You've got to be careful with that, though.

In radio, narration and dialog has to serve a purpose it doesn't have to serve in film: describing the action.

In film, dialog or narration that describes the action we see is redundant and bad.

Also, voiceover is a tricky tool. While it definitely has it's place in film, you need to be careful because many inexperience screenwriters use it as a crutch: it's the easiest way to demonstrate a character's internal state, so people often think it's the best way to do so.

Sometimes it is. But often it's not. Training yourself to search, hard, for descriptive actions that externalize the internal states of your characters will help your screenwriting immensely. One of the cues that tells an experienced screenwriter (or script reader) that a writer hasn't yet mastered the form is the use of voiceover when it's not the most appropriate tool. When I've mentored people, I've encouraged them to eschew voiceover entirely for their first few scripts. Not because it's inherently bad, mind you, but rather because inexperienced writers need to train themselves in how NOT to use it. Once they've grasped the whole toolbox, if they still choose to use voiceover, that's a reasonable choice - but nobody masters the tricky stuff of externalizing the internal through behavior unless they force themselves to.

The ways in which SB's storytelling is archaic has nothing to do with it being in black and white. It'd be dated if it was in color. To focus on the fact that it's in black and white is to trivialize the differences in storytelling technique between it and contemporary films.

To talk about the overlap between the VO in those two films, in my opinion, is to really miss the point. Yes, absolutely, you can find sentences in the AB voiceover which are simply descriptive, but it's more useful, in my opinion, to notice how those moments are used to build to moments which aren't. Compare those two VOs, and you'll notice how AB's has a much greater emphasis on things which can't be seen in the scene ("This is the highlight of my day.") Elements like that are almost completely lacking in SB.

The issue isn't the ability of a writer to gain techniques from older work or other medium. The issue is the stuff I see which you aspiring screenwriters do which hurts their work.

You see, here's the difference in our approaches. You think, as you put it, that everyone here is "brilliant and talented."

I think that one of the most destructive assumptions a developing screenwriter can make is that their brilliance and talent will be sufficient to make up for a lack of craft. And, yes, I think craft is seriously lacking. I think that the vast majority of people who fail to make it do so because they're not good enough.

Could they get good enough? I don't know. But I know that if they don't focus on their craft, learn to understand things like how radio narration is different from film narration, then they never will.

When you first mentioned radio transcripts for inspiration, I want to point out that I didn't say "reading those is a bad idea." I simply qualified your advice, because somebody who followed it without understanding how radio and film narration serves different purposes would end up writing a bad script.

You seem to have reacted to that like I said it was bad advice. And again, you seem to be content to put words in my mouth. I never said don't look at Wilder. I simply said that you need to UNDERSTAND the ways in which what Wilder did was archaic. I'm not saying, "Don't read Shakespeare" ... I'm saying "Don't write your scripts in iambic pentameter."

Maybe that strikes you as an absurd thing to worry about, but it's not. Because the problem is that people write radio-style narration into contemporary scripts all the time, and it KILLS the read. A failure to understand the difference results in a bad script. It's a very common failure of craft.

In other words, I know, from seeing it happen, that some people will follow your advice off a cliff. My point is NOT that it's bad advice, but that it needs to be qualified.

In any event, the notion that the "sit com genre goes back to ancient greece" is pretty silly. I've read my share of ancient greek plays, and to claim that even the comedies are sitcoms is to stretch the definition of sitcom well past the breaking point. This is not to claim that the student of drama or comedy shouldn't read them, but you really want to call those plays "sitcoms?"

Really?