An interview with veteran screenwriter Jay Presson Allen (adapter of "Cabaret," "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie," and "The Prince of the City," among others) appears in the book "Backstory 3: Interviews With Screenwriters of the 60's." Here's what she said about working with director Alfred Hitchcock:
"He was a great teacher. He did it naturally, easily, and unself-consciously. In that little bit of time that I worked for him, he taught me more about screenwriting than I learned in all the rest of my career. There was one scene in Marnie, for example, where this girl is forced into marriage with this guy. I only knew how to write absolutely linear scenes. So I wrote the wedding and the reception and leaving the reception and going to the boat and getting on the boat and the boat leaving . . . I mean, you know, I kept plodding, plodding, plodding. Hitch said, "Why don't we cut some of that out, Jay? Why don't we shoot the church and hear the bells ring and see them begin to leave the church. Then why don't we cut to a large vase of flowers, and there is a note pinned to the flowers that says, 'Congratulations.' And the water in the vase is sloshing, sloshing, sloshing."
Lovely shorthand. I often think of that. When I get verbose, I suddenly stop and say to myself, "The vase of water."
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I think that applies to novels as much as it does to screenplays. I've written quite a bit of material for TV over the years and a lot of television producers do favor that A to B to C progression, maybe because they think TV viewers are not paying as much attention as movie viewers. And they may be right, especially nowadays when all kinds of stuff distracts you (do you hate those little promos that show up on the bottom of the screen as much as I do?). Shows on HBO and Showtime, which are not interrupted by commercials, give viewers more credit, of course.
