Writing in Pictures: screenwriting Made (mostly) Painless by Joseph McBride (review)

Joseph McBride has produced a novel, well-written, and entertaining guide to screenwriting for fiction film. Perhaps best known as an accomplished film historian, McBride also has professional screenwriting experience, including cowriting Rock 'n' Roll High School and working with Orson Welles on dialogue for a character he played in Welles's unfinished film The Other Side of the Wind. McBride also teaches screenwriting at San Francisco State University and states that this book arose out of his frustration with the field of screenwriting guides: "I couldn't find a book that actually gets into the nitty-gritty of what's required to learn the screenwriting craft in a systematic way and that does so concisely and without telling you how to write formulaic screenplays" (4). Although one might dispute the claim that there are no such books, McBride's guide should be counted a success by his own criteria.

The book is divided into three parts. The first part deals with a number of preliminary topics, including a refreshingly upfront admission about how unwise it is to pursue screenwriting as means to money or fame. Parts 2 and 3 are where this book really distinguishes itself from other screenwriting guides. McBride believes that beginners should learn screenwriting by adapting a short story. He reasons that freeing students from the burden of coming up with an original, workable story idea allows them to focus on the craft of storytelling for the screen. This approach does not preclude creativity because of the distinctive requirements of cinematic storytelling and because adaptations can be more or less faithful to their original sources.

McBride breaks down the process of writing an adapted half-hour screenplay into five steps. Steps 1 through 4 are presented in the second part of the book. The first step is to select a short story and write a two-page prose summary of it. This "story outline" is a condensed retelling of the original literary work from beginning to end. A helpful feature of the book is that McBride presents a completed example of each step after he describes its requirements; he then provides instructive critical analysis of his example as a setup for introducing the next step. McBride chooses to adapt Jack London's "To Build a Fire," the story of a brazen young man whose arrogance to trek without human company during a harsh Yukon winter in the early 1900s leads to his death (the story is included in one of the book's appendices).

The second step is "the adaptation outline," which is similar to the story outline except that it presents the story as it will be adapted for the screen. Here one has freedom to alter the setting, time period, and characters as long as the deviation is not so radical that the story becomes unrecognizable as an adaptation. The third step is to produce a character biography. Doing so paves the way for the fourth step of fleshing out the adaptation outline into the treatment, a detailed recounting of the adapted story that gives a clear sense of the scene-by-scene structure of the film.

Part 3 of the book sets up the final step of producing a step outline with useful chapters on screenplay formatting and style, creating playable parts, building scenes, and writing dialogue. McBride believes that working through his process will make the actual writing of the screenplay straightforward. He accordingly concludes with a concise checklist for writing one's screenplay, his sample finished script, and an epilogue that dispenses some sage advice on pursuing filmmaking.

I have only two reservations about this lovely book. The first concerns what it has to say about three-act structure: "the fact is that any film with any dramatic content, however short or long or however avant-garde its approach might be, probably will still fall into three acts" (151). In order for this statement to be remotely plausible, McBride interprets three-act structure in such a broad way that...