A new screencast (scriptcast?), a little shorter than the previous one.
In the audio, I say “parallel action,” but a better term would be parallel structure: You’re lining up sentences to omit the subject. Action sequences tend to benefit from these staccato word bursts.
Update in February 2021: I no longer recommend (or half-recommend) this book. I think screenwriters are much better served by reading scripts of produced films, which you can easily find online. For simple formatting questions, you can visit screenwriting.io.
This site caters largely to aspiring screenwriters new to the profession. That’s by design. My initial ambition in writing the IMDb column, and then in creating the site, was to answer a lot of the questions I had when I was first starting out.
Screenwriting is an odd form: half stageplay and half technical document, somewhere between art and craft. And nowhere is its strangeness more apparent than the formatting. So it’s entirely reasonable that I’ve received many, many questions about margins and sluglines and whether a half-covered stadium is “INT.” or “EXT.”
But I’m done. Or at least, done for the time being. I’m going to cede all formating concerns to a printed book (yes, they still make them) which can answer newbie questions and let me focus on other points of word-pushing.
The book I’ve chosen to give up with is The Hollywood Standard by Christopher Riley. It’s not perfect, but it’s refreshingly straightforward and anticipates most of the situations screenwriters are likely to face.
The author used to work for the Warner Bros. script processing department, which the book’s blurbs highlight as why he’s an expert. Honestly, if I had seen this before I bought it, I would have put it back on the shelf with a shudder.
So I would say despite his background, rather than because of it, I’m still giving Riley’s book a thumbs-up. He admits (on page xvii) that “good writers with long Hollywood careers may find details here with which to quibble. That’s fine.” And I do have minor quibbles.
The term “fixed pitch font” is quaint, but let’s just say 12-pt. Courier. If you have a couple of Couriers on your computer, pick the one that looks best on-screen and printed. It really doesn’t matter that much.
Riley’s margins are fine, but I had to really think back to remember what “position 17” referred to (p. 4).
That’s kind of fascinating in a post-neo-Luddite, technology-as-history Make-magazine way, but without explanation, it’s apt to be confusing to 21st-century readers. So perhaps that will be omitted in the next edition.
I’ve never typed this, and never seen it. Don’t use it. Same with “two shot,” unless it’s crucial for a joke.
Awkward. Better to use the “BACK TO HUCK” format he shows later on the same page.
He underlines FLASHBACK and puts it in front of the scene heading. That’s not wrong, but I generally put it in brackets after the time of day. This way, it’s more likely to make it onto the call sheet for production.
INT. BEDROOM – DAY [FLASHBACK]
The book tells you to capitalize the first occurrence of only those characters who end up speaking, on the theory that AD’s need to treat these roles differently. I disagree. Capitalizing indicates which scene people are established in, which is a boon to other department heads, such as wardrobe and props. I capitalize the introduction of all roles, speaking or otherwise, including groups like FIVE SCHOOLCHILDREN or ANGRY VILLAGERS.
He’s right–a dialogue block shouldn’t end with a parenthetical. The exception is in animation, where this is common. You’ll often see dialogue end with (exasperated grunt) or (sigh).
He puts them in quotes. I suggest italics, in an 11-point sans-serif font. (I use Verdana, which pretty much every computer has.) It looks much, much better, and subtly signals that it’s not true dialogue.
The A.D. on Big Fish and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Katterli Frauenfelder) taught me a different scheme which ends up being a lot less confusing for production and post-production. If you need to insert a scene between 121 and 122, you number it A122. That is, lettered scenes go before the normal scenes. The great advantage to this method comes during shooting, when each new setup for a scene is given a letter. If you shoot a master and two close-ups for scene 100, they’re labeled 100, 100A, 100B. For our inserted scene, Riley’s scheme would get confusing: he’d have 121A, 121AA, 121AB. Whereas Katterli’s method would give us A122, A122A, A122B.
If you’re doing A/B pages on a script, there’s very likely an A.D. involved, so consult with him or her about preferred numbering/lettering schemes.
Riley makes a heroic effort to explain a confusing topic, but trust me, you should never have a page A5B. If you, the writer, has a hard time understanding it, pity the poor wardrobe PA who has to figure out how to insert pages into her bosses’ scripts.
Once you get into the second revision on a series of pages, you’re almost always better off backing up and releasing a run of pages that uses true numbers. To use Riley’s example:
In general, the writer’s goal with A/B pages should be to release as few sheets of paper as possible, while still making it abundantly clear how it all fits together. In fact, I often attach a memo to colored pages explaining it. (Here are the memos I attached for the blue and pink pages of Charlie.)
Here’s where I’m of no use. While I’ve read half-hour scripts, I’ve never written one, so I can’t say how accurate his advice is. But I will point out that every show is likely to have a “house style,” so it’s doubly important to get a real sample script from the show and duplicate it, right down to the punctuation.
And that’s it for my addendum/errata. Riley’s book will be nothing new to most screenwriters, but it’s a helpful and practical guide for newcomers. Note that he deliberately doesn’t teach anything about writing–and his snippet examples aren’t particularly inspiring. This book is strictly about formatting, and on that level, it’s solid enough that I hereby abdicate all common formatting questions to it.
I have a supporting character that seems to fill a far greater purpose
than I originally anticipated. The supporting character fits
Wikipedia’s definition of Hero. However, your definition says hero and main character are synonymous.
In my story, the protagonist is the main character; it’s his story. But everything is affected by this supporting character’s possession of “character far greater than that of a typical person.”
Is it wheels off to have a main character and protagonist not be the hero
in the end? Do you think the audience will feel cheated by a decision
like this?
— Trey
Dallas, TX
We’re venturing into Dramatic Theory 101, so if you’re the type who begins squirming in your seat when professor-types talk about Joseph Campbell and character arcs, you can save yourself a lot of frustration by stopping after the following sentence:
In most cases, “Hero,” “Main Character,” and “Protagonist” are the same character.
Seriously, you can stop reading now. Here’s a nice article about raising orphaned squirrels.
Now, for readers who are still with me, let’s try to come up with more specific definitions for these three terms, and explore why they may apply to different characters in certain stories.
Hero
My incredibly-simplified definition: this is the character who you hope to see “win.” While it’s fine to think of Superman, or Aladdin, the hero doesn’t have to be noble, or courageous, or especially talented. As long as you’re rooting for him, that’s what matters.
Main Character
Just what it sounds like: this is the character who the story is mostly about. Confused? Often his or her name is in the title: Shrek, King Arthur, Tootsie, Citizen Kane.
Protagonist
The character who changes over the course of the story, travelling from Point A to Point B, either literally or figuratively. She learns and grows as the story progresses. Generally, Protagonists want something at the start of the tale, and discover they need something else.
Now, remember, most times, one character is all three of these things. For example, Ripley in Aliens is clearly the Hero (fighting the monster), the Main Character (the story is mostly about her), and the Protagonist (she reluctantly joins the trip, but ends up descending to the depths to fight for her “daughter”).
The same triple-aspect applies to Cher in Clueless, and John McClane in Die Hard. And it’s fine for movies to have “teams” of characters fulfiling these roles; in Charlie’s Angels, Dylan, Natalie and Alex are each Hero, Main Character and Protagonist.
However, in some stories, the Hero, the Protagonist and the Main Character are not all the same person. One very current example is Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
There’s no question that Charlie’s the Hero. You want to see him win that Golden Ticket, and for only good things to happen to him. Likewise, he’s also the Main Character — though Wonka’s a close second. While Charlie recedes into the background a bit during the factory tour, he’s still the main focus of the movie’s storytelling energies. When the Narrator talks, it’s mostly to fill in details about Charlie.
However, Charlie is not a classic Protagonist. Charlie doesn’t grow or change over the course of the story. He doesn’t need to. He starts out a really nice kid, and ends up a really nice kid.
In terms of Classical Dramatic Structure, that leaves us one Protagonist short, which leads to the biggest change in the screenplay versus the book (or the 1971 film). In our movie, Willy Wonka is the protagonist. He grows and changes. We see his rise and fall, along with his nervous breakdown during the tour. Charlie’s the one who’s always asking — ever so politely, in the Freddie Highmore Whisper(TM) — the questions that lead to Wonka’s flashbacks upon his rotten childhood. (In Classic Dramatic terms, that makes Charlie an Antagonist. Not to be confused with a Villain. Are you sure you don’t want to read about some squirrels?)
As I pitched it to Tim: Charlie gets a factory, and Willy Wonka gets a family. It’s the whole want-versus-need thing. Charlie doesn’t need a factory. Wonka really needs a family. Otherwise, he’s going to die a giggling misanthropic weirdo.
Assigning labels
Playing “spot the protagonist” can be a good intellectual exercise — up to a point. As I started writing Charlie, asking “Who’s the protagonist?” led to some important decisions about the storytelling. But trying to pin firm labels on the characters in Go or Pirates of the Caribbean would only prove frustrating.
If a story works, it works — regardless of whether characters are fulfilling their archetypal roles. So be wary of trying to wedge characters into defined classes, simply because that’s how they “should” fit.