The Right Connections

Last bog, I was talking about building a story around three characters.  If successful screenplays have this principle in common, why aren’t they simple to write?  Why can’t a writer just dream up three characters and create a lot of events that involve them?

The answer is that, if a writer studies the structure of screenplays, he or she will eventually discover that in order to make a screen story work, it’s necessary for the writer to “connect” the three major characters in a way that will produce the best dramatic impact on a movie audience.

Obviously before that happens the writer has to have some inkling of who the three characters are, and what their role will be in the story.

In my own study of screenplays, I was highly interested in which three characters had the greatest amount of screen time.  What did I discover?  Well, nothing earth-shaking, but I found that the allocation of pages to characters was extremely consistent across all the genres except two (which I’ll deal with in a later blog).Inevitably, the greatest amount of screen pages (and therefore screen time) was allocated to the main character, whether you prefer to call that character a Hero, a Protagonist, or something else.  I like “Hero” for its brevity and familiarity.

The runner-up in pages (surprisingly to me at the time) was not the “Villain,” but a character that is dominant in movies.  I dubbed this character “the Bonding Character,” mainly because he or she typically develops a strong bond with the Hero.  Other writers have named it the “Impact Character,” not a bad monicker, since this second-most-important character has a great impact, both on the story and on the Hero.

Matt Damon (the Hero) and Franke Potente (the Bonding Character) “bond” in The Bourne Identity.

In third place is the Villain, even though the evil characteristics and threat of the Villain often makes him or her seem to be more important than the Bonding Character.


[Next blog]  The Mystique of Characters