One of the most difficult things about this epidemic is the reality of finding something to read. If you’re like me, you like the feel of a nice paperback, the smell of print fuming under your nose as you read the text. It’s your one solace from the internet, where you can curl up in a corner and spend a night getting lost in a different world. If you’re like me, you have endless resources to choose from. I personally can’t go to the bookstore chain Book-Off and walk out with three or four books. After all, who doesn’t love being able to pick up some of the literature’s biggest hits for just a buck? I probably have enough books to get me through tough times. That is, of course, unless we all end up like Burgess Meredith in The Twilight Zone (you know the one).
Of course, the internet is a reliable resource when books become too much. Certain libraries have opened up their database to the public. Other websites have endless resources of entertaining writing on just about any subject (such as this one). To me personally, there is something fruitful about going through Bright Wall/Dark Room’s archives to find some of the highest quality independent film criticism out there. Want a starting point? Why not read Travis Wood’s recent essays on either Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (2019) or Uncut Gems (2019)?
Then there’s another option that comes along less frequently, but shouldn’t be taken for granted. Every now and then a celebrity will be generous and offer their resources for personal entertainment. While coming up with a subject for this week’s entry, I came across the news that Spike Lee was going to be making public an unpublished screenplay that he wrote about the life of Dodgers baseball player Jackie Robinson (titled simple “Jackie Robinson”). He posted it on his Instagram, so all you need to do is follow the link to his Dropbox and read or download for yourself. It’s a fairly hefty read, running 159 pages long, and it’s a good way to pass a few hours.
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| Spike Lee (right) and Jackie Robinson |
It helps that Lee is an accomplished writer, having made some of the most provocative cinema of the past 40 years while exploring the African American experience. You may remember him best as the director of Do the Right Thing (1989) or his Oscar-winning BlacKkKlansman (2018), and his breakneck approach to characters is sure to take a peek into his mind all the more insightful and entertaining.
While reading “Jackie Robinson,” I came to a familiar revelation. As much as I love movies, I like tearing them apart. I’m not talking about endless nitpicking where you look for plot holes that frankly don’t matter. What I’m talking about is taking the different elements of a film in order to understand what they bring to the film.
For instance, one of my favorite things to do is to listen to the film score ahead of time. With whatever limited knowledge that I have, I will listen and try to envision the film in my head. I want to predict how the use of strings building and deescalating informs the action. I have no basis yet, so my mind runs wild. It’s a creative exercise that all writers should take, whether through film scores or (if you’re more comfortable) classical music. Take something that isn’t inherently visual and try to tell a story with it. What do you see when you hear a flute breaking through violins? Now, write that story.
Similarly, I am obsessed with the idea of reading a script ahead of a movie, though the options are less available. You can’t just bump over to YouTube and listen to a script in an hour. That’s the beauty of music: it’s a condensed portion of the film. A script is a dense understanding of the story on a level that requires sometimes a hundred pages to convey. It’s about being able to read an exchange of dialogue and understand whether it’s one of joy or anger, and even then how joyful or angry the character actually is.
While I cannot promise that the latest releases will have their scripts online, there is something rewarding about keeping an eye out for scripts during the Fall season. If you follow websites like Film School Rejects, you’ll find them posting links to legally read and download films that have submitted screenplays for awards consideration. If you want to read the screenplay for the best of 2019, why not consider The Farewell, Hustlers, The Irishman, Little Women, The Last Black Man in San Francisco, The Lighthouse, Pain and Glory, Parasite, or Us. Better yet, why not check out my personal favorite film of the year Marriage Story. The options are out there and I assure you that there are even more wonderful surprises the further back that you go.
But why read screenplays? After all, I am not by nature a screenwriter. I will fully confess that while I like to branch out and try the different fields of writing, I haven’t mastered a screenplay. I probably haven’t given it a serious effort since I was a teenager and had a friend named Fleck who did his best to guide me through the writing process. I did really stupid things like having directions like “the camera cuts to…” Not only that, but I never wrote a great story worthy of the format. Maybe nowadays I can do better, but I am uncomfortable with the form still. I love reading other people’s work. I think I love film more because it’s the one area that I find impenetrable. I can write the treatment but who knows if I could do any better.
This is because the way I write isn’t by nature visual. There is a lot that can be conveyed by putting a camera in a corner and shooting, sure, but there is a specific style to screenplays that don’t seem obvious until you try it. With a book, you can spend pages pondering one thought and nobody would question your choices. Meanwhile, showing a man standing still as a voice-over plays is less exciting. I am an insular writer and my big issue is that I compensate by making the internal dialogue more apparent in action, possibly to the point of outright saying what could be seen.
To me, screenplays are a different form of writing a novel. I don’t consider them equal in execution, but at their core, you’re setting out to present your ideas to a reader. The big difference is that books will predominantly be in print form, where you can get away with flourishes. Screenplays aren’t going to be projected on a screen and read by a theater. It’s the guidelines for the next stage of production, and thus getting too precious about internal monologues is a giant waste of time. Unless you’re totalitarian about how you want actors to see the characters, you may as well just write “He shrugged” and get to the point.
This isn’t to say that there aren’t ways to make screenplays entertaining reads. There is a famous story about how the action-heavy directions of Shane Black’s Lethal Weapon (1987) got him a strong payday. Others like Quentin Tarantino are so steeped in film that to read screenplays for his films like Inglourious Basterds (2009) is to find him adding style while putting in notes that allude to his cinematic reference points. You get a sense of personality in a good screenplay and they are capable of standing on their own.
To me, reading a screenplay has two benefits. The most apparent is trying to imagine the film in your head. When it’s finished, you have no choice but to imagine what’s presented to you. On the page, anything is possible. Why you could cast Daniel Day-Lewis as the kid in We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011) if you wanted. It doesn’t make sense, but you’re capable of creating the story in your own image.
I think it’s the one benefit of “Jackie Robinson,” especially since it seems like Lee is not likely to make it. You get to cast whomever you want in the lead. Not only that, but you get to imagine a world that couldn’t possibly be perfect. Things like Dodger Stadium have no way of looking like it did in the 1940s, but in your mind, you can do everything to convey it. Lee’s screenplay may at times play like a conventional sports biopic, but there’s clearly love thrown into the expansive cast of Negro League players, where these small character moments feel informative of Lee’s personal vernacular. Not only that, but his ability to describe a scene that could play out for two or three minutes in a montage is described in baseball terminology that runs one sentence. It’s a confidence of vision, and it understands the tone of the project well. Even the choice to make the one character who talks differently be a racist cop shows Lee’s deeper intents in the story. Simple word choice can inform the confidence or arrogance of any one character.
I don’t wish to deconstruct “Jackie Robinson” as a whole. If you want an entertaining look into a project that could’ve been, this is a primary example. It also will explain everything I am talking about here. A screenplay is like the foundation of a house, and it’s just as important to understand how it props itself up as it could influence everyone else’s.
To me, a novel is very fluid media. It can be as big or small as you want. If you want to emphasize the internal dread of a character, you can create a paragraph of thoughts strung together by word association. If you want to trivialize significance, you can simply write a word. One of the biggest things that I’ve taken from screenplays is breaking up the dialogue so that it allows the reader to notice the pause and shifts in tone within a monologue. It’s something that I learned from directions in a screenplay, and I like to think that placing a “he said” in the middle of a passage serves as its own form of punctuation, like a well-placed pause (or “beat”) in a screenplay. The only difference is that I’m limited by the structure and write it in paragraph form.
If I had to suggest one screenplay that I personally find revolutionary from 2019, it’s Greta Gerwig’s Little Women. It consists of two competing timelines and features a lot of overlapping dialogue. The question you need to ask yourself is: how do I convey that? The answer is a bit inspired.
The timelines are separated simply by font color. I don’t think that I’ve seen many examples of this, and it makes the execution easier to understand. The “past” is found in a red color, which helps when both worlds intersect in quick succession. When it gets to the moment where both line up, Gerwig makes the cryptic comment that maybe the past is present, or possibly something else. It leaves you to wonder if there are any imaginary tools at play. Considering that the film is playing with the idea of narrative agency, it’s a clever play on what we’ve come to expect. The other tool, which I’ve mostly found in the theater, is overlapping dialogue. While the final film reveals how it’s used, it’s overwhelming to think about how it works when reading on the page. Is it fast, slow, or where does one character enter and exit? If you want to read a fun screenplay, Little Women is a phenomenal use of your time, especially if you do so before seeing the film.
As you can guess, there’s a lot more to get out of screenplays. I am by no means an expert on the form, but I do know the value of making one as entertaining as possible while keeping it concise. You want to get to the point and present a story in such a way that you can see it playing out. Maybe one day I will try again to make a satisfying screenplay, but for now, I look at works like “Jackie Robinson” and see the masters doing excellent work at making me see a film with nothing more than a page. There is something to learn from them, both in what they say and how they say it. Even if you’re a novel writer, I think we should take away lessons about bettering our own style, or at least make them a lot more engaging for the audience.
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