Hello, Mark. I expressed similar concerns about the views of our 'friend'
Syd Field in the introduction to my book, _The Cinema of Isolation_. (I
had been working from a 1982 edition of his screenwriting book, but his
thinking didn't exactly 'evolve' during the 12-year period that followed.
In fact, the wording in this section of the two editions is almost
identical.) What's more than a little scary is the fact that this guy is
held in such high esteem -- he is by far the best-known of the
screenwriting 'how-to' authors and presumably one of the most influential.
--Marty Norden
On Fri, 11 Sep 1998, Mark Priestley wrote:
> Disability studies has provided many cultural critiques of the movie
> genre. However, I thought you might be interested in a little extract
> from the horse's mouth.
>
> Syd Field was a writer-producer for David L. Wolper Productions, a
> successful screenwriter and head of the story department at Cinemobile
> Systems (The Godfather, Jeramiah Johnson, Deliverance, to name a few).
> His job was to 'synopsize' thousands of screenplays and recommend the
> best of them to funders like United Artists, Hemdale and Taft.
>
> Building on this wealth of experience, he has also written several
> definitive books on how to write screenplays and get them accepted. My
> partner has just been reading the 'completely revised and updated'
> edition of his book 'Screenplay: the foundations of screenwriting'
> (1994, Dell). It is the publisher's 'bestselling bible' on the subject.
>
> In the chapter on 'Character' (ch 3, p. 31) we learn the following
> lesson from Syd:
>
> 'A screenplay, remember, is a story told with pictures. And "every
> picture tells a story", sings Rod Stewart. Pictures, or images,
> reveal aspects of character. In Robert Rossen's classic film The
> Hustler, a physical defect symbolizes an aspect of character. The
> girl played by Piper Laurie is a cripple; she walks with a limp. She
> is also an emotional cripple; she drinks too much, has no sense of
> purpose in life. The physical limp underscores her emotional
> qualities - VISUALLY. Sam Peckinpah does this in The Wild Bunch. The
> character played by William Holden walks with a limp, the result of
> an aborted holdup some years before. It represents an aspect of
> Holden's character, revealing him to be an "unchanged man in a
> changing land", one of Peckinpah's favourite themes: a man born ten
> years too late, a man out of time. In Chinatown, Nicholson gets his
> nose slit because, as a detective, he's "nosy". Physical handicap -
> as an aspect of characterisation - is a theatrical convention that
> extends far back into the past. One thinks of Richard III, or the
> use of consumption or VD that strike the characters in the drama of
> O'Neill and Ibsen, respectively. Form your characters by creating a
> character biography, then reveal them by their actions, and possibly
> physical traits. ACTION IS CHARACTER.'
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Martin F. Norden
OO Dept. of Communication, Box 34815 [log in to unmask]
[_]<| University of Massachusetts-Amherst fax: 413 545-6399
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home page: http://www-unix.oit.umass.edu/~norden
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