STORY

At the recent first weekend of this year’s Channel 4 screenwriting course, screenwriter & novelist RONAN BENNETT (Top Boy, Hidden, Rebel Heart, Public Enemies) talking about the vital importance and centrality of STORY, made reference to the script of TOY STORY 1 as a touchstone for screenplay story-telling.

This was something I really related to from my experience of reading and assessing scripts. I read a vast number of scripts – and particularly recently so many really outstanding scripts for the Channel 4 screenwriting course.

I’ve thought a lot about what made the 12 scripts that we chose to have on the course stand out – and I think it comes down to two things – a big, strong idea that’s at the heart of the script; and an ability to tell a story that keeps you hooked. And the two are very much linked. So many of the good stories work for me because they have a fascinating idea at their core.

So, for instance, among the successful scripts for this year’s Channel 4 course –

- a story about asexuality, based around two couples in each of which one of the partners is asexual. This was a fascinating idea – how some people have no sexual instincts at all, and how this deeply and often tragically affects their lives and relationships.

- a play about an aging male working-class Londoner, a lifelong Labour supporter who finds himself seduced by the promises of the BNP.

- a rom-com about a single career woman who decides to invite tenders from her male friends when she decides she wants to have a baby; and once she gets pregnant, falls in love with someone else altogether.

- a screenplay about two kids, aged 5 and 7, left in South East London to fend themselves for two weeks while their mother goes on holiday to Thailand.

- a radio play about a publishing company who discover a brilliant ‘misery memoir’ by an Afghan woman, decide to publish it to a fanfare of publicity – only to discover that the ‘Afghan woman’ doesn’t exist and the story is a fabrication.

I think it’s fair to say that all 12 scripts selected had at their heart strong ideas such as those above – they are all easy to pitch and instantly engaging as ideas. Of course the brilliance of the execution in each case matched the strength of the basic idea. But it seems to me that if you have a good idea, it’s a whole lot easier to write a good script.

So often, it’s less about the writing and more about WHAT you’re writing about. Sometimes, however good the writing is, if the idea isn’t also a really strong idea, a script still doesn’t fully come alive.

Which reinforces for me the usefulness and importance of being able as writers to pitch your ideas.

Oh yes, and one more thing that most of the scripts had – a sense of humour. Scripts that make me laugh are quite rare and strong comic moments are a huge plus.

Good luck with all your writing!

All the best

Phil

Phil Shelley

February 3rd 2012

Watching the turgid ‘THE HOUR’ on BBC2 last night made me think about the state of current UK TV drama – I find myself in so many conversations these days with writers, script development people, producers, who say things like, ‘I don’t watch much TV drama – not British TV drama anyway.’ People only ever seem to want to talk about US TV drama – or increasingly European TV drama (The Killing, for instance) and movies. People have to struggle to think of British TV shows they’ve liked recently.

For me the best UK TV drama in the last few months (years) have been shows like EXILE (Danny Brocklehurst) and THE ACCUSED (Jimmy McGovern) – but these shows, while excellent, don’t feel like pioneering, cutting-edge shows – they feel like the vanguard of a movement that was at its peak 20 years ago when Jimmy McGovern and Paul Abbott were making a real splash.

So where is most of the good new dramatic writing to be found at the moment? Well, for me, a lot of it is in the theatre. When I used to work in development at the BBC, Carlton, Granada, etc, I used to go to a lot of theatre. And my main response to it was how so much of the writing wasn’t on the same level as so much TV drama. Now I’m not so sure. Shows like TACTICAL QUESTIONING (Tricycle Theatre), CYLBOURNE PARK, POSH (Royal Court), MOGADISHU (Lyric Hammersmith) and LITTLE PLATOONS (Bush Theatre) all felt fresh, exciting and like they all had something pressing to say, whether it was about the Tories and the establishment (POSH), the British army’s role in Iraq (TACTICAL QUESTIONING) or education (LITTLE PLATOONS, MOGADISHU).

And last week I saw THE VILLAGE BIKE at the Royal Court Upstairs. This was funny, dark and original – really top quality writing. And a fantastic central performance from the same Romola Garai who is given so little to work with in THE HOUR.

So where’s all the top-notch TV screenwriting in the UK?? Please tell me!

Philip Shelley

script-consultant

Aug 3rd 2011

A bit late in the day, some thoughts about activities generated through the website in 2010:-

The main work I did last year was unquestionably writing \ script-consulting work on Nigerian TV drama series, ‘Bloodties’. I was first approached about this a couple of years ago and after initially working as script consultant on some very preliminary storylines and incomplete scripts, last year I took the project on fully, working with the excellent writer Jacqui Canham, a graduate of the De Montfort university Leicester TV scriptwriting MA, whom I’d originally met through the website. We are just coming to the end of co-writing 26 x 1 hour episodes of the series – the brief for the series was to create something like ‘Dallas’, about the hugely affluent oil barons of Lagos and their families, lovers and enemies.

As you can imagine 26 hours of drama is quite an undertaking. But made a lot easier by the preparation work we did – several drafts of an 80+ page series bible \ treatment. Although for a series of that length the amount of detailed preparation work you can do on structuring the stories across the series as a whole is infinite, we were lucky to have a producer who wanted things done quickly – at times we have been each writing a script a week. In some ways this is a good thing – there’s no time for self-critical doubts to set in as you write – you just have to get the words on the page! And while the initial response has been positive, the detailed producer \ director notes should be interesting!

Other than that, script traffic into the website has been as busy as ever and at times, it’s been quite a challenge trying to stick to my self-imposed three week turnaround.

Particularly in the last couple of months when I have also been responsible for organising and running the Channel 4 screenwriting course for 2011. As you can see from my ‘mission statement’ one of the motivating factors for starting this website was my desire to find talented new writers and give them a helping hand. The C4 course provides a fantastic opportunity to do this. We received 650 scripts – all from writers with no broadcast credit – and selected the ‘best’ 12. This proved enormously difficult – not least because the quality of the scripts was really high. I read so many scripts that I really enjoyed; the process reminded me of the wealth of  screenwriting talent there is in this country; not enough of which is currently making it to our screens (or stages for that matter); and really brought home for me the absolute necessity for all writers – but particularly new writers – to make your script as good as you can possibly make it before launching it into the wider world – because let me tell you the competition is intense, so you really need to do everything you can to make your script stand out.

It has also reminded me of the importance of STORY. A story that really grabs you, that keeps you turning the pages, on the edge of your seat (and all those other clichés) is so rare but so invaluable. At the heart of every one of the good scripts I have read for the course is a wonderful, involving story – which more often than not can be distilled down into a compelling one sentence pitch \ premise.

This year I also ran a course for writers and script-editors in Edinburgh with writer Adrian Mead, which was a really positive experience (see testimonials feedback section of the website and blog ‘Screenwriting and script editing course feedback’) and I was on a panel of the first London Screenwriters festival. Hideously expensive though this event is, there were a lot of really interesting sessions and talks – I was only there for one day but I hugely enjoyed both the live link to US screenwriter John August (check out his excellent website www.johnaugust.com ) and the talk from Peter Buckingham, Head of Distribution & Exhibition at the UK Film Council. Peter Buckingham really brings home for writers the importance of knowing your audience (and your genre), and the (fairly stark) realities of the UK feature film market. If you have an interest in writing feature films for the UK market and you ever get the opportunity to hear him talk, don’t on any account miss it. Both these sessions (almost) justified the exorbitant cost.

Philip Shelley

Script-consultant

Feb 7^th 2011

Running this website has given me a deep fasination into what makes a good ‘romcom’ as I have been sent several examples of the genre, some very good. It’s such a tricky genre to conquer because we all know how the story’s going to end but the writer’s trick is to nevertheless keep the viewer guessing while sub-consciously the viewer knows exactly where the story’s headed. If we enjoy spending time with the (usually) warring couple, then that seems to be half the battle.

Here’s a link to a Guradian article about the tricky art of the romcom, more about the casting than the writing but with some interesting things to say.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2010/apr/23/who-can-save-the-romcom

More about what makes a good rom-com later…

Happy Writing!

Philip Shelley

script-consultant

Here’s a link to a paper by the very aptly named  American academic JAMES CUTTING which discusses the differences between our perception of film shots and scenes, and how we perceive things in reality.

http://wexler.free.fr/library/files/cutting%20%280%29%20perceiving%20scenes%20in%20film%20and%20in%20the%20world.pdf

Yes! More mathematical approaches to screenplay writing! I’m not sure how practicable this is – I think if you were to try and impose these arcane scientific \ mathematical ideas to writing your screenplay first draft that you may well just disappear up your own fundament. BUT this is rather interesting nonetheless. And makes you think about how screenplays work – about the cuts within scenes and between scenes – the grammar of film or what Prof Cutting refers to as the ‘contract with the audience’.

It’s written in slightly impenetrable academic language but it’s full of fascinating insights into how film fiction and screenplays operate. For instance, it starts:-

‘Watching a film is different than observing the real world. In particular, scenes in film are framed and set off from a larger context, they are divided up into shots that are composed from different points of view, separated by instantaneous cuts, and with the camera performing other feats impossible for the unaided eye, such as zooming in. Real life has none of this. How is it that we come to accept the wholeness and integrity of film with multiple shots and cuts?’

A very interesting question but is this entirely true? How about, for instance,  when we go to sleep at night then wake up in the morning? That could be viewed just like a cut between scenes couldn’t it?

Here are a few more thought-provoking quotes from Cuttings’ article:-

‘Episodic memory, a central concern of cognitive science, is essentially the memory of scenes from our life.’

‘Why are we able to make sense out of two shots with no transition? Acceptability seems predicated, in part, on the physical differences between shots. Cuts become acceptable only when the general patterns of light in the two shots are sufficiently different…’

‘Among other things, continuity means keeping track of what is in each shot and making sure that the world that is projected on the screen appears coherent. However, it appears that we, as perceivers, are not that particular about such coherence.’

…and this quote from John Huston –

‘All the things we have laboriously learned to do with film, were already part of the physiological and psychological experience of man before film was invented… Move your eyes, quickly, from an object on one side of the room to an object on the other side. In a film you would use a cut. … in moving your head from one side … to the other, you briefly closed your eye.’

The section entitled, ‘How Cuts, Shots, and Narrative Knit Together a Film for a Perceiver’, is particularly interesting.

If you haven’t got the time or energy to read the whole thing,  here’s an article about Cutting’s work in New Scientist, which sums it up a bit more succinctly (but less interestingly) :-

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20527483.900-solved-the-mathematics-of-the-hollywood-blockbuster.html

Philip Shelley

Script-consultant

March 2010

FILM CRITICS

Seeing the recent critical pasting received by the film The Boys Are Back made me think about how much we all rely on film critics to inform us about what films we should and shouldn’t see – and how badly served we often are!

This is what I said about the film in my blog about the London Film Festival on Nov 6th last year: ‘a beautiful bit of story-telling,’…’ the observation of character and particularly poignant and hilarious moments in the family’s life is so well done. And writer Allan Cubitt, without, in my opinion, ever resorting to cheap sentiment, manages to wring every last drop of narrative tension from this deceptively slight story. Familiar in terms of subject matter – the tragic death of a loved partner – this is intelligent, accessible film story-telling at its best.’

Compare that to what some of the UK national newspaper critics had to say about it when it came out a few weeks ago, ‘an insufferably cutesy film about single parenthood,’… ‘this excruciatingly artificial and prettified film,’… ‘Not one single thing, for one single moment, looks real or sincere’,… ‘A phoney, sugary tale without substance’.

But all the above quotes are taken from British reviews. Interestingly some of the international reviews have been very different.
This from ‘The Age’ (Australia) – ‘this beautifully etched, deeply moving drama’, ‘Nothing in this finely honed film feels forced or conveniently sentimental.’

And this from the Hollywood Reporter:
‘Few films have so poignantly portrayed a father’s relationships with his sons as “The Boys Are Back,” a film by Scott Hicks that reminds you he once directed the luminescent “Shine.” For the first time since that magical feature debut, Hicks has invested heart and soul in a film project.’
‘Never does anything feel forced or contrived. Life, as this memoir reminds, can offer plenty of drama that need not abide by fictional formulas or genre conventions.’

Which all goes to prove what? Well, that you take your pick but, for god’s sake, don’t take any critic’s word as gospel unless they have proved over many examples that their taste concurs pretty much exactly with yours – and even this is no guarantee that this will continue to be the case.

But for me there’s something else here – and it’s that in the UK I don’t think we’re very well-served by our national film critics. Philip French may have reached Observer-instigated National Treasure status but to me he’s the worst of the bunch. Almost everyone of his film reviews needs a spoiler alert – he ALWAYS gives the story away! Such a large proportion of each of his reviews are spent regurgitating the plot so, regardless of whether he tells you anything interesting about a film, he’s pretty much always going to take away some of the pleasure of watching a good film – he never lets you enjoy the unexpected unfolding of a story. This seems to me just rank incompetence. Surely, not giving the story away is the most basic requirement of any film review? And most of the rest of the review is him showing off with everything he knows about previously-made, similar films (which is admittedly sometimes quite entertaining).

Here’s an example. And – just to warn you – if you haven’t seen NOWHERE BOY and want to see it, DON’T READ THIS!
PF’s NOWHERE BOY review http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/dec/27/nowhere-boy review

The critical pasting received by The Boys Are Back reminded me how all those jaded critics watch films every day of their working lives; it’s not surprising, I suppose, that they’re a bit grumpy and mean-spirited.
A load of cynical 50+ middle class white guys sitting in a preview theatre at 10 o’clock on a Tuesday morning probably are pretty resistant to a film that works by connecting with your emotions as well as your intellect. Thinking about it like this, it makes you understand why heartfelt, committed emotional stories or comedies (pretty much any comedies) get short shrift from these jaundiced hacks – and makes you realise why more ‘esoteric’, ‘intellectual’ films like The White Ribbon get all the plaudits. Don’t get me wrong, I thought The White Ribbon was a really good film but it was intellectually rather than emotionally engaging. And I don’t think it deserved its incomparably better reviews than The Boys Are Back.

It reminds me too of the blanket critical response to The Wire. Now The Wire has many strengths but this whole cult of criticism seems to have grown up around it which I really react against, not least because, at times, I think The Wire is (deep breath) well a little bit….boring. You see, now you’re shocked – no-one dares say anything negative about The (mighty) Wire! In fact the whole cult of how wonderful US TV drama is compared to UK drama smacks to me of ‘the grass is always greener’. I’m sure if you just took the best of UK TV drama and filtered out all the stuff that hasn’t quite worked, it would look pretty damn good. And that’s what we get over here. We get all the stuff that’s already proved successful, not the stuff that has been canned after the pilot or the first season. In my book, the first series of Criminal Justice wasn’t just as good as most US TV drama, it was better. OK rant over…

Philip Shelley
Script-consultant, Feb 2010

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/dec/01/research-tv-drama-csi

Here’s a link to an interesting article from The Guardian. Some boffins try to apply a scientific \ mathematical approach to script analysis. Interesting how they quite successfully boil down the plot of a CSI episode to 30 keywords(!) and allow writers to identify sub-conscious themes in their work.

It also reminded me of how I started to think about ‘Waking The Dead’ stories in a similar way as mathematical equations that needed solving! So – you have your cold case story (from the past), which is one story-line that runs through the 2 x 1 hours.
But you also need a story-line in the present (so it’s not all just retrospective backstory) – classically, another series of murders committed by the killer from the past to evade discovery.
So you have two parallel storylines that ultimately connect; and into this mix you have to throw other elements, for example: –
flashbacks (an essential characteristic of the show), and how you ‘motivate’ these flashbacks;
the issue of making sure your WTD heroes drive the story, while also creating compelling guest characters;
giving each of the regular investigator characters an investigative story strand that uses their particular specialist expertise;
and providing your protagonist – Boyd – with an antagonist who’s a match for him, the default end sequence being a long interview sequence between protagonist and antagonist punctuated by revelatory flashbacks.
Not forgetting your big turning point \ twist at the end of Hour 1 to hook audiences for Hour 2 the following evening!

Thinking about all this, it would probably would have been a good idea to give writers a chart that looked like a scientific diagram to illustrate it!

Philip Shelley
www.script-consultant.co.uk
Jan 20th 2010

www.script-consultant.co.uk has just passed its first anniversary and I thought I’d briefly reflect on the first year.

Above all, it’s been a lot of fun. Generally speaking I’ve read a huge variety of scripts in both subject matter and style and I’ve been really inspired by the energy and ambition of so many screenwriters in the UK and around the world. While most of the scripts I’ve read have been from UK-based writers I’ve received projects from as far-flung places as Finland, Singapore, the US and Nigeria (more of which later).

The overall standard has been remarkably high. In some ways this is quite depressing – I’ve read a lot of scripts by writers who by rights should be getting paid work in the UK TV & film industry but haven’t cracked it yet – but also quite encouraging. And it has only confirmed for me one of my main reasons for setting up the site – to help these writers get a foot in the door by using my contacts on their behalf.

It’s a response to the fact that there are just so few ways into the industry for new screenwriting voices at the moment. The BBC Writers Academy stands out as a sole beacon of hope. Apart from this, there is the BBC Writers Room, the annual Red Planet prize, the Script Factory – all of which are excellent. But none of the broadcasters (with the obvious exception of the BBC) or major independent production companies have taken up the mantle of running a course to find and train the script-writers of the future, as Carlton used to do before it was swallowed whole by Granada. There really should be several of these courses running annually. Apart from anything else, as the BBC have discovered, they make economic sense. It’s one of my aims over the next year to initiate and run one of these courses alongside the work of the website.

Over the past few months I’ve put several writers in touch with script editors, producers(mainly at the BBC) and agents, and received a lot of very positive feedback and I’m sure sooner rather than later some of these link-ups will result in script commissions and further work.

The best example of the website working as it should has been the opportunity to match up one of the most promising writers I have met through the site, and a London-based Nigerian TV producer who is currently working on a new 26 x 1 hour drama series for Nigerian network TV. This is an ongoing project, but this producer now wants the writer to work on polishing rewriting this series prior to it going into production in the summer. This is a fantastic (and hopefully lucrative) opportunity for the writer, but has also allowed the producer to access new writing talent he would otherwise not have known about.

This is the sort of thing I hope the website can get more and more involved in over the next year.

Best wishes & Happy Writing!

Philip Shelley

A little while ago I went to a screenwriting talk in London. It was run by a US screenwriter, and it was about STRUCTURE. The screenwriter turned out to be more of a ‘guru’ than a writer. As it turned out (mentioning no names here) he was a bit of a poor man’s McKee.

He was big on graphs and charts of wheels where (apparently) you could fit any of the great screenplays into his ‘paradigm’ and ‘deep structure’.

Anyway there was lot of jargon (I mistrust jargon in any walk of life) – ‘anti-threat’ , ‘higher self \ lower self’ and a reduction of WW2 to a Hollywood feature film scenario, which made me a wince a bit.

For some reason all this dry theorising about screenwriting ‘formulas’ inspired me into my own version of ‘the script editor’s approach to screenwriting’ through the example of (why not?!) FOOTBALL.

Thinking STRUCTURE – a football match is a 2 part serial, 2 x 45’. It works the same way as drama in that the half time result is relatively unimportant, it’s the score at the end that counts. But as with drama, if you have a story where at the midway point, the away team is winning 2-0, then it’s all the more pleasing and entertaining if by the end that has been turned round into a 3-2 home victory ie a great hook at the ad-break for the 2^nd half surprise!

All the US ‘rules’ of screenwriting can be turned into football equivalents – ‘catalysts’, ‘inciting incidents’, ‘turning points’ can be substituted for sending-off’s, free kicks, penalties, injuries, refereeing mistakes and of course goals – any one of these can suddenly transform a match, and raise the stakes in one dramatic incident.

And like episodes in a long-running series, every league game has a context, whether it’s within a single season or a club’s whole history. In the same way as you can doubly appreciate a particular episode because of the previous episode and ‘hook’ that has preceded it, so a footy match can have a greater sense of drama because, for instance, the club will get relegated if they don’t win it (speaking as a Fulham fan rather than a Man U supporter this is something I know about!)

Personalities – protagonists (one’s particular favourite at a club), antagonists (Christiano Ronaldo, El HadjDiouf). It’s also about how sometimes the most unlikely supporting cast member suddenly becomes the main, centre stage, character.

Crisis – sending off, injury, goals against and ultimately relegation and bankruptcy – look at Leeds Utd if you want a real, full-blown tragedy! And stories can be told on different levels – it can be micro ( a single player’s moment of triumph or disaster) or macro (relegation, bankruptcy)

In football, the ending is sometimes predictable but redeemed by those few times when the gloriously unpredictable comes to pass. Above all, there are so many levels of possibility, so many possible outcomes in any single game, that it’s impossible to tell how the result will be achieved, even if the odds on one particular result are great.

Like the best drama, football at its best is about these levels of complexity. It’s about the dynamics of the action and conflict between personalities. In fact this is one of the joys of football – every match by definition is about conflict. And with every new match, the conflict takes on different and surprising turns. In the same way, all drama should be about conflict

As in good drama, ‘personalities’ develop and change over the course of a game or season (the striker who hasn’t scored for 10 games suddenly scores the winning goal; the unflappable player loses his cool and is sent off) – parallels with the virtues of what the best drama series do (with The Champions League or FA Cup as a posh drama serial, in comparison to the weekly ‘continuing drama \ soap’ of the league).

In the same way as the best screenwriting \ drama is a metaphor or representation of life, so is sport. Sport at its best is as much about story as narrative film.

And what is doubly exciting about it is that story is created, in real time, in front of you. It’s improvised drama within a rigidly worked out structure (a ‘half’ within a ‘game’ within a ‘competition’ within a ‘season’). And no-one knows how it’s going to develop, turn out.

So maybe the ultimate subversion – ‘the negation of the negation’ as Robert McKee would have it!… is match-fixing. Match-fixing destroys the meaning of sport as story.

OK I think I’ve taken this analogy about as far as I can…

Philip Shelley

script-consultant.co.uk

Thinking about the best screen drama I saw in 2008, The Shooting of Thomas Hurndall was somewhere at the top of the list. Soon after I’d seen this I watched the much-hyped Clint Eastwood film, Changeling, also based on a true story. For me there was a yawning chasm in quality between the two. TSOTH was subtle, moving, avoided the clichés of the genre, and contained a couple of fantastically written (and performed) characterisations – the separated parents of the dead boy, played by Kerry Fox and Stephen Dillane.

This was factual drama at its best. Whereas Changeling reminded me of script meetings I’ve had where writers producers script editors have defended a credulous story event on the grounds that IT ACTUALLY HAPPENED as if that’s a clincher in any argument about drama. If it doesn’t work dramatically in the context of the story you’re crafting, factual accuracy is not a good reason for including or rehashing a ‘real event’. It reminds me there’s always an important distinction to be made between factual reality and what works dramatically. Just because something actually happened it doesn’t necessarily make it dramatically credible (strangely). It’s the old ‘truth being stranger than fiction’ adage.

In Changeling (a film about a mother’s search for her missing son) the whole story is predicated on the Angelina Jolie character agreeing to police and press to pose for photos with a boy whom she knows is not her son instead of saying – of course I won’t do that, he’s not my son. Now I imagine this actually happened and that these photos exist in some archive, and that the writer did their research and discovered this fact; but the way this scenario was set up was simply not believable. And in dramatic terms, it fatally undermined the credibility of the Jolie character at a very early stage of the story. From this moment she never really regained my empathy. The goodies were whiter than white, the baddies impossibly black – the whole thing felt simplistic and exaggerated.

Whereas in TSOTH, a film of subtlety and intelligence but also of real passion, one of the key images was the recurring motif of the last moment when Thomas’s mother saw him alive, when he left home, walking out of the front door of their middle class home to travel to Israel, against his mother’s will. This was not one of the big, set-piece moments of the story but a quiet, private moment that spoke volumes about the mother son relationship and was heart-breakingly sad. And it was the small, personal moments of contact between characters – particularly between the estranged parents, tragically brought back together by the most unwished for event – their shared suffering over the death of their child – that lifted the script to another level, ie. moments that were, I’m sure, imagined and created by Simon Block, the writer, not the big, documented, factual, public events of the story.

All this was reinforced for me by a very interesting article by Anne Billson in the Guardian Film section (23-1-09)-

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/jan/23/milk-sean-penn-real-people-performances

…about the dramatisation of true stories, very much along the same lines – how a writer, actor or director’s artistic interpretation of real events is often much more interesting and dramatically telling than a faithful recounting.

Philip Shelley

script-consultant.co.uk

Feb 2009