by
Donald L. Vasicek
Want to kick ass with your screenwriting? Do you know what I mean? For those of you who might have questions about it, then, let me explain.
Having acted as a writer/consultant for a studio movie (I will not mention the movie to protect myself from pissing someone off), I was in a room with 8 other writers, and three producers. The producers posed questions to all of us about how the script should be written. I offered the idea about having a beginning, a middle, and an end with a main theme, main character, and villain (The protagonist in fiction can represent anything, but pure evil. Pure evil is reserved for the villain.).
I also suggested that a transformational arc should take place with the main character, and with at least one periphery character.
And I suggested that, since the producers wanted this movie to be an action flick, then, the pace of the film must be accelerated, and that could only happen through swift and short writing, and particularly, with action scenes, the sentences must be short and choppy, punctuated by action verbs.
So, the producers assigned each one of us the job of writing the first ten pages of the script. We accomplished that in one day because that is what they wanted us to do (and the pay was very good). So, we did it.
Then, enough copies were made of each writer’s first ten pages so that all of the other writers and producers could read each writer’s pages. The goal was to find a consensus of the best ten pages, and go with that writer for the script.
As it turned out, the consensus was for my ten pages. As it turned out, we got into a discussion about that because two of the producers liked another draft better than mine.
That draft was written by a team of two writers.
The producers who liked their ten pages better than mine cited the depth of the writing as opposed to my more cut-to-the-chase version. Their descriptions were long paragraphs utilizing a host of passive verbs and flowery adjectives. My descriptions were short, choppy paragraphs that utilized active verbs with sparse adjectives.
Which ten pages would you have chosen for an action thriller, the two writers, or mine? Read on to see if your answer matches the ultimate choice of the producers.
In the end, the team of two writers’ were chosen to write the script. About 9 months later, the producers called me. They wanted a meeting. I met with them. They wanted me to rewrite the script the team of two writers wrote. They said, “The script just doesn’t feel right.” They gave me two weeks to accomplish this.
After reading the script, I knew exactly what to do. Actually, I begin the rewrite on each page as I read it. I managed to rewrite the script in two weeks. I took the flowery, adjective-heavy, long and boring paragraphs where passive verbs were utilized and cut it up into a fast-moving action thriller utilizing action verbs.
After meetings with the producers, the two who opposed my ten page draft, opposed my rewrite. The other producer loved my rewrite. There were heated arguments amongst all of us. Finally, it was decided that the final vote would be left up to the man who was forking over the most money for the $156 million film. He voted for the script with the
flowery, long paragraphed, adjective-heavy script with passive verbs.
The movie was a family-oriented action thriller. It was aimed directly at kids for its core audience. Guess what, the movie flopped at the box office. Do you know why? It’s the
same reason I argued all along. Although their script of choice was written beautifully, translating it to the screen, would translate into a film for adults with a kid theme, and would result in being boring for kids because of the exaggerated sets, the lengthy dialogue scenes, and the one-dimensionality of the characters.
So, if you still want to know how to kick ass with your screenwriting, know your core audience. Know your genre. Know that flowery writing in scripts will always lead to disaster, always, because it will bore the audience to death, even if you aren’t writing an action thriller. The use of adjectives, in any kind of writing, let alone screenwriting, must be used judiciously.
Film is a visual medium. It exists to tell stories in pictures. It exists to entertain. The only way this can be successfully accomplished is to write visually. And the only way to write visually, is to utilize action verbs. If you do this, mark my word, your writing will take you to the level you want to be with it.
Donald L. Vasicek
Olympus Films+, LLC
“The Zen of Writing”
http://michaelc.nextmp.net/wordpress
dvasicek@earthlink.net