Beyond Words

Shhh: the use of silence in

By Lisa Rosenberg

Even in the Bay Area, the quiet weeks of January remind us of the gifts of winter: a stillness, pause, and time of secret, subterranean growth. Similarly, silence and stillness can amplify the hidden dramatic qualities of your story on film. You can use them to capture your audience and draw them closer, anticipating something yet unseen. They can solicit a deeper focus on a character’s internal state. Silence can also establish a quality of place or an emotional tone.

topics: actors, authors, bay area, screenwriting

Beyond Words

Carmen Madden on watching people, writing characters

By Lisa Rosenberg

Writer-director Carmen Madden, whose highly accomplished first feature, Everyday Black Man, won the Best Feature Film award at the Peachtree Village International Film Festival in Atlanta in September, and is now on the festival circuit, calls screenwriters “the first builders of the set” —of that unique world of their story. Her screenplays reflect just how intimately she comes to see and know that world and the characters that inhabit it.

topics: authors, bay area, screenwriting

Beyond Words

Comedy that sticks

By Lisa Rosenberg

Another summer, another cavalcade of summer comedies to grab us up, spin us around, rush the world backward and leave us tottering at the end of the ride. The best of these will graze the source of great comedy, leaving a lasting glow. But most will, by August, have slid from consciousness like so many candy wrappers trampled underfoot. So: What’s the key to comedy that sticks with us, despite perhaps an overblown story line or how lost and low-down the characters seem at the time?

topics: actors, authors, bay area, comedy, screenwriting, sex

Beyond Words

Character, stripped to the bone

By Lisa Rosenberg

For the writer, traditional, instantly recognizable heroes, such as the everyman in Wall-E or the underdog in Slumdog Millionaire, are both easier to create and predictably satisfying for both creator and audience. We see the mountain dead ahead for these characters. The obstacles—and summoned courage and wit to overcome them—line up like so many hurdles on a track.

topics: authors, bay area, diy, screenwriting

Beyond Words

The alchemy of adaptation

By Lisa Rosenberg

Common wisdom tells us that the book is always better than the film. A movie based on a true story can never give us all of the layered complexity of real life.

But the object of adaptation is never just a faithful retelling. It’s instead a selective re-imagining of the tale, which brings into sharp focus essential truths about the characters and their world. It chooses not every chapter or speech, but just those elements that can distill the story’s special power and importance.

topics: authors, awards, bay area, drama, dramatic films, how-to

Beyond Words

Case studies in screenwriting: Pam Gray

By Lisa Rosenberg

Sebastopol-based screenwriter Pamela Gray’s approach to screenwriting is the literary equivalent of the slow food movement: she takes the time she needs to find her story, nurture it along, coax her characters into life, and find deep truths that don’t emerge through a formulaic approach.

Best known for A Walk on the Moon, a ’60s era drama, and Music of the Heart, the inspiring tale of a violin instructor in East Harlem, Gray writes real stories about ordinary people who experience transformative moments in their lives. Her upcoming film, Betty Anne Waters, based on the true story of a high school dropout and single mother who put herself through law school to defend her imprisoned brother who she believed was innocent, will begin shooting in January.
Over time, Gray has developed a potent mix of creative habits that guide her raw ideas to rise and take shape as finished screenplays. Her writing process has much to tell us about how to grow a story, how to access character subtleties, the importance of staying tuned to the power of the visual, and when to step in to impose necessary structural elements.

topics: bay area, features, hollywood, independent film, screenwriting

Beyond Words

The dimensions of dialogue

By Lisa Rosenberg

To the novice screenwriter, dialogue is a maddening conundrum. It has to be spare but expressive, sound natural, fit the characters and allow for insights and revelations. The most skillful dialogue on film also achieves a structural dimension. It can shape the narrative just as surely as the plot does.

Dialogue can take any number of forms. It can become a map of the lead character’s emotional journey, a smokescreen for the plot to proceed behind or a storm cloud of oncoming disaster.

topics: bay area, filmmakers, how-to, screenwriting