LOUISE
I hope you’re packed, little sister, ‘cause we are
outta here tonight.
INT. THELMA’S KITCHEN—MORNING
THELMA
(whispering guiltily)
Well, wait now. I still have to ask Darryl if I can go.
LOUISE (V.O.)
You mean you haven’t asked him yet? For Christ’s sake,
Thelma, is he your husband or your father? It’s just two
days. For God’s sake, Thelma. Don’t be a child. Just tell
him you’re goin’ with me, for cryin’ out loud. Tell him
I’m having a nervous breakdown.
Meanwhile, Thelma is cutting out coupons from a newspaper, pinning
them onto a bulletin board covered with recipes and more cuttings. Here we
get a first glimpse of Thelma’s characteristic mode of passive resistance: she
may feel a little guilty about procrastinating, but she’ll still do things her
own way. At this point, and for most of the script, the two women’s rela-
tionship is that of irresponsible little sister and responsible big sister. The
tension between them ebbs and flows, and the balance of power shifts with
changing circumstances. It is one of the more suspenseful and engaging
aspects of a very action-oriented script.
As for Louise, the tone of her speech makes it clear that she has more at stake
in their going on this trip than her friend does. Her clipped sentences, used here
to get the lackadaisical Thelma moving, are used elsewhere, and characteristi-
cally, to guard against giving anything away about her private life.
MORE ON BEHAVIOR DEFINING CHARACTER
In his treatise known as the Poetics, Aristotle defines dramatic action as “the
movement of spirit or psyche that produces a character’s behavior.” Film and
theatre director Elia Kazan, in his notebook for A Streetcar Named Desire,
remarks that “finally directing consists of turning psychology into behavior.”

linen suit, and his special lighter. He is alert to his distraught client’s every
move, because Curly is very large and very upset, a dangerous combination
in a nicely furnished new office.
The next lines describe the sobbing Curly, who rams his fist into the wall
and kicks a wastebasket. The scene goes on:
Curly slides on into the blinds and sinks to his knees. He
is weeping heavily now, and is in such pain that he
actually bites into the blinds.
Gittes doesn’t move from his chair.
GITTES
All right, enough is enough—you can’t eat the
Venetian blinds, Curly. I just had ‘em installed on
Wednesday.
40 Writing the Short Film
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Curly responds slowly, rising to his feet, crying. Gittes
reaches into his desk and pulls out a shot glass, quickly
selects a cheaper bottle of bourbon from several fifths of
more expensive whiskeys.
Gittes pours a large shot. He shoves the glass across the
desk toward Curly.
Curly is not just comic relief in the film but a secondary character who
plays an important role in the last third of Chinatown. The emotionalism and
lack of guile we see here and in the rest of this first scene make him an ideal
target for Gittes’ manipulation later, when the detective desperately needs
help in arranging a getaway.
Most fiction films, comedy as well as drama, tend to portray a particular
character (or characters) in a challenging situation: something unexpected
happens to someone—how does that person react? Does he or she struggle
to change or, instead, try to turn away from what has happened, to find a

the dining room, which is bare of furniture Miss Peach is
conservatively dressed in a drab woolen coat and unassum-
ing hat.
5
Beyond the somewhat detached description of Miss Peach and the sigh,
the box marked “auction” and the bare dining room set a feeling-tone that
expresses in visual terms something about her inner state. In a metaphorical
sense, the screenplay is about how that empty inner space becomes fur-
nished. Note the different style of the language Taylor uses to describe his
antagonist on her first appearance. Miss Peach is alone in the elevator of a
Manhattan high-rise:
INT. The elevator continues to rise, 25 . . . 26 . . . 27 . . . 28,
and PING, it comes to a stop. Miss Peach is jolted from her
daydream as the doors open, and there stands SCARLET, a
stunning and heavily made-up black woman. She boasts
a pair of sunglasses, a large wig, a fancy theatrical dress,
and a large leather zippered bag. She rushes in, ignoring
Miss Peach, and presses the lobby button.
Very shortly, battle is joined between these two unlikely combatants. It is
important that we have been given Miss Peach isolated in the elevator before
Scarlet bursts in, because we then identify with her in her shock, rather than
with the newcomer. Also, a small but telling word in the description of
Scarlet’s big bag is “leather”—she may be dressed flamboyantly, but not
cheaply.
Another example comes from the opening of Lisa Wood Shapiro’s Another
Story. Two little girls, perhaps the protagonists, are at the window of a coun-
try cottage, gazing out at the rain:
INT. Through the doorway into the small kitchen is NIVY.
She is a handsome woman in her late sixties/early seven-
ties. She is stylishly dressed, with intricate silver earrings.

accommodate the very different writing styles of Towne, Khouri, Shapiro,
Taylor, and Kusama.
WHEN APPEARANCES ARE DECEPTIVE
In one of his aphorisms, Oscar Wilde, the Irish playwright and dandy, turned
a general belief upside down by suggesting, “It is only shallow people who
do not judge by appearances.” We laugh at this deft reversal of what is
commonly held to be true, and we may even agree that it makes a kind of
topsy-turvy sense. However, if you reflect upon it, the witticism also makes
straightforward sense: in life, people unconsciously give themselves away
all the time. What is revealed to the acute observer may seem very much at
odds with what one first notices, with what the sociologist Ervin Goffman
has called their “presentation of self.” That brings us full circle, back to the
Wilde quotation.
You can understand, therefore, that the first step in learning to develop
characters for a screenplay, long or short, is focused observation of the ways
in which particular human beings behave in particular situations. The great
Russian acting teacher/director Konstantin Stanislavski has said that art is
never general, it is always specific. Although he was addressing actors, he
might as well have been speaking to directors and scriptwriters.
Discovering and Exploring a Main Character 43
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As you go about your day, try to take note of any incongruous details of
people’s clothing: the handsome silk blouse with a button missing, the well-
tailored business suit worn with scuffed shoes, the street person with a
jaunty hat, the workman in ironed blue jeans. (Remember the man-sized
briefcase toted by the small boy in The Red Balloon: while it doesn’t tell us
about his character, it certainly informs us about his situation.) On the other
hand, if the character’s appearance is “perfect,” as is Louise’s in the excerpt
above from Thelma and Louise, that too is useful information.
Notice the many different ways in which human beings express weari-

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identify with him or her. Such an introduction is often, though not always,
quite brief. (The first assignment at the end of Chapter 1 gave two examples
of brief “treatments,” up to and including possible catalysts.)
Something unexpected happens to someone—how does that person react?
Does he struggle to change the way he does things, or does he instead turn
away from what has happened, trying to get back to the way things had
been? Does he do first one and then the other? How does any or all of this
psychological activity manifest itself in the character’s behavior, so that the
audience has some idea of what is going on?
SEVENTH ASSIGNMENT
Read Dead Letters Don’t Lie, in Appendix B.
8
Then look over all four scripts
again; in each of them, try to locate the catalyst that sets things moving in a
new direction for the main character or characters. In order to do this, you
must first try to determine which of the characters is the protagonist. (Short
films often begin and end with a focus on the protagonist.)
EXERCISE 8: A SIMPLE INTERACTION
Take out your lists from Exercise 7. Without too much thought, choose one
of your locations and visualize both characters in it. Begin to write, starting
with brief character descriptions culled from the underlined items on your
lists, using simple declarative sentences. This should not take more than sev-
eral minutes. Then give us the setting, in a few words (a Greenwich Village
café, a drive-through McDonald’s, the Chicago Amtrak station, etc.).
Although triggered by your observations of real people in a real setting, what
you are going to write will be fictional. You will be transforming the people you
observed into characters—your characters—so feel free to adjust the descriptions
as you go. Set your timer for 2 minutes and close your eyes, so that you can
imagine both characters in the setting you have chosen, placing them in relation