Unlike a lot of people, especially in my generation, I have a pretty good idea of what I want to do in life. My ambition is to write scripts for movies. Good scripts. I took a joint honours in creative writing and film studies with the ultimate scheme of becoming the architect of what comes out of actor’s mouths. Dialogue, from my point of view, is an art form that requires a perfect balance of naturalism and poetry. When it’s good it turns a movie into a cult classic, it makes you sit back and wish you had the brains and the wit to talk like that all the time. “I’m a mushroom cloud laying motherfucker motherfucker!”
It can sometimes feel like not everyone shares my view of the art of scripting. I’ve heard scripts being described as ‘blueprints’ more than once. Blueprints, I understand, take incredible skill to produce if you’re building a house. In the context of cinema it seems to be a way of reducing the importance of the script.
On an episode of Futurama in which Zoidberg produces a movie for his ageing has-been film star uncle the gang attend an Oscars ceremony. When asked how far along it is Bender replies “they’re on to the minor technical awards. They’re just about to do writing”.The depressing thing is a writer came up with this joke. More disheartening is when I left the cinema after watching Dracula Untold (Draculeficent) with my flatmates. They all decided it was good. I decided it was good with a few asterisks, most notably the slightly cheesy, by-the-numbers dialogue. My flatmate said she never really noticed “things like that” and asked me as a film student do I pick up on the finer details. This was a bummer, given that these finer details were my strongest passion in life.
As a film fan I always considered the script to be the most important aspect of a movie. The acting cam close second, the editing, locations, directing and cinematography were like side dishes that if they impressed could take a film from mundane to exemplary in my estimations. The scripts is what matters though. No script, no movie. Bad script, watching the movie occasionally sucking air through your teeth and shouting CLANG! Is it only confirmed movie fans who notice these things? The general cinema going populace being underestimated is what often leads to bad moviemaking. As long as it makes money who cares if people were gigglesnorting during what was supposed to be the romantic climax!
As a former drama student I know what a bad script did. A bad script meant your acting was bad. Your direction was bad. No one knew how to say a certain godawful line to make it sound good. Meryl Streep would act like Danny Dyer given a bad script. They still happen though. All the gratuitous nudity and CGI dragons can’t save a clanger of a line. It the least expensive way to ensure a good outcome. I shouldn’t complain however, every cheesy exchange I see on screen only assures me I have at least enough talent to get into the biz so often called ‘show’. I could even get a job making half baked scripts a lot better.On the other hand the image of the bitter, grizzled writer who faces constant rejection and belittlement is all too common, hence the Futurama joke. And me when my article for online student media thingy The Tab got rejected. That’s water under the bridge though. They’ll see one day!
So where’s all this heading? I recently began lectures in my Writing For The Screen module. Going from writing for fun in school to writing for grades at uni is always a change. You go from a cheering section of enthusiastic English teachers who are just so glad you turned up for extracurricular poetry that they’re delighted in whatever crap you spin to a published professor who’s read every trope of inexperienced writing in the book and will give you praise only if he really digs it. So I sat facing a man who has worked in Hollywood asking in a patronising, world weary tone if we wanted to write ‘sparkling’ dialogue? I found myself weekly nodding. He told us to cut down our floral language, get out of the directors business, ‘kill our darlings’. So there miss dreamalot, write some half decent dialogue and don’t expect to get a Chanel dress for the premiere and have Ryan Gosling’s arm around your waist and Kevin Spacey pointing at you like “this girl’s a genius!”. Then he gave us a script to annotate. The very brilliant In Bruges by Martin Mcdonagh. It was, in a word, sparkling. It was witty, original and hinted at profundity which I can tell you does appear in that movie. It’s a gem. So the Hollywood dismissal of the writer is avoidable. You can write a glittering script that stays with the viewer,whoever they are. You just have to get good at it.
ciararuane 