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Table of Contents
Note: Because of the ascii format originally used to display this book, words such as the names of films which are italicized in the written text are NOT italicized or underlined in this online publication. I apologize for this inconvenience.Preface
Chapter 1 Prelude
Chapter 2 The Screenplay
Chapter 3 The Screenwriter as Storyteller
Chapter 4 Developing Characters and Motive
Chapter 5 Creating Great Plots
Chapter 6 Giving Your Screenplays Power
Chapter 7 The Art of Great Dialogue
Chapter 8 Cinematography for Screenwriters
Chapter 9 The Writers' Workshop
Chapter 10 A Brief Look at the Industry
Glossary
© Copyright 1991, 1999 Blake Harris. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
This book is an unusual collaboration. I
never met my co-author. He passed away before I was
born.
In fact, his contribution to this book--which
is significant--comes out of a course taught by the
Palmer Institute of Authorship in Hollywood in the
1920s. Much of the book has been developed out of
Frederick Palmer's writings on the subject of
screenwriting.
The revelation for me was that by 1925, the
techniques and know-how of successful screenwriting had
already largely been isolated and superbly delineated.
This might seem surprising to some--that many of the
things screenwriters struggle to learn today were known
over 60 years ago. Film styles change of course. But
underneath style and technological advancements are
found essentially the same problems that screenwriters
faced in 1925--how to tell a story through the medium
of film which will move and satisfy an audience.
There is a technology of screenwriting and
this has been described in various ways in hundreds of
books. One way or another, good screenwriters have
managed to learn their craft. But that road is not
always easy.
For me, Palmer's astute observations and
insights, his comprehensive analysis of the subject,
were a breath of fresh air.
This book is an effort to modernize his work
--adding in my own and other writers' thoughts and
observations. I also dropped those things he taught
which didn't hold water. For instance, he argued that
there was no such thing as original creation. He said
that imagination was simply a process of recombining
things previously seen and experienced. This actually
isn't always true.
Still, this book takes much of Palmer's
overall approach to the craft of screenwriting, and
many of the things he said, and makes it available to
today's students of film.
This is a book I would have liked to have
discovered 10 years ago when, as a professional writer,
I set out in a new direction to learn to write
screenplays. It might have saved me much time, much
groping and study--an excursion that eventually would
take me through numerous texts written over 60 and 70
years ago on the subject of creating film scripts.
I put this book together mainly for myself
and it has been kicking around for more than a year now
on computer disks. It wasn't originally written to be
published as a book. Maybe in another 20 years, I
figured, I might know enough to write authoritatively
about screenwriting. It is the old maxim that the more
you know about something, the more you know you don't
know. Knowledge is a little like an expanding circle.
As the circle grows, the perimeter that touches the
unknown gets larger.
However, I gave the first draft of this book
to a few budding screenwriters and found later that
they had begun passing it around to other would-be
screenwriters. Writers who had read many books, taken
screenwriting courses and participated in workshops
were finding the text enlightening and useful.
So there seemed to be some value in polishing
it up a bit and publishing it as a book. Of course,
you must be the final judge of this.
Hollywood, California Blake Harris
January, 1993
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Blake Harris has been a professional writer for over 20
years. He has written for magazines in England, the
United States and Canada and his newspaper stories have
been syndicated worldwide. For the last 10 years he has
studied screenwriting, has written many short videos and
films which have been produced and has now begun to sell
feature films. He was also a producer with and co-founder of
the feature film production company Film City Pictures.
More about Blake HarrisFrederick Palmer ran the Palmer Institute of Authorship
in Hollywood during the 1920s. Here he gave a remarkable
course of study on screenwriting--a course which had been
virtually lost until modernized and updated by this book.
Email Blake Harris at bh@blakeharris.com
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