The Understructure of Writing for Film and Television

by Ben Brady

  This gives you a useful perspective with its thumbnail description of character, situation, and necessary elements of back story—Ted’s insensitivity and Joanna’s long-suffering confusion. We see what the story will be about, what sets the action in motion, how the characters change, and what some of the key complications are. The conflict is man versus man. Ted must learn to cope with Billy and enters into a major confrontation with Joanna. Ted’s relationship with Billy is immediately at stake. The obstacle to its success changes from Joanna’s disappearance to her threat when she reappears. From the overview we get a sense of the story’s dramatic changes and an idea of what the crisis and climax are. The theme is apparent.

  Write your actual premise with your overview in mind. Clearly mark each act, as in the following example of Act 1 from Kramer vs. Kramer:

  PREMISE: Kramer vs. Kramer

  Act 1. Joanna leaves Ted after he has had an especially successful day at the office. Dumbfounded, unbelieving, Ted tries to hold onto her, but after telling Ted she must find herself and no longer loves him, she abandons him and Billy. Several scenes show how Ted and Billy grow close as Ted learns to put Billy ahead of his work, which had been all-important before. They overcome memories of Joanna, which haunt them at first. A sympathetic neighbor helps Ted, while he learns that placing Billy first undercuts his position at work. His and Billy’s relationship is succeeding when Joanna reappears, self-supporting and self-confident after two years of therapy. Ted and Joanna are now divorced. Joanna demands Billy from Ted: he refuses. He will fight to preserve his new, hard-won family.

  A particularly important scene, such as the one in which Joanna leaves Ted or the later one in which she returns, should get individual attention, though in a very summary way. For the rest, indicate the thrust of the action clearly so that, without actually listing them in detail, a reader would know what sort of scenes to expect. Keep in view the thematic slant and importance of the action. Mention elements like Ted’s compromising his position at work in order to be closer to Billy because it underscores how his character changes and because he will lose his job at a critical moment in Act 2 during the custody battle. Only critical details appear in a premise.

  The premise makes clear how our emotions will be roused in a story. We’re told about characters involved in a conflict who have urgent reasons for acting from eminently understandable motivations. In Kramer vs. Kramer we see that a child is involved and that the characters change in critical ways because of their immediate impact on each other. Ted does this, which makes Joanna do this, because . . . which results in . . . A premise makes clear the primary action-reaction collisions of your main characters.

  Think of a story you want to develop. Review the various sources or techniques for finding or developing stories we touched on earlier, or take a scene written for an earlier assignment that you want to treat in greater depth. What theme does your story embody? Who are the major characters? What urgent problem must they solve? How does it first appear? How does their attempt to solve the problem develop? Who or what opposes their effort to end the conflict?

  Boil your reveries and notes down to a premise. Write a clear introductory paragraph giving an overview of theme, situation, character, conflict, and story development. Then treat each act in a paragraph in the style we have just shown. If you’re dissatisfied, revise your premise. Change your characters. Rethink your acts, the main thrust of the action, or theme. Write a new premise. Don’t go on until you feel your work is coherent and interesting and you have a clear delineation of the primary action-reaction collisions of your protagonist and antagonist.

  The Treatment

  A successful premise can excite interest but cannot give more than a bare overview. The real test in preparing to write a long script comes with the treatment, a full narration of the dramatic action of your story scene by scene.

  Narrate your treatment in the style of an omniscient author who knows what each step of the action will be and what the motivations of his characters are at any moment. Take a page instead of paragraph to give an overview of your characters, conflict, and theme. Tell us how your characters look and what their ages are. If it was for Kramer vs. Kramer, you would expand on Joanna’s discontent or on Ted’s insensitivity. Any elements from back story necessary to understand the present situation should be mentioned. Give a broader statement of the theme and what it means when Joanna doesn’t take Billy away from Ted after having won the right to do so.

  Then narrate the action of your story as it will take place scene by scene, within each clearly marked act, from your protagonist’s point of view. Double-space and write in the present tense. Terry does this because . . . Michael does this, which leads to . . . Use your premise as your starting point. Do not include shots or dialogue. Do not depend on novelistic statements like “Several scenes show Ted and Billy grow close.” That’s only appropriate for the premise. In a treatment you narrate the actual scenes of your story and show their connection with each other.

  Act 1 should clearly establish and develop character and conflict and show what your protagonist first tries to do to overcome the obstacle or antagonist confronting him. Show how your protagonist’s attempts to end the conflict reach a point of clarity when he or she settles on some single course of action, like planting cotton in Places in the Heart or fighting a custody battle in Kramer vs. Kramer. That point will come quickly for you in your short piece.

  Acts 2 and 3 should be narrated with similar immediacy and clarity, making it apparent how your protagonist’s effort, scene by scene, reaches the crisis and then develops into the intensely focused final push shown in Act 3’s climax. Since you are writing a treatment and not a script, bring out the thematic implications of your critical scenes that would in a script emerge in our reflections through our emotional involvement. Bring out the nature of any critical revelations in the climax and the process of change and discovery in the earlier action. Conclude with a statement that ties the outcome of the action with meaning.

  Give more space to important scenes, such as the confrontations between Ted and Joanna in Kramer vs. Kramer, Charley and Terry in On the Waterfront, or Alexander and the bishop in Fanny and Alexander. Narrate the critical reverses in such scenes. We need these to understand how Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire attempts to hold onto Mitch or is able to plumb motivation to the depth that she does. We need to have some specific idea about the content and manner of Nora’s confrontation with Torvald in A Doll’s House. A treatment tests your understanding of those critical moments as well as how well you communicate them to others.

  Your characters should be coherent and interesting. Your narration must show that their motivations are credible and that they act in immediate cause-and-effect ways on each other. Make clear the immediate cause of the action and motivation of your story—your point of departure. Make clear the immediate causes for action in succeeding scenes. A clear immediate cause-and-effect development between your scenes should be apparent.

  Be economical. A treatment for a full-length screenplay runs 20–25 pages; for an hour’s script, 12–15; for a half-hour story, 7–10. Such scripts are approximately 120, 60–70, and 30–35 pages, respectively. Do not write more than 5 pages for your 20-page script. Professionally, economy and clarity are prized: stay within these limits. Remember you are giving an immediate description of the actual story, but not yet writing that story fully.

  Bear in mind that a writer and reader look for two essential things in a treatment: first, for a clear sense of the immediate development of the story and characters in a series of culminating actions rising to climax and resolution; second, for the meaning of the action. The immediate cause-and-effect level must exist or we cannot be involved in the story. But if we are to accept the immediate choices your characters face and the decisions they make in response to the conflict, then you must satisfy our primal desire for truth. Do we understand what is ultimately at stake? Do we know what that means? Do we bel
ieve that a man or a woman can be the particular way your story shows? Do we believe a story can culminate in the manner you show? We are interested at first in passion, but ultimately in reason.

  The Stepsheet

  Many writers go directly from the treatment to their script. Others prefer to chart their action in more detail. Some use a note card for each scene and leave the linking shots or miniscenes to the actual script. We suggest you use a stepsheet initially. Organize your stepsheet scene by actual scene as you structure these in acts. If a major scene has multiple locations, indicate those. Be clear; be brief. Use the following form:

  WHERE? Set the scene.

  WHEN? Establish the time (DAY or NIGHT).

  WHO? Name the characters involved.

  WHAT? State what action takes place.

  What is the complication?

  What choices does the protagonist have?

  What decision does the protagonist make?

  What change occurs?

  WHY? Give the motivation of the characters.

  HOW? Describe how this scene motivates the next.

  Here is a sample stepsheet for the climactic sequence excerpted from On the Waterfront:

  1. WHERE? INT. Terry’s room.

  WHEN? DAY. A moment after Edie and Terry have been on the roof arguing.

  WHO? Terry, and his girlfriend, Edie.

  WHAT? Edie wants Terry to leave: he remains silent. Then he picks up a cargo hook and declares, to her despair, that he is going down to the docks.

  WHY? She is afraid for his life. Terry realizes he must earn his rights where he lives.

  HOW? Terry goes down to the docks.

  2. WHERE? EXT. Pier.

  WHEN? DAY. A few minutes later.

  WHO? Terry, Big Mac, dockworkers.

  WHAT? Terry wants to be chosen to work, but is left standing alone. Sonny is sent to find someone other than Terry as the last man.

  WHY? Terry wants his rights. Johnny Friendly has obviously told Big Mac not to give him work.

  HOW? Terry stands and decides to act.

  3. WHERE? INT. Johnny Friendly’s office nearby on the pier.

  WHEN? DAY. Later.

  WHO? Johnny Friendly, Truck, Sonny, and Specs.

  WHAT? They see Terry. Johnny wants him—after the scandal is off the front page.

  4. WHERE? EXT. Pier.

  WHEN? DAY. Later.

  WHO? Terry, Big Mac, Sonny, Mutt, dockworkers.

  WHAT? Mutt is revealed as the last man to be chosen by Big Mac. Terry must choose whether or not to accept that.

  HOW? Terry decides to go to Johnny Friendly’s office.

  5. WHERE? INT. Johnny Friendly’s office.

  WHEN? DAY.

  WHAT? Johnny Friendly’s thugs want to shoot Terry as they see him approach. Friendly takes their guns away.

  WHY? They have to stay within the law for the time being.

  HOW? They decide to meet Terry.

  6. WHERE? EXT. Pier by Johnny Friendly’s office.

  WHEN? DAY. A few moments later.

  WHO? Terry and all the dockworkers, who follow him; Johnny Friendly and his thugs, who come out to meet Terry; Boss Stevedore, Father Barry, and Edie.

  WHAT? Terry challenges Johnny. They fight: Terry is beaten. Father Barry and Edie run to help him. Johnny Friendly exults in his victory and is thrown into the water by Pop. Edie and Father Barry try to get Terry up.

  WHY? To challenge Johnny Friendly and win Terry’s rights.

  HOW? If Terry can get up, the dockworkers will follow him.

  7. WHERE? EXT. Pier

  WHEN? DAY.

  WHO? Continuing from previous.

  WHAT? Terry staggers to his feet, up the ramp, and down the dock, now followed by the longshoremen, to work. Johnny Friendly futilely tries to stop them. The End.

  A stepsheet, then, is simply a methodical way of laying out the required ingredients for every scene of your dramatic action. A particular category can be left out if it is unnecessary: the length devoted to any where-when-who-what-why-how sequence can vary. There is no particular length requirement for a stepsheet, but be brief.

  Once you have finished your stepsheet begin your screenplay.

  11. A Last Word

  There is a tendency to think that filmmaking has no history before the motion picture camera made its appearance in 1895 and that screenwriters have no dramatic heritage or are in an artistic sense poor cousins to real dramatists. Arthur Knight begins his popular The Liveliest Art:

  For more than half a century, people all over the world have been going to the movies, drawn by the mysterious fascination of lifelike images appearing on a screen in a darkened room. . . . There is something so casual about seeing a film. Somehow it is too entertaining, too popular to be identified with the arts. And so it has taken root not because of its original masterpieces, but because its way of telling a story, of showing life, stirs both the heart and imagination of the viewer. . . . Through eighty years of trial and error, of box-office hits and box-office failures, the novelty of 1895 has been slowly transformed into the art of the 20th century.1

  This is of course true in terms of the technology of the camera, but in terms of drama, completely false. Drama has had a very long history and many masterpieces; nonetheless, the stage’s primary appeal to audiences has almost always been the same as that Knight indicates for movies. Movies only took over the broad appeal typical of the legitimate theatres of the day and brought such comedies and melodramas to everwider audiences through filmmaking’s far greater ability to create an appearance of reality. But this flow and freedom of image and story offered by the camera simply brings drama far closer to the dreams always held by dramatists—Aeschylus would have delighted in cinematic resources. Bergman might have written Greek tragedies if he had lived in fifthcentury Athens. Some theatres, like Shakespeare’s, even emulated a cinematic freedom of movement. The camera has not transformed the nature of drama so much as it has opened up powerful new dramatic media for its realization. Its essential structure and impact remain unchanged. That is why we have emphasized the screenwriter’s heritage of a wealth of dramatic experiment and achievement going back to the Greeks.

  But we don’t think drama as movies has existed only since 1895, either. Twenty to thirty thousand years ago our ancestors in Europe gathered in caves having difficult access and covered the walls with brilliant evocative images of the animals around them. Those images are well known to us through reproductions; some caves became such tourist centers they had to be closed to avoid damage. You may wonder what the static animals on those undulating cave walls have to do with films. Here is how one cave expert describes a proper visit:

  Ideally one should spend an hour or two in complete darkness before looking at the paintings. Modern eyes are not accustomed to viewing things with just a little bit of light, so you must first prepare yourself, and get in the mood for what you are about to see. Then you can light your lamp, preferably the sort of lamp the artists used. . . . After you light your lamp, it takes a while for the experience to build up, perhaps as much as fifteen to thirty minutes, certainly much sooner for prehistoric people. The animals become animated in a flickering, yellow light which plays on the hollows and projections of the cave walls. Sometimes they seem to be moving deeper into the cave.2

  No one knows what religious rites the caves were used for, but drama has twice grown out of religion’s effort to bind us together by celebrating some mystery. Drama preserves that communal power, recreating through its presentation a transient flicker of community in the audience. Even older than that communal heritage is the cinematic flood of images that sweeps across our minds each night, not once, but several times, remembered or not. Film, the most commercial of the arts, is rooted in our inherent sense of the free-flow meaningfulness of images. The dramatist still holds us in our darkened rooms with a flicker of images disciplined through the conflict toward a central point of final cohesion and revelation. Then the lights go on, and
we leave the auditorium with our friends and go out into the social night.

  Notes

  1. Arthur Knight, The Liveliest Art (New York: New American Library, 1979), p. 1.

  2. John E. Pfeiffer, The Creative Explosion (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), pp. 113–114.

  Appendix: The Market

  After This Book

  You are ready to move on to more ambitious efforts if you’ve done the assignments suggested here and familiarized yourself with the essentials. Other texts may have additional scripts within them. A number of filmscripts have been published, also. You should read these. Above all, see films or watch the kind of television that interests you. There is no substitute for knowledge of the prevailing practice and taste. If you want to write for a particular television series you must be familiar with its format.

  A great many films are adaptations from other media. Essentially, the information about dramatic structure would apply to an adaptation; however, you may care to sample a text on adaptation. Be sure to get permission from the copyright holder (usually the publisher) of the original work before you make an adaptation, or you will not be able to market your screenplay legally.

  Making a Connection

  Publications like Variety, the Hollywood Reporter, or Writer’s Digest give the names of various production companies looking for writers or material, but you will need an agent to sell a particular script or idea.

  Finding an agent poses problems. Most agencies are not interested in writers without credits, and most networks or studios won’t buy from a writer without an agent. The Writers Guild of America periodically publishes a list of bonded literary agencies that subscribe to the Guild’s Basic Agreement and indicates those agents willing to look at material from a novice writer. The Writers Guild will send that list to a nonmember. Each fall the Writers Guild publishes a market list of every television production open to submission by an agent. The list includes a précis of the plot lines for new series together with the kind of material they are looking for. The Writers Guild’s address is Writers Guild of America West, 8955 Beverly Boulevard, Los Angeles, California 90048, or Writers Guild of America East, 22 West 48th Street, New York, New York 10036. You will eventually need to belong to the Writers Guild in order to work with most production companies. It is $300 to join plus quarterly dues of $10 or 1 percent of your gross income over $1,000.