Writing Screenplays

by Dave Haslett

  The

  ideas4writers

  ideas collection

  General Fiction:

  Screenplays

  by

  Dave Haslett

  ideas4writers

  www.ideas4writers.co.uk

  Copyright © Dave Haslett 2013

  Kindle edition published in Great Britain in 2013

  by ideas4writers, 2a New Street, Cullompton, Devon, EX15 1HA

  www.ideas4writers.co.uk

  The right of Dave Haslett to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  All rights reserved

  The contents of this work may not be stored, copied, transmitted, sold, or reproduced in any form without the permission of the publisher.

  You may use or modify the ideas in this collection in any way that you wish, to aid and inspire your writing. Writing inspired by these ideas may be published, sold or otherwise distributed in any way that you wish. You may not distribute or sell the ideas themselves.

  The characters Stan and Martha Bean and their various friends, neighbours and adventures are the intellectual property of Dave Haslett and may not be used in your writing. They appear in this collection for illustrative purposes only.

  ‘He’ is used throughout the text rather than he/she or they, purely for convenience and grammatical correctness, and by convention. No gender bias or disrespect is intended. Please feel free to replace he with she.

  Glossary

  Antagonist: villain – the opposing main character

  Confidante: trusted friend – someone the hero can bounce ideas around with or reveal secrets to

  Love interest: lover – usually of the protagonist

  Protagonist: hero/heroine – main character

  1. Action!

  Directors and cinema audiences are always looking for movies with more and more action in them. The big question for writers is how the heck do you keep squeezing in more action and still leave room for the story? The answer is to use multiple layers or multiple plots, all running in parallel, and cut between them. With three plotlines running simultaneously you can afford to let one or two of them go quiet while the third is at an action stage, then switch the action to another plotline when that one calms down. By using this method you can easily maintain the action throughout the entire length of the movie, with short cutaways to quieter scenes for the (increasingly rare) moments when you think the audience needs a rest. When you want a longer period of intense action, have two or three plotlines arrive at action stages simultaneously, then chop between them repeatedly. Naturally, the separate plotlines must all be closely related.

  [EXAMPLE] Imagine a story about a motor race where one plotline concerns the leading team planning and updating its strategy throughout the race, sending advice to their driver over the radio, receiving feedback from the car’s telemetry system, and seeing how the race develops against their main rivals. A second plotline might concern a plan to sabotage the race or kidnap or kill one or more of the drivers. A third plotline might be about the financial side of motor racing, with a main sponsor threatening to pull out unless certain demands are met. All of these separate plotlines run in parallel for the majority of the movie, and we keep cutting between them until we reach the climax. Then they all merge together for the big finish, complete with bombs, shootings, kidnappings, crashes, helicopter chases, and so on. Or how about if one of the cars leaves the racetrack and chases the villains along the streets, pursued by police cars, helicopters, TV crews, and so on? That will liven things up. And if the chase is shown on live TV, all that publicity might persuade the race sponsors to stay on for another year.

  2. Actors – death is no limit.

  As you may have noticed from recent TV ads, thanks to some clever computer technology it’s now possible to ‘resurrect’ dead actors and have them appear in brand new films. So don’t be afraid to write parts for dead stars in your own screenplays. If there’s a part that only Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Humphrey Bogart, or some other long-dead icon could play, put them in anyway, and let the producers worry about bringing them back to life. If the budget is too tight for expensive computer wizardry they could just reuse old clips, or hire a look-alike – or get you to change the script a little bit.

  3. Actors – their ideal role.

  Do you read celebrity interviews in magazines? As a screenplay writer you should try to read as many interviews with actors as possible. You’re only looking for one small detail though – where the interviewer asks what role they’d really love to play, or what would be their ideal role. When you read their answer, that immediately gives you your idea for your next screenplay. The actor will usually mention a famous, infamous, or mythical character. That movie has probably already been made, perhaps several times, and there will probably be a number of novels based on the story too. But if there haven’t been any recent movies, perhaps it’s time the story was told again. This time your chosen actor will take the starring role, so you immediately know – from watching his other movies – what sort of personality your lead character will have and how the actor will play the role. The storyline can follow from there, following the original plot as closely or as loosely as you wish. Or perhaps you could invent a new version of the story, that records a second (fictional) crusade or adventure – or whatever it was – that has never been written about before. When your screenplay is finished, find out who the actor’s agent is and send it to him with a covering letter. Explain that in his interview in whatever publication it was the actor stated his wish to play this role, so you’ve written a screenplay just for him. It’s got to be worth a try!

  4. Adapting a novel.

  Many screenplays are based on novels. Often, the person who writes the screenplay is not the person who wrote the novel. The novel has to be adapted and reformatted for the screen. It takes knowledge of screenwriting to be able to do this, and a novelist might not have that knowledge. You might like to have a go at doing this yourself. Rather than tackling a whole novel though, try turning a short story that someone else has written into a short screenplay. If that turns out well then you could consider trying it with a full-length novel. Look for a novel that has great movie potential – you don’t want to do all that work for nothing. You might also like to contact the author. Tell him that you’re working on a screenplay adaptation and ask if he’d be interested in giving you some advice or extra background information. If you’ve written screenplays before – and therefore have some experience – the publishers of the novel might also be interested in hearing from you or might be able to put you in touch with an agent or production company that would be interested in the work.

  5. Adapting a novel – optioning.

  Have you come across a terrific novel or short story and thought that it would make a great movie? The problem is that you could spend a year adapting it into a screenplay only to find that someone else has beaten you to it. The solution is to option the rights to it. If you do this, nobody else is allowed to write the screenplay. Buying the rights outright would be prohibitively expensive, but you can option (lease) the rights for a limited period, up to a maximum of about two years. This gives you time to write the screenplay and try to get a producer interested. How much does it cost to option the rights? In many cases, especially for an older novel or a short story, you can do it for a nominal fee of just one pound – you have to pay something to make it a legally binding contract. If the movie gets made, the writer of the original story will receive a much greater sum of course, and part of the agreement you make with him should specify what that sum will be. You’ll need to use some judgement here: you need to offer him enough to get him to ac
cept, but not so much that no producer will to touch your screenplay because the writer’s fee is too high. Rather than offering a specific amount, it’s more common to offer a percentage of the production budget plus a percentage of the royalties. The writer’s agent will probably be able to guide you through this if you ask him for help. If you haven’t sold the screenplay by the time the option expires, you can either renew or extend the option or simply allow it to expire and go and write something else.

  When choosing a story to option, forget the latest bestsellers; the options on these will either have been snapped up already, or will command massive fees. Go to your local library or a second-hand bookshop and find something a little older. The options on these will be much cheaper, and if they were originally optioned they will probably have expired by now. Look at short stories as well as novels. Plenty of great movies have been based on short stories.

  6. Adapting non-fiction.

  Many writers think about adapting a novel or short story into a play or screenplay, but how about adapting a non-fiction book? Biographies, or histories of events, inventions or discoveries are good examples. You can dramatise the most important parts based on what actually happened in real life. But you don’t need to include every little detail; just capture the ‘essence’ or ‘spirit’ of the story. You might have to make up some sections of the story that were left out of the original accounts but which are needed to make the story flow properly. You might even decide to change some of the characters or change the location to get a better story out of it. Your screenplay is then only loosely based on the original work, or inspired by it, rather than being an accurate portrayal of true events. For more details see the book How to Adapt Anything into a Screenplay by Richard Krevolin.

  7. Adding pace.

  There’s a technique in novel writing that you can borrow if you want to add pace to your screenplay. In novel writing you can write the whole novel and then delete chapter one. Chapter one is usually the slow one where you’re introducing the characters and setting the scene. By the second or third chapter the characters are in the thick of the action and everything’s kicking off, so if you make that the beginning of the book instead then the pace becomes blistering and the readers are immediately hooked. They also have a certain amount of catching up to do, of course, because they aren’t quite sure who everyone is yet, or where they are, or what’s going on. That all becomes evident as the story progresses. The readers should be able to work it all out from what remains of the book, so the first chapter or two won’t be missed. Any gaps in the reader’s knowledge can easily be filled by adding back some of the deleted information as and when it’s needed. The same process works for screenplays: write the whole thing and then delete, say, the first ten pages. Give it to someone else to read. If they can’t understand what’s going on then you’ll have to add back some of the bits you deleted. But you’ve probably duplicated the important points from the first few pages throughout the rest of the screenplay anyway, without realising it, so all that you really need to do is a little tidying up.

  [EXTENSION] Do exactly the same with each act, or each scene, throughout the whole screenplay. Write each one, then cut the first page or two. The viewer will jump sharply from one scene to the next, and be immediately being plunged straight into the heart of the action.

  8. Audience appeal.

  If you want to give your screenplay ‘audience appeal’ try having several characters who are all very different from each other, with each one carefully tailored to appeal to a certain sector of the audience. Everyone watching the movie then has someone they can identify with. It’s worth spending some time talking to people who’ve watched movies in the same genre as the one you’re writing. Ask them which characters they identified with most strongly, and why. If someone didn’t like a particular movie it may be because there was nobody in it that they could identify with. Try putting this question to at least 100 people who’ve all seen the same movie – you should be able to find them online at various movie-related websites. You’ll probably find that some people identify with minor characters rather than the main ones. And some people may give surprising reasons for identifying with a particular character. This is valuable information that you can use to make your own movie appeal to as many people as possible.

  9. Balancing dialogue and action.

  Beginning screenwriters usually put far too much dialogue into their scripts. You need to learn how to get the right balance between dialogue and action. The best way of doing this is by watching movies – preferably with a copy of the script in your hand. You can get movie scripts from many websites; use a search engine to locate the one you need – try to get a copy of the ‘shooting script’ if you can.

  Another point to remember is that movies are visual. Why have people talking about things when you can show them actually doing them? Seeing it in action is far more entertaining. The dialogue then becomes short snippets interspersed with the action: ‘Duck!’, ‘Cover your eyes.’, ‘Here we go!’ and a few longer sections where the hero and his companions make plans, question suspects, or wait for the next piece of action to begin. If you really need to include a long section of dialogue, break it up by having small (but important and relevant) pieces of action going on at the same time.

  10. Beyond the limit.

  Screenplays often work better (and look better on screen) if you push the characters to their limit – and perhaps beyond. Let’s look at an example. How about if someone’s business is failing but he’s also getting demands for ‘insurance money’ from local villains? He refuses to pay them, so they set fire to his premises. He now has no stock he can sell to clear his debts. The police suspect that he set fire to the place himself for the insurance money. That’s a good start but we can stretch him a lot further than that. How about if his son volunteers to guard the premises at night after the villains start making their demands? He’s there when the villains arrive, and they tie him up and leave him inside the burning building. The man receives a phone call to say the building is on fire and he gets there as fast as he can. There’s no sign of his son, but a trail of blood leads inside. His son must be in there, so he rushes in. He is stretched to the limit physically and emotionally as he battles against the intense heat and smoke in a desperate search to find his son. Let’s say that his son is alive but badly burnt. We don’t know whether he’ll survive. The man spends weeks at his hospital bedside waiting for him to wake up. Meanwhile the investigation into the fire has begun and, as before, our man is the primary suspect. His son is the only person who knows who really did it, and he’s in a coma. But let’s push him even harder. His son’s wife is pregnant, and the shock sends her into labour early. Our man has to deliver the baby himself, but there’s a problem and he needs to get them to the hospital urgently. But there’s another problem: the villains are back and they’re waiting for him outside his house. They’ve destroyed his business but they still want money. Perhaps they’re out of their heads on drugs and there’s no reasoning with them. Do you think we’ve stretched him enough yet? Perhaps this is where he goes beyond his limit and things get really interesting. What will he do? Perhaps he discovers a strength he never knew he had, and starts to take control of the situation from this point.

  If you don’t think he’s been stretched beyond breaking point yet, keep piling on the pressure until he is.

  You can use this story idea if you like, or start again with a basic story outline of your own, and keep piling on more and more pressure until your main character reaches – or passes – his limit. What happens after that?

  11. Books you must read.

  There are five essential books on screenwriting that you ought to know inside out. Every Hollywood producer you meet will expect you to have read them. The essential five are:

  Screenplay – the Foundations of Screenwriting by Syd Field

  Making a Good Script Great by Linda Seger

  The Art of Dramatic Writing by Lajos Egri<
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  The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell

  Adventures in the Screen Trade by William Goldman

  12. Budgets – 1.

  You’re unlikely to write a Hollywood blockbuster first time out, so you need to think on a smaller scale. That means movies with a much lower budget. There are thousands of ways of trimming the budget, but here are a few points to keep in mind:

  (a) Characters: the fewer the better, since the actors will want paying, housing, feeding, transporting, and so on during filming.

  (b) Locations: the fewer, cheaper and more easily accessible the better. Some places will refuse permission to film there, or demand hefty fees, so you’ll want to avoid those. If a set has to be constructed in a studio that’s pretty expensive too.

  (c) Action: cheap stunts, no big explosions, nothing that would need to be filmed from a helicopter or would take months to generate on a computer. If the thought of all these restrictions annoys you, try planning (or even writing) a secret multi-million dollar Hollywood version as well as the budget version. Then you can include all the characters, locations, action and special effects you want – just in case you get an offer one day.

  13. Budgets – 2.

  Think ‘low-budget’ for your first few screenplays. Car chases are cheaper than helicopter chases. Bicycle or skateboard chases are even cheaper. Instead of having your musical heroes perform in a stadium filled to capacity, put them in a small but intimate club instead – it could be just as prestigious, especially if the right people are watching. Hackney (a borough of London) is cheaper than Hawaii – unless you, the film crew and all the actors happen to live there. A handful of fireworks and a model of a skyscraper are considerably cheaper than a real towering inferno. You just need to work out your scenes carefully – avoid scenes where the actors are seen running through the burning building, for example. If a producer likes your screenplay and decides to increase the budget, upgrading to larger settings and stunts will be relatively easy.