"...the majority of professional screenwriters out there are not producing quality material. 85It’s just sloppy, unimaginative, and vile screenwriting."

If today’s screenplays are, indeed, dreadful, such carelessness must have a basis. Popular literature, including movies, is in the business of exploiting the stylish craze, of course, but popular culture also reflects the cultural values that produce these trends. For writers, who are the primary custodians and transmitters of culture, the corruption of the craft into negligence is particularly disturbing. Just what is the world-view that’s indicated by “sloppy, unimaginative, and vile screenwriting”? If we are to judge by the daily assault by the media, our audience passionately embraces insignificance.

As writers, then, we are faced with a difficult choice. Do we contribute more meaningless twaddle to the commonweal, or do we undertake the role of professional narrative artisans. This column will be about the struggle to uphold the integrity of the word-crafter’s trade. We will look at films and parts of films to determine the guiding hand of the initial craftsman without whom no movie would exist. To begin, we need to understand how the “sloppy, unimaginative” screenwriting came to be.

Perhaps the single greatest culprit in the downfall of writing is the insidious promise of television that all desires can easily be satisfied, even those wishes that the audience isn’t aware of. We have products and plans for whatever ails us. Not only is there no need to endure life’s tribulations; one needn’t even be inconvenienced by them. The fact that this promise is empty makes it nonetheless potent in shaping our expectations. We have come to believe that we deserve painlessness, success, and even adulation simply for being. However, the guarantee of unearned satisfaction does not, by itself, account for the intellectual and moral disgrace of movies. After all, the world is full of glittering possibilities that life has a way of tarnishing. No, the implicit promise of television has to have been powerfully reinforced by a legitimacy—the official, gold-sealed endorsement awarded by our educational system.

Sometime around the mid-1970s, public schools stopped teaching the skill of critical thought. A philosophy arose that said, essentially, students should be allowed to make their own discoveries without learning the discipline of analysis. Such an approach to education is absurd, of course, but it is easy to set in place and even easier to administer. If there are no standards of judgment, then there is no need to work at teaching critical comparisons. Whatever happens is just fine, tra-la-la, fiddle-dee-dee.

But what the advocates of self-discovery did not count on was the inevitable byproduct of this educational snafu—the students didn’t teach themselves at all, but simply grew up in blissful ignorance. Suddenly, education is staring into the jaws of a voracious monster. Because not knowing anything has become a value in itself; students can hardly be blamed for their success at being mediocre. Institutionalized vapidity also means that students can’t be held personally accountable for their failures. As a result, high schools long ago lost the capacity to restrain disruptive selfishness, and now many universities actually require that their faculties take extra care in making sure that students are personally fulfilled.

The difficulty with this coddling of personal insecurity is that without the discipline of knowledge there is no framework to structure the outpouring of emotional gibberish. Too many contemporary screenwriters have never learned the essential arm’s-length examination of the work that an artist must develop. Their scripts ignore the author’s first responsibility—to provide the audience with a clarity of vision. All sparkle and no craft makes Jack a pretend writer. Play-like writers are self-focused. Not only screenplays, but just about any publication you pick up today is splattered with the dribble of me-ism.

TOUGH SLEDDING ALERT: A sentence is coming up that will make your head hurt...

“Research has shown that during puberty the connectivity of nerves in parts of the brain, particularly the prefrontal cortex, increase.” 2

O.K. you can relax now. The big words are over. Personally, I have absolutely no idea what that sentence means.

What unmitigated gall! Here’s a writer who not only doesn’t understand his subject matter, but flaunts his ignorance in the face of the reader, and snickers that we should be more interested in him. This is a fake writer afflicted with the same narcissism as many screenwriters who lack respect for the worth of their readers. Instead of creating audience-focused storytelling that provides a complete experience, writers and directors do nothing more than jab the whoopee-nerves until the audience becomes addicted to the unremitting zap of preposterous car chases and limitless slaughter. Like rats who pee on raw electric wires for the jolt even while their genitals are being fried into crispy-crunchies, the glazed movie audience can never be satisfied because no dramatic tension has been established that demands resolution.

A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. — Thomas Mann

A screenwriter’s tools are the words on the page. It is only through words that we establish the story that engages an audience. There is an often repeated, but wrong-headed, maxim that movies are a visual medium. Movies are no more a visual medium because they employ pictures, than dance is an auditory medium because it employs music. Movies are a narrative medium, a network of skillfully told lies through which the storyteller reveals a truth of life. In order to craft that narrative, screenwriters must write with care, not a literal transcription of minutiae, but an evocation of imagery. Good screenwriting is the storyteller’s instinct annealed in the poet’s blaze.

Me-ism, however, has made us vulnerable to the like-you know-whatever virus that infects the written language, as well as the spoken. Fake writers so totally fail to understand the distinction between written and spoken language that even the most elemental scrambling of grammar escapes their notice. They write ‘use to’ because that’s what they hear, but they haven’t the faintest recognition that writing “he use to be a cop,” literally makes no sense on the page. The fact is that the written and oral forms of English use such different vocabularies, grammar, and expressive markers that they are not even registered in the same part of the brain. Some seventy percent of the meaning we derive from spoken language does not come from the content of the message, but from the surrounding context of facial expression, gesture, tone, rhythm, etc. Written language, on the other hand, constructs meaning through the careful arrangement of words and symbolic pointers. “He gets pissed off and shit” might conceivably be expressive in a specialized oral context, but as a written direction in a screenplay it is utterly worthless. A writer whose language tools are limited to oral expression provides nothing that makes sense to the reader of a screenplay. Imagine an actor or director looking for motivation in such a preposterous line direction.

Given the evolution of popular entertainment, the current “style over substance” accusation is not altogether surprising. Simply because it exists, thoughtless superficiality is not necessarily desirable or inevitable, but it’s prevalence does challenge us as writers—aspiring, experienced, and professional alike—to resist the degradation of our craft.

B7Foremost, we must be vigilant. Watching films is not enough. We need to analyze the productions on the screen. The issue is not whether you like or dislike a film, but why you have such a reaction. For some, this arm’s-length view may require learning a new language, but just as scientists, physicians, and artists in other media must constantly diagnose their output, screenwriters must also learn to systematically investigate the results of their work.

B7We have an obligation to take care of our audience. Even more than excite, charm, frighten, or please our audience, we must provide them with a ‘secure’ place from which to watch the film.

B7We must take our responsibility as the conjurors of story sincerely. We are the word-workers of narrative—the only members of the collaborative art who must always drive the story forward. Directors, actors, and producers will insist on warping the narrative to serve their individual preferences, but it is the screenwriter who connects to the heartbeat of the audience.

B7We must make certain that our characters are real, that is, that they are dimensional beings motivated by goals that are believable within the context of the story.

B7We must create drama. Movie stories are about conflicting values held by characters who must defend their worlds against the actions of characters who attack those values.

Certainly these are not the only concerns of screenwriters, but they are points on the compass that we can use to find our way through the ever-changing environment of the movie business. In this monthly column we’ll examine why some movies work or don’t work, and in that process see if we can discover additional guidelines to help us find our way. If you think you spot an important landmark or a current rising to the surface, please make a recommendation. In the meantime, we’ll assume that all of us on this voyage are seeking the truth that writers have always struggled to achieve: the integrity that compels us to write right.

Notes:

1 - Wehner, Christopher. Modern Screenwriting: Style Over Substance.

2 -Shahin, Jim. Wired for Weirdness. American Way magazine. 02/01/03.