Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting - A Step-by-Step Guide from Concept to Finished Script

Every character has a dramatic need, something that drives them forward into action. As someone raised in the Hollwood foothills, I've long wondered how you can make a multi-million dollar movie and forget to have a story (Rise of Skywalker cough cough). Screenplays are the least expensive part of a film, probably below the craft services table, so why are they so frequently incoherent and mediocre?

Well, I'm still not sure, and having read Syd Field's classic guide, Hollywood has even less of an excuse. A screenplay is an odd beast of a genre, a written description of moving images. They're short, 120 pages with a lot of white space, which puts then in the novella range, and have a distinct format of scene descriptions, character show more dialog, and action. Field mentions that successful screenplays 'look right', with a nice balance, but his concern is with form and structure.

Field prototype, his favorite movie, is Chinatown. And while he's no fan of formulaic movies, for him a movie needs form. Much like a coat has two sleeves, a collar, and a front a back, a screenplay has certain requirements. A screenplay is built of scenes arranged into sequences. There's a main character, who is thrust into conflict at Plot Point I, and then resolves the conflict at Plot Point II. The best parts of the book concern the writing and research process, working up a full biography of your characters, figuring out the context and content of the incidents that illuminate who they are (and incidentally make up the pages of your screenplay), and then the harsh work of removing all the cruft to leave a tight, lean story that grabs the reader from page one. The technique of using 52 3x5 notecards for scenes, and then laying them out, has some inspired parallels with some futurist work I've done.

Field's tone is a friendly elder letting you in on the secrets of the guild. He wants you to succeed, and he has few illusions about your low odds in Hollywood. But with this book, you're at least forewarned. It's a lot better and more professional than The Writer's Journey, which I read ages ago.

Here's looking at you, kid. show less

Unless you're already a naturally-gifted screenwriter you can't do much better than start with Syd Field's book Screenplay. And would go further and say that even if you're already talented, being familiar with Syd Field's contribution is still fundamental to understanding the art and form of the craft.

Screenplay will take the aspiring writer from conception to final draft, and wherever possible an explanation of "why this works" is given. The criticism that his approach is inorganic and formulaic is valid, but why not use it as another tool in the toolbox as opposed to an all-or-nothing way of writing movies?

The all-hailed last word in screenwriting books. Syd Field wrote this book as a model for building screenplays that follow a very specific narrative structure. You could call it a formula, but it is more based on how you pace and build the story structure than a set of cookie-cutter blueprints. Field uses the (awesome) movie Chinatown as the "ideal" example, and then uses a mockup story that is quite different as an in-process example. It also gives movie examples for variations.
Obviously, there have been excellent screenplays that don't follow this model. But this is definitely a good place to start.

Very well done, but even knowing what you need to do doesn't help if you can't make yourself do it! This is one of the better books on the subject I have read, however.

Very helpful book about the three-act structure model. Field’s focus is on screenplays, but his paradigm applies just as well to novels. He includes lots of detailed examples thoughout, using well-known movies, to illustrate the points he is making. I borrowed this from the library but may end up buying myself a copy for future reference—especially since I am looking forward to thinking about how three-act structure might apply my own novel-in-progress and maybe help me get a better handle on the shape of the overall story.

The book was a good source of material. It had a lot of good information for those starting out with screenwriting. Though the book was a little hard to read at times mostly because of the blocks of text to read. It took me two weeks to read. The book had a lot of examples from current and past films. I don't think a student would read this on their own, but there is a lot of good tid bits of information that I pulled from it to teach students on the basics of storytelling inside the film universe.

I've attended his class and he's good, but not on the same level as McKee. It's a classic book on screenplays, but there are now better books.