Screenwriting: The Sequence Approach

If you're confused about your own screenwriting and are wondering where you're going wrong or just starting out BUY THIS BOOK. If a little light doesn't go off in your head after doing so, put down your pen or keyboard and go and find another way to express yourself because if you don't get this, you'll be wasting your time and the time of countless production company readers.

Gulino's book is one of the best screenwriting handbooks I've ever read. It's simple, clear and concise, providing a powerful tool that can help a screenwriter to engage an audience. The first chapter introduces the sequence concept and shows the four fundamental techniques used to capture the audience attention. In the following chapters the author uses the aforesaid tools to analyze eleven movies, covering six decades and various genres, and showing the effectiveness of the sequence method. Once you have learned the method, it's quite simple to apply a similar analysis on whichever movie you want.

As a screenwriter myself, I'm familiar with the traditional three-acts paradigm and the various writing techniques. In Gulino's book I found the anwers to three major questions I had about screenwriting:

- I noticed that all my favourites directors have the ability to create long, beautiful and well-structured scenes, or sequence of scenes sharing at least one unit of time, place, action. Classical directors like Kubrick, Hitchcock, Lean, Kurosawa and Leone all had these ability, so as Scorsese, Spielberg, Cameron and Tarantino. The sequence approach confirms this intuition and shows that it all happens in a more general way, that is dividing the whole screenplay in blocks that, just like short movies, have their own acts, protagonist and dramatic tension.

- Another classical feature is the ability to enrich and deepen the narration by shifting the thematic point of view from the protagonist to another character. Gulino's book shows that it's easily achieved building some of the movie's sequences around a character other than the protagonist. For example, in "Lawrence of Arabia" fourteen of the sixteen sequences are built around Lawrence, that is the movie's protagonist, showing us its dramatic needs, hopes and fears about the Arab cause. One of the remaining sequences is built around General Allenby and its efforts to persuade Lawrence to go back into the desert, so stating its strategical and military importance. In a further sequence the reporter Bentley serves as the protagonist, expressing the importance of Lawrence as a romantic figure and revealing the reporter's cynical point of view.

- The three-acts structure, and its further developments in Syd Field's work, is a paradigm independent of movie's length. Nonetheless, because of the way it has been developed, Field's theory seems to fit better in a canonical one-hundred-and-twenty pages screenplay, that is a two-hour movie. What about a two-and-a-half- or three-hour movie? Gulino shows that while the three acts are stretched to respect their canonical proportions, the sequences always retain a ten- to fifteen-minutes duration. This obviously means that a three-hour movie contains more sequences than a two-hour, proportionally distributed among the three acts, allowing the screenwriter to create a richer narration and explore more characters' points of view. With an exceptional length of three hours and thirty minutes, "Lawrence of Arabia" stretches the three acts respectively at fifty, one-hundred-and-twenty and forty-minutes, but the sequences are sixteen, that is twice the number of sequences contained in a one-and-a-half to two-hour movie.

In conclusion, I recommend this excellent book to anyone who is interested in movies & screenwriting.