Sid the science kid water

"Whatever problem you're having, screenwriting guru Sid Field can help."

Amazon.com

(Going to the Movies: A Personal Journey Through Four Decades of Modern Film0)

“An experienced screenwriting teacher… acts like a true Hollywood hero. No one sees films like Syd. .. Original thinking that is admirable."

“Syd Field has dedicated his life to finding the answer to what makes a great movie. Now he shares his wonderful thoughts about cinema and the legendary figures of this art who filled his life with meaning.

Special thanks

To all those who came before and to all those who will come after us… and to the great saints and siddhi masters who lit the flame and keep the fire going…

To the incredibly gifted screenwriters Robert Towne, James Cameron, David Koepp and Stuart Beatty; To Mark Hames of Dream Works ; Sterling Lord and Shannon Jamieson Vasquez, who with me overcame all difficulties; to all the staff at Landmark Education, who gave me the opportunity to collect enough material to write this book and supported me.

And, of course, Aviva, who walks this path with me.

To the reader

My goal is… to make you hear, feel and, most importantly, see. It's not much, but it's everything.

Joseph Conrad

Introduction

We may forget the past, but the past will never forget us.

Magnolia by Paul Thomas Anderson

In 1979, when I wrote the first draft of Screenwriting: The Basics of Screenwriting, there were very few publications devoted to this craft in stores. The most popular of these was the book by Lajos Egri "The Art of Writing Dramatic Scripts" (Lajos N. Egri "The Art of Dramatic Writing"), which was first published in the 1940s. Although it could not quite be called a book on the subject, since it was rather intended for scenarios of performances, the principles outlined in it were simple and precise. At that time, there was no significant difference between the art of writing scripts for stage and cinema.

The book "Movie Screenplay..." changed the situation. In order to lay the foundations of this art, it outlined the principles of dramatic structure. In addition, it was the first book that parsed famous and popular films of the time to clearly illustrate screenwriting for the big screen. As you know, writing screenplays is a craft that sometimes reaches the level of art.

When this book was published, it immediately became a bestseller, a "lightning sensation" as my publisher dubbed it. Over the next few months, the book went through several editions and became a hot topic of discussion. Everyone seemed to be surprised by her incredible success. But not me. Back in the 1970s when I lectured on screenwriting at Sherwood Oaks Experimental College in Hollywood, I met people from all walks of life who were eager to write their own screenplays. Hundreds of people attended my course, and it soon became clear that everyone had a story to tell. They just didn't know how to do it.

Since that day in the early spring of 1979, when the book Screenplay... first appeared on bookstore shelves, screenwriting has taken a huge leap. Today, screenwriting and the film industry have become an integral part of our culture that cannot be ignored. Walk into any bookstore and you'll see more than one row of shelves filled with books in any direction related to film production. The two most popular disciplines on the college bench are business in the broadest sense and the film business. Moreover, given the incredible development of computer technology, computer graphics and the increased influence of MTV, reality TV, game consoles Xbox, PlayStation, wireless Internet networks, the multiplier of film festivals in the world, we can say that we are at the epicenter of the film revolution. After all, it takes very little time to shoot a short video on your phone, email it to friends and play it on your TV. It is obvious that our vision of things has become different.

Look at the epic adventure The Lord of the Rings (all three parts), or the portrait of a modern family shown in the film American Beauty, or the emotional and visual impact of the film The Favorite, or the author's adaptations of the books Supremacy Bourne", "Cold Mountain", "Remember", "Rushmore", "Magnolia", "The Tenenbaums", "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" and compare them to any movie from the 70s or 80s and you will see be convinced of the revolution that has taken place: one scene quickly replaces another; information is visual, fast; the silence is exaggerated; special effects and music have come out of the shadows, they are emphasized. The passage of time is often subjective and non-linear, more like a novel in tone and execution. However, despite the fact that the expressive means and technique of constructing the plot have been affected by progress and they have undergone sufficient changes, responding to the needs of both technology and time, the art of narration has remained the same.

Films are a mixture of art and science; The technological revolution has changed how we see films, and consequently how we write scripts for them. However, despite all the changes in the presentation of the material, the nature of the screenplay has remained the same: the screenplay is a story told in pictures using dialogue and description, placed in the context of a dramatic structure. That's what it is, that's the essence of it, and that's the art of visual storytelling.

Screenwriting is a creative process that can be learned. In order to tell a story, you need to come up with characters, create a dramatic idea (what the story is about) and saturate it with dramatic circumstances (under which the plot develops), create obstacles for the characters that they have to fight and which they must overcome, and then bring the case to denouement. You know: a boy meets a girl, a boy meets a girl, a boy loses a girl. All stories, from Aristotle to the present day, are built on the same principles of dramaturgy.

In The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, Frodo carries the Ring back to where it was created, Mount Fire, the only place where it can be destroyed. This is his dramatic purpose. How he gets there and how he completes the task is history. The characters, circumstances, and plot in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring are developed in chronological order; we see Frodo and the Shire, as well as the Fellowship itself, set out on their journey to Fire Mountain. In the second part, The Two Towers, the obstacles Frodo, Sam, and the Fellowship face on their way to destroying the Ring are dramatized and exacerbated. After one obstacle they are blocked by another, which constantly makes it difficult to complete the task. At the same time, Aragorn and the others must overcome many misadventures in order to defeat the orcs in Helm's Deep. The third part, The Return of the King, resolves the story: Frodo and Sam get to Fire Mountain and watch as the Ring and Gollum fall down and disappear into flames. Aragorn becomes king and the hobbits return to the Shire to continue their lives.

Outset, conflict and denouement

This is the essence of dramaturgy. I understood this when, as a boy, I sat in the semi-darkness of the cinema with popcorn in my hands and looked with enthusiastic awe at the moving pictures that flashed in the white river of light on the huge screen.

Born in Los Angeles (my grandfather moved here from Poland in 1907), I grew up surrounded by the film world. When I was about ten, as a member of The Sheriff's Boys' Band , I starred in Frank Capra's Married with Tracey Spencer and Katharine Hepburn. I don't remember this early experience very well, except for Van Johnson teaching me how to play checkers.

Every Saturday night my friends and I would sneak into the nearest movie theater and watch Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers. During my youth, going to the cinema was a passion, a new type of leisure activity, an outlet and a topic of conversation. The cinema has become a place of entertainment. Sometimes these were truly unforgettable moments; for example, Bogart and Bacall starring in To Have and Have Not, or Walter Huston's wild dance when he found gold in the mountains in The Treasures of the Sierra Madre, or Marlon Brando shaking the walkways at the end of On the Waterfront.

I was a high school student at Hollywood High School, and was approached to become a member of the Athenians, one of the many high school student clubs. Shortly after graduating, one of my best friends, Frank Mazzola, also a member of the Athenians, met James Dean, and they formed a strong friendship. Frank introduced the members of our club to Dean, who at the time was such that by today's standards he would be ranked as a street gang. Director Nicholas Ray and James Dean chose Frank to play Crunch in Rebel Without a Cause, as well as a "gang" consultant. Thus, the structure of the Athenian club/gang was conveyed in Rebel Without an Ideal. Occasionally, Dean would join our Saturday walks down Hollywood Boulevard in search of adventure. We were the so-called difficult teenagers, we never gave in to anything, whether it was a fight or a “weak” test, and constantly ran into trouble.

Dean liked hearing about our "adventures" and kept asking us for details. When we got into some kind of dashing bind, whatever it was, he wanted to know how it all started, what we thought and how we experienced it. Questions typical for an actor.

Only after the release of "Rebel Without a Cause" on the big screen and its stunning worldwide triumph, I realized how significant our contribution to this film was. The irony was that Dean's presence in our company had almost no effect on me, and it was only after his death, after he became an icon of our generation, that I began to understand the meaning of our communication.

Mazzola persuaded me to take acting classes, which completely changed my life; this was one of the turning points in my life, which led me to the road that I follow to this day. My family—aunts and uncles (my parents had died a few years earlier)—wanted me to take on a “practical profession,” such as a doctor or lawyer. I worked part-time at Mount Sinai Medical Complex and loved the drama and intensity of intensive care, so I cherished the idea of ​​one day becoming a doctor. I went to UCLA, packed up my modest possessions, and moved to Berkeley. It was August 1959 years old

In the early 1960s, Berkeley was a red-hot furnace of public outrage and protest; banners, slogans and leaflets could be seen everywhere. The resistance forces led by Fidel Castro had just overthrown the Batista regime, slogans were everywhere from "Free Cuba" and "Time for a revolution" to "Freedom of speech" "Abolish non-military training of reserve officers", "Equal rights for all", "Socialism for all and all for socialism. Telegraph Avenue, the main street leading to the student housing, was always filled with a colorful palette of banners and flyers. There were protest rallies almost every day, and when I stopped to listen to them, the FBI agents took pictures of everyone, trying not to arouse suspicion despite their shirts and ties. It was anecdotal.

I did not manage to stay away from the turbulent events of that time for a long time. Like many people of my generation, I was deeply impressed by the beat culture: Kerouac, Greensberg, Gregory Corso - iconic poets who were the mouthpiece of defiance and revolution. Inspired by their voices and life, I also wanted to prove myself in the wake of change. It wasn't long before the students were swept up in a whirlwind of political frenzy led by Mario Savio and other Free Speech activists.

When I was in my second year at university, I was cast as Woyzeck in a play of the same name by the German playwright Georg Büchner. My acquaintance with the great French film director Jean Renoir took place just at the moment when I participated in the play. Acquaintance with Renoir literally turned my life upside down. I came to the conclusion that in a person's life there are two or three events that radically change everything. We meet someone, we go somewhere, we do something that we have never done before - at such moments we have the opportunity to choose the direction that was destined for us.

They say that I was incredibly lucky to work with Renoir, that it was a happy coincidence: I was in the right place at the right time. Of course it is, but over time I realized that this is not just luck or coincidence; I think a lot depends on the person. Every moment, every lesson taught to us in the short time allotted for life, teaches us something. Call it fate, call it fate, whatever you want - it doesn't matter.

I was selected for the world premiere of Renoir's film "Carola" and got the role of Campana, a theater operator in Paris during the Nazi occupation at the very end of World War II. For almost a whole year I studied with Renoir: I watched and learned everything about films through his eyes. He always commented on films, spoke loudly and passionately about everything he saw or wrote, as an artist, a person, a humanitarian in the broadest sense. He was first, second, and third. In his presence, I felt inspired, learned the main lesson of life, enjoyed it. Being around him was a privilege and a wonderful learning experience. Although cinema has always been a large part of my life, it was during the time I spent in Renoir's society that films became to me what the sun is to plants. I saw cinema in a completely new light - as an art form that can be studied and comprehended, finding expression and understanding of life in the plot and scenes. Since then, my love for cinema has grown stronger and stronger.

“Qu’est-ce que le cinema?” (“What is a film?”) is the question that Renoir always asked us before we watched the next film. He said that cinema is something more than just alternating pictures on the screen: "Films are an art form that becomes larger than life." What can I say about Jean Renoir? He was in appearance the same person as everyone else, but he differed from the others, in my opinion, in that he had a big heart; he was open and friendly, very well-read, wise, resourceful. He seemed to have an impact on the lives of everyone he came into contact with. The son of the great impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Jean was also endowed with the gift of seeing the world in his own way. Renoir taught me the art of cinema, the art of visual storytelling, he developed in me the gift to penetrate the essence of things. He pointed out the right door for me and held it open while I entered. I never looked back.

Renoir hated cliches. Speaking of bringing an idea to life, he often quoted his father: “If you draw a leaf on a tree from memory without seeing the tree itself, then your imagination will reward you with only a few leaves; but Nature has millions of them on one tree, and no two are alike among them. An artist who paints only what his own imagination tells him to do must very soon begin to repeat himself. If you look at famous paintings by Renoir, you will understand what he meant. Leaves, flowers, and people have never looked the same. The same can be said about his son's films: The Grand Illusion, Rules of the Game are considered two of the greatest films of all time, The Golden Carriage, Breakfast on the Grass, and many others. Renoir told me that he "paints with light", just like his father painted with paints. Jean Renoir was an artist who discovered cinema in the same way that his father "discovered" Impressionism. “Art,” Renoir emphasized, “should give the viewer a chance to merge with the creator…”

You get intense feelings when you watch the pictures flit across the screen in your favorite movies, from The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring to The Tenenbaums; from The Matrix to Close Encounters of the Third Kind; from the first shots fired in "The Bridge on the River Kwai" to capturing the entirety of human history as a wooden club tossed into the air turns into a spaceship in Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey." Thousands of years of human evolution are compressed into the poetry of two shots; it is a moment of magic and wonder, magic and awe. Therein lies the power of cinema.

Over the past two decades, during which I have traveled the world and lectured on screenwriting, I have seen the style of screenwriting increasingly become a means of visual expression. In my observation, there are certain bookish techniques emerging, such as the process of contemplating the content and titles of chapters, that begin to seep into the modern script. Kill Bill Parts One and Two, The Hours, The Tenenbaums, American Beauty, The Bourne Supremacy, The Manchurian Candidate, and Cold Mountain are just a few examples of such films. It is clear that the new generation, all computer savvy, raised on interactive software, digital storytelling and editable applications, perceives the world more visually and can therefore express it more cinematically.

However, the principles of scripting remain the same no matter what era, time, and place we live in. Great films do not age - they contain and reflect the time in which they were created, but the foundations of human existence remain the same as they were then.

The purpose of the book Screenplay... is to learn the craft of screenwriting and to illustrate the basics of dramatic structure. If you want to write a screenplay, you need to consider two things. First, writing should be preceded by preparation: research, time to think, work on characters and work out the structure of the script (in domestic film drama, as a rule, screenwriters use the term “scenario construction.” – Note ed.). The second is performance, that is, writing the screenplay itself, sketching images and dialogues. The most difficult thing is to know what to write . It was like that when I was writing my first book, and that's how it is now.

This book is not a how-to book; I can't teach anyone how to write a script . People themselves learn this craft. I can only show what needs to be done to write a successful screenplay. That's why I rank this book as a Category "what needs to be done", meaning that if you have an idea for a screenplay but don't know how to bring it to life, then I can help you.

I spent years reading and writing screenplays while working as a writer-producer at David L. Wolper's film studio, freelance screenwriter, and head of storytelling at Cinemobile Systems. I have read and viewed more than two thousand screenplays in my two-plus years of work, and of those two thousand I have selected only forty that could be submitted to our financial partners for possible film production. Why so few? Because 99 out of 100 scripts I read weren't good enough for millions of dollars to be invested in. In other words, only one script out of a hundred of those that I read was good enough to think about making a film. At Cinemobile Systems our task was to produce films. In just one year, we were directly involved in the work on 119 films, from The Godfather to Jeremiah Johnson, Deliverance, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, American Graffiti.

At that time, in the early 70s, the "movie mover" became a simple portable installation that literally turned the film industry around, because it was no longer necessary to take care of caravan equipment to move actors, workers and equipment from one filming location to another. A Greyhound brand bus with eight driving wheels was used as a "cinema mover". The luggage compartment was filled with the necessary equipment, the actors and workers were placed in the cabin, and we drove, for example, to the top of the mountain, filmed from three to eight takes a day and returned home. My boss, Fuad Said, creator of Cinemobile Systems, became so famous that he decided to make his own films. In a couple of weeks, he got a few million dollars and could get even more if necessary. Pretty soon, everyone in Hollywood started sending him their scripts—thousands of drafts came in from stars and directors, from studios and producers, from the obscure and famous.

It was then that I had the opportunity to read the submitted scripts and evaluate them in terms of cost, quality and possible budget. My job, I was constantly reminded, was to "find stuff" for our three main financial partners: United Artists Theater Group, Hemdale Film Distribution Company headquartered in London and Taft Broadcasting Company - parent company Cinemobile Systems.

So I started reading scripts. For me, as a screenwriter taking a much-needed break from over seven years of freelance writing (I wrote nine screenplays, two of which were made into films, four were shelved, and the remaining three never got their chance), working in Cinemobile Systems provided an opportunity to look at writing screenplays from a completely different angle. It turned out to be an amazing challenge and a chance to gain experience from which there was much to learn.

I kept asking myself what was special about the scripts I recommended that others didn't. At first I didn't have an answer, but I kept coming back to this question.

Every morning when I came to work, there was a stack of scripts waiting for me on my desk. No matter how fast I worked, reading, flipping through these manuscripts, the size of the stack never decreased.

Reading a script is a unique experience. It is not the same as reading a novel, a play, an article or a Sunday paper.

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