“A passport to Hell is not issued on generalities.”

Laird Cregar utters that immortal line in Ernst Lubitsch’s HEAVEN CAN WAIT. It’s now my new number one principle of screenwriting. Loosely translated, it means, Be Specific. Since I’m a fan of the concept of le mot juste, this is an idea I gravitate to anyway — searching for the perfect expression of the idea, however imperfect the idea may be (we won’t even be able to judge until we see it perfectly expressed)…

In more practical terms, the camera is a very specific thing, so the screenplay has to be equally crisp. A couple of examples from student scripts I’ve been reading: one opened in a police station, where a bunch of drunk kids have been rounded up. The script says that some of them are throwing up, some crying, some arguing. I decreed that the writer had to decide exactly how many were doing each activity. Because it’s unlikely that more than one would be vomiting at any given moment… And it seemed worthwhile nailing it down so that the script was an accurate plan of what we would see and hear in the finished film, or at least of what would be enacted on the set on the day of filming.

In another script, an item in a catalogue was described as being expensive, with a lot of zeros in the price. Again, I objected, saying that the camera would be unlikely to show just a row of zeros, it was more likely to show the item with a full price under it, for maximum clarity, and so I suggested that, although the line was amusing, it was no help to the production designer who would have to obtain a catalogue image with a specific price.

The need for exactitude goes the other way — sometimes, adding an unnecessary word or detail can cause confusion. When I scripted a short called BURKE AND HARE: THE MUSICAL, I included the line “They put the body in a large tea chest.” Arriving on set, I found a specially-constructed box large enough to contain two large adults. I think the production designer had thought, “Right, a large box must mean a box bigger than necessary for the job.” Now the crew had to lug this thing around all over Edinburgh, bruising their fingers squeezing it through doorways. In reality, the word “big” had just been added to try and make the sentence sound more precise…