F. Scott Fitzgerald is a perfect example. One of the most gifted novelists of the twentieth century, Fitzgerald came to Hollywood to write screenplays. He failed miserably—he tried to “learn” camera angles and the intricate technology of film, and he let that get in the way of his screenwriting. Not one script he worked on was made without extensive rewriting. His only screenwriting achievement is unfinished, a script called Infidelity written for Joan Crawford in the 1930s. It’s a beautiful script, patterned like a visual fugue, but the third act is incomplete and it lies gathering dust in the studio vaults.

Most people who want to write screenplays have a little of F. Scott Fitzgerald in them. The screenwriter is not responsible for writing in the camera angles and detailed shot terminology. It’s not the writer’s job. The writer’s job is to tell the director what to shoot, not how to shoot it. If you specify how each scene should be shot, the director will probably throw it away. And justifiably so.

A scene is written in a master shot, or specific shots. A master shot covers a general area: a room, a street, a lobby. A specific shot focuses on a specific part of the room—a door, say, or in front of a specific store on a specific street. The scenes from American Beauty are mostly presented in master shot. The script Cold Mountain utilizes both specific shots and master shots. If you want to write a dialogue scene in master shot, all you need to write is INT. RESTAURANT— NIGHT, and simply let your characters speak without any reference to the camera or shot.

You can be as general or specific as you want. A scene can be one shot (a car racing down the street) or a series of shots (a couple arguing on a street corner in front of a few bystanders).

A shot is what the camera sees.