Scene One: Death of the Semicolon

     Writing a screenplay is like writing a novel on crack.  The novel, that is, not the novelist. You have 120 pages max. (120 pages=120 minutes)to say everything that your characters have to say, and do everything they have to do. Dialogue comes in two or three line bursts. Those lines are super short and travel down the center of the page, leaving those who think they know more than you do to cover the surrounding white space with their notes.
     Between these bursts of dialogue, action lines tell the actors, director, camera people, costume designer and caterer, for all I know, what you see on the screen.  Those lines are also limited to two or three, but the run a little longer than the dwarfed dialogue lines. They are limited to what you can see and hear.  No background material, no odd family relationships or fraternal memberships.  Show it or forget it.
      And above it all, the scene heading tersely states whether it is interior or exterior, roughly where (Megan's House) and day or night.
      This is by way of saying that a screenplay is a team effort, and for those of us who really aren't team players, this can be the source of enormous frustration, requiring almost superhuman self discipline to refrain from writing : "As dawn breaks over the golden poplars lining Megan's tidy street, a dark clad figure slips...."  and sadly I could write so much more.
      One of the most brutal blows was the death of Strunk and White (Elements of Style) perpetrated by the many non-English majors who inhabit the film industry. For instance, the love of the triple dot pops up everywhere, not to signal an interrupted sentence as God intended, but mostly just for the hell of it, as far as I can tell.  Maybe they just stopped thinking about that mini-morsel of dialogue and felt it was time to move on.  Hey, if it feels good, do it, scriptwriting style.
        Another grievous loss is the semicolon.  (Megan picks her newspaper off the front steps; she looks right and left before closing her door. Or "Bobby, come here; there is something you have to see.") Gone. "Never use a semicolon in a screenplay."  Words that struck my heart.  What kind of savages are these people?
        Having a good deal of my educational history struck dead, what more could they do me?

Fade In

      This blog has a limited yet vast subject.  Roughly, and with digressions, it is how little ol' me (5'3 and over 65) in the course of one year, learned to write screenplays and have one find its way to Meryl's people, with results as yet unknown. This was not an over the transom job.  This was an agent-like artist's rep. (I'm the artist.  One whom I will call AARP, with irony, is the agent-art-rep...) pitching, and people in a vast organization liking what they heard and welcoming it's digital arrival.
      Before I get completely immersed in my subject, me, I want to thank Anne Zan* Marie Steadham (of In The Shade of the Cherry Tree) and my daughter (who wishes to remain anonymous ) both of whom helped me traverse the ways of the blog.
     I am a writer, who has written maniacally for the last year, and almost constantly for the eight or so preceding years, and always to literary purpose.  This blog won't help anyone do anything.  It won't make your life better.  It may be the basis of my next book, but presumably that would only help me. You may feel free to laugh derisively, shrink in horror, or take naked enjoyment in another writer's future insanity defense.  Be my guest.
      Away we go. July 2011.


*Sorry Zan! Curse you spell check!!





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