Frenzy film fractal

The best script course I ever went on was 20 years ago, at San Felice Circeo, south of Rome, run by Arista. They showed a clip of Frenzy to illustrate an idea. (This is niche even by these standards!)

Each film is divided into sequences, generally eight. And each of these sequences is a three-act drama in itself. They called this approach ‘fractals’.
Take the sequence from 1:10 to 1:24 (which is virtually silent):

Act I
Barry Foster disposes of Barbara Leigh Hunt’s body, in a lorry full of potatoes. BUT…
TURNING POINT: He can’t find his tie pin…
HIS MOTIVATION: To stop the body being connected to him.

Act 2
BF climbs into the lorry, it leaves, finally he gets the tie pin from BLH’s hand. (Grisly moment when he breaks the fingers)
BUT…
The lorry is still going too fast…

Act 3
At last the lorry stops at a rest stop. BF escapes…
But the body, disturbed by him in his haste, is visible to the cops and falls out of the lorry…

Don’t know why I find this so rewarding, even when I don’t write screenplays any more!

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strokeofbadluck

I had a stroke on July 26th, 2013. I was a screenwriter. Don’t do that anymore. But have found another way to write.

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