To me, Chris Dzialo is explaining something that we will try and find the balance of within our exploration of screenwriting. At this current time in our studio we are developing our ideas around how to write concise sentences but sentences that are useful (obviously) which I’ll elaborate on later. “Screen plays should be experienced,” is a great way of describing how the reader should react to a Screenplay. Maybe that’s what I think by it being “experienced,” but the quote just seems to be elaborating what a novel or book does, and relays it in terms of cinema. When you read a book, you are taking to a place where you can think of the world in your own terms, you create a setting. In a screenplay, whilst some things are and should be left a bit up in the air, the prompts form a slug line, or previous character development can lead to an added picture of what the screenwriter has written.
The quote also serves as a guide to writing a screenplay. If you are too rigid with your formulas it will take away from the reader able to read it as a visually prompted novel. With added information of a slug line and you are able to set a more specific scene by scene narrative for the reader, whereas you are able to create a visual and control where the readers view of the scene is coming from. This is the “form” of cinema itself I believe Chris is referring to. The view of your writing should be what is seen by the lens of the camera or at least the gist of where it is coming from, or to put it in better terms, controlling the gaze of the reader. A great example of this is in the screenplay for Rabbit Hole, where our minds and gaze are drawn to a specific moment of Peg stepping on a plant.
BECCA
Actually, we have plans.
PEG
(beat)
Oh. Oh, well.
BECCA
But, uh, another time though. I
haven’t talked to Pete in ages.
PEG
Well you haven’t missed much. He’s
still the same S.O.B. he always was.
Peg chuckles. Becca looks down to see that Peg has stepped on a plant recently put in the ground.
PEG
Oh God. I’m so sorry.
(steps off the plant)
BECCA
It’s okay.
PEG
I am so sorry.
BECCA
No, it’s fine.
PEG
These stupid feet.
When we read this passage, we are made to see the significance fo Peg’s “stupid feet,” crushing a plant. More importantly, we read a reference to the plant which immediately conjures up a close up or at least a frame where the plant, under Peg’s feet, is used.
Where Chris describes screenplays as a “form of cinema,” I think it can be tied into my previous point. Whereby the use of Slug Lines and visual prompts that are more obvious than literary language would exist in novel form, creates the reader as audience. This is one step away from being viewer as audience and with the reader understanding it’s purpose it will very likely be read with a visual and audio-visual track in mind.