And the Oscar Goes to...

The first piece ever written by me was the script for a short film. I mean, it's the first piece I started and finished. I think I was 20 years old.

Cinema has always fascinated me, but I don't remember exactly when and why, and I started looking online for film scripts. I thought the script was all about dialogue, but that's only partially true.

I then bought a screenplay manual, written by Age, a screenwriter of many films directed by the greatest Italian directors including Mario Monicelli, Ettore Scola, Dino Risi, and Sergio Leone. We could say an old-school screenwriter, except that many principles still remain unchanged.

Anyway, I decided to write my first short film script, a horror story. In fact, it was called The Ghost.

Set in the present day, the three-act script featured a woman wandering through the house. In addition to the woman, there was a family of 4 in this house. The woman, who was the children's aunt, cleaned, cooked, and then spent time at the window, when she tried to go out she found all the doors barred. The woman heard and saw like her in a cloud of smoke, with distorted images and distant voices. She went from one room to another without realizing how she got there. None of the family spoke to the woman or touched her.

Or at least that's what the screenplay makes us believe, because the beauty is being able to create empty spaces and change the scene out of the blue, leaving the parts you don't want to see pending. This was one of my favorite things about film writing.

However, when one of the boys forgets to lock the door, the woman leaves the house and is hit by a car. Only then do we realize that the woman is real, and discover that she is a mentally ill woman staying in her sister's family home. But were the missed human contacts due to the indifference of the people, or to the perception of the woman who took so many medicines?

Creepy right? Or so I thought. In my opinion, there were some really creepy scenes!

Overwhelmed by emotion, I sent the script to a contest, and guess what? They answered me! I didn't win anything, but the fact that they took the time to answer me really impressed me.

I don't remember the exact words, but the letter said: It seems to me a good start, I advise you to write and rewrite the screenplay many times, each time it improves a little.

And then... You presented this story to us in a horror key, but if I hadn't read the accompanying letter I would have seen a comical and amusing story in these scenes. What do you think about it?

What? I read my script thinking about what he found so funny and in fact, I realized how some scenes seemed ridiculous, yes almost comical indeed!

What have I learned?

I thought not writing the descriptions and focusing on the dialogues was an advantage. Here's the discovery: The dialogues are very difficult.

Furthermore, it is necessary to establish how the scene is composed, and in which room or outdoor place it develops and it is necessary to do it with a very precise even if synthetic caption.

And then the movement of the actors in the scene. Not to mention the timing! If the scene is fast or slow, how long is each scene and how long is the film in total?

Obviously, my script was only in its embryonic stage.

I wrote a few more scripts after this one. But I couldn't create the setting. That's when I started writing the descriptions and from there I started writing the stories.

But the script taught me about point of view, foreshadowing, and flashbacks. Cinema did not create these but exploited them and developed them so intensely that they then influenced the novels.

I think there are many modern novels that owe a lot to cinematic language in terms of organization, sequences, twists, and turns. The movies took a lot from the books, but they also influenced them irreversibly.

And I think as we write today, how many of us "see" a scene in our minds, as seen in a movie? I always do!

Anyway, this was my first piece.

Speaking of first times, perhaps you may be interested in the moment I became a reader:

Thank you for stopping by!