And the Best Screenplay Goes to...Learning from the Winners - Sideways, Shakespeare in Love, Crash by Linda Seger

by Linda Seger

This book provides a CSI (Crime Scene Investigation) approach to Academy Award-winning screenplays, giving you the nitty gritty details of how an Academy Award script was created.

Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 2008

About the author

Dr. Linda Seger has a Th.D. in Drama and Theology, and created her script consulting business based on her dissertation project about the elements needed to make a script work. She explored the integration of Drama and Spirituality during her five years in seminary. She holds three M.A. degrees: Drama from Northwestern University, Religion and the Arts from Pacific School of Religion, and Feminist Theology from Immaculate Heart College Center.
She has a broad religious background. She grew up Lutheran and did several years of spiritual seeking in her 20s. She became a Born-Again Christian and then joined the Quakers (Society of Friends) and is a member of The Colorado Springs Friends Meeting. Throughout the years, she has meditated at a Zen Buddhist center, attended New Age conferences, has done the spiritual exercises of Saint Ignacious, and has read and taken classes in the religions of the world.
Dr. Seger's thoughts about how spirituality influences her work:

“Many readers are surprised and even confused when they see I’m the most prolific writer in the area of screenwriting, an international screenwriting consultant and a screenwriting teacher. Yet, I also do theology/spiritual books. Some of this comes from having an M.A. In Drama, 2 M.A.s in theology and a ThD in Theology and Drama. They seem to be separate, but they are actually integrated.

Drama shines a light on the human condition. It explores the conflicts, struggles, doubts, uncertainties, and possibilities for transformation and redemption. Even secular drama deals with hope and goodness and the struggle for authenticity and love.

When I consult on scripts, I am trying to help the writer reach deeper into the truth about who we are as humans and what are our possibilities. When I write books on spirituality, I am doing the same thing – digging deeply into our experiences and struggles, and then shining the light of Scripture and theology on making some sense out of what we see and feel. I am trying to get at The Truth and to dig deep into our experiences. So, I never look for easy answers, and I don’t try to pigeonhole either our stories or our spirituality.”

Reviews

[Benedict Reid]

Subtitled “learning from the winners”, this is a detailed analysis of three Oscar winning screenplays, “Sideways”, “Shakespeare in Love” and “Crash”. Each section begins with a long essay by Seger of what particular elements she feels made the given script outstanding… starting with themes, then character and finally examples of dialogue. This is followed by an interview with the writers about the development process with an emphasis on how they came to make key choices around the script’s unique style. Finally there is an extensive beat sheet for each film.

In each of her essays, Seger’s thinking appears to be that these Oscar winning scripts are so good that the advice she gives in “Making a good script great” no longer applies. While she does criticise one of the choices the writers made in “Sideways” (the scene where Miles steals money from his mother), in general the assumption is that these scripts are perfect.

Not surprisingly, the section I found the most interesting was about the film I enjoyed the most. However to be honest I’m not sure how useful it was to my writing to go over in detail all the great things there were in this film’s script. Where I did find this book useful was when I disagreed with it. Being told that a film you didn’t particularly enjoy is perfect in every way really does help you clarify exactly what aspects of the script didn’t work for you. And I found this to be a great learning experience. I now know exactly what structural techniques I never want to use in my own writing.

In the epilogue Seger explains her hope that “as a result of reading this book” the reader “will be able to apply these ideas to the analysis of any great script”. This made a lot of sense to me. If you were to use Seger’s analysis as a model for your own research into other great films, you undoubtedly would have a much deeper understanding of the intricacies involved in making a great script.