The age old art of telling stories isn't a new one, and humankind has been spinning stories and weaving tales of all kinds of heroes and villains and conflicts. But the history of story and conflict can be traced back before it was made into the proper art form we know it as today. Sports and contests of strength and skill were perhaps the earliest form of conflict and conquest. Two men wrestle in an arena surrounded by their peers and fellow citizens. They are cheered on and jeered. The fans are split amongst who among the two of them should rightfully triumph in the end. This isn't unlike modern day college sports, or our numerous professional leagues. But there is one difference that separates these obvious conflicts from the art and craft of writing, and especially writing for the screen.
There is no dramatic necessity for the conflict. If we root for Team A, and Team B triumphs, sure we will be upset, and perhaps rant and rave for a day or two afterwards, but our lives will otherwise go on unimpeded. Nothing has changed for us. There is no moral value at stake, nothing in it that would dramatically change our lives and very existence afterwards. But if one team is the good team because the values they represent are our own, and the other team is the bad team, because they have a set of values that are in direct conflict with ours, and viewed as wrong by our societal context, then the name of the game has changed. We will root harder for our good team to defeat the bad team, because if we lose, than the bad team has taken control of our value system and can alter to it their own. This provides us with a dramatic necessity to need to win.
Drama, however, is both conflict and encapsulated life. Real life is ordinary and boring, and most events don't have any direct impact upon any other events. Your brushing your teeth or not will not affect how well you drive your car, as that will not effect whether or not you decide to eat steak or chicken for dinner. Drama makes sense and is a condenses series of events that must directly impact one another to form a significant change in the lives of the characters involved. DRAMA IS ORDERED CONFLICT.
In movies we never have to watch the mundane, such as a character fishing through his wallet to pay the exact cab fare, unless that act directly impacts the storyline and affects the various characters involved. Otherwise it is superfluous and unnecessary. There is always parking in Hollywood pictures, because watching a driver spend twenty minutes hunting for a spot like we do in real life just wouldn't do, unless again, it directly impacts the story being presented to us (see Bonnie & Clyde, written by Robert Benton and David Newman).
By singling out the important events and condensing the time frame needed to tell a story, the screenwriter has successfully created a "premise" for the film. This premise should be a concise statement of the central conflict of the characters and plot. This creates the moral choice that must spur the protagonist into action against an antagonist, and makes the story satisfying to an audience as a dramatic narrative instead of a telling of various random happenings occuring in that particular time frame.
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