Local teledramas require more, better scriptwriters

By Sunaryono Basuki Ks

DENPASAR (JP): The growth of Indonesian teledramas requires good materials for the stories. Many television workers have complained about the lack of good sources for their films because today, they are forced to produce their own programs to reduce the number of imported telefilms.

The number of existing telescripts cannot cope with the rising demand. Good scriptwriters, such as Asrul Sani, Emil Sanossa and Alex Suprapto Yudo, who have given Indonesian television audiences good quality telefilms are, today, much less productive.

New names have appeared, like Arswendo Atmowiloto, Nasri Cheppy and Hilman Lupus, specializing in writing stories for young people. Others are Zara Zettira and Jujur Prananto, a young short story writer, and some old names from the theater world, such as Teguh Karya and Putu Wijaya.

To overcome the lack of material for telescripts, some writers have suggested that television workers turn to Indonesian novels. The United States, for example, has a long history of adapting novels for films and television. One of many successes was The Godfather.

In the 1960s alone we could enjoy film adaptations from well- known novels such as War and Peace (Tolstoy), and Crime and Punishment (Dostoyevsky), or from contemporary novels such as Peyton Place or Bonjour Tristesse (Franscoise Sagan, then a very young French novelist).

That decade also adapted famous plays by Shakespeare, not only by American or European producers but also by Russian and Japanese ones.

Othello was produced in Russia, its characters still wore European costumes, while in the Japanese adaptation of Macbeth, the story was set in Japan. In the past, Indonesian black-and- white films included the adaptation of Anak Perawan di Sarang Penyamun (Virgin in the Nest of Robbers), based on a novel by Sutan Takdir Alisyahbana, and Sukreni Gadis Bali (Sukreni, the Balinese Girl), based on a novel by AA Pandji Tisna.

Some adaptation problems hinder telefilm scriptwriters. A novel is literature using narration and dialog. All the incidents and character revelations are described in wordy detail.

Words

In short, the novel is a written form of art, while a film is visual art. Rambo particularly shows the use of words is not considered overly necessary.

In a way, a film script, with its dialogs, settings, etc., is like a novel, while a stage-play script, generally, contains only dialog and a little description (except in the case of George Bernard Shaw, who liked to include detailed descriptions of characters and their actions in his plays).

In many Indonesian films and teledramas, the use of words is dominant. In almost any Indonesian television serial, we have characters speaking, even in a situation when speech should be replaced by pictures.

This normally happens in teledrama scripts which were initially made for film by inexperienced scriptwriters. Emil Sanossa, who wrote many scripts for the state television station TVRI in the 1980s, wrote good-quality scripts, showing his mastery of writing film scripts.

Sanossa, who started in the 1960s as a playwright, director and actor, wrote scripts following the standard techniques of writing a film script, giving detailed guides for audio and visual aspects of the film in the text.

In all his scripts he divides the page into two equal columns, the left for writing the visual aspects of the film, and the right for the audio.

His perfectness in writing techniques and interesting stories resulted in him winning five out of six scriptwriting competitions held by TVRI's Surabaya station in the 1980s.

He continued with his writing, producing good quality scripts such as Bertahan dalam Badai (Surviving the Storm, 1984) about the struggle of Indonesian nationalists in 1934, Luka Bayang (Wounded Shadow, 1983), Ketika Tebu Berbunga (When the Sugar Cane Blossomed) and many others.

Actors in his teledramas included the likes of noted actors Rano Karno, WD Mochtar and Adi Kurdi. Many were directed by Dedi Setiadi, a prominent TVRI director. Sanossa's scripts made a film director's work easy because they were already perfect shooting scripts. Other scriptwriters, especially those who directed productions themselves, only wrote outlines of their works.

The script for Non, written and directed by Putu Wijaya, looks like a play script, containing only the names of the characters and the dialog that each character speaks.

Putu can finish writing a script in two days, and then spends two days shooting to produce one episode. This method may explain why he is very productive; his work is popular, though quality could be questioned.

The different media used in novels and films have, occasionally, resulted in protests from novelists.

Ernest Hemingway once stated he was not satisfied with a film based one of his novels. In Indonesia, YB Mangunwijaya rejected the film Roro Mendut, which was based on his novel, because the scriptwriter changed the ending.

As long as a film is credited as an adaptation of a novel and not an imitation of it, such problems could be avoided.

Both scriptwriters and novelists should acknowledge that the film and the novel on which it was based are separate works of art.

Filmmakers cannot be forced to follow a storyline in detail from the original source, using the same way of expressing ideas.

A scriptwriter is required to use his own imagination and creativity to make a visually good film based on a written text.

One example is the adaptation of the novel Karmila by Marga T., which was popular in the 1970s. It is said to be different from an earlier film adaptation of the same novel.

Asrul Sani has also proved the possibility of good adaptation by writing a more lively and interesting script based on a famous old Indonesian novel, Siti Nurbaya.

Scriptwriters should keep in mind that unlike novels, the interchange of normally short sequences for teledramas are parts of a jigsaw puzzle gradually taking shape in the viewers' mind. Visual representations of the settings and actions no longer require a narrative, which makes many of our teledramas rather boring.

It is clear that the main problem of the increasing need for telescripts is the shortage of creative scriptwriters. Prominent novelists such as Putu, Iwan Simatupang, Mangunwijaya, Umar Kayam and many others have written a number of good novels just waiting to be adapted for television.