He had a girlfriend by the name of Trink who was struggling as an actress. He broke his leg by, uhh, slipping down stairs. Jeff was a sportswriter who enjoyed playing amateur sleuth when he had the time. To brutally simply things, Logan provided a backbone to the film, although the details were kind of weak. A man was stuck in his single bedroom with an unscreened bay window and not unlike the film, watched the nameless “rear window dwellers” and suspected a salesman named Thorwald of murdering his invalid wife.įirst, the studio had a 13-page treatment written by playwright and director Joshua Logan. Rear Window started out as a short story by Cornell Woolrich published in Dime Detective in 1942. Steven DeRosa has a great chapter on Rear Window in his book, Writing with Hitchcock. When you see how a story began, read the choppy ideas in its infancy stages, and then study the decisions the filmmakers made about the story to make it truly great, that’s where you find your lessons. However, there’s much to be learned from studying the development of great films.
Because half the battle of screenwriting is avoiding mistakes, and believe me, there’s an infinite field of landmines ahead of you. You take those failures with you when you sit down to write. You always learn more from failure than success. Failure, on the other hand… failure holds universal truths. I also get kind of fearful about being too knowledgeable about films because I’m afraid I’ll borrow too liberally from the past when I should be creating something new we haven’t seen before. You have to use your imagination and create great moments in the context of your own story. You can't live off someone else's successes. Studying the strengths of great films always seemed to be a kind of elusive game to me because successful moments in one story does not necessarily equate into successful moments in a different story. What a sensational twist! Look at the way they handled exposition ! Subtext ! Visual storytelling ! Look! Truffaut was right! She wasn’t simply showing the wedding ring to Stewart simply because it was the crucial piece of evidence needed to indict Thorwald! She finally PROVED herself to him! That was her PROPOSAL! Wasn't that brilliant? Try it in your current script.One can always point to the obvious strengths of a great film. Making the exposition part of the unfolding dramatic structure is a very powerful way of imparting information to the viewer in a hidden way. We are hooked by the drama, and in the process we learn a host of facts which will be essential to understanding the story that will follow. Within this context it is totally logical that Stern and his colleagues should use the information they have to try to persuade the Jews of the enormous danger they are in and how they can escape.
To do this, Zaillian first creates a strong dramatic throughline: Stern and his colleagues want to save as many Jewish men, women and children as possible, but the Jews of the time were confused and uncertain as to what was going on. Stern hires Jews in order to save them from deportation to the death camps, and in the process we learn about the deportations and how to avoid them. It’s approximately 25 minutes from the start. There’s one brilliant sequence of Schindler’s List written by Stephen Zaillian which is full of exposition, but you’d never notice. So if you have exposition to hide, use drama. Great scripts are full of exposition, but in “covert” form – great writers are adept at hiding their exposition so that you get the information without noticing it.Īnyway, here’s the #1 exposition technique:ĭramatic action is the heart of all good scripts. In fact that is what is technically known as bad exposition! I call it “overt” exposition. “No, really, would that help us escape deportation and also buy eggs that we can’t get inside?” “Did you know you can get jobs that help you get out of the ghetto?” Many writers think exposition means clunky dialogue-ridden scenes where the characters tell you important but heavy-handed information such as: This one really sorts the professionals from the wannabes and I’m going to share one of my top exposition techniques with you here. I teach the writers I help, and one of the most crucial is how to handle exposition. I’ve been working on some of the advanced techniques
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