Making Sense of Documentary Scriptwriting
Published by Emil Abraham,
Is a Script Necessary?
If somebody asked you to name nine or ten outstanding documentaries or documentary series, it is highly possible that your list might include Nanook of the North, Hoop Dreams, Best Boy, The Good Woman of Bangkok, Harlan County, One Day in September, "The Nazis: A Lesson from History," Soldiers in the Army of God, The War Game, Letters from Vietnam, Diary for Timothy, "A Walk Through the Twentieth Century," Soldier Girls, and Tongues Untied. What strikes us about the list? First, the sheer variety of the ¤lms. They range from Flaherty’s classic description of Inuit life through an institutional portrait to Jennings’s gentle observation of life in England at the end of World War II. Best Boy tells us about the life of a mentally retarded man; Harlan County deals with striking miners; The War Game is a horrifying documentary drama of the effects of an atomic bomb on a small British town. All are, in their own ways, outstanding examples of really excellent documentary films.
But what was the writer’s part in these projects and in the success of the ¤lms? Apart from "The Nazis: A Lesson from History," only ¤ve or six of the works—including The War Game, "Twentieth Century," Tongues Untied, and, perhaps, Diary for Timothy—had anything resem- bling a full preproduction script or ¤nal narration. All the other ¤lms were largely unscripted. Notes were probably jotted down and long dis- cussions held as to what sequences to shoot, but no long preproduction scripts with suggested visuals and tentative commentary were prepared. Instead, most of these ¤lms were built on the editing table. Clearly, then, you can have a successful ¤lm without a script, or at least without a con- ventional script that de¤nes action and progression and carefully lays in all the narration or guidelines for the narration. All this, of course, is il- lustrated by the success of cinema verite in the 1960s and by the esteem granted to Drew, Pennebaker, Wiseman, the Maysles brothers, Leacock, and other pioneers of the genre.
Granted, then, you can have a ¤lm without a prewritten script, or even a clear outline of ideas, but if you are going to do a commissioned ¤lm for television, then usually both become necessary. So the sooner you learn how to deal with these items the better.
The essential problem of writing for visual media comes from the difference between print as a medium, or words on a page, and the medium of moving images. You have to describe an audiovi- sual medium that plays in real time using a written medium that is abstract and frozen in time. So, a description in words on a page of what is to be seen on a screen has limited value until it is translated into that medium itself.
Writing Not to be Read But to be Made
The fundamental premise of scriptwriting is that you are writing not to be read but to be made. This does not mean that a script is not read by producers, directors, and others who must decide whether to put resources into producing it. It means that the audience doesn’t read the script. By contrast, a novelist or a poet or a journalist writes what the reader reads. I am now writing what my readers will experience directly as written language. Not so for a scriptwriter! Just as the musical score is a set of instructions to musicians and an architectural blueprint is a set of instructions to builders, a script is a set of instructions to a production crew to make a film, a video, or a television program. Only the ideas, scenes, and dialogue that are written down get made. This is the first principle to keep in mind.
Whatever your vision, whatever your idea, whatever you want to see on the screen, you must describe it in language that a team of technicians and visual image workers can understand and translate into perceived moving images and sound.
A script is fundamental to the process of making a movie, video, or any type of visual program. It is the basis for production. From it flow a huge number of production decisions, consequences, and actions. The first of these is cost. Every stroke of the pen (or every keystroke) implies a production cost to bring it to reality on the screen. Although the techniques of filmmaking and special effects are seemingly without boundaries these days, extravagant ideas incur extravagant cost. A writer must keep in mind that a production budget is written with every word by virtue of the visual ideas contained in the script, whether that script is for a feature film or a training video. A script writer can reach an audience only by visualizing and writing potential scenes for directors and producers to shoot and edit. The finished work often reflects a multitude of creative choices and alterations unspecified by the writer.