When they first asked me to teach "Scriptwriting" at the university, I didn't know a thing about the subject. But I learned fast. I read all the textbooks I could find on radio, television, and film scripts. And, to my surprise, I found out that there are simple, one-two-three formulas for writing most scripts. The trouble is, some of those formulas aren't aimed at bringing out the best in us!
Take writing scripts for television soap operas, for instance. Most textbooks say that TV drama should aim for the maximum emotional effect on the viewer. Soap operas especially are supposed to pull all the strings of our feelings—serving up a daily diet of heartache, sex, revenge, fear, anger, and self-indulgent materialism. All this in a context of plots and counterplots that come to a timely crisis point just before every commercial (so we won't wander off and do something else at the break!).
But think of what this kind of dramatic formula really suggests. It suggests that life is just a soap opera—an emotional roller coaster through the trials and triumphs and tragedies of materialism. If you and I go along with such a suggestion, we're buying into the notion that we're emotion-based, crisis-based, physicality-based, sex-based, drivebased, matter-based. And, in doing that, we're selling ourselves tragically short. We're settling for a shortsighted, formulaic view of ourselves. A view that, carried to its extreme, says life is nothing more than what the five physical senses take in. A view that says material bodies and compulsions and emotions make up the sum total of what we are.
