Structure! Structure! Structure!

You've got a great idea for a movie, with characters that spring to life in your mind and a concept that'll slay them in Hollywood. And maybe you can even make the sale on your pitch alone. But then what? Well, write the script, of course. But how do you translate your great idea into 120 riveting pages of standard industry format that someone will want to spend at least a minimum of low six figures on? In other words, what makes a screenplay work?

A common misconception, especially among novelists and play-writes looking to switch genres and those looking to make "intelligent" (or French) movies, is that a good screenplay is driven by dialogue. Wrong. While there are some great dialogue driven films (think "Swingers", "Diner", even, in a way, "Pulp Fiction"), dialogue alone is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for a successful movie. Just look at the recent Tom Hanks release "Cast Away" which includes seventy-five fully realized and dramatic minutes with scarcely any words spoken. Look also at, say, the first "Rocky", an excellent film not particularly known for its verbiage. While dialogue is one of the best ways to show character and "Quest For Fire" and "Koianistasi" are best viewed under the influence of mind-altering substances, script readers, not to mention movie goers, are quickly turned off by long stretches of what is known in the industry as "talking heads", i.e. endless pages of uninterrupted dialogue, no matter how funny.

"But the acting and the camera will take care of that," the quality-minded scribe cries. Maybe, maybe not. Either way, you're not selling acting. And you are definitely not selling camera work (if you have any mention of camera direction and angles, etc. in your script, start hacking, because nothing pisses a director off more than being told what to do--after all, if you want to direct your own script, pick up a camera). No, what you're selling is your script and that's what you will be judged on.

So, fill in the witty, character revealing dialogue with action, then, is that the answer? That's what Tarantino did with "Pulp Fiction, right? Well, yes, that is what he did, but he also did that with "From Dusk Till Dawn" and I'll pay anyone a hundred bucks who's managed to sit through that movie without feeling like he or she must've done something terribly wrong in a former life to be subjected to this kind of torture.

Action is good. Action is important, but you don't have to spend a lot of time at Blockbusters to realize that action doesn't make good movies, even if it does rake in the green. And not all action movies are successes--because, contrary to the opinion of far too many studio executives, and screenwriters as well, the audience isn't stupid. Even in an action-laden, big-budget, Hollywood blockbuster, the audience, if it's going to be satisfied and want to come back for more (repeat viewers being the wet dream of any studio exec.), wants to feel it has seen a story--a full and complete story, with a beginning and middle and end--and not just a collection of action sequences populated with mindless, expendable, interchangeable characters. That's the only explanation I have why "Titanic" was such a success. Even with it's hokey story and simplistic dialogue and over-the-top acting, it appealed to our need to be told a story, a story that brought in the female viewers in droves to a special effects laden movie they wouldn't otherwise see.

So, what makes a story work, even a bad one like "Titanic"? What brings dialogue, action and story development together into a seem less whole? What allows the archetypes so apparent in the original "Star Wars" (despite it's dreadful writing) to have the power and force they do?

Structure. Because without structure you have a story that comes across like telling someone about a dream you had the night before. Because structure is the very reason why stories are important to us. Because without structure a story ends up just as messy as our every day lives, which is not what we go to the movies to see. Whether it be for escape or clarity, thrill or insight, to fall in love or to be caused to think--we go to be shown what we can't see ourselves.

This is all fine and good, but what exactly is structure and how do you achieve it? At its simplest, structure can bee seen to fall into the three acts movie execs are so fond of, but this is misleading. Structure, like, say, language, is organic. You have to have a feel for it, the way comics have a feel for timing. It involves knowing what scenes work in relation to each other and how long a scene can go on before having to cut away to another, contrary scene. It has to do with when, exactly, at what beat, to cut away from a scene and what to cut to, knowing what scenes work in opposition to each other and which work together, like rhythm in a piece of music. It has to do with how the scenes need to be laid out to make a cohesive whole. Ultimately, though, there are no strict rules on how to do this--this despite the fact that scriptwriting teachers will tell you things like always enter a scene as close to the end as possible.

Yet, there is a logic. And that logic, like the logic of language, is internal. If you make up you own language and grammar, it may make sense to you, but does it make sense to anyone else? The same with structure. On the other hand, grammar is merely a function of language and exists to codify the way we speak, not bind it (which is why ending a sentence in a preposition and splitting infinitives has been deemed kosher by the OED). In a similar way, structure must grow from story, holding tension at a maximum while keeping the conclusion at bay until, inevitably, but still surprisingly, it comes together with all the pieces falling naturally in place like a puzzle waiting to be completed.

Which begs the final question: how do you do that? But that one you have to figure out for yourself.

Brian Fleming (c) 2001  

Brian graduated from the prestigious Iowa Writers' Workshop and is the author of: "CURVES & BENDS & CARS THAT WON'T COME FAST" published by Phoenix Press.