“I try to make my screenplays as readable an experience as I can.”
William Goldman
Both Aaron Sorkin and Tony Gilroy talk about one of the important things they learned personally from William Goldman was trying to give the reader of their scripts the same experience emotionally as they would get from watching the movie.
To do this sometimes you have to cheat on the page. To at times tell the reader what is going on in a character’s mind. (Common in novels, but often looked down on in screenwriting because it’s not something you can shoot.) Or write things that aren’t filmable. Or writing something that is a wink to the reader could be seen as a cheat.
Screenwriter Scott Frank, who was also mentored by William Goldman, said he read the ButchCassidy screenplay as an 11-year-old that last line from the fight scene made him want to be a screenwriter. When Goldman begin the scene which is going to introduce the superposse one of his lines is (in all caps): THE LONGEST TRAVELING SHOT IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD.
I imagine if that line was written today in a student screenplay that more than one college professor would give a note that read, “Save us the ALL CAPS and the hyperbole–it’s the sign of an amateur. And don’t try to tell the director and the director of photography how to do their job.”
But Goldman came to screenwriting as a novelist and decided he didn’t want to follow traditional screenwriting. He wanted to have fun on the page. And make it for the reader. But he also wanted to draw attention to important scenes like the jump off the cliff, the fight scene, and the superposse showing up.
Mission accomplished. But Goldman wrote Butch Cassidy in the 1960s, and it’s fair to ask if that style is done today.
Gilroy (The Bourne Supremacy) says that he’s desperate to not lose the reader’s attention. And because of that, he’s willing to reach into the whole bag of tricks to convey his intentions.
Look, as we well know, there’s so many things that work better on the page than they do on the screen, and there’s so many things—so many more things—that work better on the screen than they do on the page. And a tiny little slug in a script of a moment—of a camera moment— that can be so critically important to a film that just disappears on the page. If you know when you’re writing it it’s important you have to lean into it. You have to let the reader, you have to let the actor, you have to let the director, you have to let the cameraman, you have to let everyone know this really means something here. I’m going to reward this here with a disproportionate amount of real estate in my script so that you understand that this is really important.”
Writer/director Tony Gilroy
The Moment with Brian Koppelman (11/27/18)
44:22
This is what “the three horses scene” looks like on pages 15-16 of the screenplay of Michael Clayton.
Gilroy wrote, “And later on we’ll understand all the forces rolling inside him, but for the moment, the simplest thing to say is that is a man who needs more than anything to see one pure, natural thing, and by some miracle has found his way to this place.” That would qualify as a cheat. Screenwriting professors are getting out their red markers—or digital equivalent— for that sentence. But that line is there to shine a spotlight on the importance of that moment.
Gilroy doesn’t want that moment to be lost as the reader, the actor, the director, or the DP to miss it. Tony Gilroy passed on what he learned from Goldman to his brother Dan Gilroy who wrote Nightcrawlers. You can see the unconventionality if Dan’s script in the first line where is forgoes writing “EXT. LOS ANGELES – NIGHT” and just jumps right into scene description. Later he tosses in a logo of a video company.
Nightcrawler is one of the screenplays that inspired screenwriters Byran Woods and Scott Beck as they were writing the original version of A Quiet Place script.
“We were looking at the Walter Hill and David Giler draft of Alien, and Dan Gilroy’s draft of Nightcrawler, and were just really in awe of how they were able to use words and spaces on the page to really just convey a mood, a tone, and a pace as well. That was always super important for us to crib from them.”
Scott Beck
Go Into the Story interview with Scott Myers
As I wrote last year in the post Writing an Unorthodox Script (‘A Quiet Place’)
Beck and Woods used a whole range of cheats that many would call gimmicky. They also played with font sizes, added graphics, and included hand-scrawled words.
At though there is almost a 50-year gap between the release of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) and A Quiet Place (2018) both screenplays share a common bond in being fun reads. The only thing that I would add is that make sure when you cheat that you do so with a spirit of intentionality. Do so because you want the reader of your screenplay to experience the movie by just reading your words.