The Wall Will Tell You: The Forensics of Screenwriting Paperback – March 12, 2019

Hampton Fancher gives great digestible quips in this small book. It isn’t a step by step guide. Instead it takes the parts of a screenplay and gives short bullets to fine tune that particular topic. It’s physically a small format and only about 80 pages, but this makes it easy to carry and easy to breeze through. I find it helpful to read the whole thing and then look at what you’re writing and every now and then picture reading your screenplay to Hampton and having him excitedly agree with you or shout why your story is falling flat. Def worth picking up.

This is a strange little book. And it is very little, in writing and in advice.As to the writing, the book is 80 pages and its dimensions are about one-half the typical book. Those 80 pages are not full of text. No, Mr. Fancher provides about one-half page of text on each page. As to that text, it reads as a bunch of one-line cliches and brilliancies compressed together to make 'paragraphs'. "Paragraphs" is written with ' ' because these are not your school teacher's paragraphs in which you state a topic sentence and then expand on that topic. No, Mr. Fancher does not have time to develop any topic. He is too busy ejaculating his wisdom onto the page to worry about coherence!Perhaps an example will help. Well, I could start with the title "The Forensics of Screenwriting". 'Forensics' is one of those buzzwords. It promises a lot. It promises a deeply analytical, highly reasoned, thoroughly argued deconstruction of the basic 'universal' components of a screenplay. This book is not analytical, it is poetical; it is not highly reasoned, but religiously preached, it is not thoroughly argued, but simply stated as 'the truth'.A more specific example. Page 1 is entitled "START" and, thereafter, followed by this little gem:'A screenplay is the bones of a poem and the poem is a movie and the movie is a dream.'That is a pretty little thing and highly suggestive, yet literally it is nonsense. Just like his use of 'forensics', Mr. Fancher misuses 'poem' and 'dream'. A movie is not at all like a poem nor is it at all like a dream. First, screenplays are effectively 'blueprints' for the actual work of art, the movie. As to movies, they are narratives which generally follow the structure of prose stories rather than the highly compressed, highly symbolic structure of poetry. So, screenplays are a combination of dramatic play writing and prose. It is a cliche to say "I dreamt it up" when speaking of a fiction which the speaker has created. So, I suppose it could be accurate to state a screenplay is the step you must take if you hope to have the movie you 'dreamed up' in your head (subjective existence) become an actual movie (objective existence). But that is not what Mr. Fancher's sentence states.(I won't even get into the rather obvious fact that a poem does not have 'bones'. Only an animal has bones and a poem is not an animal. In fact, it is not even a thing, it is a stated idea. However, Mr. Fancher believes a good heaping of metaphor and similes, along with a bit of metonymy, makes his statements 'artsy' and, so, makes him come across as 'sophisticated', if not 'an artist'. It does not. Unless, not to me. Again, if a simile is required, then 'blueprint' is much more accurate, though far less 'poetical' and 'artsy' than 'bones'. Blueprints outline the creative thought of the architect/author and give guidance to creation of the building as does a screenplay for a movie. Bones are just the structural elements of a body and, so, would be the actual physical framework of a building being built from a blueprint. The 'bones' of a movie, therefore, would likely be the master shots of the scenes written in the screenplay and the close ups and more intimate shots would be the 'flesh'.)You are likely protesting at my overly literal analysis. After all, the sentence is 'inspiring' and the reader can see what Mr. Fancher is 'getting at' when he rhetorically uses 'poem' and 'dream' in an illiterate fashion. I would agree with you. However, it also isn't anything other than 'inspiring' and 'suggestive'. I bought the book to be instructed, not to be 'inspired'. If the title had stated it was a book full of 'inspiration' rather than 'forensics', I would not be writing this review since I would not have bought the book. If Mr. Fancher wants to use words 'poetically' when he promised a 'prose essay' by claiming his book was a 'forensics', then neither he nor you should be surprised that some of his readers feel cheated by that false promise.Page 3: "Don't just point to the thing in the window; go into the store."Again, highly suggestive and would well serve as a topic sentence to a paragraph which thereafter expanded on this metaphorical 'store' and the 'window' thereof. However, there is no paragraph. That sentence is the paragraph itself.Well, you say, Mr. Fancher is obviously saying 'to show, not tell'. Yes, I agree. But everyone says that. It does no good to say that. It only does good to give examples and, otherwise, explain how one goes about showing rather than telling. Mr. Fancher has no time to do such prosaic work as actually teach how to 'show, not tell'. It is much more fun to write a 'colorful aphorism' and leave it at that.Page 48: "The term karma means an unbroken sequence of cause and effect, each effect being, in its turn, the cause of a subsequent effect. The structure of a good screenplay must be filled with comprehensive karma."This is trite and nearly cliched. There is no need to invoke 'karma' since all he is saying is that a screenplay, ideally, will have each 'effect' become the cause of the next 'effect'. In short, the sentence could just as easily be written:"The structure of a good screenplay must be filled with an unbroken sequence of cause and effect, each effect being, in turn, the cause of the subsequent effect."Of course, when it is written like this; you realize it is again a topic sentence demanding a supporting paragraph stating the specific ways a writer can go about achieving this ideal. Yet again, the sentence is the entire paragraph. So, once again, a 'suggestion' and a basic one at that wrapped up in pretty language to imply something important is being stated when just a bit of common writing advice is being given.As can be seen, Mr. Fanchon's book is full of colorful aphorisms. Which is not entirely bad. However, it does not instruct. At best, it inspires. I do not believe a beginning writer can get anything materially worthwhile out of this book. At best, I think a writer who has written a screenplay which he/she believes does not work might use this book to find suggestive approaches to inspire a second go at the draft.The book is not terrible. It does not live up to its title nor does it teach much of anything. It does inspire at times and does suggest very general guidelines which I think would best serve as inspiration when trying to revise a first draft or rewrite a screenplay which seems flat. I got very little out of it.Even now, when I picked it up to refresh my memory before writing this review, the book still aggravated me. There is just too much sugary sweet frosting hiding the little morsel of cake being offered and it annoys me that I paid very good money for such little benefit.

This isn't so much of a how to book in screenwriting, as it is a collection of the author's seemingly random thoughts about writing. Well with the read. It is your own private cheering section.

This book is small and easy to carry!

Holy. Smokes.This has got to be the most pretentious thing I have ever read. Not that there’s anything wrong with what he’s saying (he’s just regurgitating everything Syd Field, Robert McKee, and Michael Hague ever said), it’s the WAY he says it. Every paragraph is made up of these clipped, stilted, sentence fragments. It’s like he thinks that, as long as he cloaks the same old thing in mystical-sounding, opaque language, people will forgive (or even miss altogether) his commitment to conventional storytelling. The comparison to koans is perfect actually. Because koans are, by definition, mystical nonsense.Heck... if his affectation succeeds in tricking the avant-garde crowd into reconsidering plot, structure, and theme, I’ll praise him as a genius.

Yeah, as other reviewers have said: short. 68 pages, minus 20 for the frontispiece of each chapter and the blank back of those, minus 5 for the often mostly empty last page of each chapter - divide all that by 2 for the stretched out spacing, halve again for the cut size and you’re left with about 11 pages of a regular size book. And then there’s a grammar typo on the first page. Disappointing. If you're wondering why there's no 'look inside' feature on this title and don't have a tenner to burn, you might wanna go to a bookshop, especially one with a coffee bar, where you could read it over a three pound cappucino. You might wanna go to a real bookstore anyway. In fact, what am I doing here!?But this little book has its uses. It's like a personal trainer shouting at you at the gym, shouting at you while you’re on the marathon treadmill of screenwriting, trying to develop both muscle and stamina. It keeps you going and reminds you of the important stuff while you’re in the thick of things.‘Too much talk and not enough trouble is a bad thing to do!’ for example.It’s guy stuff and a Hollywood thing and someone who feels like he wants to be, or should be, a hippy actually shouting Hollywood slanted, commercial and bourgeois stuff at ya to shape up.Some stuff is knotty and suggestive, structurally: ‘Linkage: a chain of events, without a chain the wheels won’t turn.’ But there’s often more in it than first appears. I thought this was a cheap shot and then began to think about caterpillar tracks where the end drives the beginning and everything in between, in concert.Some stuff is just inane tautology: ‘Cause and consequence. Without the former, you can’t have the latter.’ Which is the same as above: a correct but inane repetition. But this is what PT’s do: Yeah, I’d forgotten this, it’s a practical reminder not a philosophy – I cannot have this scene without its groundwork.Some stuff is stuff your Mum would say. Some laugh-out-loudable: ‘Draw a tree of your story. Climb the tree.’This is compensated for, though admittedly expensively, by the other 50% of those eleven pages. A lot of it you will have heard before in other places, but Fancher un-clichés the clichés, breaks them open and gets to their immediate, practical core and yells them in your ear while you’re sweating: ‘Compression: we call them movies because they’re supposed to move! Be abrupt and ride two rails, one suggestive, the other concise. It comes at you and it’s gone.’So I’m not going to be carrying McKee’s ‘Story’ tome with me on the bus, I’m gonna be glancing at this pocket sized fella, yelling in my ear, keeping me on track, reminding me – non comprehensively and sometimes incomprehensibly – but reminding me of what I’m at and what the craft relentlessly needs.