Economy
Posted By Iain Coleman on January 28, 2010
I’m polishing up a short script. A very short script. It’s for the Scottish Book Trust’s Screen Lab 2010, and they want something no more than three minutes long.
Three minutes! That’s just three pages to tell your whole story. So every word counts. That’s true of all screenwriting of course, but here it’s especially pronounced - as is the sheer joy of realising that you can cut two whole lines of dialogue.
So I wrote a pretty solid story in an hour or so, and now I’m just trying to hone those precious words. The bit I’m working on most is the first page - actually the second half of the first page - where I have about ten lines to sketch in the two characters and their relationships to each other.
Russell T Davies is the master of this, of course. Here’s an example I read the other day, from his Doctor Who story “Midnight”:
Mrs Cane’s calling across to Jethro, who’s sitting apart, on his own towards the back, left-hand-side.
VAL CANE
Now don’t be silly, come and sit with us. Look! We get slippers!
BIFF CANE
Jethro! Do what your mother says.
JETHRO
I’m sitting here.
BIFF CANE
Oh, he’s ashamed of us. But he doesn’t mind us paying, does he?
VAL CANE
Don’t start, you two. Should I save the juicepack or have it now? Look, it’s peach and clementine!
In just five lines we understand this family: not just their relationships with one another, but their social class, aspirations and attitudes to the world. And Davies makes it look so easy.
But of course it’s a hell of a hard thing to get right. Encoding so much meaning into so few words takes great dramatic skill. It’s something that’s a lot easier to analyse - and, hopefully, to learn - by reading scripts than by watching performances. Davies has made a lot of his Who scripts available online for free, and if you haven’t read them yet, go and download them now. I can’t recommend them too highly.
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