“When I wrote the screenplay for A Few Good Men, not only had I never written a screenplay before, I had never read a screenplay before. I didn’t know much about movies at all. I had been a student of plays…so I read as many screenplays as I could. I started to pay attention to movies, and I tried to figure out how to kind of crowbar this story into a three-act structure, which I was told movies have to be. So I fiddled around with the placement of some emotional climaxes in the story and then managed to turn it into three acts.”
Oscar-winning screenwriter Aaron Sorkin (The Social Network)
Zen and the Art of Screenwriting by William Froug
On that first screenplay (based on his play) Sorkin wrote an emotional climax that is one of the most memorable (and most quoted) scenes in contemporary cinema when Jack Nicholson tells Tom Cruise, “You can’t handle the truth!”
Thinking back to my days in L.A. doing actor workshops, the scenes where people yelled (or had some other emotional outburst like crying) usually won the competitions that were judged by people in the industry. They call it drama for a reason.
[…] “When I wrote the screenplay for A Few Good Men, not only had I never written a screenplay before, I had never read a screenplay before. I didn’t know much about movies at all. I had been a student of plays…so I read as many screenplays as I could. I started to pay attention to […] Original Source… […]
eli manning
Youth is wasted in the younger