You have screenwriting software. You have a great idea for a flick. You know the time, place, characters, action. You know your script will be in 12-point Courier. In that font, one page of script equals one minute of screen time. You know the limit is 110-120 pages/minutes—that's how long commercial features are. 

Saturday arrives. The day you swore to yourself you'd start your script, the thriller that has been percolating away in your fevered brain for a year. You turn on your box. Its hum is equal to the hum of your creative juices.  

You click on your brand new version of Final Draft.  

You open a new document.  

You begin.  

You begin with a "treatment," a prose version of your story—with some choice dialogue tucked in if it happens to come to you while you're writing. Or maybe you throw in the odd slug line to mark a scene: 

INT. BUCKMINSTER FULLER'S GEODISIC DOME, MONTREAL - MIDNIGHT 

Now you're in Vienna.  

The pages burn.  

Now you're in Albuquerque.  

Go! Go! Go! 

Your narrative's down! Villain! Heroine! Action! Action! Yes! Yes! Build! Build! Heading for the climax. Wham! Bam! Yes! A page of dénouement and you're out!  

Yes! Wow! Hoo-boy. Whew.  

And now, like any pro, you set aside your 20-page treatment to let it percolate. 

Thursday evening. You've been waiting impatiently for five days, thinking of the chase scene, thinking of the love scene, thinking of the f/x, thinking of the shootout. Are they as good as you thought they were? 

You open and read your splendid treatment.  

By page six you're sinking faster and lower than Andy Fastow and George Bush combined. How can this be?! The treatment was fantastic when you wrote it! Now those long dialogues make you wince. And the villain's a pushover. We lose sight of the main character twice for more than five pages each time. The heroine's too wimpy. That cool plot thing now is creaky, not flashy! And that comes before this, which isn't logical; and also the getting into the action takes forever, but then the climax comes too soon, and on top of it all everything seems so writerly. And the pages after the climax? It's all exposition babble to try to wrap things up. Even I can see through it. And I wrote it! Oh God. It's awful! Awful, awful, awful. Woe is me! Woe is me! 

First of all: Whoa!  

Some self-esteem here, please. And second of all: Welcome to the club. You are now an official member of the NSS (Neophyte Screenwriters Society). So let's take another look.  

You have some elements of your story down on paper, even though it may all seem like a mess. Right?  

Yeah, I guess.  

Something to work with?  

Yeah. I guess.  

So ease up. You're somewhere. Take a bow.  

[NS takes a hesitant bow.] 

Feel better?  

Yeah, a bit.  

So let's backtrack to screenwriting's roots. In one paragraph. 

Spring. Way back when. The Greeks throw worshipful bashes to their favorite god, Dionysus. A chorus of 50 people, plus chorus leader, dance and sing hymns to The Big D. 536 BC: Thespis, a chorus leader, puts on makeup and costume, steps out of the chorus, and pretends he's someone else. Voilà!, the first character in Western drama. He interacts with the chorus, talking to them in memorized words (i.e., script, dialogue). The audience goes bananas—and oranges, too. Buzz builds. Rumour runs rampant. Around the Peloponnesus, writers figure they can easily twack Thepis's butt, so they sit down to compete in the new form. Dialogue now stresses conflict between chorus and leader. The bandwagon rolls. The audiences extol. Cut: c. 490, Aeschylus, the first great Greek playwright, adds a second character and diminishes the chorus to 12—interpersonal conflict is foregrounded. Cut: Sophocles, the second great Greek playwright, adds a third character in conflict on the stage. Cut: Euripedes makes the chorus mostly insignificant in some of his plays. Action and conflict between characters is foregrounded even more. Dah-daaah! By 420 BC, the max-three-characters-in-conflict-at-once-in-any-one-scene of Western drama is set. Result: The newfangled plays do major box office and earn a wide release throughout the Greek peninsula for many years.  

Fast forward: Two thousand or so years later, Renaissance scribes read the Greek stuff and then write their own stuff modelled on what they read. Ergo: Goldoni, Racine, Corneille, Molière, Lope de Vega, and, of course, Willie the Shake. Before not too long Edison, Meliès, the Lumière bros, Porter, Griffith, Keaton, Sennett, Chaplin, Eisenstein come along. The old Greek invention, via the Renaissance, is copped by the flicks.  

Point of insistence: The three characters in conflict rule doesn't mean that there are only three characters in conflict in an entire narrative. It means that rarely are there more than three characters in conflict at one time in front of us, i.e., in one scene. One scene might pit Oedipus against Iocasta and Creon; another scene pits Oedipus against Tiresias, with the Chorus waffling. (The chorus as a single character—a phenomenon surviving in films to this day—we'll take up later.) Nonetheless, three major characters is a good rule of thumb.  

Which leads us to a quick look at principals. How many in any flick? Look at the poster (what The Biz calls a "one-sheet"). Count the actors billed. Usually two or three. Take Stuart Beattie's Collateral: Foxx, Cruise, with Jada Pinkett's lawyer as supporting.  

And of these two principals, only one main/central character. The question in that respect being: Whose story is it? Vincent's? Or Max's? 

And the way to find whose story it is? Whoever changes the most. 
 

Next month: The Rules, Part 2. Films to watch: High Noon, Collateral. Red Eye, The Terminator, Breakdown. 

Copyright©Neil Flowers, 2006-2007.

All Rights Reserved.