I have a feeling that title will be more clever than this post, but anyway...
I've been a little slow at posting lately (been busy), and I apologize, but I did want to fulfill a promise I teased last week some time. How to determine the correct medium in which to tell your story. No, I'm not talking about Whoopie Goldberg in
Ghost vs. a t-shirt that ain't
that big. I'm gonna address the big four forms in the lit world (in no particular order): film, TV, stage, and book.
One error I see a lot in amateur scripts is that despite the fact that they are film scripts, they don't feel like films. There are clearly many potential reasons for this. But often it stems from a lack of understanding of what makes a film a film. It's not just that it will be seen on a large screen (though with the increasing importance of the DVD market, even this is becoming less the case). Different types of stories -- and more importantly, different types of storytelling -- work better in the different media. And while film might prove highly lucrative, if your story is better suited to a different medium, it will never succeed as a film (or if it will, you or someone else will need to make major alterations to the way in which it is told).
(By the way, I'd like to mention that I'm focusing primarily on fictional tales here. Frequently, the same non-fiction subjects can be explored in much the same manner in a documentary film, a non-fiction book, and a TV documentary or news program. I have yet to see a documentary play, however.)
Film, by its nature is a visual medium. We all know the famous exhortation that in film we should "show, don't tell." Now of course there will be those who will chime in with, "What about
My Dinner with Andre or the bulk of
Neil Labute's career?" Well, first off I'll say that I'm focused primarily on mainstream films, rather than experimental indies, such as the former
Malle/
Gregory/
Shawn classic. I'll also say that the talking-much-but-saying-nothing is what I most dislike about Labute's work. His stuff would probably work great in the theater world from which he came, but I think they represent rather poor examples of films, for this exact reason. Where I was intrigued by
Andre's subject matter within its conversations, I never felt this way watching a Labute film. Hey, maybe I'm just too boorish to catch some of his subtle subtext or something, but to me his stuff belongs on the stage. Why?
Because stage plays by their very nature create a sense of intimacy, and because they are built on a specific lack of action. In fact, this stems at least in part (I think) from that snarky comment I made earlier. No stage documentaries. When we watch anything on a screen in either a filmed or taped medium, our minds can connect it with reality in a way that they can never do when we watch something on stage. There is a long history of documentary films (in fact, they form the medium's origin), and we've all seen hundreds or thousands of hours of actual events portrayed on the news. I won't even get into reality TV here (for more reasons than one). So when we watch a good fictional film, if it truly absorbs us, the mind has the ability to "forget" that it is fiction and "think" it is processing data from reality. When we watch a stage play, we are sitting in a room with these people who are on the stage, and we can look off to the side and see the curtain and the proscenium. We can spot the wooden stage upon which they stand. Sometimes the set is not designed to mimic reality (recognizing, nay embracing the limitations of the medium and turning them into positively artistic distinctions), and thus we
know even more deeply that we are not watching reality.
Thus, without the call to think we are watching reality, and with its obvious physical limitations, a stage play instead focuses on a more incisive look into subject matter. The actors can't move around a lot, and can't do many actions that can be done in real life. So we stay with a particular situation and examine it intensely, often from distinct perspectives.
So what about TV then? Well, hour-long "dramas" (which has become the all-encompassing term for many different types of hour-long shows) actually differ less from films than do sitcoms. Especially with the growth of such action oriented dramas as
24 or
Alias. But even within such shows, the focus is much more on the characters, as they develop over the course of a long period of time (heck,
Reunion is going to watch them develop over 20 years).
Certainly, however, the distinction is even greater within the sitcom format. Many people forget that the term "sitcom" is a combination of two words: situation comedy (not to be confused with
Situation: Comedy, starring my man
Mark, though of course that's why it's the show's name). In the old days, sitcoms were all on a single set. Nowadays, they often have a handful, but still a limited number of sets for the show. The comedy stemmed from different situations occurring in these limited spaces. Interspersed with strings of jokes. Thus, much as on stage, the writers were limited by space, and the format became a largely verbal one. Now, many sitcoms (though hopefully not the best ones) are built on jokes that are almost purely verbal, rarely relating to the situations at hand. But even in stronger sitcoms, the laughs usually come from the jokes themselves and the situations are only mildly humorous set-ups for these jokes. Only the more off-beat sitcoms really present scenarios that themselves make us laugh. In my mind, the ones that first spring up are
Arrested Development,
Malcolm in the Middle,
The Simpsons, and
The Family Guy, though I'm not saying that's all there are. And you may note that all four have the ability to break the rules and limitations more, either through the use of practical exteriors or animation.
Before I continue, I must add that I am in
no way denigrating the skill of writers in other media, nor am I saying that jokes themselves are not funny. I'm merely attempting to delineate the distinctions between the media, and learn from those differences.
Anyway, that leaves us with books, and novels in particular. Well, as I see it, where film is a primarily visual medium and TV and stage are both primarily verbal ones, novels are mainly built on the mental. What I mean by this is that because books have the ability to tell us what people are thinking and how they are feeling, they actually must do so in most cases. The best books get inside the heads of their characters, and teach us things about them that a film, stage play, or TV show would be hard pressed to do. Now of course they too feel no constraints of time or place, just as film doesn't (or barely does). Thus, action can work in a book as well. But what they lack (obviously) is the visual. While an author can describe a scene in great detail, he will still be limited in communicating his view by the reader's ability to understand and his preconceptions. If the author references a specific experience or metaphor, the reader may not understand the metaphor, or his prior experiences might cloud the emotions the author wants to evoke. Of course, this necessary vagueness can often become the birth of art, and an entire school literary criticism focuses on
a reader's response to a literary work. Again, this is not meant to be a negative aspect to books as compared to film, but rather a note of distinction.
"But what about all of those literary adaptations on screen?" you may ask. There's a semi-famous maxim which states that Hollywood makes good movies out of bad books. I don't want to get into the discussion of "good" or "bad" books, but I think there is a certain truth in this statement. Books that are less internal are much easier to adapt to the screen, and thus are more frequently into Hollywood movies. Thus, the "bad" epithet here may refer more to these books' embrace of the things that make books unique as a medium. Some best seller type books seem little more than extended treatments for the movies they will later become. Not that there's anything wrong with that. It is what it is. Then there are the good or even great novels that are turned into films. Well, many of those fail for the very reasons the other ones work. The things that made the novels great can never translate effectively to the large screen. And the ones that did work, for the most part, made major changes during the transition. Perhaps the only cases where such changes are not necessary are those in which the book itself has such a sizable enough audience that would prefer to see it translated 100% accurately, though in even those cases, a "faithful" but slightly altered retelling is often warranted.
Whew, this post is already
much longer than I anticipated. I'm not even going to go back and reread it, so I hope it's clear. Feel free to ask any questions, if something isn't. Let me also add one more caveat: I come from a Hollywood, mainstream sensibility, and that's what I'm mainly focused on here. Are there exceptions in
each of these media? Of course! I'm simply trying to focus on the generic qualities of each one.
Let me end with a oversimplification:
FILM: active, visual
THEATER: verbal, intensely focused
TV: verbal with some visual, more character driven
NOVELS: inner-focused, descriptive with some action
Tags: writing+mediums,
screenwriting,
film,
playwriting,
theater,
television,
sitcoms,
novels,
fiction+writing
