A New Paradigm In Screenplay Structure by CSUN Professor Eric Edson

FilmCourage.com
Jul 27, 2017 · 4 min read
Watch the video interview on Youtube here

A New Paradigm In Screenplay Structure by Eric Edson

Film Courage: Eric in your book The Story Solution you claim that you’ve come up with a completely new paradigm for writing screenplays and novels and we’re curious what this is?

Eric Edson: Just a quick word on how it came about. Because I know it’s pretty outrageous for a lot of people to be claiming that “What new under the sun could there simply be and all?”

Watch the video interview on Youtube here

For a long time (for years) before I became a professor here [at CSUN] while I was still a full-time screenwriter, I was teaching at UCLA extension Writer’s Program. Largest such writing program in the world and it’s really great! Really great people teach there. And it was a really great way to get out of the house one night a week (out of my room, out of my office). And I was working with really bright and talented in various and sundry ways. Great characters, warm, three-dimensional, super dialogue that kind of crackles and pops. But when they finally turned in their final project at the end of the quarter (they are on the quarter system there), they just laid there. They were flat. Thus the story wasn’t happening or going anywhere. They would have three or four events and then try to stretch that out over 110 pages or however long a screenplay would be.

I gave them the books. We read the books. We went over it in the structure, the classic structure and Joseph Campbell and all of that. And yet when they sat down to write it, some how it didn’t gel into a concept or command of screen story structure. And screenwriting is screen story structure more than it is anything else.

So I went looking (as people do) for patterns. There had to be a way to teach story construction not to the exclusion of all else but focus on only finding an objectified way to teach story construction (this is how you build a house board one), you know that kind of stuff. And hundreds and hundreds of films…and yes…I began to see a pattern that I hadn’t heard anybody talk about before or mention before or hadn’t read about it before. And I kind of codified it and put it as a paradigm and cleaned up the questions that it raised and I kept looking. And I became more and more convinced and then I set out to prove myself wrong. I mean this I thought was a real important step. So I went back searching through movies that had been hit movies, that had emotionally affected audiences all over the world from pretty far back. I went as far back as 1929 with Buster Keaton (THE GENERAL) I don’t know if you ever saw it? It was one of his last (if not last silent) films. It is something of a masterpiece of a the silent era. Same thing, the same beats, the same moments, the same sequences (Watch the video here on Youtube).

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About Professor Eric Edson:

Eric Edson has written seventeen feature screenplays on assignment. His produced script credits include PASSION’S WEB for Showtime, and he co-wrote and co-executive produced the NBC Movie of the Week LETHAL VOWS starring John Ritter and Marg Helgenberger. Other films include THE ROSE AND THE JACKAL starring Christopher Reeve, THE SOGGY BOTTOM GANG starring Don Johnson, and DIVING IN starring Kristy Swanson. Eric has also written for episodic television.

Professor Edson’s new book “THE STORY SOLUTION: 23 Actions All Great Heroes Must Take,” published by Michael Wiese Productions, uncovers for the first time the 23 Hero Goal Sequences® used in every successful motion picture to create dynamic, three dimensional heroes and link together all plot development from first page to last (Read more here).

Watch the video on Youtube here

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