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Post by Fading Fast on Dec 1, 2022 13:52:09 GMT
What constitutes a good script? And how do your favorite screenwriters fit the bill?One thing a good script can (though probably not must) feature is a solidly detailed central character around and through which the story can be told. Not too long ago I rewatched Horton Foote's A Trip to Bountiful (1985) with Geraldine Page as a basically serene but also fully determined woman defying her son and his wife, with whom she's living dependently, in order to revisit her old homestead one more time before she dies. Page's performance was beautifully shaded; a lot of it seemed to be happening behind her eyes without being spoken, yet her meanings were clear. I think that was only possible because Foote wrote it that way; he wrote a character who had been forced inward by circumstance, who was discouraged in her household from expressing herself, and yet still had a spark of self-determination within her. Geraldine was brilliantly following a path Foote had set for her. Geraldine won the Academy Award that year and Foote was nominated for his adaptation of his own stage play. |
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Post by I Love Melvin on Dec 1, 2022 13:54:44 GMT
Carrie Fisher spent a decade as a sought-after script doctor. I read that she finally got fed up with the business practices involved and quit. Yeah, I'll bet it was a real drag, especially for someone as personally dynamic as Carrie. It must have been humiliating to have to deal with younger industry types in positions of power, more so because most of them were probably men. I'm sure a lot of them thought of her as a former Princess Leia poster babe and that they were doing her a favor by keeping her career alive. Yuk. She got great revenge on the industry with Postcards from the Edge, though, didn't she? A great example of a screenwriter getting the last laugh. |
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Post by dianedebuda on Dec 1, 2022 14:04:33 GMT
I got the impression that it was more industry-wide rather than specific to her practices. Tell us what you plan before we hire you. Nope, going to go with someone else (that we were going to use anyhow) but we'll just have them use (steal) your ideas for free.
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Post by I Love Melvin on Dec 1, 2022 14:13:03 GMT
I got the impression that it was more industry-wide rather than specific to her practices. Tell us what you plan before we hire you. Nope, going to go with someone else (that we were going to use anyhow) but we'll just have them use (steal) your ideas for free. Yikes! Even worse. I think I was probably channeling some of what Lily Tomlin said about "taking meetings". She described it as like being in a roomful of babies. |
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Post by ando on Dec 1, 2022 19:10:22 GMT
What constitutes a good script? And how do your favorite screenwriters fit the bill?One thing a good script can (though probably not must) feature is a solidly detailed central character around and through which the story can be told. Not too long ago I rewatched Horton Foote's A Trip to Bountiful (1985) with Geraldine Page as a basically serene but also fully determined woman defying her son and his wife, with whom she's living dependently, in order to revisit her old homestead one more time before she dies. Page's performance was beautifully shaded; a lot of it seemed to be happening behind her eyes without being spoken, yet her meanings were clear. I think that was only possible because Foote wrote it that way; he wrote a character who had been forced inward by circumstance, who was discouraged in her household from expressing herself, and yet still had a spark of self-determination within her. Geraldine was brilliantly following a path Foote had set for her. Geraldine won the Academy Award that year and Foote was nominated for his adaptation of his own stage play. Agreed. Love the play and movie adaptations of which there have been a few. The Page version is an undoubted classic but the 2014 tv movie featuring the late Cicely Tyson, Vanessa Williams and Blair Underwood has its charms, too. Re: fleshed out central character rule In film I don’t think a thoroughly drawn central character is crucial to a successful narrative. Take a movie like Rahomon, for instance, where through four different accounts of the same scenario one is ultimately unsure of any of the characters, though the detail with which they relate their own characters and what happened is of vital importance. So I agree with you on that score. How about the Bourne movies? We never learn much about who Bourne actually is but we do learn a lot about the people out to get him! There are innumerable movies, particularly action/adventure types, where we know little about the identities of the characters involved because the direction of the storyline is more dependent on what happpens and less on why it’s happening. |
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Post by dianedebuda on Dec 1, 2022 19:31:55 GMT
I was appalled when the first Bourne movie showed up. All of the character development in the book ... gone. Nothing but action. 😞
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Post by BunnyWhit on Dec 1, 2022 19:43:02 GMT
Lots of playwrights have tried a hand at adapting their own work for film but not always successfully. (Same with novelists.) One of the best was Sidney Howard. TCM has shown Dodsworth a couple of times recently, probably due to a new restoration, and it's indeed a wonder. He adapted Sinclair Lewis' novel for stage and then again for Samuel Goldwyn as a film and the result is truly stunning. He apparently became a very reliable script doctor and Selznick actively pursued him for Gone with the Wind, even allowing him the unheard-of luxury of working from home on the East Coast. His script was rewritten (Of course. It was Selznick) but Howard won the Academy Award that year posthumously as the scriptwriter of record. (He died in an accident at his farm.) (I love me some Sinclair Lewis.) As you suggest, writing a novel and writing a screenplay is not the same exercise at all. Broke and desperate for a steady salary, when the opportunity arose for him to adapt his short story "Turnabout", William Faulkner began a collaboration with Howard Hawks which resulted in Today We Live (1933). Though he worked in Hollywood from the early 1930s until the late 1940s (or perhaps a bit beyond?), Faulkner was not hugely successful as a screenwriter; he has screen credit on only half a dozen films. Undeniably, he had hits -- Gunga Din (1939), To Have and Have Not (1944), The Big Sleep (1946) -- but he also wrote or co-wrote dozens of scripts that were either never produced or were made, but not well. Where Faulkner does fare well on film is with others' adaptations of his novels. For example, Intruder in the Dust (1949) was well-received in its day, and its acclaim has grown over the decades. But it took Ben Maddow, of The Asphalt Jungle (1950) fame, to adapt Faulkner's Southern gothic/modernist bent into a great film. Faulkner said that screenwriting was not his forte, that he'd only done it to support himself and his family, and I think that is plain to see in the fact that so little of his work actually made it to the screen. But what is also obvious is when you hear a few lines of dialogue in a film that are so well-crafted, so beautiful in their cadence and concise in their imagery, that you think -- "Wow! That's Faulkner!" |
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Post by cmovieviewer on Dec 1, 2022 21:37:57 GMT
By coincidence, TCM has scheduled a tribute to National Screenwriters Day on Thursday, Jan. 5 (I didn’t know there was such a day).
The entire daytime lineup consists of films that won an Oscar in one of the writing categories. (In looking into this, I learned that up through 1956 the Academy gave a third writing Oscar for Best Story, in addition to Original and Adapted Screenplays.)
Here is the schedule (ET): 2023-01-05 06:00 AM Cimarron (1931) (Howard Estabrook - adaptation) 2023-01-05 08:15 AM Love Me or Leave Me (1955) (Daniel Fuchs - story) 2023-01-05 10:30 AM Interrupted Melody (1955) (William Ludwig & Sonya Levien - story and screenplay) 2023-01-05 12:30 PM The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936) (Pierre Collings & Sheridan Gibney - story and screenplay) 2023-01-05 02:00 PM The Stratton Story (1949) (Douglas Morrow - story) 2023-01-05 04:00 PM Vacation from Marriage (1945) (Clemence Dane - story) 2023-01-05 05:45 PM Tom Jones (1963) (John Osborne - adaptation) |
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Post by I Love Melvin on Dec 2, 2022 13:49:44 GMT
......... Broke and desperate for a steady salary, when the opportunity arose for him to adapt his short story "Turnabout", William Faulkner began a collaboration with Howard Hawks which resulted in Today We Live (1933). Though he worked in Hollywood from the early 1930s until the late 1940s (or perhaps a bit beyond?), Faulkner was not hugely successful as a screenwriter; he has screen credit on only half a dozen films. Undeniably, he had hits -- Gunga Din (1939), To Have and Have Not (1944), The Big Sleep (1946) -- but he also wrote or co-wrote dozens of scripts that were either never produced or were made, but not well. ........ Just out of curiosity, do you know whether or not Faulkner was involved in the scenes of The Big Sleep which were filmed later to capitalize on the "Bogey/Bacall" relationship, specifically all that sexy "race horse" stuff? And speaking of sexy, Marlowe's description of the Martha Vickers character as having tried to sit in his lap while he was still standing up is one of my favorite movie lines anywhere. I know there were "co-writers" so it might be hard to separate out what is whose, but you seem to have a good feel for Faulkner dialogue. |
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Post by BunnyWhit on Dec 3, 2022 2:53:36 GMT
Just out of curiosity, do you know whether or not Faulkner was involved in the scenes of The Big Sleep which were filmed later to capitalize on the "Bogey/Bacall" relationship, specifically all that sexy "race horse" stuff? And speaking of sexy, Marlowe's description of the Martha Vickers character as having tried to sit in his lap while he was still standing up is one of my favorite movie lines anywhere. I know there were "co-writers" so it might be hard to separate out what is whose, but you seem to have a good feel for Faulkner dialogue. In the book, Carmen does do that bit where she collapses into Marlow's arms. When he tells the General about it, he only says that she tried to sit in his lap. In the original screenplay, Marlowe is sitting in a chair when Carmen comes in, and when she attempts to rest on the arm of the chair, Marlowe rises out of it, knocking it akilter, so that Carmen lands in the chair alone. He later tells the General about it in the same way. So in the film, when she tries to sit in his lap "while he was standing up", that was either an addition or an adlib by Bogart. Like you, I think that line is fantastic. All the racy horse racing stuff is most definitely Faulkner's cadence. Besides, he very much enjoyed the horse races. Faulkner wrote an article titled "Kentucky: May: Saturday" for Sports Illustrated about the 1955 Kentucky Derby. They reprinted it in 2014. (See it here). You mentioned something a few posts back about collaboration in writing and provided a nice image of a typewriter being shoved back and forth across the table. Who's to say that doesn't sometimes happen! Leigh Brackett was asked once in an interview how it worked collaborating with Faulkner. She said she was shocked and intimidated to be paired with him. Upon meeting him, he simply told her he liked the book and wanted to change it as little as possible, that he would treat A, B, C chapters, she would treat X, Y, Z chapters, and that's how it happened. She said she barely even saw him again. |
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Post by I Love Melvin on Dec 3, 2022 13:17:24 GMT
Great answers to several different questions. Thank you.
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