Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting
Syd Field
Delta
As announced in obituaries in Variety, Hollywood Reporter, New York Times and other publications, screenwriting guru Syd Alvin Field died last November in Los Angeles at the age of 77.
It’s been 35 years since Field’s book Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting was first published in 1979. It sold millions of copies, became known as the “bible” of screenwriting, and established him as a sought-after consultant who gave high-priced seminars to which hopeful novitiates and Hollywood insiders alike would flock.
Field gained seminal experience as a writer-producer and script-reader at a couple of Hollywood production companies. At one company, he read more than 2,000 screenplays in little over two years, recommending only 40 for further development. Only half of these – just one per cent of the total – did he consider worthy of production involving potential investment of millions of dollars.
Field writes that the mountainous size of the slush pile of screenplays never varied, “no matter how fast I read or how many scripts I skimmed, skipped or tossed.”
He could synopsize two screenplays a day, but when he got to the third, “the words, characters and actions all seemed to congeal into some kind of amorphous goo of plotlines concerning the FBI and CIA, punctuated with bank heists, murders and car chases, with a lot of wet kisses and naked flesh thrown in for local colour.”
This passage reminded me of my decades-long involvement as a freelance reader for a major Toronto-based commercial publisher. A huge pyramid of unsolicited action-adventure manuscripts towered behind my boss’s desk. Each time I visited, he gave me a stack of them; I was paid $75 to $100 to read and write a two-page synopsis of each. Over time, I learned to skim through the pages, seeking out what Field would call the essential “plot points” that help shape and define the narrative, dividing the ever-present sections that Field, like Aristotle, labelled Beginning, Middle and End.
Field gave immense thought to why he gave the thumbs-down to most scripts and what distinguished the precious few that won his approval. “What I was looking for, I soon realized, was a style that exploded off the page, exhibiting the kind of raw energy found in scripts like Chinatown, Taxi Driver, The Godfather and American Graffiti.”
But of course there was much more to it than that. Ultimately he looked beyond content to structure, finding the essential “plot points” that exist, or should exist, in all narrative films, no matter the story, setting, characters or genre.
Most films run 90 to 120 minutes on average, Field reasoned, and a script should average about one page per minute of screen time. In a 120-page script, the beginning section, Act 1, will be about 30 pages long. This is where the screenwriter sets up the story, establishes the characters, illustrates the situation surrounding the action and launches the movie’s dramatic premise.
Act 2, approximately 60 pages long, is where the main character deals with the challenge earlier established, confronting a series of obstacles in pursuit of his or her dramatic goals. Act 3, filling the remaining 30 pages or so, delivers the resolution to the story. Field’s reductionist paradigm, “Set-Up, Confrontation, Resolution,” along with the plot-points separating these sections, should be recognizable in all movies, he writes. When a set-up is weak, viewers lose interest, though they may not know why. When a film lacks a clear resolution, viewers will be disappointed, saying the plot went wrong or became confused.
I must acknowledge that Field transformed the way I view films. Usually when I watch a film, I try to identify two key plot-points – the “handshake” moment at the end of Act 1 when the dramatic challenge is defined, often with a handshake or vow, and the grand “reversal” at the end of Act 2 that sets the stage for the resolution. Who dared say, before Field came along, that all movies were essentially the same in structure?
“Syd was the pioneer of the study of the screenwriting form,” screenwriter John Truby told the New York Times. “He was the first to challenge the old romantic notion that writing a good script was a gift of divine intervention, and instead showed that it comes from a craft that can be learned.”
Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting is the most popular of Field’s handful of books on the subject. When I first read it many years ago, I felt I had found the cinematic equivalent to The Anatomy of Criticism, Northrup Frye’s brilliant and unsurpassed classic of literary criticism.
Revised and updated numerous times, Screenplay stands up well to a second reading, and its insights still seem exciting, but the movies cited as examples – such as The Godfather, Chinatown and Witness – seem dated and limited. Field is certainly not in the same league as Frye, but novice scriptwriters are nonetheless well advised to consider his cinematic paradigm as a sort of “great code” of the movies.
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Correspondences
Poetry by Anne Michaels and Portraits by Bernice Eisenstein
McClelland & Stewart/Random House
Here’s something you probably never knew about Joyce Kilmer, author of the famous poem Trees (“I think that I shall never see/ A poem as lovely as a tree”). Turns out that despite the first name, Kilmer was a man – an American from New Jersey who died tragically young, age 31, in World War I.
Correspondences is an “accordion book” featuring the poetry of Anne Michaels (author of the award-winning novel Fugitive Pieces) on one side and colour portraits by Bernice Eisenstein (author of the graphic novel I Was A Child of Holocaust Survivors) on the other. Their shared subjects are a gallery of notable 20th-century writers and thinkers – Camus, Celan, Einstein, Kafka, Levi, Mandelstam, Manger, Schultz, Schwartz-Bart, Sebald and others – many of whom trod around or into the fateful terrain of war and the Holocaust that is so familiar to both contributors.
While Eisenstein’s portraits are a delight and instantly accessible, Michaels’ poems seem aloof, unable to make friends easily. The stated purpose of this avant-garde book is to engage the reader in the correspondences and spaces between the former’s beguiling bust portraits and the latter’s much more demanding observations and pontifications, seemingly so deep at times as to be obscure.