“I think the best book about screenwriting that will help you in terms of prose is Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett. Read his prose in that book—he says a lot with a little. It’s so terse and wonderful. Just the way he describes things in that novel. The way the dialogue done, but more importantly the way he sets up a room or sets up what someone is thinking—it’s the greatest how-to book on screenwriting ever written.”
Screenwriter Scott Frank
The Art of Screenwriting/2002 seminar
(That talk/Q&A along with Steve Zaillian can be seen on Amazon Prime)
Here are a couple of examples I pulled from Red Harvest (a book originally published in 1929):
The city wasn’t pretty. Most of its builders had gone in for gaudiness. Maybe they had been successful at first. Since then the smelters whose brick stacks stuck up tall against a gloomy mountain to the south had yellow-smoked everything into uniform dinginess.
______
The first policeman I saw needed a shave. The second had a couple of buttons off his shabby uniform. The third stood in the center of the city’s main intersection—Broadway and Union Street—directing traffic, with a cigar in one corner of his mouth. After that I stopped checking them up.
_____
As an example of how that Hammett-like terseness translates to screenwriting here’s the introduction of the Tom Cruise character from Scott Frank’s script Minority Report:
INSIDE PRECRIME HEADQUARTERS – MAIN FLOOR
Slides open, revealing senior detective JOHN ANDERTON. Mid thirties, military haircut. He pushes through a second, pressurized door, leading us past a series of glassed-in offices and viewbicles.
______
Here’s what one of Frank’s scenes from his Minority Report script looks like on the page, followed by a clip of that scene.
INT. ANDERTON’S ROOM – NIGHT
As the Spyder flattens out and eases under the door.
INT. BATHROOM – NIGHT
As Anderton climbs into the ice cold tub, reaches over and
shuts the bathroom door as…
THE SPYDER
Turns toward the sound of the water shutting off. As it
moves towards the bathroom door, it begins to fold its legs
and flatten itself out.
INT. BATHROOM – HIGH ANGLE – NIGHT
Anderton lowers his head under the water, just as the spyder
comes under the door and into the bathroom.