Writing in Pictures: screenwriting Made (mostly) Painless by Joseph McBride (review)

WRITING IN PICTURES: SCREENWRITING MADE (MOSTLY) PAINLESS Joseph McBride. New York: Vintage, 2012, 365 pp.Joseph McBride has produced a novel, well- written, and entertaining guide to screenwrit- ing for fiction film. Perhaps best known as an accomplished film historian, McBride also has professional screenwriting experience, including cowriting Rock 'n' Roll High School and working with Orson Welles on dialogue for a character he played in Welles's unfinished film The Other Side of Wind. McBride also teaches screenwriting at San Francisco State University and states that this book arose out of his frustration with field of screenwriting guides: I couldn't find a book that actually gets into nitty-gritty of what's required to learn screenwriting craft in a systematic way and that does so concisely and without telling you how to write formulaic screenplays (4). Al- though one might dispute claim that there are no such books, McBride's guide should be counted a success by his own criteria.The book is divided into three parts. The first part deals with a number of preliminary top- ics, including a refreshingly upfront admission about how unwise it is to pursue screenwriting as means to money or fame. Parts 2 and 3 are where this book really distinguishes itself from other screenwriting guides. McBride believes that beginners should learn screenwriting by adapting a short story. He reasons that freeing students from burden of coming up with an original, workable idea allows them to focus on craft of storytelling for screen. This approach does not preclude creativity because of distinctive requirements of cin- ematic storytelling and because adaptations can be more or less faithful to their original sources.McBride breaks down process of writing an adapted half-hour screenplay into five steps. Steps 1 through 4 are presented in second part of book. The first step is to select a short and write a two-page prose sum- mary of it. This story is a condensed retelling of original literary work from begin- ning to end. A helpful feature of book is that McBride presents a completed example of each step after he describes its requirements; he then provides instructive critical analysis of his example as a setup for introducing next step. McBride chooses to adapt Jack London's To Build a Fire, of a brazen young man whose arrogance to trek without human company during a harsh Yukon winter in early 1900s leads to his death (the is in- cluded in one of book's appendices).The second step is the adaptation outline, which is similar to outline except that it presents as it will be adapted for screen. Here one has freedom to alter setting, time period, and characters as long as deviation is not so radical that becomes unrecognizable as an adaptation. The third step is to produce a character biography. Doing so paves way for fourth step of fleshing out adaptation outline into treatment, a detailed recounting of adapted that gives a clear sense of scene-by- scene structure of film. …

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