by Ben Brady
Dialects
Sometimes it is appropriate for a character to speak a particular dialect. You must familiarize yourself with that dialect, and then—there is no shortcut—you will have to write it accurately in the dialogue. But unless the dialect is completely unfamiliar, it may be enough to give a full sample of the dialect in your first lines, and thereafter simply evoke it. You must make that procedure clear in the business.
If your characters simply speak the more or less rough and ready kind of English spoken by rough or uneducated people, then you need to be consistent in the dialogue. On the Waterfront gives you a good example of that. Sometimes just the feel of a dialect is enough—Williams in A Streetcar Named Desire is content to give us the feel of Southern dialect and an older gentility in Blanche’s vocabulary and through the structure of her lines.
Use phonetic spelling very sparingly in any attempt to render dialogue: it makes a script hard to read. The imitation of the structure of a dialect is more effective: write “Tis a fine time we’ll be havin’ at the party” instead of “We’ll sure hev a foin time at the pahrrty.”
Common Errors
CHARACTER
(angrily)
Dammit! I said stop that!
or
CHARACTER
(sadly)
How could you say something so hurtful? . . . Oh dear, I can’t stop crying . . .
or
CHARACTER
(happily)
I’m so happy to see you!
Nothing betrays the novice more than parenthetical directions to make sure we get what is obvious in a line. Don’t put in “sadly,” “happily,” or “angrily” when a line is perfectly clear without that direction. Characterize a line only when there is legitimate doubt about how it should be understood. Always try to write with such economy and force that how a line should be taken is clear.
Another common error appears in dialogue written by the author who forgets to use contractions when characters speak. Language without contractions in the mouths of characters sounds precious and stilted. Don’t have a character say “I will not,” when ordinary speech would have him say, “I won’t.” Don’t say, “I have not got it,” when normal usage would be, “I haven’t got it.” Remember that we expect to hear characters use our everyday, conversational speech unless there is some special reason for modifying it.
Hone your dialogue as you work on your scenes. Make sure it expresses feeling and character appropriately and economically, reveals information under immediate necessity, and forwards the business of revealing motivation and driving the action forward. If you are spare, lean, economic, to the point, conversational, and immediate, you will be in good shape. If, beyond that, you can drive such language naturally or as part of a special character into a particularly forceful or even poetic mode, then your scene will be more effective. But do not lose the immediately realistic surface of speech.
THEME
Ideas in Dramatic Art
Art is not just an outpouring of feeling, nor is feeling the only content of drama. Characters without minds are morons. Ideas cause profound passions and are often at the center of effective drama. The ability to think is critical in a dramatist.
These may seem obvious statements, yet they are at odds with popular notions about drama, and make many American critics and dramatists uneasy. Hollywood is not famous for the play of mind in its films, nor has the American legitimate stage proved hospitable to dramas of ideas as frequently as the European. The result has been a tendency to underplay the thought involved in craft or in a given film and often to depend on plays and films from elsewhere to supply the gap of mind in American drama.
Any limited view of human nature is bound to fail, however. We know now that scientists pursue their research with passion and that some of the greatest scientific breakthroughs have been anticipated by intuition or dream, yet we are still less willing to admit how much thought and intellect go into the making of a drama.
The notion that an idea is of little dramatic interest is certainly an odd idea in itself. How could such an attitude ever have arisen in a century of revolution and war caused by ideas of social structure, economic practice, or political behavior? How could anyone even vaguely familiar with the history of religious ideas be ignorant of the convulsions those have caused? There are few things men and women become as passionate about as an idea whose time has come. Any dramatist who tries to deal with the conflicts around him today must be able to think about the ideas that so passionately divide us if he is to treat them adequately in his drama; otherwise, what will he be writing about? The streak of anti-intellectualism in American life has no room in the practice of playwriting with its attempt to deal with real characters confronting real issues.
By now you must find the idea that thought has no place in art a very odd one simply through your struggle to write effective scenes. You have discovered just how much disciplined and critical thought it takes, constantly reexamined and redefined rewrite by rewrite, to create an effective scene. Drama is not an easy art. The saying “Art is long but life is short” was not first said by a dilettante.
Similarly, you have seen how thought plays a considerable role in the content of many of the scenes at which we have looked. The question about the nature of justice is raised in the first scene of The Godfather. Ideas are deeply embedded in screenplays like Tootsie, On the Waterfront, or Kramer vs. Kramer. Part of their continuing interest as well as their initial impact was caused by their attempt to deal with issues that have meaning in the real world: sexual politics, labor corruption, the changing roles of men and women in the family. Robert Redford in Brubaker dealt with a reform-minded prison warden whose efforts to clean up a prison fail because prison cannot be made less corrupt than the world outside its walls.
Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander evokes a comparison of comfortable materialism with austere ideology to make a humanistic statement in favor of moderation and simple humanity. In the scene we quoted, Bishop Vergérus is incapable of outwardly giving up his faith, even though inwardly he has lost it. When confronted with Alexander, he goes through a form of doublethink: by “love” he really means hate; by “well-being,” debasement. He is an ideologue in a century of ideologues, and he maintains his ideology in order to maintain his power. Bergman thus treats one of the oldest themes in a contemporary setting: power corrupts. Any look at the headlines will remind us how urgent an issue this is.
Even television cannot exclude ideas, though it suffers most from the Hollywood cliché of entertainment as mindless activity. Typically television reduces the scope of ideas so that a television drama might deal with the obvious drawbacks of alcoholism or drug addiction or wife beating without any attempt to deal with the larger issues of social structure, economic justice, or political theory that dominate and divide our society. Serious dramatic series constantly try to deal with real issues, though we have seen more than one such series canceled, even though it won an Emmy for its efforts. Miniseries often have minimal intellectual weight and so have fallen on lean times, some, like Roots, have dealt with issues central to our national experience.
The presence of real issues in a well-written drama can generate an unmatched level of involvement and excitement. Men are moved to great passions by their thoughts. It is not surprising, then, that so much of television has been preempted by reruns of theatrical release films: balance has to be found somewhere.
How to Handle Thematic Material
We have stressed thought and idea rather than theme to emphasize the intellectual involvement that is characteristic of good writing. Theme in drama is your, the writer’s, point of view on your material. It involves your thought on the issues involved in your story: your ideas and reflections.
Writers cannot simply impose their thoughts on their material or use their characters to say what they think, however. Characters don’t debate an issue at their creator’s convenience, nor does a character speak the theme of a dr
ama, even one simple enough to be reduced to an elementary statement. “There can be no doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience” was said not by a current critic but by Immanuel Kant at the beginning of his Critique of Pure Reason, one of the cornerstones of modern philosophy.10 A dramatist creates that experience through the conflict: how he handles the conflict and how it turns out generate whatever thought he hopes to leave us with. Our involvement in drama is always immediate and emotional: any theme, to be effective, must be embodied in the immediate action of the story. As a screenwriter you must make us care by arousing our feelings for your characters through the conflict: then, because we care, we will think about what their story means.
Let’s look at two examples to see how this works.
The Parting Scene from A Doll House
Reality is not a given; how it is experienced varies with time and culture. How reality appears to us is at least in part how we would like it to appear, a process that drama reflects with especial truthfulness with its emphasis on cause-and-effect connections. How often in reality do we find such connections so clearly rendered? We touched on how drama creates the truth often lacking in our lives; how modern drama does just that is primarily the nineteenth-century Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen’s creation.
Ibsen created the realistic, conversational style we take for granted. He also wrote the first modern feminist, environmental, sociological, medical, and anti-ideological plays. His sense of structure underlies our own ideas about structure. A screenplay like Kramer vs. Kramer originates in form, tone, and attitude with Ibsen and would have been hardly conceivable without his revolution in dramatic practice. Ibsen’s plays continue to be performed, adapted for television, or released as major films: A Doll House, repeatedly; The Wild Duck, recently, with Jeremy Irons and Liv Ullmann. So let’s begin by looking at the climactic, final scene of A Doll House.
Both Kramer vs. Kramer and A Doll House start with a man at a peak of success who the story reveals is insensitive to his wife. Nora in A Doll House and Joanna in Kramer vs. Kramer leave their husbands and children to find themselves, resentful of the past and the way men have treated them. Joanna is forced to go to court to get her child back, where she is cross-examined and her behavior and motivations challenged; Nora is challenged immediately by her husband Helmer as she tries to leave. The women share identical attitudes about their rights.
Torvald Helmer has treated his wife Nora like a doll for the eight years of their marriage. That was the role that pleased him, and Nora began by wanting to please. But there was more to Nora. Early in their marriage Helmer became ill but, unwilling to borrow money and too poor otherwise, was unable to take the trip to a warmer climate necessary for his recuperation. Unknown to Helmer, Nora borrowed the necessary money by forging her dying father’s signature on a loan she took from a moneylender. She tried to repay the loan out of her household allowance and by doing odd jobs like copying without Helmer’s knowledge. She has lived in dread of being discovered. Helmer’s “doll” has been a woman living year after year with anxiety, thrifty with the money Helmer thought she was casual about. Nora dreamed that if she was discovered, Helmer would stand up for her and take the blame. She had no intention of actually letting him do that: she fantasized commiting suicide to take the shame off his shoulders.
Helmer discovers her loving deception through an attempt of the moneylender to blackmail him. His reaction reveals him as a pretentious hypocrite with no thought for Nora, only his own public image. He calls her a criminal, unfit to be a mother to his children. Then the blackmail attempt is withdrawn, and Helmer reverts to his former benign self in front of the shocked Nora. We pick up the action at that point.
FADE IN:
INT. HELMER HOME: PARLOR (EST) NIGHT
[HELMER, a successful banker, is alone by the parlor table. Nora, his wife, has just LEFT THE SHOT to change from her Christmas costume.] NORA ENTERS in her regular clothes.
TWO SHOT: HELMER & NORA
HELMER
What’s this? Not in bed? You’ve changed your dress?
NORA
Yes, Torvald, I’ve changed my dress.
[She walks up to one side of the table, confronting him.]
HELMER
But why now, so late?
NORA
Tonight I’m not sleeping.
HELMER
But Nora dear—
Looking at her watch
NORA
It’s still not so very late. Sit down, Torvald; we have a lot to talk over.
She sits at one side of the table.
HELMER
Nora—what is this? That hard expression—
NORA
Sit down. This’ll take some time. I have a lot to say.
Helmer [sits] at the table directly opposite her. [CROSS-CUT between them.]
CLOSE ON NORA & HELMER AT THE TABLE
HELMER
You worry me, Nora. And I don’t understand you.
NORA
No, that’s exactly it. You don’t understand me. And I’ve never understood you either—until tonight. No, don’t interrupt. You can just listen to what I say. We’re closing our accounts, Torvald.
HELMER
How do you mean that?
After a short pause.
NORA
Doesn’t anything strike you about our sitting here like this?
HELMER
What’s that?
NORA
We’ve been married now eight years. Doesn’t it occur to you that this is the first time we two, you and I, man and wife, have ever talked seriously together?
HELMER
What do you mean—seriously?
NORA
In eight whole years—longer even—right from our first acquaintance, we’ve never exchanged a serious word on any serious thing.
HELMER
You mean I should constantly go and involve you in problems you couldn’t possibly help me with?
NORA
I’m not talking of problems. I’m saying that we’ve never sat down seriously together and tried to get to the bottom of anything.
HELMER
But dearest, what good would that ever do you?
NORA
That’s the point right there: you’ve
(MORE)
NORA (CONT’D)
never understood me. I’ve been wronged greatly, Torvald—first by Papa, and then by you.
CLOSE-UP: HELMER
HELMER
What! By us—the two people who’ve loved you more than anyone else?
BACK TO SHOT
NORA
(shaking her head)
You never loved me. You’ve thought it fun to be in love with me, that’s all.
HELMER
Nora, what a thing to say!
NORA
Yes, it’s true now, Torvald. When I lived at home with Papa, he told me all his opinions, so I had the same ones, too; or if they were different I hid them, since he wouldn’t have cared for that. He used to call me his doll-child, and he played with me the way I played with my dolls. Then I came into your house—
HELMER
How can you speak of our marriage like that?
NORA
(unperturbed)
I mean, then I went from Papa’s hands into yours. You arranged everything to your own taste, and so I got the same taste as you—or I pretended to; I can’t remember. I guess a little of both, first one, then the other. Now
(MORE)
NORA (CONT’D)
when I look back, it seems as if I’d lived here like a beggar—just from hand to mouth. I’ve lived by doing tricks for you, Torvald. But that’s the way you wanted it. It’s a great sin what you and Papa did to me. You’re to blame that nothing’s become of me.
HELMER
Nora, how unfair and ungrateful you are! Haven’t you been happy here?
NORA
No, never. I thought so—but I never have.
HELMER
Not—not happy!
NORA
No, only lighthearted. And you’ve always been so kind to me. But our home’s been nothing but a playpen. I’ve been your doll-wife here, just as at home I was Papa’s doll-child. And in turn the children have been my dolls. I thought it was fun when you played with me, just as they thought it fun when I played with them. That’s been our marriage, Torvald.
HELMER
There’s some truth in what you’re saying—under all the raving exaggeration. But it’ll all be different after this. Playtime’s over; now for the schooling.
NORA
Whose schooling—mine or the children’s?
HELMER
Both yours and the children’s, dearest.
CLOSE-UP: NORA
NORA
Oh, Torvald, you’re not the man to teach me to be a good wife to you.
CLOSE-UP: HELMER
HELMER
And you can say that?
BACK TO SHOT
NORA
And I—how am I equipped to bring up children?
HELMER
Nora!
NORA
Didn’t you say a moment ago that that was no job to trust me with?
HELMER
In a flare of temper! Why fasten on that?
NORA
Yes, but you were so very right. I’m not up to the job. There’s another job I have to do first. I have to try to educate myself. You can’t help me with that. I’ve got to do it alone. And that’s why I’m leaving you now.
NEW ANGLE
HELMER
(jumping up)
What’s that?
NORA
I have to stand completely alone, if
(MORE)
NORA (CONT’D)
I’m ever going to discover myself and the world out there. So I can’t go on living with you.
HELMER
Nora, Nora!
NORA
I want to leave right away. Kristine should put me up for the night—
