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

On July 2nd  I spent a day at the Cheltenham Screenwriters Festival, publicising the website and being on the panel for a session on ‘Showrunning’ and how this US trend is beginning to catch on in UK TV drama. The Festival was held in and around a beautiful country house near Cheltenham and it provides a great and rare opportunity for the screenwriting community in the UK to get together for three days and compare notes. It’s set up so that there’s ample opportunity for all the delegates (of whom there must have been a few hundred) to socialise (I resist using the term ‘networking’) and share experiences.

It’s an invaluable chance to meet people sharing similar experiences as well as catching up with old mates. For me it was a great chance to meet up with a lot of familiar faces and to put faces to writers with whom I’ve been working on scripts from the website. It brought home to me the added value of face-to-face meetings.

Added to all that was the attraction of some really interesting – no, more than that – inspiring, guest speakers. On the 2nd day, when I was there, there was a really entertaining talk by Julian Fellowes about the difficulties for a writer of receiving and addressing script notes – which was a salutary lesson to both writers and those on the other side like me(script editors, producers, directors etc.) as well as being very funny. There was also a pitching competition in which 10 admirably brave writers put themselves on the line and pitched to a panel of 4 industry judges and an assembled audience of several hundred. The standard of both delivery and content was really high and any one of 7 or 8 could have won.
Amongst the sessions I had to miss on the day were talks by Christopher Hampton, which again was apparently very inspiring, Barbara Machin (creator of  Waking The Dead), Laura Mackie (Head of ITV Drama) and several others. On the other two days the speakers included Mike Leigh, Jane Tranter, Ronald Harwood, Stephen Woolley, Tony Jordan, Kay Mellor and many others.

If you missed it, I can thoroughly recommend this event to any screenwriters for next year.

Double Inspiration? Oh yes I spent two nights last week glued to my computer on BBC i-player watching the absolutely outstanding drama Criminal Justice. 5 hours of drama – and completely gripping from start to finish. To any aspiring TV drama screenwriters out there – this really is the standard to aspire to. Compelling story-telling, engaging, complex, flawed characters; and a piece that had something important to say about the criminal justice system in the UK. I can’t recommend it highly enough. I knew Peter Moffat was a good writer but I didn’t realise he was this good. It reminded me of just how good TV drama made in the UK can be. We spend so much time lauding the plethora of excellent shows from the US – but this was up there with the best of them, and better than most. I recommend to anyone interested in screenwriting who missed it, to seek it out – honestly it can’t fail to inspire and energise your own writing ambitions seeing something this accomplished.

Regards

Philip Shelley

script-consultant.co.uk

The Script Consultant’s Role

As a writer one feels a huge sense of satisfaction getting to the end of that first draft having wrestled and struggled with it for weeks \ months \ years. But this is only the start. So much of screen-writing is in the rewriting and in maintaining that creative impulse, energy and enthusiasm through each subsequent draft.

This is what I have always aimed to achieve with the writers I work with as script editor and producer, and how I work as script consultant. Each draft that the writer does should be undertaken with the same level of excitement and positivity as the first draft.

Writers in my experience benefit greatly from having someone to bounce ideas off, an objective eye, someone who has not been part of the daily grind of the creative process, who has some perspective on the script and can offer script advice and guidance dispassionately and objectively, helping the writer to unlock problematic parts of the script.

As a writer it’s so easy to lose the wood for the trees, and this is where a script consultant can help. Having said that, there’s never a definitive right answer to how to write a screenplay. And you should distrust anyone who tells you there is. Part of the joy and the frustration of the process is that no two people will feel the same way about the same script. But you the writer should feel as sure as possible when you finally submit that script to a potential buyer that you’ve done the best job you think you can. Good luck!
Regards,

Philip Shelley
Script-Consultant.co.uk

Welcome to my website! As a screenwriter whether brand new or of some experience, I hope I can give you the help and support you need to fulfil your vision as a writer, to realise fully the screenplay in your head, and then, to help you sell your script in the tough marketplace.

This has been a project I’ve been thinking about starting for some time. I’ve worked on many shows and for many different companies and have a number of exciting projects in development.

But probably the work I’ve most enjoyed was running the Carlton new screen-writers course – finding and meeting writers who’d never written for film or TV before, working with them over 6 months on a one hour pilot TV script – and then seeing where this lead them. I’m still in touch with many of the writers from these courses, and it’s been great to see how well so many of them have done since and to feel we played some part in getting them started on a new and fulfilling career.

To all of you out there, it would be great if I could now do the same for you. As someone who’s worked with screen-writers for many years, I know how often the odds are stacked against you, and I hope I can be part of battling those odds with you!

Regards,

Philip Shelley
Script-Consultant.co.uk