Senior Thesis- Part Five

Despite all the books I’ve read, all the screenplays I’ve seen, and all the movies I’ve watched, nothing has taught me more about writing a screenplay than actually sitting down and writing (for 3-5 hours at a time). Its one thing to have an idea in your head that sounds nice, that sounds like a good movie. It’s another thing to actually sit down and try to write it out into a hundred minute movie (industry standard).

I’ve already talked about how much time I spent preparing a storyboard and a treatment before writing the screenplay itself. But after spending time writing the screenplay, it felt like I didn’t prepare at all. At first, I only put in the dialog which I thought was absolutely necessary to move the story along. After a week of this, however, I realized that I was going to be short by about 40 pages (that’s forty minutes for those of you keeping score). This actually put me into panic mode because it meant that I wouldn’t have a finished product, I wouldn’t have a movie that I’d be able to sell to the typical production company. So to pinpoint the problem, I decided to watch a few movies and find out what I was missing from my own.

I was actually surprised that I didn’t realize this sooner. After watching a few films, it jumped out at me. Not every seen need’s to be there. I don’t mean that directors put in scenes for no reason and that the movie is better off without them. I mean that in most movies, not every scene in the movie needs to move the story along. Some scenes are just there. They don’t contribute the story and they aren’t plot driven.

This doesn’t mean that those scenes need to remain purposeless necessarily. In some cases, though the scene isn’t crucial to the plot, it might be crucial to understanding the personality of a certain character. An example off the top of my head would be in Iron Man, where Tony Stark (Robert Downey) is at a charity banquet, dancing with his assistant (Gwyneth Paltro), and they make small talk while he gazes into her eyes. This scene has nothing to do with his metamorphosis into Iron Man, or his fight against evil. But it does show the viewer a certain side of Stark that we wouldn’t have had otherwise. It shows the viewer that despite his reckless behavior and his blaze attitude, he is capable of having emotions, particularly warm ones which are not typical to a weapons maker. It also somewhat contributed to his metamorphosis into a more heroic-like character. Before hand, he wasn’t really a good guy; he just wasn’t a bad one.

So after picking up on little techniques and nuances like this one, I’ve begun to insert scenes like this into my own movie. It still like my movie will be short a few pages, but I’m more aware now and I’ll have something more presentable. One thing that I know for sure, even after I’ve presented this project to a panel, I still won’t consider my movie to be 100 percent done. It has a long way to go before it’s worthy of the silver screen.