[Quick Summary: After his team mate is killed in a race car crash, a world famous American driver falls for an terminally ill Italian woman who opens him up to life.]
Q: What do screenwriters do?
A: They structure a film/tv's story on the page.
Q: I thought they just wrote dialogue?
A: They do write dialogue, but it is dialogue with a purpose.
Q: Where is the difficulty in that?
A: The writer must combine/juggle/squeeze/shove several dramatic elements, such as dialogue, setups and payoffs, into a structure that is invisible to most viewers.*
Q: Can you give me an example of dialogue + setups and payoffs?
A: Let's look at the scene below from today's script. I know it doesn't look like much.
However, this is the most that Bobby speaks/reveals to anyone, including his brother or regular girlfriend.
Notice how the writer uses dialogue to setup a deepening relationship:
ex. "EXT. OUTDOOR RESTAURANT - BOBBY AND LILLIAN
...Lillian devours the dinner. Bobby watches, fascinated.
BOBBY: Don't you ever get fat?
LILLIAN: No. Do you?
BOBBY: No.
LILLIAN: You eat carefully, hmmm? [Setup for an analogy later.]
BOBBY: Right.
LILLIAN: Are you married?
BOBBY: No. You? [Bobby is not usually so straightforward.]
LILLIAN: No. Were you married?
BOBBY: Was I married? Why?
LILLIAN: Just curious. You were married.
BOBBY: Once, for a minute. [He barely knows her and reveals personal details?!]
LILLIAN: You watch people eat. But you don't eat. (pause) I have been told that the intestine is thirty-two feet long...but we control only the first few inches of it. Maybe that is why you do not eat, it's too risky. [Payoff: Eating is an analogy for control.]
BOBBY: Maybe.
LILLIAN (pause): You're a careful man, Deerfield.
BOBBY: You like to pick on me, don't you? [Setup: He calls out that she's prodding him.]
LILLIAN: I find you curious. [Payoff: She admits to her behavior.]
BOBBY: Curious, huh?
LILLIAN: You are such a turtle. [Payoff: She explains why she's curious.]
BOBBY (smiles): Well, that's one thing I've never been called...a turtle. [Humor for the 1st time! We have not seen this connecting with anyone else.]
LILLIAN: Perhaps you are the world's fastest turtle, but just the same, you are a turtle...
....Then three musicians who have been playing in the b.g. pass their table enroute to another art of the cafe. Lillian watches them for a moment.
LILLIAN (continuing): I have musicians in my family. I've thought lately about learning to play the cello. Do you have musicians in your family? [Setup: She dares to be vulnerable, go more personal.]
BOBBY: No.
LILLIAN: What do you have in your family?
BOBBY: Y'know...you're a very difficult person to have a conversation with. I never know what you're going to say next. [Payoff: Her questions make him uncomfortable, in part b/c he WANTS to engage.]
LILLIAN: Do you always know what you will say next?
BOBBY: I have some idea. But you...I mean...you're all over...Like right now, I have no idea what you're going to talk about...what you're going to hit me with...I mean...I don't know what you're thinking. [Payoff: Her vulnerability prompts him to spell out her effect on him. Maybe a first for him?]
LILLIAN: Would you like to know?
Pause. Bobby thinks a moment. She studies him. Waits for his answer.
BOBBY: Sure... [He is attracted and takes the risk.]
She waits a moment. Then lifts her hand, extends it toward him, palm up.
LILLIAN (quietly): Do you think my hands are too large to play the cello?" [Moving toward more physical and emotional involvement.]
WHAT I'VE LEARNED: Structure is the hard, invisible work that often gets overlooked in favor of shinier objects, like explosions and set pieces.
(And in my opinion, it's often the reason why films work, or don't.)
Bobby Deerfield (1977)(dated 4/3/76)
by Alvin Sargent
Based on the novel "Heaven Has No Favorites," by Erich Maria Remarque
*I don't want to sound like a broken record, but give yourself the TIME and SPACE to read MANY scripts to get the hang of structure. (I always wondered how many is "many"? For me, it turned out to be hundreds, plural. Not a hundred, singular.)
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