The Screenplay
In the beginning a writer will sit down at their computer and from their blood, sweat, and tears, produce a screenplay.
The screenplay tells a story and it can make or break the film. A good story can be filmed badly and be a success. But a bad story, even if it’s filmed brilliantly, will never work.
Now it’s by no means easy to create a good story, but you will see that in 90% of cases they follow the same basic pattern:
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The main character faces a problem in their life
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The main character tries to solve the problem, fails, and the situation gets worse
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The main character tries again (and again) and, at the last moment, succeeds
And that’s it!
Think about it: Captain Marvel, Meet the Parents, Amélie, Bend it like Beckham, all the James Bond films… if you strip them all down they happen like this.
The writer then develops the story by adding memorable characters, tight dialogue, exciting events, thrilling backdrops, and everything needed to turn a few simple words into a masterpiece.
The writer will work on it for hours, days, weeks, months, years crafting and perfecting it until they have a pile of pages of pure gold.
And then?
And then 99.9% of screenplays get ignored, left in taxis, forgotten about, rebutted, rejected, refused, or simply abandoned… and so the writer will start again on a completely new topic: What if the they discovered the elixir of life coming out of a tap in a flat in Copenhagen? What if a group of teenagers were kidnapped from earth by an alien scouting party who looked like slugs?
But every so often a screenplay will get picked up and someone, somewhere, will decide to turn it into a film. It might be a huge Hollywood studio; it might be an indie (or independent film) director who loves the idea; it might be the person who wrote the screenplay in the first place who decides to make the film in their parents’ basement. But whatever and whoever, wherever and however, the screenplay is ready to be turned into a film which is when it’s time for… Pre-Production.
