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How to write screenplays using Vladimir Yakovlevich Propp approach. PRACTICAL GUIDE
PRACTICAL GUIDE
Maxim Bukhteev
Illustrator ArtFanat
Translator Ksenia Sterlenko
© Maxim Bukhteev, 2020
© ArtFanat, illustrations, 2020
© Ksenia Sterlenko, translation, 2020
ISBN 978-5-4498-1447-0
Created with Ridero smart publishing system
Introduction
Who is Vladimir Yakovlevich Propp, quoted by many foreign screenplay manuals? Why had his work become so popular among screenwriters, that in the professional community people even started talking about overusing of this approach?
Indeed, many other scholars were engaged in folk art, and they have also noticed that many elements in fairy tales repeat themselves constantly. Attempts to somehow describe and systematize these recurrences to create a lean fairy tale structure, have been made repeatedly. However, it was only Propp who has managed to create a methodology flexible and versatile enough, which allowed it to be applied to other formats as well. By the way, this has happened already against the author’s will, as he had deliberately limited his research solemnly by fairy tales, being afraid of losing some in scientific accuracy.
So, right from the start I would like to focus your attention on the fact that the Russian philologist, folklorist, Leningrad University professor has never written anything about movies. On the one hand, this is a very bad start for the “how to write a screenplay” book. But on the other hand, Joseph Campbell, the worldwide famous American mythology explorer, has not written anything about screenplays either. However, his works are in every serious Hollywood screenwriter’s library.
How did that happen?
A motion picture is a young art comparing to painting, literature and poetry, and it didn’t have a solid theoretical basis from the beginning. While a motion picture was just an attraction, this basis wasn’t really required. The first directors were just filming crowd on a street. And it was enough for a box-office success. Everything was done by one single person and a separate screenwriter profession did not exist at all.
Sure enough, a viewer got bored of watching the screen, as through the window to the street, pretty fast, and authors started making up new tricks. They were moving a camera and went to different places with it. Then circus actors came into movies – clowns, acrobats and bearded women. Then gradually camera started filming actors and acting out simple scenes as in a theatre.
And when a motion picture became more complicated, it got clear that viewers like good stories a lot more than they like tricks and simple special effects. They started to take a backseat and that’s how a screenwriting was born.
But a weak foundation cannot hold a big and complicated construction. Writers came to the movies aid. For some time, film adaptation of books worked pretty well, but all the more movies were filmed. They were becoming more and more complex and a viewer was getting choosier. It was not easy to surprise him, and the literary material was ending.
Gradually a motion picture has become an independent art, but for quite a long time the screenwriting theory was limited with just general words. Every author could hope only for his own hunch, experience and talent. This continued until George Lucas had filmed his famous Star Wars. Film release was like an explosion. It has created a new motion picture and its own mythology. As an indirect process of this phenomenon, there was a surge of interest in common mythology. Although Lucas wrote the first movie in the old way, by touch, after its tremendous success the director has found out with surprise that he had been walking the same way as authors of ancient myths had.
There was nothing surprising about it. Firstly, viewers story perception has its laws, common to all humanity. Secondly, George Lucas himself studied these laws at Modesto Junior College, where he was taught anthropology, sociology and literature.