If we are going to get the audience’s attention then we need to understand the genre we have chosen. We need to know where it has come from, how it developed, if it’s a currently popular and if so why, also what its conventions are. Once we know this, it will help stop our film failing and appeal to our target audience and meet the genre guidelines. We have chosen to do our opening in the Drama genre.
Drama film is a genre that relies on the emotional and relational development of realistic characters. While Drama film relies heavily on this kind of development, dramatic themes play a large role in the plot as well. Dramatic themes often include current issues, societal ills, and problems, concerns or injustices, such as racial prejudice, religious intolerance (such as anti-Semitism), drug addiction, poverty, political unrest, the corruption of power, alcoholism, class divisions, sexual inequality, mental illness, corrupt societal institutions, violence toward women or other explosive issues of the times. Whether heroes or heroines are facing a conflict from the outside or a conflict within themselves, Drama film aims to tell an honest story of human struggles. These films have successfully drawn attention to the issues by taking advantage of the topical interest of the subject. Although dramatic films have often dealt frankly and realistically with social problems, the tendency has been for Hollywood, especially during earlier times of restriction, to forgive society and institutions and to blame problems on an individual, who more often than not, would be punished for his or her offence.
Problems of the poor and dispossessed have often been the themes of the great films, including:
o The Good Earth (1937) with Chinese peasants facing famine, storms, and locusts.
o John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath (1940) about an indomitable, Depression-Era Okie family - the Joads - who survived a tragic journey from Oklahoma to California.
o Martin Scorsese's disturbing and violent Taxi Driver (1976) told of the despairing life of a lone New York taxi cab driver amidst nighttime urban sprawl.
o Issues and conflicts within a suburban family were showcased in director Sam Mendes' Best Picture-winning American Beauty (1999), as were problems with addiction in Steven Soderbergh's Traffic (2000).
A hard look was taken at alcoholism:
o With Ray Milland as a depressed writer in Billy Wilder's The Lost Weekend (1945).
o Jack Lemmon (and Lee Remick) in Blake Edwards' Days of Wine and Roses (1962).
o An ageing alcoholic singer (Bing Crosby) desperate for a comeback was the theme of The Country Girl (1954), the film that provided Grace Kelly with a Best Actress Oscar.
o Susan Hayward acted the decline into alcoholism of 1930s star Lillian Roth in Daniel Mann's biopic I'll Cry Tomorrow (1955).
o More recently, Mickey Rourke and Faye Dunaway played the parts of two fellow alcoholics in Barbet Schroeder's Barfly (1987).
Juvenile delinquency:
o Young punks and gangs, and youth rebellion were the subject matter of Dead End (1937)
o Laslo Benedek's The Wild One (1953) with biker Marlon Brando disrupting a small town, Richard Brooks'
o The Blackboard Jungle (1955) with Glenn Ford as an idealistic teacher in a slum area school.
o Nicholas Ray's Rebel Without a Cause (1955) with James Dean as an iconic disaffected youth.
Films that were concerned with race relations included:
o Hollywood's first major indictment of racism in producer Stanley Kramer's and director Mark Robson's Home of the Brave (1949), the story of a black WWII soldier facing bigoted insults from his squad.
o Then, there was John Sturges' Bad Day At Black Rock (1955) about small-town Japanese-American prejudice uncovered by a one-armed Spencer Tracy.
o Stanley Kramer's The Defiant Ones (1958) with Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier as bound-together escaping convicts.
o Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967) about an inter-racial couple (Sidney Poitier as WHO doctor John Prentiss and Katharine Houghton as SF socialite Joanna Drayton) planning on marrying who needed parental approval from Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy (in their ninth and last film together).
o Also, In the Heat of the Night (1967) featured a bigoted sheriff and a black homicide detective working together to solve a murder.
o Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing (1989) - about racial tensions and eventual violence during a hot Brooklyn summer.
Some more examples of films with a genre of drama are:
o The Shawshank Redemption - A former banker convicted of murdering his wife develops a lifelong friendship with a fellow prisoner, and ultimately tries to defy the odds by keeping hope alive inside prison walls.
o The Godfather - The ageing patriarch of an organised crime circle must secure the future of his family’s empire by leaving it in the hands of his reluctant son.
o Casablanca - A jaded nightclub owner must choose whether or not to help his ex-lover and her husband flee Nazi-occupied Morocco.
From looking at other Drama films opening sequences we have picked out things that occur in a majority of them. For example the music is a tune that will be repeated at different points in the film, maybe just changed slightly. The lighting is normally natural or bright, and not usually dark or dull, depending on the storyline and theme of the film. We are also always shown only one person’s life or everything from their point of view. So for our opening sequence we have made sure we use conventions like these so it makes our genre more obvious and so our audience understands what is happening.
Dramatic films are probably the largest film genre because they include a broad spectrum of films. They are a popular choice of film genre as they are appealing more and more to both and men and women, giving them a wider range of audiences, meaning that the demand for them will continually grow.
My research has helped us make a decision about our own production as it means we can base our film on a real life issue or problem without having to conform to strict guidelines as the Drama genre coves a wide spectrum of styles of films
