Chapter 7 From Page to Screen 259the audience must believe in the story and the dilemmas and desires of the
characters. When this does not occur, viewers and critics oft en complain of
a lack of credibility in the characters or their world. As you have seen many
times, that world is created through the use of the language of cinema and the
depiction of a reality that sticks together on the screen in terms of style, tone,
and meaning. Our experiences of seeing and hearing that world need to make
some logical and instinctual sense to us, thematically and artistically. Oft en,
the screenwriter is the person who sets the fi rst foundations for that world.Constructing the Story
Writers of many of the most celebrated motion picture scripts talk in terms
of building a structure for a motion picture. Charles Bennett, the writer of
numerous classics from 1929 to the 1960s, including Hitchcock’s Th e Th irty-
Nine Steps and Th e Man Who Knew Too Much, described his primary talent
as a constructionist. He refers to the architecture of the story as how elements
work together to build a chain of events that makes sense to us as a story. Th is
architecture was defi ned in Chapter 3 as the structure of the story. However,
it is hard to develop a structure before we know what we are building or what
we are using to build it!
Premise is the central concept or dramatic situation of the fi lm. Oft en, a
writer can successfully describe in one sentence the premise of a story. Here
are some examples:
Upon hearing the news that he is terminally ill, a therapist who is
leading an empty life disconnected from all the people surrounding
him is motivated to interact with them in a genuine way.
(Our Time is Up, written and directed by Rob Pearlstein)
A woman riding on a tramway in Germany is disturbed by the
presence of a black man sitting next to her and shares her racist
views with the people in the car, prompting an inventive, non-
violent revenge from the silent target of her verbal attacks.
(Th e Black Rider, written and directed by Pepe Danquart)Figure 7-9 Efren Ramirez
and Jon Heder in Napoleon
Dynamite, directed by Jared
Hess. (Fox Searchlight/Photofest)Copyright 2010 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).