I’ve often heard it said (mostly by playwriting teachers) that playwriting is all structure. I couldn’t disagree more. Playwriting is language and conflict, and a lot of freedom to experiment and explore either or both. As long as there is ample talent pushing the pencil, a play can simply be like a John Coltrane solo. But a screenplay, that’s different.

In a movie, the primary art is photographic. Language is less important in screenplays than in plays. Conflict remains important, but the conflict must be both specific and specifically progressive. The conflict that is essential to story can meander in literary forms, such as novels or plays — as long as the language is vibrant. But a movie is primarily visual art and has the word “move” in it. A screenplay is there to provide structure, order, and ultimately, meaning, to the images in motion.

If I get stuck on a play, I just write reams of dialogue and allow the characters to define themselves through talking (using language) and eventually they find themselves and I just go back and cut the slow stuff. But a screenplay is not going to find itself through talking or language. A screenplay has to mean something from the first page on. It has to be specifically progressive (one thing leads to the next, set-up, pay-off, topper) in order to do its job, which is to send a director, actors, and a film crew out to a series of locations where they might come back with a collection of moving images that, when strung together, pack a theater with an audience full of people waiting for a boring part so they can run to the rest room. And if you do your job well, it never arrives.

Structure is simply a way to guarantee meaning. The beginning doesn’t prepare the audience for the ending so much as set the audience up to have a set of expectations that will provide suspense when those expectations might be in danger of not being fulfilled or, worse, having no meaning. The middle of a movie has to threaten the expectations than have been set up. The end has to provide a surprise about the expectations that still fulfills them in a believable yet unpredictable way. And the final line, the last moment, the freeze frame, whatever you want to call it, has to be the answer to the math problem, the sum of the expectations fulfilled, the punch line, the final surprise, and the kicker, all in one instant.

Whatever the writer does in a film will be trumped (or destroyed) by the photographic art (or lack thereof). What you want to do is provide meaning. Whatever technical craft a screenwriter brings to the fore (character, dialogue, pace, atmosphere) is a help and a definite plus, but without meaning none of it ever leaves the gate. Meaning has to exist first, then comes the structure that provides the delivery system for the meaning. Then come the words. Take it in that order, and the words will serve the structure, which will serve the images, which is as it should be.