What do you think are the best-written films?

What screenplays are not only well-written, but are written in such a way as to support the VISUAL communication of film?

So many films are really just good literature with pretty pictures. What's good FILM writing?

Which film writers really understand, and consistently demonstrate, great writing for film?

These are the questions on my mind, provoked by two shots of caffeine and a donut.

I assume we can't include writer-directors, as the film becomes a work in progress right from beginning to end, and it's impossible to seperate any one process. But as to 'just' writers:


Mamet. The man cannot direct. At all. But he can write. And even though one might be inclined to dismiss him as all talk, as witnessed by Glengarry Glen Ross and Ronin, under proper direction his writing lends itself to cinema in every way.

Robert Towne. The older stuff. Chinatown is the great Hollywood script, though I should give Polanski credit for his perfect ending (that Towne supposedly hated). His uncredited rewrites (Godfather) added nicely to the overall products.

Funny how I picked two guys that still went on to direct. Hmm.

Anyway, the king of them all (and also a director):

Paul Schrader. Extremely visual writer. Taxi Driver. Raging Bull. Last Temptation Of Christ. Bringing Out The Dead. I don't think I need to say anything more than that.

: Mamet. The man cannot direct. At all.

Please watch The Winslow Boy again and get back to me.

Dale

Cool Hand Luke -- Donn Pearce was a one-hit wonder, but this is one of the greatest screenplays ever

Paddy Chayefsky (Network)

William Goldman (Princess Bride, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid -- but he also worked on Maverick and Fierce Creatures, so go figure)

How about Robert Bolt?

I recently watched Lawrence of Arabia again, and on one of the bonus features Spielberg called it the greatest screenplay in the history of motion pictures. I couldn't find a lot to quibble with -- it's brilliant. In particular, some of the debates and arguments (esp. the insults traded by Auda and Sherif at the watering hole) are so deftly drawn.

And, talk about writing for the screen -- there are many scenes that are brilliant, like when Lawrence is walking along the top of a building (or maybe a train?) and the crowd is following his shadow on the ground. And, of course, the great desert scenes.

The guy also wrote The Mission and A Man for All Seasons (3 versions, a TV script, a play at the movie), and Dr. Zhivago. No slouch, Mr. Bolt.

American Beauty is definitely a well-crafted script.

I'm partial to Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond, who generally began work on their films before the screenplay had been completed. They generally took a lot of their plot points based upon the individual idiosyncrasies of their cast--case in point, Tony Curtis' impersonation of Cary Grant in Some Like it Hot, which wouldn't have made it in the script had they kept their original cast members--Danny Kaye and Bob Hope. Some Like It Hot, The Apartment and One-Two-Three are classics.

I second Paddy Chayevsky (Network). I wholeheartedly support John Sayles (Lone Star) which had some of the most creative camerawork I've seen in a long while. And to the earlier poster defending David Mamet--I fell asleep watching _Winslow Boy_ (but like him anyway).

Nick

Er, sorry... I think the premise to the question is all wrong.

Since film is such a collaborative work, and a script is merely a blueprint I really don't think that the writer can take full or most credit for the images presented (except, as SoNowThen pointed out, writers who direct their own work - despite his negative example of Mamet).

Take for example The French Connection. From what I know the original script merely had something like: A car chase ensues.

And what did Friedkin do with that?

I like William Goldman. Sure, he's had his share of poopers. But hey.






And that's all I have to say right now.

Isn't asking what makes a great script kind of like asking what makes a great book proposal?

There are so many things that happen between the conceptualization of a work of art and the actual production of the work of art -- and there are likely as many different ways of taking the work of art from conceptualization to production as there are artists -- that I don't really feel anyone can comment on what makes a good script beyond saying, "THIS is what works for ME when I make movies."

Jeff's right, there are stories and authors who seem to be geared specifically to cinematic presentation. Andrew Niccol's stuff comes to mind, specifically Truman and Gattaca. I'm not sure I can quantify what makes me see this or not see it, but it seems as though some writing is a perfect fit for filmic narrative.

Great question. I disagree with a few of the suggestions. I don't think Mamet is a filmwriter. And though Schrader is probably a favorite around here he is a great case of being at the right place at the right time with a pretty good script, then he kept writing pretty good scripts that got visually taken over by good directors at times. Bringing out The Dead is fantastic, that is an exception for Schrader. Obviously Taxi Driver is a great script, but that film really came out of a synergy of 70's American filmmaking talents. Feel free to disagree with this though.

- I think the classic answer for this question would be Cassavetes and Jarmusch for two of the most influential Americans. Spike Lee and Wes Anderson are two great contemporary writers in the same scene.
- The Iranians are remarkable storytellers, Makhmalbaf or Kiarostami could write a script about a pencil that would be epic and rewarding.
- Yang both wrote and directed Yi-Yi, and the strength of that film is the script itself. Wong Kar Wai writes all of his films too, pretty spectacular stuff.
- Kurosawa wrote most of his own films, but I have to nod to Teshigahara on this one. I recently caught Woman in the Dunes and was impressed by the rote scripting of their speech and activity. Very prescribed but so simple. Kurosawa was famous for being very rigid about his screenplays though, which certainly paid off for him. By and large anyway, Ozu obviously is where contemporary Japanese film-writing starts. What an artist that guy was.
- Mike Leigh, that guy's screenplays must be six inches thick. Lynne Ramsay's screenwriting abilites are already legendary even though she has only made two feature length films. Just her short films alone are lessons in writing screenplays and turning them into films.
- Godard, Godard, Godard. His quip about screenplays ("All you need for a movie is a girl and a gun") may be one of the most famous statements about movies. His life story is little more than the story about how he wrote his films. He would be at the top of my list in this category. It is through Godard that we get Jarmusch and Tarantino and others.

I guess though if we want to talk about a script as a "blueprint," then we could turn to people like Lynch, Gaspar Noe (shudder), Lynne Ramsay, von Trier, and Kaufmann. Even if a good screenplay doesn't prescribe specific sets of imagery (which many screenplays written by directors do), good screenplays do invoke visual sequences that fit the material like a glove. It strikes me that my entire list above is all of directors that write their own things, I guess I have a predilection for auteurs.

As far as screenwriters that write for directors things that aren't adaptations of plays or literature, I guess I would have to poke around on that one. So my list is fairly lopsided.

I agree to a wide extent, but mostly for those directors involved somehow in the writing process.

But within the idea of 'everyone for hire', or 'film by committee', I'd say we could seperate more, and thus have a clearer discussion of "good writing". Let's use the Third Man. Welles wrote his own monologue, but other than that he was just a hired actor, as Reed was a hired director. So in this case we could say that Greene wrote a killer script. Creating interesting characters and situations, suggestive of visuals, but allowing for full bloom by the director and actors and DP. Greene's script would still have been brilliant if they decided to build and shoot this story on a set, but I think the film would have suffered.

Good example, here is Greene himself talking about it. This makes me wonder though, that if we took a list of 100 ultra classic films from DVD Beaver or something and put "films by writer/directors" on one side and "films by writing, producing, and directing teams" on the other, I wonder what the ratio would be.

I was pretty surprised to see when I made that list above just how many directors that we consider influential or "the best" actually write all of their own stuff. Can we think of any great director that consistently depended on a writer, like in The Third Man? Carol Reed didn't exactly make a big mark on the history of art.

Peter T Chattaway wrote:
: Isn't asking what makes a great script kind of like asking what makes a great
: book proposal?

Better yet, isn't asking what makes a great script kind of like asking what makes a great storyboard?

Robert McKee is, of course, the contemporary guru of screenwriting in the states, and his book Story really is masterful. My copy is underlined and notated until it looks a bit like my Bible - and, as a result, I certainly got an extra kick out of ADAPTATION.

Some of the screenplays that he refers to again and again are;

Casablanca
Chinatown
Kramer vs. Kramer
Ordinary People
Tender Mercies

I'm thrilled by that last one (my all time favourite), and amused by the first. He makes a particularly big deal of Casablanca, and often concludes his seminars with a close viewing of the film, providing commentary on all the film's screenwriting marvels. The irony (to me) is that he advocates doing a massive amount of structural preparation before writing a word of dialogue, and then uses for his Number One Example a film that was cobbled together on the fly by many writers during shooting! Ah, wee Bobby McKee - ever brilliant, ever mockable.

*

I wasn't going to get into this, but what the heck. I take exception to my friend Peter's comparison of screenplays to book proposals. I feel strongly that writers are grossly undervalued in film criticism. Film writers talk immediately about the film as the director's work, but that can be exceedingly misleading. It's appropriate with auteur film makers - "authors", in case our french is rusty - who conceive, write and direct their own work. (In the case of von Trier, they even operate the camera!).

But there are also a great many remarkable films that originate with a writer who is not the director. I understand that often the original writer's work is barely intact in the film we eventually see on screen, and to that extent I accept Peter's comment. But there is a correction needed. For example, we talk about Peter Weir's "themes" as if he is the originator of all his films. Well, he's not - not since "the Australia days," for sure. Certainly he's drawn to certain themes in a diversity of film scripts, but he's not the author of them - much as I'm a PW fan, I think more distinction needs to be made here.

It really galled me with MYSTIC RIVER. People wrote endlessly about this being Eastwood's greatest (or at least latest) statement on his central themes, that he was "saying" this and "exploring" that. Piffle. The story was devised in almost all its details by Dennis Lehane, adapted for the screen (competently, but with very little innovation or change) by Brian Helgeland, and then filmed in straightforward and workmanlike fashion by director Clint. It's Dennis who did the "saying" and "exploring:" Dirty Harry just transferred it to film.

What about my storyboard analogy?

It just seems odd to me to ask what the best scripts are, when I doubt most of us have read more than a handful, and when we are openly admitting that some directors had incredibly thick and detailed scripts while other directors had simpler and sparser scripts. In the end, the script, like the storyboard, is just one of those tools the filmmakers use in making the actual FILM, and each filmmaker has a different approach to the tools that works for him (or her). Film scripts are not plays -- they are not stand-alone works of art that can be re-interpreted over and over again, but rather, they are blueprints for the real works of art, i.e. the films.

Note, this is not about overvaluing the director. Even when we have characters like Charlie Kaufman running around and getting us all excited about "the screenwriter as auteur", the fact remains, it is the finished film that we see, and while the film might be the product of a collaboration between Kaufman and Jonze (or Kaufman and Gondry, or Kaufman and Clooney), it's also possible the film might be what happens when the director takes the script out of Kaufman's hands and puts his own stamp on it. Who knows, who cares -- it is the finished FILM that counts, is all I'm saying, and even if any of us COULD see the script that lay behind the film (as opposed to merely guessing what the script was like, which is what I think most of us do), the fact remains, the script is just one stage in a work-in-progress.

I agree with everything but this: