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Customer Reviews
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The Pioneering Book on Screenwriting
This review focuses on the latest edition of Syd Field's SCREENPLAY: The Foundations of Screenwriting, published in December 2005.
Syd Field published the book in 1979, the first book ever on the subject. In his memoir, GOING TO THE MOVIES -- A Personal Journey Through Four Decades of Modern Film, published in 2001, he says: "There were three printings within the first six months of publication, and it wasn't long before many of the major college and universities across the land were using it as a text (p 239)."
Introducing his SCREENPLAY book, Syd Field writes, "This not a `how-to' book....I call it a 'what-to' book, meaning if you have an idea for a screenplay, and you don't know what to do or how to do it, I can show you (p 8)." Very well, let's see how he shows what-to do to write a screenplay.
Write down your answers to the following three questions. First: What is your story about? Who is the main character? What is the dramatic situation? ("You've got approximately ten pages of screenplay or approximately ten minutes of screen-time to establish this.") Second: What is your screenplay's ending? Third: What is your screenplay's inciting incident? -- which he defines as the incident "that sets the story in motion; it is the first visual representation of the key incident, what the story is about, and draws the main character into the story line (p 129)."
The major structuring form, Syd Field emphasizes repeatedly, is the classic three-act paradigm: Act I, set-up; Act II, confrontation; Act III, resolution. Assuming 120 pages as the typical length of a screenplay, the three acts take 30, 60, and 30 pages. Next, he introduces the concept of plot points: How do you get from one act to the next? "The answer is to create a Plot Point at the end of both Act I and Act II. A Plot Point is defined as any incident, episode, or event that hooks into the action and spins it around in another direction (p26)." Of course, there are many minor plot points throughout.
Does this paradigm hold for most, if not all, screenplays? Yes, says Syd Field, and establishes it by analyzing the structures of linear screenplays such as CASABLANCA and THELMA & LOUISE as well as nonlinear screenplays such as THE HOURS and THE ENGLISH PATIENT. The book analyzes, in detail, several other screenplays, both classic and contemporary.
In the companion book, THE SCREENWRITER'S WORKBOOK, Syd Field adds three plot points to the basic three-act, two plot-points paradigm. The new plot-points are the midpoint at about page 60 and pinches at about pages 45 and 75 in the standard 120-page screenplay. These concepts of midpoint and pinches certainly enhance the form guidelines presented in the earlier book. A major strength of Syd Field's books is his focusing on form, not on content, which is up to the creative writer. Form, of course, interactively affects content; nonetheless, Field wisely refrains from micromanaging techniques of content generation.
I must say the three Syd Field's books I've read so far could certainly use a consultation with a professional copyeditor, a copyeditor who'd excise his annoyingly repetitive pedagogy. According to social psychologists, repetitive communication is the behavioral tendency in teachers caused by the practice of their profession ("deformation professionelle" carry-over to their communication pattern). Syd Field's penchant for repetition arose from leading numerous lectures and workshops? The three books, totalling over one-thousand pages, could be easily edited into an excellent 450-page book.
-- C J Singh
Rating: -
The Bible
If it didn't restate the same elements over and over I think this book would be about thirty pages long, but that aside it really is a fantastic resource. Something has to be said for those teachers who explain things in such a way that you believe you knew it all along (even though you didn't). I believe this is a must for not only screenwriters, but filmmakers in general. The basics can only make us stronger.
Rating: 
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Hollywood of the 80s
I liked this book. Coupled with Syd Field's Screenwriter's Workbook, I managed to write a first draft of a screenplay. I've never been able to complete a play or screenplay before reading these books! This book gives you the background of screenplays and writing, plus his theory of what makes a good Hollywood screenplay. The workbook gives you a step by step process of writing one.
One drawback is that this book was written in the 80's. Sometimes it sounds so dated. The other drawback is it only explains one type of screenplay, the standard Hollywood 3-act narrative.
Overall, this book was a great help in writing a readable well structured screenplay.
Rating: -
As good as a screenwriters bible
If you are looking for a text on formats, this is not the book.
Fields presents a thinking man's guide to screen writing. He writes in an honest style that presents thoughtful ways to compose a screenplay based on experience and knowledge.
He talks about several concepts making up a screenplay and what and why the elements of it are. He teaches the value of preparation and research prior to putting pencil to paper. The defining and detailed examination of the three act paradigm of a screenplay are defined and re-examined throughout the book, adding up to a good grasp of the concept.
Used as a textbook in my class, it was extremely useful and helpful to us beginning students.
Rating: 
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Mixed Feelings
To sum up my opinion of the book in a short sentence: it's not the most amazing book ever, but I don't regret having read it. The good side of it is that the three act structure and all sound like a good plan to start working on a script. It does help a tonload to be able to cover so much ground in such a short time and with such big lines. I won't deny that. The card system is quite nice too, but you don't need 300 pages to learn that.
The thing that struck me the most was how redundant Field could get. Seriously, there are entire blocks of sentences that you will read over and over again. At first I thought that sounded really bad... I mean, if you're a famous script-writer and all, your writing should reflect that. So I was confused. Then, and I don't know if that saves it or not, I figured that the repetition was perhaps not so bad, since it kept hammering the same basic things in your mind, and since that helps to remember. It's a bit like a class, I guess.
I'm not saying that Field can't write, however, I think he merely opted for a personal style, oral if you want, and I don't think it's any fair to criticise too much on this aspect as other critics did. He's not writing a novel, he's writing about screenplay and he's talking to you.
I didn't buy this because I wanted to write a movie, I was curious about the script as a form of writing. Now I feel secure enough to consider writing a whole movie even though I never intended to, and that's pretty cool, I have to admit.
On the flip side, I have my doubts about Syd Field. Now, maybe I'm a dumb person, but I wasn't able to find a single movie written by him. And he doesn't mention any of his own scripts! He mentions those of others, oh yes, that he does, but I can't recall him mentioning one of his own personal scripts. (My bad and apologies if he did and I didn't see or forgot.)
Syd Field hated "Pulp Fiction" when he first saw it. That's bad. I mean, if you can't see right off that "Pulp Fiction" is a great movie, moreover, as a specialist of films, then I worry. I saw it years ago when I was a teen and it struck me as special even though I was no film specialist. So I don't know. It seems that Field eventually liked it when he was able to put it in his 3 act structure, by dividing the stories as units onto themselves. Fine, but do you need that to enjoy a movie or think it's great? No. In fact, if you are rendered unable to enjoy a movie because of that, then it majorly worries me.
As to the 3-act theory itself, I think it's a great tool to use for structure and for the writing of a movie, but I wouldn't base everything on it more than that. See, I think anything has a beginning, middle, and end, and that you can find those 3 things anywhere. It's too vague to be really meaningful, although it can be useful. I see it as something like construction lines in drawing: you use them, but then you erase them. And I think that's also how Field sees it; he doesn't think of his "paradigm" as impossibly rigid.
Other thing that worried me about Field is that he claims to write biographies for his characters that encompass their parents, grandparents, and, yes, past lives. Alright, that can always give you cool ideas that you'd not think of if it hadn't been for the character's past life as a fisherman in Antarctica, but that sounds far-fetched.
There are other things in Field's style that antagonised me from the beginning. Cliché zen analogies and such didn't do much to make like the text, and repeating the same things without backing them up doesn't convince more.
Also, and maybe I'm dumb, but I would have started the book with the form of script-writing. That's the first thing you look at when you consider writing a script! That's what I bought the book for, originally. Very little of the book is consecrated to that, and it's among the final chapters.
So what's the result of my reading this book? Well, I feel like I could start working on an actual movie script right now, and that alone isn't so bad, but I don't know that another book couldn't have done the same. The read itself wasn't too bad, although the redundancy can get seriously annoying. I also felt like the chapters weren't properly delimited, like you'd talk of a topic in this chapter and 4 chapters further, you find yourself reading about the same thing again.
I would recommend that to anyone who's interesting in scrip-writing, but be careful. It does give you a good basis for working up the spine of a script, and that's what the book was written for, so even though I gave it only 3 stars, I'd still recommend it (for lack of a better, since I never read anything else on script-writing).
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