Screenwriter in Residence

I’m thrilled to be appointed the first screenwriter-in-residence for the Toronto Public Library.  I’ll be blogging here throughout my term over the next couple of months. 

As a first post, I wanted to start with a fundamental.  If you’re interested in film and TV, then you should know that the first person on the job is the one who writes the script or screenplay.  No one else–producers, directors, actors, gaffers, grips, editors–has a job until the screenwriter completes theirs.

But what exactly is a screenplay?

Some people may know what a screenplay looks like–a bunch of pages of writing in a funny, not especially reader-friendly format. But how do we define this thing?

The great screenwriter Frank Pierson, (Dog Day Afternoon) once called it a "passionate letter to the cast and crew." That’s probably what it is in it’s highest form. But on the most prosaic, fundamental level, a screenplay is really a set of instructions to the cast and crew.

It describes in a very trackable way–breaking it down scene by scene–what the reader should see and hear if they were watching the finished product.

It’s a blue print or a rendering of what the final product–a film or TV show–would look like.

A set of instructions written in practical language that explains explicitly or implicitly what’s required to film.  Based on the screenplay, the props master will know if a gun is required for a scene.  The casting director will know how many principal actors, day players and extras the production will call for.  The production designer will be able to start choosing locations or designing sets based on what’s described in the screenplay.  All their jobs start with the screenplay.  No one can afford to wait for filming to start to be told what to do.  The screenplay tells them what to do.  (Though it does NOT tell them how to do it!)

Drop into your favourite library and check out some of the published screenplays of films you may have seen to see how the screenplay evokes everything the movie embodied.  That’s the best way to learn how a writer like Frank Pierson could transform a set of instructions into a work of art.