Talking to the cast, not the audience

I'm interested in seeing what people here think of a certain script-writing technique which I haven't seen employed very much but which did strike me as incredibly useful when I saw it used.

I hold that there are some things that you need to know a lot of details about the world as a writer that you don't need to ever tell anyone else, because it would bore the crap out of them. Whether you're like Tolkien and construct a whole new geography complete with maps, languages and a historical canon of literature to which you can actually refer accurately or you just happen to know what your protag's favourite food is even if he never visits a restaurant, you need to have a universe in your head in which all this plays out. With novels this is nice and self-contained, because you pick and choose which details out of your fantasy world you wish to convey specifically, which to infer, and which are just there to help you get the world to work in your head. However, when writing a stage or screen play, the audience isn't the audience, but the cast and director and producers and the various people whose job it is to convey this story to the real audience, the paying punters who are going to keep you in truffles and foie gras (or at the very least, in food and shelter). You tell them what to say and what to do, and then they have to expand on that in a thousand different ways, none of which it's really your job to describe.

However, there may still be some information which is important, but which does not fall into the category of what people are saying or doing at the time.

In Arthur Miller's The Crucible, he takes occasional time out from the play to present information which has nothing to do with the scene he is immediately describing, but instead to give detailed backstory on characters and situations. The world of The Crucible is one in which historic context and the specific relationships of the characters are important, but which would be incredibly clunky to get across in dialogue. So Miller says "hey, Cast, Director -- do your jobs." He gives them the information that they need to add background to their character, to understand "their motivations", and hence gives them the capacity to get that information across in the course of their acting or directing.

On to the relevance: the story I'm trying to tell takes place against a detailed, rich backdrop of political and religious intrigue which borrows from the real world but which is mostly all, y'know, made up. While it's not so important that the audience know the details it is pretty important that the characters know them. In a novel, I'd just write them, maybe drop some information in, but it's a film, so I'm going to be relying on actors and directors to know this backstory in order to properly understand just why this character doing this thing is important.

Would it be reasonable practice to break from the script, like Miller in The Crucible, and just tell people things? To not bother trying to insert them into the dialogue so that the actors can clunkily say those lines and themselves understand "Oh, OK, I am prejudiced against the French", but to come out and give them three or four paragraphs of "here's why you're prejudiced against the French, so you can get that across very subtly in ways that I would have been completely unable to get across if I'd just given you three lines of dialogue"? (random example, I have no plans to actually include any anti-French bias) It seems like a useful tool for a screenwriter to have, much in the same way that leaving comments all over your code helps other programmers come in and understand what you did, but as I said I haven't seen it used anywhere outside of Miller, and he wrote plays anyway. Is there some reason I should avoid doing this?

And the way you describe it, you're going to write semi-obscure dialog only actors will understand.

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Not at all, the aim is to write non-obscure dialog, and not too much of it. And they wouldn't find it in an encyclopaedia because I have, in fact, made it all up. Some is politics, some is really convoluted personal histories. I would never actually write "I am prejudiced against the French" in the script, but that's the point. There may well be a hypothetical scene where the character is talking to a French person. The lines can be delivered any number of ways, but the actor needs to know that he doesn't like the French. I could stick in "Bert doesn't like French people and makes it clear with his tone" and then the actor would have some clue, but then, why doesn't he like the French? Is it because his mother was killed by a Frenchman? Is it because he's just a racist tool? Is it because he's a Republican?

To use an actual example from the screenplay, some point about ten years before the story takes place, one of the major characters conspires with his brother's wife to have his brother killed so that they can get married. He does it because he's a lust-filled manipulative pervert, she does it because the main character is positioned to become very rich and powerful as a war profiteer and her husband just lost a lot of money in the self-same war. She also has a daughter. This young girl would have been about eight at the time, and is now about eighteen, and because the character is a dirty pervert he's casting glances in her direction rather than at his wife. I'm not even sure whether the murder is going to get any mention at all, and if it is it will only be by the briefest of allusions, because even people in extremely dysfunctional relationships don't casually talk about murder and also it's not the story I want to tell. The major character is descending into a fantasy world so he doesn't really believe it happened any more, his wife is trying to keep control of an increasingly uncontrollable situation and the last thing she wants is to dredge up old demons, but at the same time she knows all the history so when he looks at her daughter that way...

In my opinion, you can see that, and hear it too, in tone of voice and in action. The reason I want the information there is because it will have a genuine impact on what is shown on the screen. But it's much harder to put that in dialogue and in scene descriptions, especially if you don't want the characters to ever talk about it.

And then there's the explanation of just how much power in what arena the various government officials who drift in and out of the story have in relation to each other. That's something that's very easy to convey on screen with looks and actions, but hard to get in text to tell the actors what kind of looks and actions are required without some kind of tree diagram. Just telling people "OK, he's here and you're here, he's your boss here but you have power here unless this guy turns up, and he's on the other guy's side..." and then let them act out the lines on screen with the appropriate amount of knowledge as to how they should deliver the line "what are we going to do about these terrorists?" It's not a political drama and some of these guys are only going to be on screen for a couple of scenes at most, yet since I've had to create this political situation entirely from scratch nobody will know who's in charge of who unless I actually tell them.

It wouldn't require a paragraph or two explaining every scene, it would be a break at certain key points telling people history or salient information. And maybe a map, a diagram or two...

However.

I'm already writing a "Bible" running parallel to the screenplay -- I have more of that written than screenplay at the moment, because I need to get the world to work before I can edit it down into a coherent story. If it would be a bad idea, in people's opinions, to try and put information into the screenplay itself, I can simply work on solidifying the mess of notes into a coherent document alongside the script itself. Would that be better?

But that's my point. The audience will know it, because actors (and directors) have all kinds of tools at their disposal that I don't. I'm putting words on paper in black and white. They're raising their voices a semitone or looking away at X moment or giving a *look* that conveys more than anything I could put in the dialogue. All I want to do is give them the tools to work out why they're doing it.

Double post: I know I've asked for advice and now I'm arguing against it, but I think that people are misrepresenting what I'm trying to do. The point made above that it's Just Not Done in standard screenplay format is valid, and the kind of thing I was expecting. But the idea that I'm intending to put in irrelevant information is off base. To return to the original example, Miller's information-rich asides in The Crucible are tremendous assistances when it comes to staging the play, and it's hard to see how he could have incorporated such information into the drama without putting in too much useless junk that would have got in the way of the story. That's the kind of thing I'd be aiming for.

But, if it's Just Not Done, a "Bible" will do.

You don't offend at all. I suspected when I asked that the question would be answered "you don't do this because you don't do this." I did hope that the answer would be more fluid -- I'm much more used to writing in novel form where I get to do whatever the hell I want and nobody can stop me (bwahaha) -- but I understand the constraints.

That said, if this gets made there's an incredibly high chance it will get made on a tiny budget by an independent (I'm writing because various people with lots of talent and no money said "write it and we'll try and make it"), so I'd probably be able to swing more creative control of the project anyway. Still, I'm not discounting anything, so I figure I should keep this in such a form that I could shop it off to the big houses in the incredibly likely event that the independents fall through.