A Study in Visual Story Telling: Rear Window

Gone with the Wind, The Godfather, On the Waterfront, The Wizard of Oz and Casablanca: What do they all have in common? They're the top 5 films on AFI's 100 Years...100 Movie Quotes list. Alfred Hictchock, however, has but one film on this list: Psycho, and it's not even in the top 50. Let's be honest, though. The quote, "A boy's best friend is his mother," is not the most memorable moment of the film.

No, with Hitchcock, the moments that we just can't shake are always visual, like Cary Grant being chased down in the middle of field by a rogue crop duster, or Janet Leigh being stabbed over and over again while in the shower, or a convalesced Jimmy Stewart spying on his neighbors with a telephoto lens.

And it makes sense. Hitchcock got his start in silent pictures. Dialogue in many of his films, especially Rear Window, often served the simple purpose of conveying to the audience what pictures alone could not. The screenplay for Rear Window, written by John Michael Hayes, is such a slave to this notion, that the first 4 pages have no dialogue whatsoever. And it is these first 4 pages that we will be focusing on because, without a single scrap of dialogue, Hitchcock and Hayes are able to convey theme, tone, and character.

Balancing Acts: Character Introductions in Children of Men

A masterful character introduction is one of the screenwriter’s most valuable tools.  Characters are the writer’s link to his audience, so their introductions must be vivid.  These introductions, also called character description, must create a mental picture of the character for the reader by detailing physical characteristics; however, the screenwriter must also give the reader some notion of the character’s internal emotional identity.  And he must do so with just a few lines of description.  In their script Children of Men, screenwriters Alfonso Cuaron and Timothy J. Sexton beautifully illustrate the balancing act that is character description because each introduction of a major character offers details of physicality and psychology using a mixture of language that is both abstract and concrete.