Nearly a year ago, I had the unbelievable luck of holding a screenplay written by Satyajit Ray. The pages, dusty and dry like leaves in autumn, were filled with dialogue, setting details, costume details, camera angles, and at times drawings. I was impressed that the director had prepared some level of storyboarding, that he used his analytical skills to enhance art, and trusted the written word over his memory.
I also realized why many films today are what they are. The famous joke in Nagesh Kukunoor’s Bollywood Calling about the absence of a script, or rather its existence only after a movie has been made, has some truth to it.
I feel that neither storyboarding nor scripting happens most of the time during Indian film-making. Credits in Indian movies often separate story, screenplay and dialogues. Now who is the writer? Does each person playing each of the three roles become a one-third writer? How is it even possible to separate these three essential elements that form a compound called “script”? Compare interviews of Indian directors, or actors with their Hollywood counterparts. The latter mention “reading the script”, while the former only mention “hearing the story”. Don’t these suggest that a script isn’t written until after the movie has been made only to submit it then to the National Film Archive of India?
It is possible that this may have been inherited from our ancestors. India has proudly held the heritage of oral storytelling. Storytelling is a fascinating art, but it can have undesirable effects when used during development of a story. A story is lost not just in translation, but in recitation.
It is against business sense to start making a movie without at least a draft of the script. It is like a group of developers working on a product without a design, without knowing what all features are there and how they fall in place. How does one know where a bug may be lurking? I guess there aren’t even a QA team to test a movie prerelease. At a time when moves are being made to commercialize movies further, this is an aspect which works against such moves.
Today, it is encouraging to hear news about scriptwriting workshops in Mumbai, or by Bollywood writers, that there is homework being done in this area. I am waiting to hear such news in the Telugu film industry.
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“How is it even possible to separate these three essential elements that form a compound called “script”?”
Diwakar Babu (a dialogue writer for movies viz. Choodaalani Vundi and many other movies by S.V.Krishna Reddy) in an interview told this.
X comes up with a storyline. (what one wants to narrate)
Y develops the characters (their history, traits etc.)
(Mostly) Y writes the screenplay. How the storyline should be narrated. What scene should come after what, etc.
Z, takes these (character development and screenplay) and writes dialogues for the scenes.
He mentioned that he had a white page with the left half having screenplay and he wrote the dialogues on the right half.
So in some telugu movies, we have different credits for Katha, Chitraanuvaadam, Maatalu and DarSakatvam.
Let us keep screenplay aside. There are non-linear screenplays and while the effect may be very different, it might sometimes be a similar story when the scenes are reordered linearly.
However, storyline (or plot) and the characters are inseparable. For a plot to happen, the most effective choice of characters may be something. A kind of character may be most interesting when set in a kind of plot. Irrespective of which takes birth first, they both live together.