Based upon some comments and emails, I’m going to do a series of posts in the next several weeks featuring various ‘screenwriting gurus’ and their respective theoretical approaches to writing a screenplay. My thinking is everyone is different and every story is different. Some people may find insight with Robert McKee, others may respond better to Blake Snyder. So why not have the opportunity to be exposed to all (or most) of them?

Given my work schedule and the fact that I’m writing lectures everyday through next Tuesday for the current online screenwriting course I’m teaching, I won’t get to this project for a week or so. But in the interim, here’s an interview with the granddaddy of screenwriting gurus Syd Field. A few excerpts:

“We really have had a screenwriting revolution in the way that stories are being told,” Syd told me from his LA home. “Story in itself will never change, the way we construct and appreciate story is actually relatively fixed in Aristotelian terms, but the way we can express narratives and characters has transformed and is transforming. It’s incredibly energising!”

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“Then I began script reading. I had to read 70 screenplays a week and of the 2,000-plus screenplays I read, only 40 were actually put forward for production. This really intrigued me. I wanted to know what made these forty screenplays better than all the others because at that point I really did not understand what made them good. I just sensed it.”

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“Sideways!” he says excitedly. “For me Sideways is a real contemporary classic, I really wanted it to pick up the Oscar for Best Film. It’s full of humanity and the narrative line is excellent. The integration of character and action is true poetry and I had to include it in my workshop. The Miles character is so aware of how he appears to other people. The writers use wine as a way to show two parts of his character – his need to project a view of himself as a wine taster and also the way he becomes a drunk to deal with his emotional problems.”

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“Laura Esquival was developing her screenplay Like Water for Chocolate from her novel. She would tell me that she felt constrained within the three-act structure, that it was dictating content to her. She was actually afraid of it! But I explained that it is just a form, nothing needs to be compromised in her story. Good structure should never dictate. That’s what form is about. Context not content.”

I am partial to Syd Field because his was the first book I ever read on screenwriting theory. So read the interview. And next week, we’ll begin with a look at Field’s ‘screenplay paradigm.’