la dolce screenplay

badducky said:

I saw La Dolce Vita last night, and one of the many lingering questonmarks of the film involves the screenplay.

How does one write a screenplay for such a free-flowing poem of a film?

Just curious.

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Well, you don't.

I know nothing about the writing or directing of "La Dolce Vita," but I do recall the film, so what I say here is strictly an opinion and some speculation, at least somewhat informed by studies.

Italo and Euro filmmaking has been a rather different animal that movie making in the US, with the Brits being more like us than their Euro or Italo counterparts. Canadian production follows the American model except for Quebec, which is decidedly Euro.

The principle difference is that in America writers write pictures and directors direct them, whereas in the Italo-Euro scene it has been almost exclusively a director's medium or, better, a filmmaker's medium. Think Fellini. The Italians did veer off their traditional course with all those "spaghetti westerns" they produced.

Euro and Italo directors create a "scenario" and then go out and shoot their picture. Their "scenario" isn't like a script as we know it, it's more like an outline as we know it. The movie is a vision they keep in their heads, the scenario merely guides them to the next location, and there, they "write the picure" as they film, so to speak. They invent scenes on the spot. They shoot a lot of film. Then they retire to an ediitng bay and proceed to assemble their vision, which often takes months.

We don't do it that way in America, of course.

Because of their techniques and approach, Italo and Euro films present more spontenaity and "stream of consciousness" imagery than their US counterparts, and because of this they often seem to make much less "sense" to an American audience. Italo and Euro films are less structured, less oriented to a literary storyline, and more free flowing and nonlinear, as "La Dolca Vita" showed.

You said it, their stuff involves cinematic poetry, whereas our stuff is linear and involves cinematic staging of dramatic tales that adhere to the dictates of a literary storyline and the conventions of a genre.

Great movies are made by both.

badducky said:

That makes sense, historically and artistically.

However, how would you write a screenplay for a movie like this, though?

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Pretty tough to do. Not impossible I suppose, just tough.

One reason is that many scenes/shots only occur to a director after they've arrived on the set or at the location and look things over. This happens frequently even in US-made features; it's a hallmark of Italo and Euro pictures.

So you're a screenwriter and you're sitting in your cozy NYC loft or Echo Park cottage writing and in effect you're trying to anticipate what your director is gonna find when he or she arrives on the set or at the location, and what they'll decide upon finding what they find. Tough to do.

And remember, the sequences you see in films like "La Dolca Vita" are in effect manufactured in an editing process, not filmed as cohesive parts at some location or series of locations or on sets.

On the other hand, one could write similar sequences ... but getting them on film then becomes the issue. A director reads your script and wonders where he's gonna find all the footage he needs from which to assemble the sequence. "How am I gonna film this?" he asks. And doing so may become a real time consuming (and hence expensive) chore.

But a writer could write them. Just sit down at your machine and let your imagination explode, and write what it reveals to you.

One problem with this is you'd probably end up with a 200-page script, because you'd be slugging the thing to death with cuts, unless you stuck to the master scene format and let your narrative paragraphs become the shots, which is indeed perfectly do-able.

Maybe try to find some American scripts that have "stream of conscousness" sequences in them and see how they were written?

I dunno, this isn't something I've ever thought about much, as can be seen by my fumbling around here.

Do what ya do ...

badducky said:

That makes sense, historically and artistically.

However, how would you write a screenplay for a movie like this, though?

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I'd be Italian and live in that era.

badducky said:

To me it's a thought experiment only.

When I was watching the film, I was thinking like a writer of books.

I was thinking about poetic books like "The English Patient", and how they get turned into Hollywood Features, when a Euro-style would have probably built a better film, and a film closer to the source material.

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The source material - 'The English Patient' novel was pretty much unfilmable. The acclaim the screenplay got was wholly deserved IMO.