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lunarchick - 10:05am Aug 23, 2001 EST (#8041 of 8047)
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Shift into mainstream:Aronson

By ADRIAN MARTIN Friday 30 March 2001

The world is full of ``how to write a screenplay'' manuals. They have titles such as Making a Good Script Great, Writing Great Screenplays, The Writer's Journey and How to Write a Selling Screenplay.

Most of these guides come from the United States. This tends to mean that they are focused on mainstream industry successes (the plots of Witness, Chinatown, Casablanca and Star Wars are analysed over and over), and that they preach the need for ``strong'' narratives with a ``central conflict'' and an unambiguous hero.

Australia has recently made its way into the screenwriting advice industry, firstly with Jonathan Dawson's Screenwriting: A Manual and now Linda Aronson's Scriptwriting Updated: New and Conventional Ways of Writing for the Screen.

Aronson is in Melbourne this weekend to lead a course at RMIT and to give a lecture at Open Channel. Her book has met with international success - and has even received the nod from such script manual gurus as Linda Seger and Christopher Vogler. This may be partly because she shows an awareness of traditions beyond Hollywood, such as Australian and British cinema.

``I think the American passion with one hero travelling a journey of redemption is historical,'' says Aronson. ``The great literary icon of their culture is Pilgrim's Progress: man in charge of destiny; man changing to become better,'' she says. ``It's exactly what their notion of a film hero conforms to. In Europe and Asia, fate and a perceived lack of personal control is the norm. Australia comes between the two - we love the Pyrrhic victory''.

The most striking and novel aspect of Aronson's book, however, is her attempt to bridge the gap between oldfashioned principles of screen storytelling and the newer forms that have emerged in films such as Pulp Fiction and Run Lola Run.

``I feel that film structure is rapidly changing, and we should embrace that process of change - indeed, work to take it further.''

At stake is the classical threeact structure, which most screenwriting manuals claim to be the one, true foundation of all good films. It is easy to claim that a story has a beginning (a situation which is disturbed), a middle (consequences of that disturbance) and an end (resolution of the disturbance) if it proceeds in a linear fashion and is played out between a hero and a villain.

But what, Aronson asks, of films with elaborate flashback structures, such as The Sweet Hereafter? What about parallel narratives, such as Sliding Doors? Films with many characters, such as American Beauty?

Although Aronson doesn't say so, many such films mark the long delayed effect of the radical arthouse movements of the 1960s and '70s (such as the French New Wave) upon popular cinema.

Paul Thompson's foreword pitches Aronson's book to a ``new wave of screenwriters'' because it ``covers the great divide between the exception and the rule'' in contemporary screenwriting practices. There is an intriguing paradox at the heart of Aronson's method. ``My research has revealed that even the mos

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