BACK STORY – TV – Film
They use this word a lot in Hollywood. It relates to a movie script. The back story is that part of a character’s past life that takes place before the first scene of a movie. This might be the fact that he had a violent father which affects events on the screen. It is the also the events, or the lines of dialogue in a screenplay that tell the audience something extra that happened before the time scale of the movie. It is the events that the scriptwriter knows and that inform aspects of a film but do not necessarily happen in the film. The back story may show a protagonist’s internal desires and the reasons behind the desperate search to fulfil his or her goals. At one level back story is dropping into the script details of a character’s upbringing or former marriages, and at a deeper level it can inform the psychological impetus behind a character’s actions. See FLASHBACK., SCRIPT, WRITING FOR TV
