Awhile back, I was looking for the script of the Ingmar Bergman movie “Fanny and Alexander” in order to find some quotes for updating the relevant article on tvtropes.org. After some googling, I found a link to an archived copy of a published edition of the screenplay. On reviewing it, I found that large chunks of it were not actual portions of the script but that the screenplay was written as a combination of three different kinds of text:
-Past-tense narration, including the provision of a backstory for the characters that does not directly occur in the film
-Present-tense descriptions of some scenes, which do not all occur in the film (at least not in the cuts I’ve seen, and I think I’ve seen both the theatrical and the television one)
-Some parts of the actual script
Is this normal? Do screenplays do this sort of thing or are they normally co-equal with a full script? Would the edition I found have been what Bergman originally used with the actors or would it have been a modified version of the screenplay adapted for the retail book trade? Did what I described above perhaps reflect parts of the screenplay that were not initially scripted but were improvised on the spot, or that did not make the final script/director’s cut?
I just talked to my younger son, who is a screenwriting major. He said that it’s more likely to be the same if the film is written and directed by the same person. Also, the amount of time lapsed between the screenplay is written and the film is made can figure into it.
A peripheral question - I recall someone discussing scripts (for Hollywood or TV) and mentioned that generally, the studio dislikes the scriptwriter including detailed stage direction unless it’s relevant to the story. Composition, framing, how the characters are situated or moving, even sometimes the settings or reactions, is usually a call the director makes - true?
Based on what I’ve learned at the screenwriting club at LIFT, the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto, I think this is largely true. We would say, “Let the actors and the director do their jobs”.
It’s strangely similar to writing a script for a graphic novel, which I am doing. So much is ‘carried’ by the artwork: drawings in the case of the novel, moving pictures in the case of the film.
I’ve heard this described as a ‘scriptment’, a cross between the actual script and a ‘treatment’, which gives backstory and other info and may not directly correspond to what is actually shot. I have a copy of the scriptment for ‘Avatar’, which starts out with pages of exposition and backstory that sets up the world of the story. In the actual movie, this is expressed in the contents of the establishing shots: the design of the world portrayed and the characters in it, the way they move, etc.
In Adventures in the Screen Trade William Goldman calls this kind of stuff hype. At the end of the book he turns one of his own short stories in to a script and has various film professional critique it.
Director George Roy Hill says:
This script as written has things in it that set a director’s teeth on edge. Look at your opening page-“Pull back to reveal a schoolyard on an agonizingly beautiful spring day.” Well, the studio executive reads that and he says, “Oh, an agonizingly beautiful spring day, that’s great.” The director says, “When have I ever agonized over a spring day?” Then he says to his cameraman, "Get me an agonizingly beautiful spring day."It’s all hype-you write it, the executive reads it, and after I’ve shot it, everybody looks at it and says, “Wait a minute, that isn’t agonizingly beautiful, why isn’t it?” It’s the director’s fault.
Goldman comments:
He does hate what he calls hyping the script-a lot of directors do. John Schlesinger didn’t tike the hype I stuck into Marathon Man-but he took the job. Hill was driven almost mad by some of the hype in Batch Cassidy. I remember him being furious about the way I wrote the entrance of the Superposse-where I had half a page about the camera zooming like a racing car toward this stopped train. But again, he took the job.
The podcast “Scriptnotes” has a rule of thumb: Great screenplays can break all of the (so-called) “rules” of formatting, and following all of the “rules” of formatting will not improve a bad screenplay.