A look at what's right (and what's wrong) with today's screenplays

Near the end of The Counterfeit Traitor there’s a beautiful scene in which William Holden’s Allied spy and a couple members of the Danish resistance who are helping smuggle him back to the neutral country of Sweden are spotted by a group of Nazis and have to flee through the streets of Copenhagen. The Nazis pile into trucks and take off after them, and it looks like all is lost until a flash mob of ordinary Danish citizens on bicycles forms and blocks the Nazis’ way, allowing Holden and his compatriots to escape. What’s beautiful about the scene, though, isn’t the idea of the flash mob, the tension of civil disobedience under Nazi rule, or even anything about the way the scene is shot; it’s actually the sound design. At first there are just a few bicycle bells ringing in the background, an almost unnoticeable part of the acoustic environment. Our attention, after all, is on William Holden and the developing situation with the Nazis, not on the extras riding their bikes around behind them. But then, before we even fully realize what’s going to happen, more and more Danes ring their bells and converge until suddenly the noise is overwhelming and suspense has reached almost unbearable levels.

The bells are so effective for two reasons. They form an unusual counterpoint to what is otherwise a pretty standard chase-and-escape scene, transforming it into something different and memorable. And they heighten the emotional stakes of the scene by bringing home just how defenseless everyone is against the Nazis and their guns — all they have to fight with are bicycle bells, for god’s sake!

Most people would probably think of this scene as an example of great directing, but to me, it’s great writing. I haven’t read the screenplay, but I’m willing to bet that the swelling symphony of bicycle bells was right there on the page. This actually happens pretty often; the all-time greatest example may be the magnificent and justly-famous transition in Lawrence of Arabia from Lawrence blowing out a match to an angry red sun low in the desert sky. That too was on the page. Robert Bolt wrote it; David Lean just filmed it. So while we as screenwriters are rightly warned not to “direct on paper” in the sense of a lot of almost unreadable jargon along the lines of “TELEPHOTO SHOT OF X” and “CAMERA PANS LEFT TO REVEAL Y” and “So-and-so crosses CAMERA-RIGHT in front of Z,” we should remember that there’s another kind of “directing on paper” that’s actually one of the highest and most effective forms of writing there is. It’s unobtrusive, but it’s what real writing for the screen is all about.