The Screenplay and its creator, you.

Let there be screenplay

What kind of storyteller are you?  Are you a lighthearted one, or a brooding poet?  Are your characters living through historical events or in an amazing and unfamiliar future?

Have you written a novel that belongs on the silver screen, or do you have a story banging around in your head trying to force its way out?  Maybe you have a protagonist with a draw filled with revealing documents, and she is about expose a rich and powerful group of men.  Or is it a young couple who have moved to a new city to find a better life for their children, only to have a terrible tragedy befall them in a place where they are utterly alone.

I know you.  You love the movies; you always have; you want to be a part of them.  You want to paint your story in words, have those words transformed into moving pictures, and have those moving pictures, and the characters that live in them, become relevant memories to those that see them.

“I love stories. 

“I see the story in my head; it’s like an extreme daydream.  When I’m lucky, there is no one around to bother me and  I can write down what I see in my mind. 

“Man, I love that.

“It’s almost enough in itself.”

A middle-aged man once said that to me.  Putting aside the skills and the craft, this is a great source of good screenplays: you not only have the story and dialogue, but “seeing it” indicates that you also have the visuals that are so important to a screenplay.

Creativity is a common commodity.  There are so many talented writers who would love to earn a living with their talent, but cannot.  Writers face stiff competition.  What’s move, it is destine to become even more competitive. The educational community in the United States has decided that the workforce of the future must be more articulate.  Therefore, from the third grade on, a major component of every subject is writing.  Even math: third graders in the town I live in must not only answer their math questions correctly, but they must, in writing, explain how they came to that answer.

With all this competition, how are you going to succeed as a writer?

You will succeed if you are a passionate teller of compelling stories; and by becoming, and staying, a hard working student of your profession. 

I love this nugget: when you’re green you grow, when you’re ripe, you rot.   The good news is that it has never been easier to stay green.

Depending on where you live, there are classes to attend that will help you greatly.  If you’re really determined to be a success, you may want to take a basic writing course, if you feel you could use even a brush up, get some fresh ideas by attending a creative writing course with a good teacher at a local college.

There are more screenplays for sale than you can shake a stick at.  Not to mention all the screenplays that are published online.  Reading successful screenplays is a great learning tool. We've put a page together with a number of screenplays that we recommend.

The advent of the DVD brings with it a form of instructions that is unequalled.  Many DVDs not only have the director and an actor or two doing commentary, but the writer as well.  A wonderful bonus is that there are so many writer/directors these days, and their commentary is especially enthusiastic and instructive.  A writer/director is often the origin of the concept, and writes with a unique visual understanding; he is usually a passionate witness to the tale, and he is intimate with the characters.  Like our friend, he has seen the story unfold in his mind.

These DVDs in particular are rich in very interesting and highly instructive information. Two excellent DVDs that have great commentary by the writer are Orange County and Almost Famous.  At the end of this article you will find many recommendations.

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Another great course of study is to compare.  Compare the original screenplay to the scrip or the actual movie.

Many directors and actors change things as the go, to paraphrase Indiana Jones.  Sometimes what they do is a hit, and sometimes they really mess things up.  And there is something to be learned in each of these cases.

Then there is the novel that became a screenplay that became of movie.  After you’ve read a few novels, the screenplays they became and then watched the movies, grab a copy of Dashel Hammet’s Maltese Falcon.  This is a great novel, and it became a classic picture.  I don’t want to give anything away, but I dare you to find a difference in the film from the novel.  Hammet wrote a great book that will paint pictures in your head, the screenwriter put his ego on the shelf and left great-enough alone.

Vanity Fair: Bringing Thackeray's Timeless Novel to the Screen (Newmarket Pictorial Moviebooks)
 
A wonderful learning tool
JDM

• Learn the method that the great writer, W. Summerset Maugham taught himself to write like the the great writers that preceded him. Follow this link

• COMPARING THE NOVEL, SCREENPLAY & AND FILM

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These are the opening lines to the book “xxx”

            Xxx

These are the opening lines to the movie “xxx”

            Xxx

This is the beginning of the “xxx” screenplay.

Xxx 

And there was screenplay!

© copyright by Joseph De Matteo, October 2004 all rights reserved.  You must get written permission to us this in whole or in part, and give credit to Joseph De Matteo