies are a combination of art and science; the technological revolution has literally changed the way we see movies and therefore, by necessity, has changed the way we write movies. That's what it is; that is its nature. It is the art of visual storytelling. The craft of screenwriting is a creative process that can be learned. To tell a story, you have to set up your characters, introduce the dramatic premise what the story is about and the dramatic situation the circumstances surrounding the action , create obstacles for your characters to confront and overcome, then resolve the story.

You know, boy meets girl, boy gets girl, boy loses girl. All stories, from Aristotle through all the constellations of civilization, embody the same dramatic principles. In Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, Frodo becomes the ring bearer to return the ring to its place of origin, Mount Doom, so he can destroy it.

That is his dramatic need. How he gets there and completes the task is the story. Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring sets up the characters and situation and narrative through line; it establishes Frodo and the Shire, as well as the Fellowship, who set off on their mission to Mount Doom. They are confronted with obstacle after obstacle that hinder their mission. At the same time, Aragorn and the others must overcome many challenges to defeat the Ores at Helms Deep.

Aragorn is crowned king, and the hobbits return to the Shire and their life plays out. Set-up, confrontation, and resolution. It is the stuff of drama. I learned this when I was a kid sitting in a darkened theater, popcorn in hand, gazing in awe and wonder at the images projected on the white river of light reflected on that monster screen.

A native of Los Angeles my grandfather arrived here from Poland in , I grew up surrounded by the film industry. I don't remember much about the experience except that Van Johnson taught me how to play checkers. During my teens, going to the movies became a passion, a form of entertainment, a distraction, and a topic of discussion, as well as a place to make out and have fun.

Occasionally, there would be unforgettable moments—like watching Bogart and Bacall in To Have and Have Not, or Walter Huston's mad dance as he discovered gold in the mountains in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, or watching Brando stagger up the gangplank at the end of On the Waterfront.

I attended Hollywood High School and was invited to join the Athenians, one of the many clubs whose members hung out together during high school. A short time after graduation, one of my best friends, Frank Mazzola, also a member of the Athenians, met James Dean and formed a strong relationship with him. Frank introduced Dean to what a high school "club" was like during this period by today's standards it would probably be referred to as a gang.

Occasionally Dean would come with us when we strolled down Hollywood Boulevard on a Saturday night looking for trouble. We were the so-called tough kids, never backing down from anything, whether it was a dare or a fight. We managed to get into a lot of trouble. Dean loved hearing about our "adventures" and would continually pump us for details.

When we pulled some wild stunt, whatever it was, he wanted to know how it started, what we were thinking, how it felt. Actors' questions. It was only after Rebel Without a Cause was released and stormed the world that I became aware of how significant our contribution to the movie had been.

The irony of Dean's having hung out with us during that period had no real effect on me until after he died; only then, when he became an icon of our generation, did I begin to grasp the significance of what we had contributed.

My family—aunts and uncles my parents had died several years earlier —wanted me to be a "professional person," meaning a doctor, lawyer, or dentist.

I had been working parttime at Mount Sinai Hospital and I liked the drama and pace of emergency room medicine, so I entertained thoughts about becoming a doctor. I enrolled at the University of California, packed up the few belongings I had, and drove to Berkeley. It was August Berkeley at the dawn of the '60s was an active crucible of revolt and unrest; banners, slogans, and leaflets were everywhere.

Protest rallies were held almost every day, and when I'd stop to listen, FBI agents, trying to be inconspicuous in their shirts and ties, would be taking pictures of everyone. It was a joke. It didn't take long for me to be swept up in the activities personifying the fervid issues of the time. Inspired by their voices and their lives, I, too, wanted to ride the waves of change. It wasn't too long before the campus exploded into a political frenzy initiated by Mario Savio and the Free Speech Movement.

It was during my second semester at Berkeley that I auditioned for, and was cast as, Woyzeck in the German Expressionist drama Woyzeck, by Georg Buchner. My relationship with Renoir literally changed my life.

I've learned there are two or three times during a lifetime when something happens that alters the course of that life. We meet someone, go somewhere, or do something we've never done before, and those moments are the possibilities that guide us to where we're supposed to go and what we're supposed to do with our lives.

That's true. But over the years, I've learned not to believe too much in luck or accidents; I think everything happens for a reason.

There's something to be learned from every moment, every experience we encounter during the brief time we spend on this planet. Call it fate, call it destiny, call it what you will; it really doesn't matter. I auditioned for the world premiere of Renoir's play Carola, and was cast in the third lead, playing the part of Campan, the stage manager of a theater in Paris during the Nazi occupation in the last days of World War II.

For almost a year, I sat at Renoir's feet, watching and learning about movies through his eyes. He was always commenting on film, his opinions vocal and fervent about everything he saw or wrote, either as an artist, a person, or a humanitarian. And he was all of these. Being in his presence was an inspiration, a major life lesson, a joy, a privilege, as well as a great learning experience. Though movies had always been a major part of my life, it was only during the time I spent with Renoir that I turned my focus to film, the same way a plant turns toward the sun.

Suddenly, I saw movies in a whole new light, as an art form to study and learn, seeking in the story and images an expression and understanding of life. My love for the movies has fed and nourished me ever since. He was a man like any other, but what separated him, at least in my mind, was his great heart; he was open, friendly, a man of great intelligence, wisdom, and wit who seemed to influence the lives of everyone he touched. The son of the great Impressionistic painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Jean, too, had the great gift of sight.

Renoir taught me about film, mentored me in the art of visually telling a story, and imparted the gift of insight. He showed me the door, then held it open as I walked through. I've never looked back. He would quote his father about bringing an idea into existence. No two leaves are exactly the same. The artist who paints only what is in his mind must very soon repeat himself. No two leaves, no two flowers, no two people are ever painted in the same way.

It's the same with his son's films: Grand Illusion, Rules of the Game considered two of the greatest films ever made , The Golden Coach, Picnic on the Grass, and many more. Renoir told me he "painted with light," the same way his father painted with oils. Jean Renoir was an artist who discovered the cinema in the same way his father "discovered" Impressionism. Thousands of years and the evolution of humankind condensed into the poetry of two pieces of film; it is a moment of magic and wonder, mystery and awe.

Such is the power of film. For the past few decades, as I've traveled and lectured around the world on the art and craft of screenwriting, I have watched the style of screenwriting evolve into a more visual medium. As I mentioned, we're seeing certain techniques of the novel, like stream of consciousness and chapter headings, beginning to seep into the modern screenplay.

It's clear that a whole new computer-savvy generation, who grew up with interactive software, digital storytelling, and editing applications sees things in a more visual way and is thus able to express it in a more cinematic style. Great films are timeless—they embody and capture the times in which they were made; the human condition is the same now as it was then.

My purpose in writing Screenplay was to explore the craft of screenwriting and illustrate the foundations of dramatic structure. When you want to write a screenplay, there are two aspects you have to deal with. One is the preparation required to write it: the research, thinking time, character work, and laying out of the structural dynamic. The other is the execution, the actual writing of it, laying out the visual images and capturing the dialogue.

The hardest thing about writing is knowing what to write. That was true when I first wrote the book, and it is now. This is not a "how-to" book; I can't teach anybody how to write a screenplay.

People teach themselves the craft of screenwriting. All I can do is show them what they have to do to write a successful screenplay.

So, I call this a what-to book, meaning if you have an idea for a screenplay, and you don't know what to do or how to do it, I can show you. As a writer-producer for David L. Wolper Productions, a freelance screenwriter, and head of the story department at Cinemobile Systems, I have spent years writing and reading screenplays.

At Cinemobile alone, I read and synopsized more than two thousand screenplays in a little over two years. And of all those two thousand screenplays, I only found forty to submit to our financial partners for possible film production. Why so few? Because ninety-nine out of a hundred screenplays I read weren't good enough to invest millions of dollars in.

Put another way, only one out of a hundred screenplays I read was good enough to consider for film production. And at Cinemobile, our job was making movies. At that time, in the early '70s, Cinemobile was a portable location facility that literally revolutionized film production. Basically, the Cinemobile was a Greyhound bus with an eight-wheel-drive, so we could store equipment in the luggage area, then transport cast and crew to the top of a mountain, shoot three to eight pages of script each day, and return home.

My boss, Fouad Said, the creator of the Cinemobile, became so successful that he decided to make his own movies, so he went out and raised several million dollars in a few weeks, with a revolving fund of many million more, if needed.

Pretty soon everybody in Hollywood was sending him screenplays. Thousands of scripts came in, from stars and directors, from studios and producers, from the known and the unknown. That's when I was given the opportunity to read the submitted screenplays and evaluate them in terms of cost, quality, and probable budget. My job, as I was constantly reminded, was to "find material" for our three financial partners: the United Artists Theatre Group; the Hemdale Film Distribution Company, headquartered in London; and the Taft Broadcasting Company, parent company of Cinemobile.

So I began reading screenplays. As a screenwriter taking a much-needed break from more than seven years of freelance writing I had written nine screenplays: two were produced, four were optioned, and three nothing ever happened with , my job at Cinemobile gave me a totally new perspective on writing a screenplay.

It was a tremendous opportunity, a formidable challenge, and a dynamic learning experience. I kept asking myself what made the screenplays I recommended better than the others.

At first I didn't have any answers, but I held it in my consciousness and thought about it a long time. Every morning, when I arrived at work, there would be a stack of screenplays on my desk, waiting.

No matter what I did, no matter how fast I read or how many scripts I skimmed, skipped, or tossed, one solid fact always remained: The size of the pile never changed. I knew I could never get through the pile. Reading a screenplay is a unique experience. It's not like reading a novel, play, or article in the Sunday paper.

But that didn't work for me. I found it too easy to get caught up in the writer's words and style. I learned that most of the scripts that read well—meaning they featured lovely sentences, stylish and literate prose, and beautiful dialogue—usually didn't work. While they might read like liquid honey flowing across the page, the overall feeling was that of reading a short story or a strong journalistic piece in a magazine like Vanity Fair or Esquire.

But that's not what makes a good screenplay. I started out wanting to read and "do coverage" on—synopsize— three screenplays a day. I found I could read two scripts without a problem, but when I got to the third, the words, characters, and actions all seemed to congeal into some kind of amorphous goo of plotlines concerning the FBI and CIA, punctuated with bank heists, murders, and car chases, with a lot of wet kisses and naked flesh thrown in for local color. At two or three in the afternoon, after a heavy lunch and maybe a little too much wine, it was difficult to keep my attention focused on the action or nuances of character and story.

So, after a few months on the job, I usually found myself closing my office door, propping my feet up on the desk, turning off the phones, leaning back in the chair with a script on my chest, and taking a catnap. I must have read more than a hundred screenplays before I realized that I didn't know what I was doing.

What was I looking for? What made a screenplay good or bad? I could tell whether I liked it or not, yes, but what were the elements that made it a good screenplay?

It had to be more than a string of clever bits and smart dialogue laced together in a series of beautiful pictures. Was it the plot, the characters, or the visual arena where the action took place that made it a good screenplay?

Was it the visual style of writing or the cleverness of the dialogue? If I didn't know the answers to that, then how could I answer the question I was repeatedly being asked by agents, writers, producers, and directors: What was I looking for?

That's when I understood that the real question for me was, How do I read a screenplay? I knew how to write a screenplay, and I certainly knew what I liked or disliked when I went to the movies, but how did I apply that to the reading of a screenplay? What I was looking for, I soon realized, was a style that exploded off the page, exhibiting the kind of raw energy found in scripts like Chinatown, Taxi Driver, The Godfather, and American Graffiti. Scott Fitzgerald's classic novel.

At the end of the book, Nick, the narrator, recalls how Gatsby used to stand looking out over the water at the image of the green light, beckoning him to past memories of unrequited love. Gatsby was a man who believed in the past, a man who believed that if he had enough wealth and power, he could turn back time and recreate it.

It was that dream that spurred him as a young man to cross over the tracks, searching for love and wealth, searching for the expectations and desires of the past that he hoped would become the future.

The green light. I thought a lot about Gatsby and the green light as I struggled through those piles of screenplays searching for "the good read," that special and unique screenplay that would be "the one" to make it through the gauntlet of studios, executives, stars,financialwizards, and egos and finally end up on that monster screen in a darkened theater.

It was just about that time that I was given the opportunity to teach a screenwriting class at the Sherwood Oaks Experimental College in Hollywood.

At that time in the '70s, Sherwood Oaks was a professional school taught by professionals. It was the kind of school where Paul Newman, Dustin Hoffman, and Lucille Ball gave acting seminars; where Tony Bill taught a producing seminar; where Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman, and Alan Pakula gave directing seminars; where John Alonzo and Vilmos Zsigmond, two of the finest cinematographers in the world, taught classes in cinematography.

It was a school where producers, professional production managers, cameramen, film editors, writers, directors, and script supervisors all came to teach their craft. It was the most unique film school in the country. I had never taught a screenwriting class before, so I had to delve into my own writing and reading experience to evolve my basic material. I kept asking myself. And pretty soon I started getting some answers. When you read a good screenplay, you know it—it's evident from page one, word one.

The style, the way the words are laid out on the page, the way the story is set up, the grasp of dramatic situation, the introduction of the main character, the basic premise or problem of the screenplay—it's all set up in the first few pages of the script: Chinatown, Five Easy Pieces, The Godfather, The French Connection, Shampoo, and All the President's Men are all perfect examples.

A screenplay, I soon realized, is a story told with pictures. It's like a noun; it has a subject, and is usually about a person, or persons, in a place, or places, doing his, or her, or their "thing.

Out of that understanding, I saw that any good screenplay has certain conceptual components common to the screenplay form. These elements are expressed dramatically within a structure that has a definite beginning, middle, and end, though not necessarily in that order.

When I reexamined the forty screenplays submitted to our financial partners—including The Godfather, American Graffiti, The Wind and the Lion, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, and others—I realized they all contained these basic concepts, regardless of how they were cinematically executed. I began teaching this conceptual approach to writing the screenplay.

If the aspiring writer knows what a screenplay is, what it looks like, I reasoned, it can be used as a guide or blueprint to point out the path through the forest. I've now been teaching this approach to screenwriting for over twenty-five years. It's an effective and comprehensive approach to the writing of a screenplay and the art of visual storytelling. My material has evolved and been applied by thousands and thousands of students all over the world.

The principles in this book have been totally embraced by the film industry. It's not uncommon for major film studios and production companies to contractually stipulate that a delivered screenplay must have a definite three-act structure and be no longer than 2 hours and 8 minutes, or pages, in length. There are always exceptions, of course.

At this writing, Screenplay has been reprinted nearly 40 times, gone through several editions, and been translated into some 22 languages, along with several black market editions: first in Iran, then in China, then Russia. When I began thinking about revising this book, I quickly realized that most of the films I had written about were from the '70s and that I wanted to use more contemporary examples, movies people might be more familiar with.

But as I went back into the book and saw the film examples I had originally used, I realized that most of them are now considered classics of the American cinema—films like Chinatown, Harold and Maude, Network, Three Days of the Condor, and others. These films still hold up, on both an entertainment and a teaching level.

In most cases, the films are as valid today as they were when they were made. Despite having some dated attitudes, they continue to capture a particular moment in time, a time of unrest, social revolution, and violence that mirrors some of the antiwar sentiments prevalent today.

The nightmare in Iraq is very similar to the nightmare in Vietnam. What I see and understand now, in hindsight, is that the principles of screenwriting that I delineated at the dawn of the '80s are just as relevant now as they were then. Only the expression has changed. This material is designed for everyone. Novelists, playwrights, magazine editors, housewives, businessmen, doctors, actors, film editors, commercial directors, secretaries, advertising executives, and university professors—all have benefited from it.

As I said earlier, the hardest thing about writing is knowing what to write. When you complete this book, you will know exactly what to do to write a professional screenplay.

Whether you do it or not is up to you. Talent is God's gift; either you've got it or you don't. But writing is a personal responsibility; either you do it or you don't. A pretty stenographer you've seen before comes into the room and you watch her.

She takes off her gloves, opens her purse and dumps it out on the table. She has two dimes and a nickel—and a cardboard match box. She leaves the nickel on the desk, puts the two dimes back into her purse and takes her black gloves to the stove. Just then your telephone rings. The girl picks it up, says hello—listens—and says deliberately into the phone, "I've never owned a pair of black gloves in my life.

Scott Fitzgerald In the summer of , F. Scott Fitzgerald, drinking far too much, deeply in debt, and drowning in the suffocating well of despair, moved to Hollywood seeking new beginnings, hoping to reinvent himself by writing for the movies. Despite all the preparation he put into each assignment, he was obsessed with finding the answer to a question that haunted him continuously: What makes a good screenplay?

Billy Wilder once compared Fitzgerald to "a great sculptor who is hired to do a plumbing job. He did not know how to connect the pipes so the water could flow. Mankiewicz eventually rewrote his script. He worked on rewrites for several other movies, including a disastrous week on Gone With the Wind he was forbidden to use any words that did not appear in Margaret Mitchell's novel , but after Three Comrades, all of his projects ended in failure.

One, a script for Joan Crawford called Infidelity, was left uncompleted, canceled because it dealt with the theme of adultery. Fitzgerald died in , working on his last, unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon. He died believing himself to be a failure.

I've always been intrigued by the journey of F. Scott Fitzgerald. What resonates with me the most is that he was constantly searching for the answer to what made a good screenplay. His overwhelming external circumstances—his wife Zelda's institutionalization, his unmanageable debts and lifestyle, his excessive drinking—all fed into his insecurities about the craft of screenwriting.

And make no mistake: Screenwriting is a craft, a craft that can be learned. Even though he worked excessively hard, and was disciplined and responsible, he failed to achieve the results he was so desperately striving for. But reading his books and writings and letters from this period, it seems clear that he was never exactly sure what a screenplay was; he always wondered whether he was "doing it right," whether there were certain rules he had to follow in order to write a successful screenplay.

When I was studying at the University of California, Berkeley, as an English lit major, I read the first and second editions of Tender Is the Night for one of my classes. It is the story of a psychiatrist who marries one of his patients, who, as she slowly recovers, exhausts his vitality until he is "a man used up. In the first edition of the novel, Book I is written from the point of view of Rosemary Hoyt, a young actress who shares her observations about meeting the circle that surrounds Dick and Nicole Diver.

Rosemary is on the beach at Cap d'Antibes on the French Riviera, watching the Divers enjoying an outing on the sand. As she watches, she sees them as a beautiful couple who appear, at least from her point of view, to have everything going for them. They are, she thinks, the ideal couple. Rich, beautiful, intelligent, they look to be the embodiment of what everyone wants for himself or herself.

But the second book of the novel focuses on the life of Dick and Nicole, and we learn that what we saw through Rosemary's eyes was only the relationship they showed to the world; it was not really true. The Divers have major problems, which drain them emotionally and spiritually, and ultimately destroy them. When the first edition of Tender Is the Night was published, sales were poor, and Fitzgerald thought he had probably been drinking too much and might have compromised his vision.

But from his Hollywood experience, he came to believe he did not introduce his main characters early enough. So he opened the book focusing on the main character, Dick Diver. But that didn't work either, and Fitzgerald was crushed. The book was financially unsuccessful until many years later, when Fitzgerald's genius was finally acknowledged.

What strikes me so vividly is what Fitzgerald didntsee; his opening section focusing on how Rosemary saw the Divers was more cinematic than novelistic.

This is the book summary of Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting. It should actually be something like a bible for ya. Although Syd Field is pretty dead now his book lives on. Read it! Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting written by Syd Field is the second book about screenwriting coming up on this blog. Syd Fields book is very thorough and has a great structure that makes it easy to grasp the content. One interesting thing that happens afterwards is that you start to watch films differently.

You catch yourself analyzing, judging and improving the movie in our head while watching, and this is an amazing thing if you watch a lot of films — your mind is working in silence, contributing to you screenwriting knowledge base. Book title : Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting. Download Summary of Screenplay pdf. Read the summary of Screenplay Chapter 1: Intro What is a screenplay: The nature of the screenplay is the same as it has always been: A screenplay is a story told with pictures, in dialogue and description, and placed within the context of dramatic structure.

It is the art of visual storytelling. Two aspects to deal with when writing a screenplay: When you want to write a screenplay, there are two aspects you have to deal with. One is the preparation required to write it: the research, thinking time, character work, and laying out of the structural dynamic. The other is the execution, the actual writing of it, laying out the visual images and capturing the dialogue.

The hardest thing about writing is knowing what to write. Screenplay vs. We know how they act, feel, react, and figure things out. If other characters appear and are brought into the narrative line of action, then the story embraces their point of view, but the main thrust of the story line always returns to the main character.

The main character is who the story is about. A play is different. The action, or story line, occurs onstage, under the proscenium arch, and the audience becomes the fourth wall, eavesdropping on the lives of the characters, what they think and feel and say. They talk about their hopes and dreams, past and future plans, discuss their needs and desires, fears and conflicts. A screenplay is different. Movies are different. Film is a visual medium that dramatizes a basic story line; it deals in pictures, images, bits and pieces of film.

Definition : We could say that a screenplay is a story told with pictures, in dialogue and description, and placed within the context of dramatic structure. A linear structure : Screenplays have a basic linear structure that creates the form of the screenplay because it holds all the individual elements, or pieces, of the story line in place. A holistic view : What is the relationship between the parts and the whole? How do you separate one from the other? A story is the whole, and the elements that make up the story—the action, characters, conflicts, scenes, sequences, dialogue, action, Acts I, II, and III, incidents, episodes, events, music, locations, etc.

Act I, the beginning, is a unit of dramatic action that is approximately twenty or thirty pages long and is held together with the dramatic context known as the Set- Up.

Context is the space that holds something in place — in this case, the content. In this unit of dramatic action, Act I, the screenwriter sets up the story, establishes character, launches the dramatic premise what the story is about , illustrates the situation the circumstances surrounding the action , and creates the relationships between the main character and the other characters who inhabit the landscape of his or her world.

The first ten-page unit of dramatic action is the most important part of the screenplay. Act II is where your character has to deal with surviving the obstacles that you put in front of him or her.

What is it that drives him or her forward through the action? What does your main character want? What is his or her dramatic need? All drama is conflict. Without conflict, you have no action; without action, you have no character; without character, you have no story; and without story, you have no screenplay.

It is held together with the dramatic context known as Resolution. Act III is that unit of action that resolves the story. It is not the ending; the ending is that specific scene or shot or sequence that ends the script. It is the relationship between these parts that determines the whole.

A Plot Point is always a function of the main character. It is a story progression. As mentioned, it usually occurs anywhere between pages 80 or 90 of the screenplay.

The dramatic structure of the screenplay may be denned as a linear arrangement of related incidents, episodes, or events leading to a dramatic resolution. How you utilize these structural components determines the form of your screenplay. You need a subject: You need more than just an idea to start writing a screenplay. You need a subject to embody and dramatize the idea.

A subject is defined as an action and a character. An action is what the story is about, and a character is who the story is about. Every screenplay has a subject—it is what the story is about. Every screenplay dramatizes an action and a character. You, as the screenwriter, must know who your movie is about and what happens to him or her. It is a primary principle in writing, not only in screenplays but in all forms of writing. And that becomes the starting point of your screenplay.

Reducing the story line : It may take several pages of free-association writing about your story before you can begin to grasp the essentials and reduce a complex story line to a simple sentence or two.

Just keep doing it, and you will be able to articulate your story idea clearly and concisely. Creative decisions : Every creative decision must be made by choice, not necessity. Your subject will find you , given the opportunity. Trust yourself. Just start looking for an action and a character. The next step is expanding your subject. Fleshing out the action and focusing on the character broadens the story line and accentuates the details.

Gather your material any way you can. It will always be to your advantage. Research : By doing research you acquire information. The information you collect allows you to operate from the position of choice, confidence, and responsibility. The principle rule of storytelling : The more you know, the more you can communicate.

The key to a successful screenplay , Waldo emphasized, was preparing the material. That cannot be changed, because it holds the entire story in place. Putting words down on paper, he said, is the easiest part of the screenwriting process; it is the visual conception of the story that takes so long. There are two kinds of action — physical action and emotional action. Physical action can be a battle sequence. Emotional action is what happens inside your characters during the story.

Ask yourself what kind of story you are writing. Is it an outdoor action adventure movie, or is it a story about a relationship, an emotional story?

First, define the dramatic need of your character. What does your character want? What drives him to the resolution of your story? The primary ingredients : Conflict, struggle, overcoming obstacles, both inside and outside, are the primary ingredients in all drama—in comedy, too. The job of the screenwriter is to keep the reader turning pages. The story always has to move forward, toward its resolution.

And it all comes down to knowing your subject. Without action, there is no character. Action is Character. What a person does is what he is, not what he says.

Incidents : Henry James says that the incidents you create for your characters are the best ways to illuminate who they are—that is, reveal their true nature, their essential character. How they respond to a particular incident or event, how they act and react, what they say and do is what really defines the essence of their character.

Film is behavior. Main character : You can have more than one main character, of course, but it certainly clarifies things if you identify a single hero or heroine. First, establish your main character. Who is your story about? The interior life of your character takes place from birth up until the time your story begins. It is a process that forms character. The exterior life of your character takes place from the moment your film begins to the conclusion of the story.

It is a process that reveals character. Film is a visual medium. When you begin formulating your character from birth, you begin to see your character build. Questions and answers : Writing is the ability to ask yourself questions and wait for the answers. Try to phrase any questions using the word what: What causes my character to react in this manner?

The exterior aspect of your character takes place during the actual time of the screenplay, from the first fade-in to the final fade-out. Three basic components : How do you make your characters real, believable, and multidimensional people during your story? From fade-in to fade-out? Professional : What does your main character do for a living?