Screenplay principles

I mentioned some time ago that I’d signed up to a short course on Screenwriting, part of an ongoing series of Creative Writing classes. This was not necessarily because I wanted to complete a screenplay but because writing for film is part of that tradition of composing narratives that includes drama, oral tales and, of course, novels.

Here I only want to briefly outline a few definitions when it comes to the ideas from which a screenplay is born. In class we were introduced to Robert McKee’s 1999 text Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting (Methuen Film), in particular the part in which he outlines the three basics which every good screenplay needs. These basics are Premise (what the story is about, in other words a general description of the story); Hook (what grabs the attention of the viewer, rather like a riff or chorus in a popular song); and finally Controlling Idea (in other words, the main themes of the movie).

To try and get under the skin of these basics we were asked to identify them in a mainstream film; I chose The Bourne Ultimatum. This thriller from 2007 (which seems to be showing on one digital channel or another most nights of the week) was directed by British filmmaker Paul Greengrass and starred Matt Damon. See what you think.

Death, wizards and hats

… and still the wonder grew that one small head could carry all he knew.

Terry Pratchett A Slip of the Keyboard:
Collected Non-Fiction Foreword by Neil Gaiman
Corgi 2015 (2014)

I’ve come late to Pratchett’s writings. I had tried some comic fantasy and sci-fi and found it wanting; it mostly seemed to be trying too hard to be funny and witty. I enjoyed Red Dwarf on TV and Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy on the radio but somehow on the page much of this genre writing seemed to consist of dull, lifeless things, full of their own cleverness. So, despite everyone saying I ought to try Pratchett, that I’d like his stuff, I resisted it. Perhaps it was the cover illustrations that put me off: “This is a wickedly weird funny book!” they seemed to scream at me.

Finally I recently took the plunge. Somehow the Piaf song Je ne regrette rien now rings a little hollow…

Breezing through Roman ruins

Excavations at Uriconium by Francis Bedford (photo of hypocaust and Old Work public domain)

City of Gold and Shadows
by Ellis Peters.
Heron Books 1982 (1973)

Take an assortment of singular characters, one missing person and a generous helping of archaeology; when you blend them together you’ll likely get something like this, a whodunit by Ellis Peters set in her favourite area — the Welsh Marches — and based on the ruins of a fictional Roman city that is rather reminiscent of Wroxeter in Shropshire. Though I’ve not knowingly read any of her work before (certainly before I was aware that this was the twelfth in a series) I wasn’t disappointed in this offering — what would be known in North America as a cozy mystery — especially as it worked very well as a standalone novel.

An essential aspect of a ‘cozy’ is that it often features a strong, intelligent woman as amateur sleuth; and here it is Charlotte Rossignol. Half-French, a classical musician at what one hopes is the start of a successful career, she is drawn by the concerns that a lawyer (“like a very well-turned-out troll from under some Scandinavian mountain”) has over her missing archaeologist uncle, Alan Morris.

Visiting the subject of his latest (or last?) monograph, the ruins of Aurae Phiala near Moulden village in Midshire, she makes the acquaintance of a number of very distinctive characters, any of whom could be responsible for some of the odd incidents that start to occur. Who is Gus Hambro, and why is he behaving suspiciously? What is schoolboy Gerry Boden up to? What’s the nature of the relationship between site custodian Steve Paviour and his young wife Lesley? Is gardener Orlando Benyon all that he seems to be? What does graduate student Bill Lawrence know? How does DCI George Felse deal with the strange events that closely follow one another? And do we ever find out what happened to Charlotte’s missing uncle?

Rough magic

J W Waterhouse’s 1916 portrait of Miranda watching the shipwreck in The Tempest

D G James The Dream of Prospero Oxford University Press 1967

… We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

The Tempest, along with A Midsummer Night’s Dream, seems to me to be among the most magical of Will’s comedies, with illusion, love, conflict and happy endings all genially conspiring to entertain us. Generally assumed to be the last play Shakespeare composed for the stage, completed in 1611, it’s ironically also the first play contained in the posthumously published First Folio of 1623. Meanwhile, D G James’ The Dream of Prospero is an expanded version of the author’s Lord Northcliffe Lectures of 1965 in which he sought to extend his reflections on Shakespeare’s great tragedies to musings on the last plays and, specifically, The Tempest. Bacon’s description of poetry as “a dream of learning” had provided the title to an earlier published discourse, and James followed this conceit here, appropriately given Prospero’s celebrated speech from Act IV. But how much of The Tempest is a dream-like fantasy, how much based on real life?

The beast without and within

Tim Winton In the Winter Dark Picador 2003 (1988)

This bleak novella is set in an isolated valley called the Sink, somewhere in Western Australia. The inhabitants of three houses — Maurice and Ida Stubbs, Murray Jaccob and Ronnie Melwater — all have secrets which, in the normal run of things, would just stay secrets. Except, with the arrival of an unseen predator which starts attacking livestock — a dog, geese, ducks, a goat, a kangaroo, sheep — these secrets come creeping out of their past, into their dreams and out into reality. What is this predator? A feral cat? A mange-ridden fox? Wild dogs? A Big Cat escaped from a circus trailer? Or something more rare, something out of the Southern Continent’s dark prehistory? And how does its unpredictable presence impact on the guilty feelings of individuals and their relationships with each other?