Screenplay

Chapter One


What Is a Screenplay?

Suppose you re in your office. . . . A pretty stenographer you ve seen before comes into the room and you watch her. . . . She takes off her gloves, opens her purse and dumps it out on the table. . . . She has two dimes and a nickel and a cardboard match box. She leaves the nickel on the desk, puts the two dimes back into her purse and takes her black gloves to the stove. . . . Just then your telephone rings. The girl picks it up, says hello listens and says deliberately into the phone, I ve never owned a pair of black gloves in my life. She hangs up . . . and you glance around very suddenly and see another man in the office, watching every move the girl makes. . . .

Go on, said Boxley smiling. What happens?

I don t know, said Stahr. I was just making pictures.

The Last Tycoon

F. Scott Fitzgerald

In the summer of 1937, F. Scott Fitzgerald, drinking far too much, deeply in debt, and drowning in the suffocating well of despair, moved to Hollywood seeking new beginnings, hoping to reinvent himself by writing for the movies. The author of The Great Gatsby, Tender Is the Night, This Side of Paradise, and the uncompleted The Last Tycoon, perhaps America s greatest novelist, was, as one friend put it, seeking redemption.

During the two and a half years he spent in Hollywood, he took the craft of screenwriting very seriously, says one noted Fitzgerald authority: It s heartbreaking to see how much effort he put into it. Fitzgerald approached every screenplay as if it were a novel and often wrote long backstories for each of the main characters before putting one word of dialogue down on paper.

Despite all the preparation he put into each assignment, he was obsessed with finding the answer to a question that haunted him continuously: What makes a good screenplay? Billy Wilder once compared Fitzgerald to a great sculptor who is hired to do a plumbing job. He did not know how to connect the pipes so the

Acclaimed as “the guru of all screenwriters” (CNN), Syd Field (1935-2013) is still regarded by many Hollywood professionals to be the leading authority in the art and craft of screenwriting. The Hollywood Reporter called him “the most sought-after screenwriting teacher in the world.” Field’s internationally acclaimed best-selling books Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting, The Screenwriter's Workbook, and The Screenwriter’s Problem Solver have established themselves as the “bibles” of the film industry. Screenplay and The Screenwriter’s Workbook are in their fortieth printing and are used in colleges and universities across the country. They have been translated and published in more than twenty-five languages.

Screenplay is one of the bibles of the film trade and has launched many a would-be screenwriter on the road to Hollywood. Library Journal

Syd Field is the preeminent analyzer in the study of American screenplays. James L. Brooks, AcademyAward winning writer, director, producer