Is Your Story a Play or a Screenplay? By Paul Peditto Read Paul's ScriptMag column Classes by Paul Peditto at Screenwriters University

So you’ve got an idea for a story, but you can’t decide: Is it a play, or a screenplay? Not trying to sound like I live in The Matrix, but… maybe the idea is both, or neither. You’ve got to write it and find out. But which discipline to pick—screenplay or stage play?

Let’s work out a checklist of questions you can ask yourself. Answer these honestly. It might help you figure out this conundrum.

First, we should realize that the play vs. screenplay debate isn’t just about the material. It’s also about you as writer, your strengths and weaknesses, finding your natural set of gifts and playing to them.

One of the core differences between writing plays and screenplays, something that dogs works of art even at the highest levels of achievement, is this: How does one, on film, recreate the intimacy of the theatrical experience, while expanding out the cinematic experience expected by a movie audience? It’s a Catch-22, a Jumbo shrimp of the arty kind.

Plays are about the alchemy of words. Movies are the juxtaposition of images for emotional impact. As a playwright, I’ve felt this uneasy transition myself. Jane Doe, a film I made with Calista Flockhart, was based on my play. To be fair, one reason Jane Doe went into the toilet was my insistence on using the same Voice Over that appeared in the play. This forced additional scenes to be shot when they weren’t necessary. More often than not, we wouldn’t “make our day”—meaning we couldn’t shoot all the scenes required. Meaning scenes were cut for no reason other than we didn’t have time/money to shoot them. Meaning that the story no longer made sense. Meaning rewriting under the gun because, without scene B, you have to build a bridge from scene A to C for the story to make sense. And you have to do it in 17 minutes with a crew of 15 people standing around waiting for you because time, time, time is money! And all of these are considerations which bear no resemblance to the reality of the playwright!

The Mamet stories I heard coming out of Chicago, as a playwright living there myself, were legendary. One story recounted in Richard Christenson’s loving portrait of Chicago Theater, A Theater Of Our Own, has Mamet walking into The Goodman Theater and handing off American Buffalo to Gregory Mosher, “promising in a bit of vainglory that he would put five-thousand dollars in escrow as a guarantee that the play would win the Pulitzer Prize.” And while it wasn’t until Glengarry Glen Ross in 1984 that Mamet earned his Pulitzer, American Buffalo opened on Broadway in February of 1976 to a Frank Rich review calling it, “one of the best American plays of the last decade.” So, why did it make for a mediocre movie—especially when it had young Dustin Hoffman playing the lead role? Roger Ebert, in his review, put his finger on the cause: “It is a cliche, but true, that some plays have their real life on the stage. 'American Buffalo' is a play like that – or, at least, it is not a play that finds its life in this movie… On the stage, they are trapped in their space and time. In this film (although the action has been opened up only minimally), they seem less confined.” That’s it, exactly. On the stage they are trapped in space and time. When you open things up — which you inevitably do for a film — you lose that. This is the Bermuda Triangle for playwrights: How do you take the verbal nature of theater and transmute pure language to the language of imagery that is required for a film? A movie theater audience is an entirely different animal. They aren’t paying to see a play on film. The play must be re-imagined for the new medium. Glengarry Glen Ross faced the same difficulties, but with more success. In the play you’ve got four scenes: 1. Chinese restaurant 2. Chinese restaurant (later) 3. Restaurant (later) 4. Real estate office. Total of two locations. Now think about the movie. Sure, we keep the Chinese restaurant. The real- estate office, too. But we’ve also got scenes with Jack Lemmon in a driving rainstorm at a telephone booth. We got Lemmon and Spacey on the street in the same rain, Lemmon trying to bribe him. There’s a full scene inside a customer’s home, Lemmon trying to sell the customer. It’s a movie, we have to see that! Then we’ve got full scenes at the bar with Arkin learning of the theft plans of Ed Harris, being drawn in to the conspiracy. More recently Tracy Letts’ August, Osage County went from stage to screen, “expanding out” as most play-to-screenplays do: Characters once restricted to the stage now running through an Oklahoma field. But it also monkeyed around with the on stage chemistry. You take out the original cast of the Steppenwolf production who had built up chemistry performing the show hundreds of times, and replace them with a bevy of stars who come in for a week or two, lay it down for film, and leave. Sure, putting Meryl Streep in the lead role helps. She’s always a lock for the Oscar nomination. But you might lose the essence of what made the play great — the not knowing what will happen on stage, live, every night. The electricity of being different nightly, vs. the single performance you end up with for the film is also a major difference.

OK, without further ado, here’s the checklist. This isn’t a be-all or end-all. If your strength is writing dialogue, sure, that’s important for writing a screenplay. But it’s essential for the playwright. And sure, there are Broadway stage plays with 20 lead and secondary characters and a cast of a hundred extras. But those numbers are found much more often in a movie. First the question, then which discipline the idea is possibly better suited: • Is your story primarily told in dialogue? Play. • Is the story primarily told in images? Screenplay • Is your strength writing dialogue? Play • Does your mind see things more in terms of images? Screenplay • Do we need to actually be in Macau, China, or on the surface of the moon, or sailing on The Titanic, for an audience to believe the story? Screenplay. • Will the story be believable with simple suspension of disbelief? Can we merely indicate a location? Play. • Do you need a dozen locations or more to tell the story? Screenplay. • Is the story centralized, with minimum locations? Play • Do you need 20 lead and secondary characters and a cast of hundreds? Screenplay • Is your story told with minimal cast and extras? Play • Are you structuring the story more toward one or two acts? Play • Are you structuring it more toward three acts? Screenplay • Are you writing 10-page dialogue scenes? Play • Are you writing half-page or single-page scenes primarily based in images with little or no dialogue? Screenplay • Will you need 10 or fewer scenes to finish the story? Play • Will you need 100 scenes to finish the story? Screenplay. • Are you planning extensive monologues? Play. • Are you excited by the idea of having the story come alive nightly with live actors before a live audience? Play. • Are you comfortable giving up control of the story once it’s written to a collaborative team that might radically change the look or message of the material? If not: Play. Again, the choice between screenplay and stage play is as much about you the writer as it is about the story itself. Playwright and screenwriter… two very different skill sets required. The concept of screenwriting is foreign to playwrights because the process is so different.

Yes, you’ll be asked to rewrite your play, but as The Playwright you are waaaay up there on the priority pyramid. If they come at you for script changes in theater, they might come in a conciliatory fashion: “Excuse me, Mister Esteemed Playwright, can we discuss page 88, possibly changing the and to but?”

A bit further down the priority pyramid squats the screenwriter. Volumes have been dedicated to the atrocious treatment of this delicate “work-for-hire” creature. There is no question about relinquishing control (unless, of course, it’s micro-budget, and the writer likely raised the money and has slash director/producer beside his name). Each case is different but what is essential stays the same: Know thyself. Know your material. Playwriting 101: Everything You Need to Know to Write a Play

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