Thanks, all. I do know why the 'rules' are there, BTW, and I'm not arguing with them, but I wanted to see a screenplay that is written the way we're always told to write them, and the ones I'm seeing have long chunks of action instead of 4 lines max, novelistics, camera angles, etc.
I'm sure it is because of the status of the screenplay and writer, but as we are always advising beginners to look at finished screenplays to get an idea of how to do it, I think we should acknowledge that can be quite misleading. I remember I wrote a piece after looking at the famous first few of 'Changeling', by which I thought it was OK to write the characters' state of mind and thoughts pretty freely. Unfortunately, it wasn't my agent who corrected me, but the company I subbed to.
it would be great if instead of saying, Go and look at scripts, we could say 'Go and look at X', as a 'pure' example, particularly if you then watch the finished movie and see how the relative starkness of the writing translates upscreen.
Here's the deal. All of these "rules" aren't being presented as natural laws. They are rules of thumb that are being offered as *cautions* to beginning writers not because professionals don't use them or because you won't find examples of them, to a greater or lesser extent in produced screenplays -- nor is it because of what you sometimes hear which is -- "Oh, when you direct your own movie you get to break the rules, or "Oh, when it's an assignment you get to break the rules," or any variation thereof.
No.
The point is -- think of it like this. You are someone who is just barely learning how to drive. Professional screenwriters are people who are the equivalent of Nascar race drivers.
So when you say -- Hey, I keep reading these rules that say, "Don't take turns at 120 miles an hour -- but then I keep seeing all of these other guys, these professional race drivers, and they're all taking turns at 120 miles an hours. What's the deal. I thought there was this big rule saying never take a turn at a 120 miles an hour.
And the basic answer is -- when you've mastered everything you need to master to drive a car at 250 miles an hour -- by driving cars for thousands of hours at high speed, by knowing how the car that you're driving is put together and taken apart from the ground up -- then you'll be in a position to take turns at 120 without wrecking your car.
Until then, you would be much better served if you didn't take turns at 120.
And it's the same thing with all the stuff that people warn beginners about -- about using "we see" -- about flashbacks, about dream sequences, about voice overs.
It's not that you can't point to professional screenplays that do all of these things and use them successfully. They're not cheating.
They're just doing correctly something which, in virtually every case, when a beginner attempts to do it, he's simply going to wreck the screenplay.
NMS
