Billy Wilder (1906-2002) was one of Hollywood’s greatest writer directors.
From the naughty elegance of The Major and the Minor, 1942, in which the grown-up Ginger Rogers disguises herself as a teenager, to the lacerating portrait of Hollywood in Sunset Boulevard, 1950, Wilder’s work stands at the pinnacle of movie craftsmanship.
In the invaluable Conversations with Wilder, by writer-director Cameron Crowe, the 93 year-old Wilder listed ten rules for screenplays that are, for yours truly, the ten commandments of screenwriting.
1. The audience is fickle.
2. Grab ‘em by the throat and never let ‘em go.
3. Develop a clean line of action for your leading character.
4. Know where you’re going.
5. The more subtle and elegant you are in hiding your plot points, the better you are as a writer.
6. If you have a problem with the third act, the real problem is in the first act.
7. A tip from Lubitsch: Let the audience add up two plus two. They’ll love you forever.
8. In doing voice-overs, be careful not to describe what the audience already sees. Add to what they’re seeing.
9. The event that occurs at the second act curtain triggers the end of the movie.
10. The third act must build, build, build in tempo and action until the last event, and then—that’s it. Don’t hang around.
Ariel Chaim Avrech, ZT'L, May His Righteous Memory be a Blessing.
21 Comments
Instead of “grabbing them by the throat,” I”m more of a fan of kissing them on the neck and then working my way down.
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Maybe to amplify #7, Don’t condescend to your audience.
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Good points, most applicable to novel writing. I better write them on the wall above my desk.
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Rachel:
Glad you enjoyed the post. Both Stand By Me, and Shawshank VO’s are excellent.
I would add one more screenwriting rule.
11. Decide on the tone of your script. And then stick with it.
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Robert,
Thank you for posting this list. I especially agree with #7 – basically assume your audience has some working gray matter and they’ll assume even more about the writer
and regarding #8 – voice overs. I remember that Richard Dreyfuss did the voice of the adult Gordie character in Stand by Me. Did you think that was done well? Oh, and speaking of Stephen King….also there was voice-overs in The Shawshank Redemption….love that movie.
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Kent:
I agree about the last line. It’s really preachy. Bridge is not my favorite David Lean movie. It also has structural problems, specifically when Bill Holden escapes and returns to the British lines. The tension in the film deflates during these scenes.
There ar no perfect films. Every film has a weak point. The trick lies in cleverly hiding the imperfections.
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It strikes me that The Bridge on the River Kwai, which I otherwise admire, violates #10 with the “Madness, sheer madness” line at the end. We needed to be told that?
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… and in a post about writing….
It’s a post about writing not spelling. Nitpicky posts about spelling get few readers.
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Linked: Worthwhile reading & viewing
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It is interesting that, for two people that were among the best screenwriters of English language movies, both Wilder and Diamond were born outside the U.S. speaking a language other than English.
And of course the greatest last line of any movie “Well, nobody’s perfect!”
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I suspect that the quality of PowerPoint presentations would go up considerably if people who create & deliver these presentations frequently (executives, academics, sales reps) would spend a little bit of time studying the basic elements of screenwriting.
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Robert,
Thanks for posting Wilder’s Rules. I had read them a number of years ago, but ignored them to my detriment. Am going to do the right thing this time and add them to my writing class slides.
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********2. Grab ‘em by the throat and never let ‘em go.
The trick, I would think, is to do so without appearing to do so.
*********7. A tip from Lubitsch: Let the audience add up two plus two. They’ll love you forever.
Sometimes I can’t add it. Is it me or the screenwriter?
*********8. In doing voice-overs, be careful not to describe what the audience already sees. Add to what they’re seeing.
Besides Goodfellows (I LOVED the voice over – most memorable line from the voice-over “The Mafia was simply the police for people who couldn’t go to the police” – Another GREAT movie – I had never previously heard of was Farewell My Lovely with Robert Mitchum as Phillip Marlowe. A great 1940s movie made in 1975. It was probably one of Jerry Bruckheimer’s first productions.
**********9. The event that occurs at the second act curtain triggers the end of the movie.
Since learning about moviemaking just a bit (courtesy of the Avrech Correspondence School) I have learned some movies will have a scene at the beginning that seems unrelated to the rest of the movie – until you get to the end. The recent “Kick Ass” was one such movie.
Finally I got a huge education on the art (not doing but appreciating) of screenwriting, directing and acting from seeing Breakfast at Tiffany’s and then, out of curiosity, reading Truman Capote’s novella on which the movie is based.
Other than the end – both book and movie are basically the same as far as plot and character development (the book has a different ending) – the difference is subtle shades of emphasis of acting and screenwriting -
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Joe:
Kagan is Obama, just the female version. Another dreary leftist who has spent her entire life in the liberal bubble. She was born a Jew, but her religion is progressive politics.
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I think the BBC has produced 2-3 products which I enjoyed over the years (not that I want to watch them now..) including — Are You Being Served, All Creatures Great and Small, May to December, Red Dwarf, and Dr. Who.
Of those, I think I only watch May-Dec and All Creatures again… Still I find either more intelligent and entertaining than 2+1/2 Men or Everybody Loves Raymond (a remake of All in the Family — think about the roles and you’ll see it’s just filmed from a different point of view, but the family members are, essentially, the same!)
So, Robert… any chance the SCOTUS candidate is a closet frum??
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James:
Most sitcoms are filmed radio. As are 90% of TV dramas. Way too much yadda-yadda. Which is why I, for the most part, watch Turner Classic Movies.
I have to admit that I’m not a big fan of PBS or the BBC. Most of their productions strike me as endless remakes of endless remakes.
BTW, why the heck does PBS still exist? Why are our tax dollars being spent in a world of hundreds of competing cable channels? I believe that if they were to be unleashed from their tax subsidies, PBS would sink like a stone, and very few would notice.
As for the BBC. Well, outside of Palestinian TV, it would be hard to find such a reflexively anti-Semitic network.
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Ben-David:
Thanks for the correction. I’m a writer not a speller.
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Johnny:
Billy Wilder and Victor Fleming are two of my favorite directors. Both effortlessly shifted from comedy to drama with equal excellence and both were sticklers for establishing proper geography, an art that has been discarded in favor of lightning fast edited action sequences.
Regarding voice-overs: Martin Scorsese has learned the Wilder lesson best. The VO’s in “Good Fellas” and “Casino” are brilliant.
I’ve used VO’s in two films and I have to tell you, they are very hard to get right.
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#7 is almost universally ignored in the US. Sitcoms are a particularly high profile offender here. That’s why I continue to seek out non-domestic film and television. The scripts don’t treat us as dunces in need of continual hand-holding. Thank Heaven for PBS and BBC America.
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laserating? You mean lacerating.
… and in a post about writing….
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Among the greats, Wilder was able to work in so many genres. Some Like It Hot, The Apartment (comedy) Double Indemnity (film noir) Stalag 17,Sunset Blvd (drama) can all be considered as the best of their type and he wrote and directed them. While Ford had more Oscars Wilder had a much better batting average when you look at the relatively few films he directed.
No. 8 should be pounded into the heads of a lot of screenwriters today. Joe Gillis doing a voice-over is part of the story since he’s floating in a pool at the start of the movie. But today a lot of movies use it because its a lot easier than developing the story for viewers to understand.
It would have been interesting to have seen Wilder direct Schindler’s List since he was a Jew that actually lived in Berlin when Hitler took over. And I’ll bet he would not be one to take Iran’s intentions lightly were he around today.
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