Screenplay — The Foundations of Screenwriting, by Syd Field

This relatively short, breezy guide to writing better screenplays is full of good, practical advice. I was keen to see what it had to say about structure, having seen it discussed elsewhere. 

Field favours a three-act structure, where Acts I and III are of the same length — roughly 30 minutes of screen time or 30 script pages each — but Act II is twice that, roughly 60 minutes / pages. By working out how each of these three Acts ends, you construct a basic structure on to which everything else can be added (inevitably, via little cards for individual scenes). Everything, says Field, must either drive the plot forward or reveal character (or do both at the same time), all motoring towards those endings.

He provides plenty of examples from movies old and new, some of which — hello, American Beauty — may not have dated well. The implication is that these are inviolable, unchanging rules that apply to all successful movies. There are quotations from various writers and film-makers, as if they concur with the thesis. Some points are made more than once, I assume to drum them in.

But I’m not sure that all the films fit his structure as neatly as he suggests. Field talks a lot about the Lord of the Rings movies but, for example, I think the prologue that opens the first film, The Fellowship of the Ring, and sets out the history of Middle Earth sits outside the three-act structure about Frodo and his pals: that’s why it is a prologue. The details aren’t quite right, either:

“In Lord of the Rings, we open with the history of the ring, then watch as Bilbo Baggins finds it at the bottom of the river. This is the inciting incident that sets the entire trilogy in motion.” (p. 131)

Bilbo isn’t in the river scene at all. It’s a brief moment in the first film but returned to, and dwelt on, at the start of the third one. The implication is that Field has misunderstood that whole sequence of the trilogy.

Having identified Bilbo finding the ring — wherever he might find it — as the inciting incident of the trilogy, Field says Bilbo handing it on to Frodo who learns that it is dangerous and must be destroyed is the ‘key incident’ of the screenplay (p. 134). But Frodo receiving the ring and learning of its nature are two separate moments, separated by months (and, in the book, years). 

And what, then, is Plot Point 1 of The Fellowship of the Ring, which ends its first Act? It should be about a quarter of the way through the film. It is the Nazgûl on the heels of the hobbits, or Frodo disappearing in the pub, or the hobbits meeting Strider, or Frodo getting stabbed? I just worry it’s a bit reductive to apply this model too rigidly.

Also, while there’s a fair bit here on the way changes in technology are changing the business of film-making, there’s nothing on say, how an extended version of a film affects the structure. The Lord of the Rings films were written and made with extended versions in mind, for release on DVD, which is at odds with the emphasis here on lean, efficient screenplays.

So, there’s plenty here that is useful and practical, but — perhaps just because I am awkward cove — I found myself worrying at its edges.

Most annoying at all is the lack of references or bibliography, so that we might follow up on claims. For example, I was really taken by this:

“Hegel, the great eighteenth-century German philosopher, maintained that the essence of tragedy derives not from one character being right and the other being wrong, or from the conflict of good versus evil, but from a conflict in which both characters are right, and thus the tragedy is one of ‘right against right’, being carried to its logical conclusion.” (p. 132)

Oh, for a footnote to indicate where to learn more. 

I’ve looked elsewhere, and this seems to come from chapter 5 of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind, in which he apparently “discusses character, ethical action and guilt partly by way of an analysis of Sophocles’s tragedy Antigone”, as per Mark W Roche, “The Greatness and Limits of Hegel’s Theory of Tragedy”, p. 52.  We shall see…

ETA: It seems to be the bit under the subheading “The Concrete Development of Dramatic Poetry and its Genres” under “The Genres of Dramatic Poetry and the Chief Features it has had in History” in Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics, Part 3, Section 3.