I do this a lot, it helps me see how the pieces fit together ...

Scott, I've used scene by scene breakdowns in the past to help wade through the editing processing of page shaving to get under, or close to 120 pages.

I like your method. It is shorter and more concise than the unoffical, stumbling as I go along, methodology of the guy making it up as he goes along.

ALWAYS good to know how the pros do things. Thanks for sharing.

- E.C. Henry from Bonney Lake, WA

I did this once but haven't for a long time.

My writing partner and I were tackling a thriller about the kidnapping of the President's daughter and how the secret service pieces together the crime. We figured, at the time, that it was, quite simply, Ransom meets In the Line of Fire meets Absolute Power.

So, in the interest of "getting it right," I did scene by scene breakdowns for those three films that looked a lot like your Shakespeare in Love sheet.

In the long run, I'm sure it had a huge impact on the script, though I also fear it may have cramped our style a bit because we became slaves to the breakdown sheets and lost our creativity along the way.

In short, the script became too paint by numbers and read rather stilted.

Either way, it was a huge eye opener. I remember RANSOM in particular having a fascinating stucture - - playfully tinkering with our expectations.

Perhaps it's time for me to get back on this type of excercise...

Jeff, you raise a good point as using this scene-by-scene breakdown exercise -- because that's really what it is -- as some sort of specific guideline to writing a script similar to a pre-existing one is, as you suggest, more stultifying than helpful.

I'm think it's value is more along the lines of F. Scott Fitzgerald, who transcribed by hand Charles Dickens' novels, word for word, in order to really 'get' the flow of the narrative and the tone of the piece.

Way back when, we were going to write a big action script. So I did scene-by-scene breakdowns of several action movies including Die Hard, 48 Hours, Lethal Weapon, and so on. And I think that was helpful at the beginning of the brainstorming process to get a general sense of how those type of stories flow.

But your point is a good cautionary tale: Scene-by-scene breakdowns have their benefits, but can also be problematic.

Thanks this is really helpful, I just started breaking down "The Dark Knight" and never realized this is what I was doing. That really helped me a-lot.

Thanks Jeff, for showing the other-side of it too, this will help me, not too get stiff in my approach to my own work.

I'm an admirer of F. Scott and I had no idea that he did that.

Good lord, I hope he transcribed Edwin Drood and not Bleak House or Nicholas Nicklebly... can you imagine the time expenditure???

I think breakdown are one of the most helpful exercises you can do. I've done a couple-- done more sequence breakdowns.

I suspect new writers read a script & get distracted by the dialogue. It helps to strip away all the dialogue & get down to the nuts & bolts of what makes up a screen story.

Laura said, "I suspect new writers read a script & get distracted by the dialogue. It helps to strip away all the dialogue & get down to the nuts & bolts of what makes up a screen story."

I concur. A scene-by-scene breakdown can show you key structural elements of the narrative.

Re sequences: You can also break down the script by sequence; the sequence approach is becoming more and more popular.

One suggestion: when doing a scene by scene breakdown, flag where you think the major structural beats are -- the inciting incident, the first turn, etc -- depending on what screenwriting form you subscribe to -- even better, know multiple forms and try and see which apply and work and which don't. A lot of interesting lessons to be learned.