Writing Film Scripts 4: Blinking Hard Work

After the action statement, fragmented or not, put your dialogue under the character’s name in capitals. Get the implied action and dialogue from the four chapters into the four script pages. You live with judgements on inclusions and exclusions for the rest of the adaptation, but they make it yours.

Harry Hama on location, crew in the background.

Was that interesting? Not at all what you were expecting I am sure. Further, all you have done, if you did it, is physically organise Jane Austen’s material to fit, just the mechanics, without the continuum between Jane Austen’s era and yours, ‘[i]t is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife’ that is your real contribution.

Have you wondered why I might be writing this? I do not need to, I am even ‘retired’, but I am narked by the books based on workshops of enthusiastic students with ideas and no practical experience, but it is an approach to ‘knocking’ out textbooks, even if they are flawed to practitioners, who do not tend to write books anyway. There are exceptions, of course: they are more relaxed, but about something else: Stephen King’s book ‘On Writing’ is excellent; others are David Mamet’s book ‘On Directing Film’; Mike Figgis on ‘Digital Filmmaking’; and Walter Murch’s ‘In the Blink of an Eye’. None of these are textbooks, and none are about scriptwriting per se, but they will give you practical insights into writing film scripts.

But I have digressed: many people want to write film scripts, and some ask me if I can help. I live in Zambia, but this is not the reason: there is literacy and then there is literacy. I repeat, if you want to write ‘professionally’, you need to read a lot and write a lot. It is often said, we all have a book in us, and it is probably right, but if you are not writing frequently, it will take a long time because you do not know how to write or have a style. I am wrong? What is odd about numbers in this text; what is odd about the titles in this text; how about capitalising proper nouns – when should it be Prime Minister and when should it be prime minister?

With your biopic, the film script will never be finished, be in doubtful English and have no market; while, adapting a recognised book from the literature canon, you will discover how to write a film, inherit an timeline and pacing, and have a saleable script in the end. Kenneth Branagh did lots of them, wisely. Eventually, you will write your own material, but it is less costly when it is out-of-copyright. No, I did not follow my own advice!

Best regards,

Peter Langmead

P.S. Please have a look at my website here, for all sorts of interesting things about my film productions, operas and books on social photography. Remember, if there is no spit on the lens, you are not close enough - I do not know who said that but it is true. Write to me if you have a question.

My CSR Project 2: Saved by Eating

If you did not eat carbohydrates all last week, and briskly walked 45 minutes at day after breakfast, your BS will be fine by now. But you did, did you not! If you are foolish enough to eat a bread sandwich, even a brown one, you know your BS is going to be high. It is too late, it is done. For me, my eyes will go out-of-focus, my ankles will ache, and my feet will hurt. I will become aggressive and tired. If I had really been as stupid as that, I would run 10km, about an hour, starting within half-an-hour. In preference. I just would not have had the bread, chips, pasta, rice, and you will not be doing it again, I hope.

Is there something wrong with real tomatoes? And I do not mean processed cheese when I say a slice of cheese! Asserting processed food has some type of sugar, added or concentrated, is a fairly safe assumption.

Here is my stand-by diet for getting back into control.

Breakfast: two eggs, fried in olive oil or butter if you like, and with ham or bacon if you like. If you wax lyrical about saturated fats in butter being bad for you, or the nitrates in ham and bacon, remember that nobody cares if you die with or without your feet.

Lunch: beef, chicken, pork, cheese, eggs with a salad made from lettuce, tomatoes, cucumber, olives, radishes, peppers, with olive oil and vinegar - I do not need oil and vinegar now-a-days because my taste buds have recovered. I did not say vinaigrettes from the supermarket, I said oil and vinegar; any kind of oil is fine, including palm oil and avocado oil.

Dinner: vegetable soup, but not made with nshima, potatoes, rice, pasta, couscous or any other carbohydrate. Watch out for Indian ‘vegetable’ curries because they often include potatoes, peas, lentils and beans that are high in carbohydrates; they will come later. They are good but not while you are trying to get your BS under control. My alternative is an omelette without milk, with butter, cheese, ham, bacon, tomatoes, and any other vegetable you like. Please do not rant about Glycemic Index (GI) to me, I am diabetic, but we will get to it.

If you need to snack, which I do, a slice of cheddar cheese is good, or ham; otherwise, seeds or nuts, not cake or biscuits, not even oat biscuits, and not fruit. Homemade guacamole or baba ghanoush I like with celery or carrots, but not hummus because it is made from chickpeas, so not for now.

Tea or real ground coffee, not with milk but butter or double cream is fine, and no sugar. I did not say yogurt and cut the wine and beer for now. Yes, I do know about resveratrol. Never anything like Coke or Fanta. Go for a walk, now, or, better still, after every meal. One of them should be 45 minutes, the others can be 20 minutes. Get a dog!

If you succeed with this diet without cheating, you do not eat any carbohydrates. If you walk everyday, a week from now you will not be getting up at night and sleeping better, your feet will not hurt so much, you will lose three kilograms or so, your eyes will be in focus and your BS will under 6 mmol/L. If you cheated, your BS could be anywhere, and you are not serious. I know because I am a diabetic and you do not fool me.

Best regards,

Peter Langmead

What Is Going to Happen?

For some reason, many believe the situation that prevailed before COVID-19 is going to prevail after COVID-19. It is not. Whether you consider it to be better or worse than the past is a subjective judgement. Everyone will have a view based on their business and life style. This is my opinion.

There are half-a-dozen people working in my company that will be influenced by my decisions, which are a function of what is happening in our environment, which is Lusaka. Most of them are working at home and two are living and working at the office, essential workers dictated by computing power or failsafe productivity. Everyone else is working from home where they suffer from 12-hour power outages everyday during which they cannot work. They work any hours that ZESCO gives them, including through the night.

I am older now, explicitly vulnerable to COVID-19 by age and diabetes, so I am not working nights; but remember being younger and happily working into the night. Especially for those with children, being at home must be a bonus; further, time is not wasted travelling to and from work. I can see many office workers preferring to work at home.

This is not so straight forward however: a professional company has an office as a matter of presence, prestige, a meeting place, and a place of work with reliable utilities. Not having an office is not an option for a professional company and working from home is not what professionals do. Sorry, but the definition of whether you are left at home or required in the office is a measure of status - freelance is not really a professional category and is a synonym for being somewhere between being employed and unemployed, underemployed.

What will happen though is a proportion of employees will be left at home to work, and that is going to have two outcomes: in the short term, less office space is required, resulting in a decline in office rents; and nobody is getting salary rises until there has been some movement towards normal. The combination means less demand for nearly everything other than food, internet, digital media. Let us hope. The world needs a sea change.

Writing Film Scripts 2: the Adaptation

As dull as this may be, the start is about mathematics. I suggested books in the first part of this series on purpose. Practice your moderately redundant reading skills and learn from them, because I am not telling you what is in the public domain. Done it? I am talking about what you get from experience, not from reading, but you need to read first.

A film script written in a scriptwriting programme is about 120 pages of A4 or Letter size for a 2-hour film. I use Final Draft but Celtx is also useful. One page of script is one minute of film. Blake Snyder’s dogmatic rules are well-advised. Really, do them, but know you can throw them out later. If your first ten pages to the 'inciting incident' do not hook the reader, rewrite again because, at that point, your script is binned without a rejection letter.

Three months is what you expect to be paid for a 120-page script. In Zambia, you would be lucky! A tv-hour, an episode of a series, is around 56 minutes, 56 pages, which is an hour of programming with advertisements. A tv-½ hour is more saleable because ½-hour gaps need filling. Smart writers design their films to fit ad breaks because they are time to ‘put-the-kettle-on’; smarter writers take advantage of the enforced Brechtian point.

What does a book for adaptation look like? On average, feature films have 60 scenes. A scene defines a location, simply EXT. FOREST - NIGHT or INT. OFFICE - DAY. It is the senior class of the scriptwriting hierarchy in your writing programme. If the film is 120 minutes, 120 pages, each scene is two pages, two minutes. This is a rhythm. If four scenes are concurrent in the same location, I maintain the four scene headings to ensure there is tangible change between each in the two-minute rhythm. If you do not, the director, cinematographer and editor will.

You probably dimly recall writing at school and having to conform to the beginning, middle and end philosophy of Aristotle. This is the three-act structure used by many. There are other models, Shakespeare uses five, but there are always at least three. The halfway point is also a staging post. So, what is the perfect storm in three acts and sixty chapters, and happens to be one of the finest examples of English literature, famous for its opening paragraphs?

Fortunately, the BBC, other British film institutions and the film industry are (or were) obliged or predisposed towards writing scripts to support the British education system, which has resulted in excellent films and series with meaningful quotes straight out of the nation’s great literature, including Shakespeare, Thomas Hardy, Jane Austen and Charles Dickens.

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, one of the greatest novels of British literature, is in three acts and has 61 chapters. The first volume/act is 23 chapters, act two is 19 chapters, two minutes per scene for a feature film, or ten chapters to a tv-hour episode in a six-part series. So, one chapter is two minutes or six minutes.

Best regards,

Peter Langmead



P.S. Please do have a look at my website here, for all sorts of interesting things about my film productions, operas and books on social photography. Remember, if there is no spit on your lens, you are not close enough - I do not know who said that but it is true. Feel free to ask questions. My last film is 'The Borderline', which can be watched here.

Writing Film Scripts: in the Beginning!

Hi! I thought you might like to read my new article: Writing Film Scripts: in the Beginning! https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/writing-film-scripts-beginning-peter-langmead