Product: Syd Field's Screenwriting Workshop [VHS] (1999)
Rating: 5.0
An immensely valuable resource..
This video takes you from Ground-Zero and explains the structural requirements for a screenplay so that it stands a fair chance of being successful. Syd Field's approach is by way of a paradigm onto which a story's elements are placed so that the resulting movie will involve the audience in the story. This paradigm has been developed from Syd Field's analysis of the historical record of movies, and is presented in the video using Titanic; The Shawshank Redemption; and Thelma and Louise, as illustrative examples. He could have used a legion of others - some of which I would have preferred to watch - but they are a legitimate choice for the exercise, and are pretty current.Having watched this video I think that Syd has done a really good job in conveying a useful set of guidelines for an aspiring scriptwriter to work with. The only problems that I could identify were that the aspirant would need to be a capable writer, in the first place, of manuscripts, coupled with a huge amount of discipline to follow through on what Syd has to say. Someone diving in to write a screenplay would find it really tough going, since they would have no prior experience of writing and structuring a short story or novel length manuscript.Previous commentators of Syd's video have slammed the notion of the Paradigm and bolstered this by suggesting that Syd is some kind of no-name/ hack / charlatan. The problem isn't the paradigm; the problem is that tat affixed to the paradigm is still tat, as so many films of today, and yesteryear, clearly are.It's not the paradigm's fault that the powers in Hollywood are familiar with the paradigm, but are incapable of imbuing the paradigm with quality input, insisting on the endless deployment of stereotypical and worn out content. It's like shooting the messenger because you don't like the message, or filling the paradigm's contextual glass with sewage effluent instead of sparkling water.The assertion that the Syd Field paradigm has destroyed the modern film industry in comparison to Hollywood's `Golden Era,' is obviously nonsense to any objective person. The better movies from the past are clearly tied to the paradigm, which I think is well worth paying attention to.The bottom line is this: A poorly written and poorly executed story equals a bad screenplay. So the first thing to do is to learn how to write. I would recommend The Elements of Style, by Strunk and White. And The Art of Fiction and The Art of Non-Fiction , by Ayn Rand. In the `Golden Era,' of movies it was common for a good screenwriter to be capable of writing a good manuscript. A contemporary example would be Harlan Ellison.Some examples of films worth looking at are: The Fountainhead; Tiefland, by Leni Riefenstahl; Chinatown; The Shining; The Blair Witch Project.This is a very good instructional video, and provides a huge amount of valuable information to those without access to more direct, or hardly any guidance. It's even more relevant now because of the availability of PC based editing system allied to inexpensive DV equipment. All you need is the ability to write a great script to go and make a great film. Just think of all the artistic freedom that permits.