Scriptwrangler

How Characters are Not Like People

2011-01-07T10:57:00.000-08:00

I've been working on a character roughly based on me about 15 years ago. Some of the same struggles and same situations, but amped and reworked a bit. I started work with a default assumption that I was working on a feature but I kept mining more and more, then finding more and more storylines. I'm thinking about it as a TV series now. Probably a hopeless, unproduceable project -- but it's caught my interest, so here we go.

I've written and rewritten numerous synopses and story ideas for about six weeks now. It's starting to move from the conceptualizing stage to the shitty first draft stage. The shitty first draft stage is usually all about finding out about the 42 things you neglected to conceptualize. This time it's about herding cats. My characters are off doing their own things, seemingly oblivious to the fact that they're in a TV series.

The one exception is my main character. As I mentioned, he's based off me in my twenties. And I based his journey on a journey I had at the time: a relationship that was intense, beautiful, and doomed the moment I evolved. I couldn't stay in it and I couldn't leave. Yup, I was in my twenties.

My problem is one a lot of writers encounter during the shitty first draft stage: you know where the character is supposed to end up, so you write to that. Everything feels a a little telescoped. There's no real development because all the development feels planned.

Put another way, I'm breaking the cardinal rule of drama. My character seems to already possess his end goal through much too much of the story. I'm starting him off on the 50-yard line instead of his own end zone. I know better than this, and I planned it all out. So how did I make this basic mistake?

If a character you're close to lacks important knowledge, then they will fail. They'll suffer. They'll suffer tragic defeat and humiliation. You don't want that for a friend. Of course, you do want this for a character.

This is one way in which characters are not like people. But there's another way: I think characters exist in some special dimension of constant flux and change in a way that people do not. Yes, the writer of course can and does experience each moment individually. But we also sense characters as a kind of range of potentialities. I remember a Sunday school teacher telling me once that god sees our whole lives at once. This makes sense to me now. It certainly explains why god would create the world. It's a beautiful way to see things.

Something about this allows me to go into my script with the right perspective. I can give my character all the suffering, humiliation, and defeat he needs to work as a character AND see his potential for growth. I think this is something like compassion or love. I may not shelter my characters from all the awful things of the world (as I shouldn't), but I make sure that those defeats mean something.

Happy Thanksgiving!

2009-11-26T11:16:00.001-08:00

"Gratitude is a quality similar to electricity: it must be produced and discharged and used up in order to exist at all.”

- William Faulkner

Reason to Write #137

2009-11-03T12:34:00.000-08:00

"As a young child I wanted to be a writer because writers were rich and famous. They lounged around Singapore and Rangoon smoking opium in a yellow pongee suit. They sniffed cocaine in Mayfair and penetrated forbidden swamps with a faithful native boy and lived in the native quarter of Tangier smoking hashish and languidly caressing a pet gazelle."

William S. Burroughs, The Adding Machine

Neurocinema

2009-10-14T10:21:00.000-07:00

Everybody in California has been to a test screening once. Very few have been twice.

It's exciting to the unsuspecting: you're invited to a free screening of an unreleased Hollywood movie. Then a plasticized marketing executive gets up in front and asks very sincerely for your opinion. You get a questionnaire and one of those little golf pencil, and you dutifully report if you liked Tobey Maguire, whether the climax was bloody enough, whether the trace remainders of a character's liberal political views were off-putting or enlivening. And so on.

Based on your responses, the studio may well re-edit the ending, add back in the scene where Tobey pets the dog, or lose the fat chick. In short, studios use the marketing data to make the movie as palatable to the broadest audience range possible. Characters become more like characters we've seen before. Plot twists that excite 70% but confuse 20% are cut out. Bad guys explode more frequently. And the movie joins the rest of the pack, bobbing in the murky water around the lowest common denominator.

Like I said, few people make it to a second test screening. Even if you don't know what's going on you leave feeling a little dirty.

You'll be pleased to know that marketing is losing its golf pencils. Instead, it's putting the audience into an MRI! The new thing is neurocinema.

The idea is that you can scan the brain of the audience member and watch what parts light up as the scene progresses. The reactions are most testable in horror. You watch for the amygdala, the "fight or flight" center of the brain, to light up like a Christmas tree.

I imagine watching almost any movie -- say, Air Bud -- while trapped in a giant humming magnetic brain probe might light up my amygdala, but enough about me.

The idea that you can make a movie better by stimulating one area of the brain is disturbing to me. The amygdala isn't the horror-genre center of the brain. Yes, it controls fear. It also controls rage and disgust. Your amygdala lights up when you see a car accident. Your amygdala lights up when a drunk hits on your girlfriend. But the film industry is investing serious money in this technology just so it can tickle this part of the brain.

But what bothers me most about this technology is that it just might work. Maybe movies can boil down to a lower common denominator. I suspect that many moviegoers already equate a good movie with a vigorous amygdala rub. And maybe, like with video games, the effect is addictive.

Check out this interview in Wired for more.

You can see the test clip from the horror movie they tested. And they'll need a little more than an MRI to fix that one. Sorry, couldn't help myself.

(BEAT)

2009-08-30T11:29:00.000-07:00

What does (BEAT) mean?

Some people will tell you it's a way to get an actor to pause for something important. It tells the actor when to take the breath. It's a dramatic equivalent to OMG!!!!;) Or something.

Others will tell you it simply indicates a pause.

Most writers go through a (BEAT) phase. (BEAT) starts littering the script wherever the writer wants to indicate something significant, or worse -- weighty. And the writer convinces himself that he makes his script weigh more by doing so.

Then there's the added benefit of telling the actors how to act. If you put that (BEAT) in there, well, they need to stop and savor your brilliance.

Not surprisingly, actors bristle at scripts full of (BEAT), just as they do at scripts full of "smiles knowingly", "claps his back reassuringly", or (subtly, with rising anger). Actors are not puppets, and you are not a puppeteer.

And actors usually know what a beat is.

A beat is simply a unit of drama. It's a moment that moves the story forward. It's not a moment that represents something, or elaborates, or even 'weighs' anything. It is movement. It is forward motion.

In virtually every drama virtually all of the time, the beat happens through the actor. How?

They change their intention. They react to a new circumstance. They try to effect a change in another character.

These are all things that happen first in a character's. So what does (BEAT) mean to an actor? It tells her she needs to consider how her intention changes. It tells him that a shift has occurred in his character's psychology.

Sometimes this even happens without a pause for emphasis.

(BEAT) used correctly engages the actor's training. They look for interesting possibilities in the character. They uncover connections that need to be brought out. They consider your lines in a different way. You're telling them to make a choice, a gamble, a deeper read.

And when they read more deeply and just come up with (ponderous pause)? You've bored them or worse -- you've lost their faith in the script.

Set Ups

2009-08-18T14:37:00.000-07:00

Have you ever watched a movie without audio -- say, in a bar or on an airplane? If you're paying any attention at all, you usually know exactly what's going on. Screenwriting is, after all, visual storytelling. Our job is to pull together combinations of images and characters as expressively as possible. Usually this is a matter of setting two elements against each other, in a power relationship, or to express a contrast, or simply to create dramatic potential. What does this mean?

In Lolita, Humbert Humbert (James Mason) checks into a hotel with the 16-year-old Lolita (Sue Lyon) unaware that it's almost completely booked with a convention of state troopers. Now, the contrasts and power relationships are painfully clear. But the screenwriter, Vladimir Nabokov, doesn't stop there. To preface the set up we see the inimitable Claire Quilty, a dissolute TV writer who apparently made note of the precocious Lolita while bedding her mother in the backstory, wanders in just in time to watch the whole thing.

Note something important here: the entire import of the scene is in the set up. James Mason could discuss fuzzy bunnies with the front desk clerk. It wouldn't matter. We'd know why the scene was there, and the scene need only prolong itself until old Humbert's committed himself to a night in a hotel full of cops with his 16-year-old paramour, daughter of his recently deceased wife. You come up with a set up like that and you're done. You did your job.

All well and good, you say, but I'm not Vladimir Nabokov. How do I come up with a set up like that? They don't just pop into my head.

No, they don't. As a matter of fact, I'm writing in my blog precisely because I'm stuck trying to think up a strong set up for a scene right now.

Actually, everybody encounters the immovable and intractably dull set up issue on a pretty regular basis. Good writers are just better about working through them.

Let me make a hypothetical here in pursuit of a point. How did Nabokov come up with this set up? Out of necessity.

The second act is largely built on the tension of Lolita not knowing that her mother has committed suicide upon realizing that Humbert's after not her but her daughter. At this stage in the movie Humbert has nowhere to go. He has to stop somewhere, and this hotel is the proper place for the urbane literature professor that he is.

How often do you run into that 'necessary' scene that just lays there? It would be easy enough to write through a little booking-the-room scene then off for some sexual tension that evening in the bedroom. It's necessary, but you don't learn much.

That's not how screenwriting works. Each scene has to build the drama and not just move through the have-to-be-there moments. So, you look at the scene and start to add in the elements you need. To wit: fear of law enforcement? Check. Obsessed and unshakable drunk with an infatuation with the young girl and a fishy story? Check. Desk clerk a little to hep to the jive to not pick up on the sexual energy between Lolita and her supposed father? Check.

Then you subtract all the stuff you thought you needed but has nothing to do with the set up. The exposition. The boilerplate dialogue between desk clerk and guest. That weird thematic stuff that never reads anyway. The clever line that will never sound half as good outside your head (and you know it).

You come up with a strong set up and you're done. Stay out of your own way. Don't overcrowd the scene with dialogue. And whatever you do, don't drive the scene with dialogue. How on earth are people in bars and airplanes supposed to watch the movie if you do?

On a separate note...

Go watch Orson Welles' Touch of Evil. Right now. I'll come to your house if you don't. It's about as good as a movie can be with Charleton Heston and Marlene Dietrich playing Mexicans. And the set ups ain't too shabby either.

Quote of the Day

2009-08-14T15:16:00.001-07:00

"You can't wait for inspiration, you have to go after it with a club."

– Jack London

Who Wants Blood?

2009-08-07T10:24:00.000-07:00

...and who wants self-actualization?

I recently read David Mamet's Bambi vs. Godzilla: On the Nature, Purpose and Practice of the Movie Business. It's a remarkable book. I usually choose not to read books about screenwriting or, for that matter, the movie business. A little Robert McKee or Syd Field goes a long way for me. Then I'm somehow bloated. Never trust a guru. They're smart, sure. But you have to shut a little something off to stay with them.

Bambi vs. Godzilla is different. Mamet is, of course, a first-rate dramatist. And this has driven him to revulsion at the way things work in Hollywood. There's a gem every other page or so. Some of the gems are depressing as hell. But you leave the book a better writer, I think.

Mamet turned me onto a remarkable American noir film from 1967: Point Blank. It stars Lee Marvin and Angie Dickinson. The tagline is one for the ages:

"There are two kinds of people in his up-tight world: his victims and his women. And sometimes you can't tell them apart." Uh huh.

Mamet points to the film as an example of what's wrong with many mainstream Hollywood thinking about main characters: that they must be likable. After all, the audience essentially engages the main character as his lackey to pull us through the plot, right? So, the audience is happiest when they like the guy up on screen most of the time. Audiences like main characters with pluck (and boobs) and a desire to become better people. Everybody likes that, right?

But drama isn't always so easy on the viewer. This self-actualization that Hollywood wants us to vicariously enjoy while sitting upon our ample asses descends from a much sterner mother: catharsis. Catharsis isn't a pleasant thing to go through. It's ripping away the traits that define you and letting yourself slide to the floor in a jelly, hoping that something new and better will prop you back up.

And that's not the worst of it.

What drives any good drama is the main character's need for something. Think to what you lack. Think to what you can't bear to have the world know you lack. Love. Respect. Family. Something darker, perhaps. That's what drives a drama. It's what you can't mention. Hollywood realized a while back that this isn't quite as safe a model as self-actualization. Nobody's afraid to want that for themselves, at least vicariously through Spiderman.

This, predictably, makes the drama (and the very potential for drama) less.

At the beginning of Point Blank, Lee Marvin loses big. While robbing some gangsters, Marvin's partner steals his wife, his share, then lodges two bullets in him -- all on an abandoned Alcatraz. As his life seeps away, he wants one thing: revenge. And this alone drives him to survive (and swim to San Francisco, apparently).

Now, self-actualization is an easy, calm, soothing kind of master. It has twelve steps. You can take a break. You do your best. There are books to help you. Self-actualization has websites. Revenge? Not so much. It's irrational, unquenchable, and merciless.

Lee Marvin tracks down his wife. As he sits there wordlessly she pours out her confession and he realizes that she wished for the death she thought he had. Unsure whether to kill her or take her back, he loses both options when she does kill herself. He marches on. He tracks down his former partner, who's now bought his way into the mafia. He gets his sister-in-law, Angie Dickinson, to sleep with her dead sister's husband so he can sneak up and kill him. He does kill the partner -- but in about the most unsatisfying way possible: the poor guy falls off the roof trying to get away from Marvin.

At this point you'd think the movie is about done. Everything that was set up has been resolved. But not for Marvin. Where do you put revenge? He was ripped off for $93,000 in the initial heist. He chases and murders his way up through the criminal syndicate to get the money. They're mostly baffled by him. What is he gaining by going after this incredibly powerful organization? Why, for that matter, does he even think they owe him a penny? It's not terribly rational -- but revenge just isn't.

And then at the end Marvin finally gets his money. Or he could. It's offered to him in a pay off back on Alcatraz. But he won't come out of the shadows to take it. He won't take the boat back to San Francisco. Instead, he just recedes into the darkness. End of movie.

Ouch.

NEVER do you 'like' Marvin's character. Sure, he maybe fulfills the old screenwriting bromide: "the audience has to want the main character to succeed'. But that's begging the question. And if you gave him a dog and a sweet, supportive wife, we'd puke.

What makes him work as a character? Put simply: a great dramatic question at every step. What happens next? He's a mystery, a Manichean hodgepodge of good and evil with a not insignificant pinch of crazy thrown in. But he is consistent and coherent, and he never once panders to the audience.

This has the effect of making him human. The final tragedy hits like a ton of bricks.

And while the movie business might have difficulty making money laying that kind of trip on you, it's certainly something the audience can appreciate. And I'd say the writer of drama simply must understand this.

The Wild Blue Yonder

2009-07-31T22:24:00.000-07:00

Tonight I stumbled upon one of the most original films I've ever seen: Werner Herzog's The Wild Blue Yonder. It's a hybrid of science fiction and documentary, if you will. A sci fi fantasy made by a writer/director who, by his own admission, is not terribly well acquainted with sci fi.

Herzog is, above all, a good eye. He knows how to dig through footage and know when he's found something. It's a unique skill. If you saw Grizzly Man you know what I'm talking about: finding images taken by others and bringing out the story that's really there beyond what the supposed teller intended.

Wild Blue Yonder is a weird amalgam -- material in equal parts found and created. The whole conceit lies on the fascinating dichotomy of disparate parts coming together and creating something unexpected.

Brad Dourif plays the only true character in the movie: an alien from the Andromeda Galaxy now living on a lonely earth. His people intended to come here and establish a colony, but it didn't really take. These aliens don't vaporize L.A. They just, in his own words, "suck". They sit by and watch as humans now locate his planet and consider what it might be useful for (as humans do).

The film is a composite of several formats. The earthlings traveling in search of a colonizable planet are actually astronauts on the space shuttle. The aliens are found footage of early 20th century aviators. Underwater shots from Antarctica sub in for an alien planet with a frozen sky.

The piece has a distinctly cobbled together feel. The audience is continuously forced to suspend disbelief -- or at least play with disbelief -- to pretend they aren't watching astronauts spinning around and eating pudding on the space shuttle.

But what arises out of this cobbling and weird play with disbelief is something truly beautiful. You watch found footage of a functionary at the Pentagon from the early 20th century and somehow the suggestion that he's an alien colonizer makes a great deal of sense. The audience fills in the gaps -- they see something that rings true. And this alien is a great deal more real than Spock or Obi Wan Kenobi. There's a life story there. There's a resonance.

When the film drifts into a kind of visual poetry -- beautiful original music played alongside undersea footage you can hardly believe was shot on earth, the audience undergoes a strange transformation. There's something rare and strange here, and it's been found again simply by making us the alien on our own planet.

Sometimes in our rush to make something seamless we create something hermetically sealed. But I'm more of the Leonard Cohen school on this one:

Ring the bells that still can ring.
Forget your perfect offering.
There's a crack in everything.
That's how the light gets in.
That's how the light gets in.
That's how the light gets in.

"Anthem", Leonard Cohen

The Wild Blue Yonder is by no means a perfect film, but it did wake me up to myself in a way sci fi is, or at least once was, supposed to.

Elizabeth Gilbert on Creativity

2009-07-30T13:42:00.000-07:00

I hate it when bloggers apologize for their absence. It seems like a cop out -- a somewhat presumptuous cop out. But I am sorry for not spending more time on the blog. I've been working on a stage play and a LOT of teaching. My screenwriting efforts have been mostly limited to clients, and it's best not to share material related to those projects (even obliquely).

I did re-open a script for redrafting today and had one of those beautiful, transcendent moments when you slip into your work like a hot bath. You find the key to something and before you know it the insurmountable job of a few weeks suddenly makes sense in a morning. I stood back and let whatever or whoever is in charge of inspiration take over.

It made me think of this lecture by Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love. I offer it up to all the writers out there with the dedication and fearlessness to choose a career (and a life) founded on a capricious little daemon that speaks only when propitiated in the most maddening ways.

And I promise I'll be back with more posts soon.

Shameless Plugs: Frameline Edition

2009-06-10T13:05:00.001-07:00

Friends and colleagues of mine wrote, directed and/or produced four great movies that are showing in the 2009 Frameline Film Festival this month. If you're a fan of indie film -- especially LGBT film -- these films are well worth your time.

Prodigal Sons finally makes it to SF after an incredible run on the festival circuit. This documentary tells the true story of a truly unique family -- complete with transgendered football star, grandchild of Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth, and... more. we'll leave it at that. See it in a big theater.

David Lewis' latest effort The Redwoods is making its festival debut. David's been working late and sleeping little since I saw a rough cut a few months back. As he put it to me, it's a gay "The Bridges of Madison County". This film breaks out of the gay romance genre in a big way.

Back to Life is long-time actor Desi del Valle's directing debut. She also plays the lead, which should set girls' hearts a-patter all over the Bay Area.

City of Borders has made a splash all over the world. It's a documentary about a gay bar in the heart of Jerusalem -- where gay and lesbian Israelis and Palestinians commingle and find a way to share ground and build community. Like a lot of films in the festival, it's not about what makes gay people different, but about what makes our stories universal. If you've never considered going to an LGBT film festival, maybe this is the year to start.

Anvil: Story and Life

2009-06-07T15:01:00.000-07:00

I went to see Anvil: The Story of Anvil yesterday. This documentary's being called the greatest rock movie of the year -- or ever -- depending on who you're reading. I'm not quite sure that's the case, but it is good. And it did get me thinking.

There was a time way back when most documentaries were structured more like an essay than a story. What does this mean? An essay format approaches facets and aspects of the story, takes into account the different arguments, and makes a case for seeing an issue in a certain way. An essay format documentary on, say, Einstein, might look at his early life, then his first successes and troubles, political problems and exile, rivalries with other physicists, and how he came upon relativity, then follow up with what this all means.

Story-format documentaries work more like feature films. The audience engages a story because they want to see how it turns out. The main character must embody a strong question and engage the audience. Put simply, there must be both a 'why' and a 'how' for the audience to care about the protagonist. We stay tuned because we want to see how things turn out for the main character. A story-format doc (usually) engages on a more emotional level than an essay-format doc.

Anvil has this all in spades. Back in the early 1980's, at the height of heavy metal, Anvil seemed destined to ride the wave to the top. They headlined with The Scorpions, Bon Jovi, and White Snake. They knew everybody, and everybody knew them. Now the lead singer works for a school lunch delivery service. But he still dreams of making it and the band is still together. They'd make a great subject for a feature script.

The documentary is structured very carefully to fit a standard three-act structure. You meet the band at the height of their fame. Talking heads like Lars Ulrich of Metallica and Slash of Guns N Roses wonder why they never made it. Twisted Sister remembers back when Anvil blew them off stage. Then you find the lead singer talking about when the schools on his delivery route get meatballs and when they get shepherd's pie. Depressing, huh? Yes and no -- they still play regularly, and a chance for a European tour falls in their laps.

The hero's journey rolls on before us. They commit to the journey, find no way back, and encounter innumerable and unbearable sufferings along the way. But they manage to capture an amulet or two, and when they return home you sense it's just in time for the third act to begin. I won't spoil it for you because I think you should see the movie.

I recently consulted on a documentary about a musician. It's difficult. Unlike Lips, the protagonist in Anvil, this musician seemed bent on undermining any possible story. He was reticent, difficult, and at times adversarial with the filmmaker. After all, you can't have a hero's journey without going through innumerable humiliations and defeats. No one actually wants that -- especially with a documentary filmmaker following you around. It wasn't feasible or desirable to move to an essay format, so we wrestled with how to make the story compelling without changing it.

As I watched Anvil, the screen was littered with tiny moments that show the restructuring. Band members wearing T-shirts from the as-yet-unrevealed low point. The return home finds everybody in surprisingly similar garb and mood to the first scene in the house.

Now, it's effective to bring a main character back to a familiar setting from early on in the movie. It allows the audience to gauge dramatic distance -- how far the main character has traveled since we met him. In a feature film (that is fiction), the writer has the ability to manipulate elements however he or she wants. It's part of being a good writer. Documentary filmmakers aren't so lucky. You don't know where you'll end up when you start. You don't know when someone will do something memorable. And you certainly don't know when that memorable thing will actually fit the narrative you've constructed. So you move material around. You stay true to the spirit. Or at least you try.

It's a weird compromise. You want to please the audience but you also want to stay true. I'm not sure if those two can ever sit together peaceably.

I wonder if there's not a better structure for documentaries. Something freer. Something that uses surprise to capture an audience rather than adherence to a mythic structure. Imagine what reality TV could actually do without all the cliches and structural points that the producers seem to think we need. It feels like there's a wealth of story hiding there, buried just under our expectations.

Food For Thought

2009-05-15T16:59:00.000-07:00

The American Heritage Dictionary's definition of the word 'plot', found in Peter Brooks' magnificent Reading for the Plot:

1. (a) A small piece of ground, generally used for a specific purpose. (b) A measured area of land; lot.

2. A ground plan, as for a building; chart; diagram.

3. The series of events consisting of an outline of the action of a narrative or drama.

4. A secret plan to accomplish a hostile or illegal purpose; scheme.

As Brooks points out, "there may be a subterranean logic connecting these heterogeneous meanings."

Brooks blew me away when I first read Reading for the Plot 20+ years ago, in college. I've just picked the book up again, and it doesn't seem to have aged a bit. Well worth a read if you're through with the screenwriting gurus of the world and ready for something a little meatier.

Thought for the Day

2009-03-19T13:39:00.000-07:00

Writing well is as simple as creating characters that speak more clearly than you do.

Dexter

2009-03-18T10:24:00.000-07:00

Dexter is one of those apparently incredibly awesome and groundbreaking Showtime series I'm always hearing about. I'm generally filled with guilt at the mention of Showtime. It's next to impossible to go to a cocktail party in this town without someone rattling on about Weeds or The L Word or The Tudors or some other apparently groundbreaking thing that Showtime is daring to do. Sooner or later I give in to my guilt and rent the damn thing. Usually the stories are fairly amusing. But groundbreaking? Meh.

This happened recently with Season 2 of Dexter, which is now out on DVD. It stars Michael C. Hall, from Showtime's Six Feet Under, as a serial killer who works in the forensics division of Miami's police force department. He solves crimes. He uses his powers for good. You can just see the pitch meeting in your head.

I popped it into the DVD player and prepared to have some ground broken. First thing you notice? Dexter won't quite shut up. He's not terribly chatty in real life, but give the man a chance to narrate and you're done for. Each plot point is carefully voiced over with a thick, starchy glaze of backstory, character intent, and cliff notes for the character development-impaired. It's enough to drive a script consultant batty. I mean, jeez, Dexter: you're this way because of that awful thing that happened to you in your childhood? Really? It's come up three times in this episode alone. Enough already.

Then I thought about it a bit. Why are the writers doing this? They seem smart otherwise. Then it hit me. Character sympathy. Good old Dexter has a problem, and the whole show is more or less structured around keeping the audience engaged with him. What do I mean by this?

You've got Dexter, who's a serial killer. And he's facing off against another killer. And the audience can pretty easily just decide they don't have a dog in this fight, and watch Operation Repo instead.

In my screenwriting class, we work a lot on character sympathy. We talk about how you need to concentrate on one central strategy for why the audience should engage the character. This is a more difficult problem than you might think (at least until you've tried keeping an audience in a seat for two hours). It's a daunting task even if your main character doesn't go around killing people he barely knows every episode.

If you're having character sympathy issues, consider watching Dexter just to witness the multiple strategies that show employs. For example:

Underdog. The man is a serial killer constantly surrounded by cops.

'Fighting for us'. Dexter knows he has a compulsion to kill. He saves himself for those who truly deserve it -- like gangland thugs who knock off young mothers.

Strong opponent. Dexter is constantly facing off against someone who should be able to track him down no problem. In Season One it was a truly bad serial killer dude (who was apparently also his brother. Please, make it stop.) This season he has a sergeant trailing him during his off hours, waiting for him to slip up. This sergeant gets thrown off the trail just as a hotshot FBI agent comes on to track him down after they find his victims stashed in the bay.

Entertainment value. Why do audiences engage Hannibal Lecter? Because he'll always get himself out of a situation in the most intelligent and highly unpredictable way. And he'll make a mess doing it. Dexter at least works the set up, although the unpredictable has a way of drifting into the implausible.

Sympathy. Yep. Plain old sympathy. Every five minutes or so you flash back to his childhood. He's a child, stooping in a pool of blood. Most of us would curl up and die. Dexter trundles on. He's even got a stepdad who knows there's something very wrong with him, but who loves him nonetheless. That stepdad models sympathy for us. Dexter's a victim... so go get 'em, Dexter. Go get the bad guy. Exorcise that compulsion. Then maybe you can have a healthy relationship with that single mom. Or something.

It goes without saying that none of these strategies would work in real life. But they do work here precisely because they give the entire story structure and pacing. There's a reason to keep watching, and it's reinforced minute to minute.

Minute to minute. Something to think about.

Story and Memory, Chapter 762

2009-03-13T08:46:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking about 1985 a lot recently. I was 18 years old. I came out of the closet that year. I remember one conversation in particular. I walked around Morningside Heights with a friend from school. We walked all day -- just perusing the city and talking about what coming out was.

I was full of joy. I was free. I couldn't believe I'd come out and the world hadn't collapsed around me. I couldn't believe my friend was still my friend. This was 24 years ago, when coming out was a different thing, of course. But that's not the point of this story.

"This isn't about love or freedom or getting laid," she told. "This is about everything." She explained how if you make your own sexuality your own enemy, you basically spend your life fighting yourself. Make peace, and it's gonna change the whole way you see the world. Be honest with yourself and you can be honest with friends, sure. But beyond that, you can see friends better. You can feel things better. And she was right. In the following months, noodles tasted better, friends were somehow really real. Rain felt different on my skin. I cried during movies -- all movies. I walked differently. I looked people in the eye. I bloomed. I found spontaneity. The scales fell away from my eyes, and the world was no longer twilit. There was sunshine and darkness, and I could barely contain myself for joy. My friend woke this up in me with a few sentences. She woke me up to my own life.

I remember the day very clearly: perfect, crisp, sunny late fall in December New York. I remember we stopped and had diner food, and later we had noodles. I remember sitting on the steps near her dorm before she went in to get ready for a date.

There's only one problem: I remember her as Patricia Clarkson. Now, I know for a fact it wasn't Patricia Clarkson. There's no possible way it was. It seems much more likely that it was Angelica, who was one of my best friends that year. She was smart like that. But I remember Patricia Clarkson.

Why does the brain do that? How does the brain do that? How did it choose Patricia Clarkson, and have her play the role of Angelica? I know I had a professor who looked a lot like Patricia Clarkson. I remember her loudly complaining about gay men telling her how to run her life in the department reading room around that time. I don't know -- maybe it's as random as that.

I suspect that there's something more. I suspect I had to condense it down in my head. We probably grabbed coffee and went to the park, then meandered for a while. We no doubt talked about all kinds of things. Angelica was 18 at the time. She probably didn't dispense words of wisdom with the pith and clarity of a Patricia Clarkson character. While I'm sure she said many helpful things, I probably just observed her, figured something out, and shifted radically in a single afternoon.

In other words, something magical happened that day. She did still give me my own private Fall of Communism moment. But there's no one moment. There's no neat three-act structure. We probably talked about her boyfriend. We probably talked about the Meat Puppets and Sonic Youth and the Bad Brains. These are the things we had in common. It sounds about right, and I can just barely see her with a cup of coffee in her hand on a still chilly morning walking out onto Broadway.

I'd been disturbed by how this pretty central memory had been so easily corrupted. But I'm not so much anymore. I think this is what stories are for. This is why story structure is important. It's how we remember. It's how we make sense of things. We're hardwired for it.

It's probably something you have to own rather than fight against. Not an easy task. I wonder if Angelica's on Facebook.

CS Podcasts

2009-02-28T09:35:00.000-08:00

Ever feel like you're awash in resources? Me too. So many screenwriters writing and talking on and on about screenwriting. And so often it seems like they're saying the same thing, with new names swapped in for variety.

It's easy to miss the pearls of wisdom out there. Creative Screenwriting's editor Jeff Goldsmith regularly interviews some of the top names in screenwriting, and he does it in a nice, open, hour-long format. There's an actual chance for depth. You can subscribe here via iTunes.

I checked out the interview with John Patrick Shandley, writer of "Doubt". There are plenty of others worth your time. (But you might want to skip ahead of Jeff Goldsmith's ebullient introductions if you haven't had your coffee yet.)

Lullaby

2009-02-22T11:25:00.000-08:00

This was my favorite English-language poem for years and years. Then it somehow drifted away from me. I was struggling to remember the second stanza the other day, and this morning I woke up with it all in my head. Nothing to do with screenwriting, I'm afraid. Enjoy nevertheless.

Lullaby

Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and passions burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.

Soul and body have no bounds:
To lovers as they lie upon
Her tolerant enchanted slope
In their ordinary swoon,
Grave the vision Venus sends
Of supernatural sympathy,
Universal love and hope;
While an abstract insight wakes
Among the glaciers and the rocks
The hermit's sensual ecstasy.

Certainty, fidelity
On the stroke of midnight pass
Like vibrations of a bell,
And fashionable madmen raise
Their pedantic boring cry:
Every farthing of the cost,
All the dreaded cards foretell,
Shall be paid, but from this night
Not a whisper, not a thought,
Not a kiss nor look be lost.

Beauty, midnight, vision dies:
Let the winds of dawn that blow
Softly round your dreaming head
Such a day of sweetness show
Eye and knocking heart may bless,
Find your mortal world enough;
Noons of dryness see you fed
By the involuntary powers,
Nights of insult let you pass
Watched by every human love.

W.H. Auden

Someone has to Design the Toilet

2009-02-19T09:41:00.000-08:00

NPR has an interesting piece on how Production Designers work. It's worth a listen.

Screenwriters usually evolve along a certain path. They learn something about structure and story overall. This teaches them something about how a producer looks at a script. Then they figure out character -- and maybe a bit about how an actor reads a script. At some point they hit on the all-encompassing idea of conflict, and they get an insight into how a director might look at a script. This path is in no way fixed of course. And many of us either decide they've figured everything out when they get to, say, character. Or they perhaps blaze their own little trail deep into the forest, never to be seen again. Being a script consultant lets me read lots of different scripts. It's a bit like being an archaeologist -- digging up the clues to how a mind works, and what altar a writer worships at.

It usually takes a page or two at most to tell is a writer has ever actually worked on a set or not. Why? Because they are either answering that very particular set of questions or they aren't.

What kinds of questions are these? A gaffer lights a scene to make it feel deep, tragic, full of import. The DP refuses to shoot it, saying it looks like a horror movie. The two get in a tiff about just how much optimism there is in a scene. What does it really mean? They've both read the script -- and they've read it from their particular perspectives. Sooner or later the director comes in and imposes order. Sometimes this fight will recur scene after scene.

Another example: the production designer comes to you minutes before a scene is shot, vaguely pissed off that you put a coffee cup with baby dinosaurs on it in the scene. Where was he supposed to find that? Don't you realize you wasted his afternoon? He found a coffee mug with puppies on it -- and that's just the way it'll have to be.

A writer who's worked on a set understands that conceit is no abstract concept. Conceit is a strategy for unity. It's what makes a film unique. It's what keeps gaffers, actors, DP's, and even directors on the same page. It's a way of avoiding the baby dinosaur question. It's a way of avoiding endless conflict between team members. It's a way for things to go smoothly. It looks a lot like kismet.

Writers, myself included, will often not really sweat the details of a room -- especially a bathroom. After all, it's just a bathroom, right? There are enough expectations. But it's someone's job to decide what the character's bathroom looks like. And, if you think about it, you can tell just about everything about a person by the state of their bathroom.

The good news here is that you don't have to tell the production designer whether the character leaves the top off the toothpaste. But you do have to write clearly enough that they can make that decision easily and clearly.

Professor Schimpf, I presume

2009-02-11T12:17:00.000-08:00

A funny thing's happened this semester. I've gone from "Rich" to my students to 'Professor Schimpf', 'Mr. Schimpf', or even, on two occasions, 'sir'. It's fairly emphatic. I teach at a laid back, very California college. Even the dean is 'Michael'. I'll ask the students to call me Rich. Then the next email comes back with Professor Schimpf. It's true I've gained a few pounds. It's been a tough year, and I'm sure I wear the effects of that to some degree. Or perhaps, they simply note on a semi-conscious level that I've crested the hill and have begun my descent into old age. It's unnerving. There's a bout of soul-searching with each mention. And the mentions seem to come with roughly the pacing of a repeated joke in a Woody Allen movie.

When I first started teaching, the rare mention of 'Professor Schimpf' meant something else. There was a bit of pride, of course. This was mixed with a different kind of soul-searching. I'd made a firm decision to leave academia years before, and found myself teaching only through a fairly circuitous twist of fate. I'd tell the student to call me Rich, but what I meant was, "No, I'm a writer. This is just a gig."

The whole thing has me thinking about dialogue, and just how flimsy and fickle words on a page can be. So much dialogue is written without a firm handle on the assumptions. You call a professor Professor because that's what he is. But the meat of the drama in any life is all about the meaning beyond that. It's all in the set up. Professor Schimpf, like any other phrase, means most of what it means by virtue of the narrative it's in. It marks a line crossed over. It brings up my backstory. It engenders conflict and reveals development. We often write as if the words on the page mean what the dictionary says. But we never hear them that way in daily life.

You find yourself standing in line at the grocery store. The couple in front of you is arguing about whether to buy a jumbo pack of crackers. You'll forget the crackers. You'll know instinctively who holds the power, what strategies they use, what they likely do for a living, what their families are like. We can do that. We can divine almost endless information just eavesdropping on a conversation about a box of crackers.

Good dialogue is when the writer achieves an approximation of that endless information. Good dialogue pours more meaning into one word than bad dialogue does in pages. How does that happen?

Set up. Conflict. Audience question. There's a three-act structure in most scenes. You begin with a strong, visual set up. You've got compelling characters, and you've found an interesting opposition for them. That drives a conflict. That conflict opens up more for the audience to engage and explore. It opens up something new for the audience to bet on.

That work is exacting. That work is the architecture. Dialogue is the choice of paint color, or what kind of curtains you're going to hang. It matters, of course. But it matters in a very different way. And it matters not at all if you've not constructed the set up well.

This will come as no surprise to most of you out there, but dialogue follows action for a reason. It's nothing without the stronger, more visual, more immediate elements of the script. It can't replace them. It can't live without them. And when you've got those right, your characters can talk about crackers and the audience will understand.

The Character is Always Right

2009-02-07T13:18:00.000-08:00

It's always difficult to finish my own projects at the beginning of a semester. So much of screenwriting is essentially modeling potential answers. So much modeling is basically throwing mud at the wall and seeing what sticks. I've spent much of the last few weeks convincing sophomores of the value of repeatedly synopsizing a script, or of trying out different conflicting elements within a character. This is largely a process of convincing them of the value of making mistakes and trying again. They are suspicious. They want to know how I intend to grade them on it.

Like most writers, I have a perfectionist screaming inside me most of the time. He's my editor. He's offended by mistakes. He's offended by what doesn't ring true. I'm still learning to stick him in a box while I try out different options. I've learned that my mistakes are usually more productive than that perfectionist A student still looking for a gold star still pacing back and forth in my head.

I just finished the second draft of a script. It's been a nightmare getting the damn thing down in on paper in a respectable fashion. My work, both with students and clients, has been all about making a effectively modeled character move through a well thought out plot. It's been all about those few equations that define different aspects of the story. There's a grand unified theory in there somewhere. You know all your story answer are there. You just know it.

And then you sit down to write.

I'd realized that building the perfectly structured screenplay had become more an impediment than an aid. I let go. I let myself be wrong one more time. I let my main character drag me, scene by scene, wherever he wanted to go. He tracked mud all over the carpet, and missed a couple appointments on the way. But he got to the climax, and he covered a lot more distance doing it. The midpoint got deeper, the high points higher, the low points more desolate and flecked with...comedy. It all felt more real. I had that model imprinted on my brain. I'd tried out dozens of ideas for each plot point. They varied wildly, but all had a certain aspect that made them structural. When I let the main character loose, he seemed to understand it all a bit better, more intuitively than I did. That was humbling.

I've been thinking a lot about this experience. It's not the first time I've had it, but it feels new each time. I'd all but decided I must have imprinted the story part of my brain with a kind of ingrained path that the main character just naturally followed.

But I'm of a different opinion now. This structure that we try so hard to impart is... already there. We see the world in stories. We understand each step we take as set up-conflict-resolution. We see the world that way. My character is no exception. We don't have to think about three-act structure. We think in three-act structure. We model, make mistakes, and learn something on the other end. It's not that the theory's wrong. It's thinking we control the process just by knowing a little bit about it.

One Rat Short

2009-01-20T10:34:00.001-08:00

A nice little video that shows the versatility and strength of a well-thought out three-act structure.

A Tough Stretch

2009-01-11T10:10:00.000-08:00

It's been a weird week full of movies. It's been a weird week of bad movies, actually. Went to see The Day the Earth Stood Still with Keanu Reeves last Sunday. That should have been a sign. Did I listen? No.

While the movie isn't as bad as everyone wants it to be, it's got this hollow, scraped-out feeling to it. You want to blame Keanu, but you know he's just the vessel. You're watching a character without a character for two hours. It might have hurt more to have an Anthony Hopkins in there. Keanu has the virtue of not raising our expectations unduly.

Like a lot of blockbusters, the plot structure had a sour milk feel to it, like it was sitting out in a producer's office too long. It's actually quite different from the 1951 version. You sensed that the filmmakers had taken out what didn't work anymore, added the blockbuster yeast, and fed it through the plot machine they have buried in a secure location half a mile below Century City. The recipe should have worked, but there were too many cooks, and no agreement to add a pinch of salt, or to keep out the partially hydrogenized monosodium something or other. You walk out of the theater feeling like you had one too many twinkies, and it's time to join a gym or maybe a Buddhist monastery.

Maybe my week was all about trying to get the taste of that movie out of my mouth. Maybe I was looking for perspective on my own script, or what writing is supposed to mean for me in the new year. Either way, I subjected myself to American Gothic, a terrifyingly bad 1987 horror flick that managed to completely engross me with the sheer camp impossibility of it topping itself -- until it did. The tagline is "The family
that slays together, stays together". 'Nuff said. You watch, and that same horror plot unfolds before you in a strangely devotional kind of orthodoxy. Here's the group of sassy, innocent white kids. That's the bitch, over there you have the hottie, and right on cue, the responsible guy with the good girl with a problem. And so on. What's scary is that this stuff does work on some level. Even when you're farming on poor land, you've got to farm correctly.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107165/ is one of Javier Bardem's first starring roles. He plays a macho guy with a chip on his shoulder and a deep insecurity, assiduously hidden throughout his life. In a way it's a beautiful movie. It's hard for an American audience in 2008 to watch a dream sequence full of castration symbols, but you can appreciate it for what it meant at the time. And it follows that same plot structure -- the same basic beats that drive The Day the Earth Stood Still and American Gothic. Aristotle knew what he was talking about.

Simon Pegg knows what that structure is, and knows how to follow it. Shaun of the Dead is a pretty brilliant script. He knows who he's writing for and he knows how to communicate. He pretty much replicated the same process for a cop movie spoof in Hot Fuzz. No harm in that. Run, Fat Boy Run is another story. The movie's busy serving two Caesars here -- it's a comedy and a terribly, terribly predictable romance. No amount of careful screenwriting is going to fix a problem like that. And when said Fat Boy, played by Simon Pegg, literally hits the wall while running the marathon (with a hangover. With the love of his life and his son watching. With his landlord and best friend and gamblers with bets against him all in tow.)... you almost have to get up and do the dishes.

I don't mean to sound nasty about this. I'm going to stop now. I'm going to devote myself to looking a little harder at my screenwriting and why I'm doing it this year. I'm going to get past what I know and find more of what I don't understand yet. Let's see where I am in a year.

The Curious Case of John McCain

2008-12-30T07:20:00.000-08:00

I saw The Curious Case of Benjamin Button the other night. It's one of those gorgeous movies that makes you sit through plodding, pro forma scenes every 20 minutes or so. Ah, Hollywood. I'm not sure how I would have approached a project like that. The story sounds like it's best left on a page. Benjamin Button is born an old man, and dies a newborn. Through most of it Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett are aged digitally. If you're thinking it's not a good idea to stick two of the most beautiful people on the planet in a mask (digital or no) for a long (very long) movie, you're thinking what I was thinking. But they pulled it off reasonably well.

There's a great deal of bravery even taking on a tale like this. The writer, Eric Roth, is an old hand. He's written everything from The Good Shepherd to Forrest Gump to The Concorde...Airport '79. He writes well, and he writes to industry expectations.

Forrest Gump is a textbook case of what many screenwriters refer to as misbehavior. There's one trait that defines a character throughout a story. It's how we know we're watching that character. It's how we place bets or worry or otherwise engage in what's about to happen. American audiences view a story vicariously through the main character. If that misbehavior isn't clear, they can't see the drama clearly. New writers often look on the misbehavior as the root of all evil in screenwriting. My characters are too complex to be summed up like that! That's why movies are too predictable and safe! It's also why their stories tend to be completely impenetrable. They don't leave a clue for how an audience should approach the story, so the events lack the significance the writer intends.

Benjamin Button is another classic example of misbehavior. Because it follows one man from birth to death, it offers a good way to explain how misbehavior works in a complex, real-life situation. Just about any trait you can think about will play out differently in an adolescent than it will in an old man. Quick to anger. Gullible. Dogmatic. Cowardly. Choose your own. Now you understand misbehavior. And now you understand the charm of Benjamin Button. He never looks his age, but the misbehavior reads as it should for his chronological age. We see a development. We're constantly looking under that clever but inevitably annoying digital mask. When the misbehavior does get murky the story lags.

The story held a strange resonance for me with the tale of John McCain. Campaigns these days are all about establishing narratives. This is not news. So much of our perception of John McCain was taken up with the task of lining up the POW in grainy black and white with the elder statesman of 2008. There are innumerable elements that make John McCain John McCain. And at the base of them is a misbehavior (in the screenwriting sense) that makes him immediately John McCain.

I was fascinated by an article in the New York Times magazine entitled The Making (and Remaking) of McCain It gets to the heart of why the poor guy went down in flames. Quite simply, his campaign made some rookie screenwriting mistakes. They started writing before they'd mapped out the story. They ran up against plot point after plot point that might make reasonable drama in their own stories, but failed to line up with the one the electorate had tuned into the week before. If you liked McCain in 2000, you'd almost inevitably be turned off by the McCain of 2008, when he hired the demons who slew him eight years previous. If you liked the experienced McCain in August, you'd have trouble with the same guy in October. This may be a sign of complexity or lack of focus. I'll let you decide. The article documents some shifts that are fairly clever (and others that, uh, weren't so clever). What they inevitably failed to see was the context that they themselves created. They looked at what wasn't working about the narrative, rather than the narrative itself.

It's worth noting that a campaign that failed to develop a compelling narrative can itself become one. The journalist was able to stand back and find that misbehavior. He found the quest and the obstacles and the rest that would illuminate and develop out a beautiful misbehavior. There's something to be learned from this. It's probably essential to a tragedy that the players can't step back in time to see the potential that their mistakes opens up. We all know that a good setback makes a bigger victory possible. Screenwriters are supposed to make it darkest before they let the dawn in. Campaigns, not so much. Or, well, who knows. Maybe this is what Karl Rove has in mind.

Subtext, Text, and Doubt

2008-12-26T16:01:00.000-08:00

Screenwriters are very different from most writers. While your typical novelist is urged to challenge what they know and explore uncharted territory, your average screenwriter is told to hew to the straight and narrow. Baby prose writers thrive on subtext. They get a whiff of its power early on. Writing teachers and girlfriends and open mic audiences only fuel that drive into the ineffable resonance that distinguishes a real character from words on a page.

must survive a much more difficult path if they are to succeed. This path is a minefield of "five easy ways" to build a compelling character, or the ten commandments of plot, or the thirty two dozen things you must never do lest ye be cast into the slush pile for ever more. We're taught to keep our heads down and plow all our creativity into a very narrow range. It's a lot like Catholic school. If your desire to write and learn survives, you're probably better for it.

Subtext doesn't come naturally to screenwriters. My personal suspicion is that it simply falls between the cracks. We learn how to construct a non-heretical plot. We learn that characters need dialogue that moves much faster than real-life dialogue. We learn to construct the elements of character and play them through to the end.

But we tend to get a little lost with something like subtext, which is a function of not just dialogue, but also plot. And not just plot, but character also. Dialogue doesn't show up on the page like a good set up. It doesn't jump out at you like a carefully constructed misbehavior, patiently placed and coaxed from action line to action line. Subtext requires being there.

There where? There, in the story -- and off the page in front of you. It's the opposite of so much right thinking about screenwriting.

I've had more than one student come up to me half way through a semester and ask, fidgeting, what subtext really is. They want a neat little definition to put in their writer's toolbox. Truth is that subtext is like love. You know when it's there.

If you're one of those who thinks he knows, or thinks she should, do yourself a favor and watch Doubt, starring Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman. There's great subtext throughout, but it truly shines in the scene where Sisters Aloysius and James and discussing the Christmas pageant with Father Flynn.

Try transcribing this dialogue in your head. Can you find the subtext? You certainly know it's there. But it's not on the page.

It's in the audience's mind. They know the plot. They have an expectation. The discussion of the Christmas pageant (and the suspicious carol "Frosty the Snowman") conflicts with the expectation of that meeting. It conflicts with how we expect everyone to talk. And there you have subtext.

Subtext is relying on the strength of your story. It's hard to do that. We're very much like novelists and playwrights and every other kind of writer in one important respect: we're neurotic.

But writing has a strange way of rewarding faith. In a way, the more you rely on your story, the more it reveals itself. The more you rely on an audience, the bigger the bet they'll place on you (and the afternoon they're willing to risk with your work). Give yourself the chance to find that subtext. You'll fidget, looking for the simpler, page-centric answer. But you'll let that go eventuallly.

Twelve Point

2008-12-26T07:40:00.000-08:00

A nice screenwriting blog with access to a lot of nice resources and free articles.

Enjoy twelvepoint.com.

Christmas Thought for the Day

2008-12-24T18:35:00.001-08:00

A poem to remind us of how story is eternal and ancient and new and universal and personal and the greatest gift our little brains and hearts ever gave us:

Two girls discover
The secret of life
in a sudden line
of poetry.

I who don't know the
secret wrote
the line. They
told me

(through a person)
they had found it
but not what it was
not even

what line it was. No doubt
by now, more than a week
later, they have forgotten
the secret,

the line, the name of
the poem. I love them
for finding what
I can't find,

and for loving me
for the line I wrote,
and for forgetting it
so that

a thousand times, till death
finds them, they may
discover it again, in
other lines

in other
happenings. And for
wanting to know it,
for

assuming there is
such a secret, yes,
for that,
most of all.

Denis Levertov, "The Secret"

Apocalypse! And the Lambada!

2008-12-18T11:01:00.000-08:00

Back in the early 90's I worked as a tour manager for charter groups to the Soviet Union. I remember one trip I worked for a Western Kansas radio personality and his farmer listeners. They wanted to witness the fall of communism firsthand.

Travel to the Soviet Union had been, until then, a very ordered and orderly affair. You got visas from the governments international tourist bureau, Inturist. You stayed at one of several hotels. You got on and off buses. You saw the Kremlin. You saw Swan Lake. You tried to keep tourists away from the prostitutes and vice versa. It was straightforward.

But chaos was descending. Inturist wasn't responding. There was some strange little company no one had ever heard of in its place. They had sent my visa but none of the other 72. Those were in an office in Moscow. This defeats the purpose of visas. We had reservations in a hotel no one had heard of. I was pretty much sure it was a scam.

We were on a one-day layover in Berlin, and the group was headed to Kiev, Ukraine. We were told that Ukraine was now an independent country. Americans don't need a visa. This was new.

We decided I would go to Moscow and try to score the visas and check out what was happening. The other tour manager would take the 72 farmers and the radio personality to Ukraine. I remember landing at the international airport in Moscow, and seeing no one at the counter where foreigners were required to check in. Some half-drunk meathead walked up to me and eventually took me to get the visas. There were no officials in sight. The airport was pure chaos. I asked him about the hotel, and he told me it was "almost finished".

The whole trip was like this. The government, which had provided everything, had basically vanished. Ukraine had declared independence, but no one really believed it yet. The Kansas radio personality droned on about capitalism and this and that. He wanted people dancing in the streets, and pronto. It's hard to dance in the streets when you don't know what money to use, or if your money actually means anything. It's hard to dance in the streets when you don't know what country you live in.

The trip was a seat-of-the-pants affair. We fed 72 tourists very well with a few dollars. We couldn't order tickets to the ballet from the non-existent government bureau. But we could scalp them for lunch money. The plane tickets from Kiev to Moscow never arrived, but we bribed our way onto the plane. The country was coming apart at the seams.

We ended up in Moscow, staying at a brand new hotel in the middle of an endless sea of mud. On the last night this strange little company put together a massive feast with endless vodka for us. We were their first customers. It's hard to express the desperation and elation and just overall weirdness of the time. No one knew what to expect. A young woman I barely knew proposed marriage to me. And that's when they started to play the lambada.

My coworker, Jennifer, looked over at me. She knew what the young woman next to me was saying. We'd both received a few offers in the past week. She pulled me to my feet, and we tore the place up as only two drunk gringos can. We couldn't believe we'd made it to this final day. Each and every day we'd been besieged with absurd and unimaginable changes in a familiar landscape. I looked out the window of this tacky Russian disco at the endless field of mud and realized I was crying. There's a point where you can't feel any more dislocated. There's a point when it really does feel like the end of the world. The lambada still means that to me.

What does this have to do with screenwriting?

How many movies will Hollywood make about the end of the world? Why does Hollywood make so many movies about the end of the world?

The first rule of storytelling is that the subject and main action has to be significant. And you don't get much more significant than apocalypse. It doesn't take a lot of explaining to get across the import. It's easy to tell a story about the end of the world. Throw in some CGI and Keanu Reeves and you've got yourself a movie. No matter that the first rule of storytelling is that the subject and main action must be significant relative to the context. The end of a marriage or a bank heist can mean everything in the same way.

We're suckers for tidal waves and alien ships and megastorms. We feel, on some level, that we deserve this. Or suspect we might deserve it. The tsunami washes over us and we're somehow cleansed. Some spark of humanity is all that's left, and that's enough to save us. We're new again.

But the end of the world isn't so neat and clean. There's a chaos and a dislocation that makes it difficult to tell the tale. There's no three-act structure. It's the absence of that structure. There are tinges of it running through American society right now.

I wonder how we'll tell tales about this period. I've been working on a script for a few months now. I feel the dislocation whenever I sit down to write. Last August was a different time. We've traveled farther than we know.

Thought for the Day

2008-12-11T10:15:00.000-08:00

"The world of novels, there's corruption and mediocrity, but in the end it's still a republic of letters. But film is a tyranny, and the tyrant is money. The great thing is that, in spite of that, impossibly, some people keep on smuggling out messages of hope from the other side, past the tyrant. I mean, there shouldn't be one good movie made given the way it's structured, and yet there are many good movies made. That seems to me to be implausible and marvelous at the same time"

– Australia's Richard Flanagan

BackStory

2008-12-08T11:30:00.000-08:00

... is one of those words that doesn't look write no matter how you spell it: as one word, two words, or hyphenated.

It's also a blog about writers and how they found their voices. I'm not big on this kind of thing usually. But it's compelling here. Check it out:

Backstory.

More on Symmetry

2008-12-07T14:05:00.000-08:00

I saw Quantum of Solace the other day. Can't say I was terribly excited about it -- it was just the only reasonable choice given time and companionship constraints. But there was something there.

The script is by Paul Haggis, who wrote Million Dollar Baby, Crash, and Casino Royale among many others.

Screenplays, for better or worse, run like clockwork. It might sound like a paradox at first: you have to create an audience expectation before you can exceed it. You have to mark your starting point before you can mark distance away from it. This is why symmetry is important in a script. This is why you'll usually find symmetry built into a story even when you don't consciously experience it. After you hit a midpoint, you start finding scenes and moments that bookend what you've experienced so far. As the mirror effect brings the audience back to the beginning of the story, the dramatic distance increases and the audience has a good subconscious gauge of where they are in the story -- allowing them to settle in for the long haul.

Haggis is routinely adored and reviled for his straightforward approach to this. He pulls no punches. He isn't afraid to be obvious or even manipulative. For some, this means his stories are powerful. Others love to accuse him of false depth. (Many of these accusers have a tad bit of jealousy regarding Mr. Haggis' incredible success.)

Now, a Bond film is not really about emotional depth. Generally you'll get farther with assorted car chases and a shirtless Daniel Craig than 007 walking alone on a beach, cursing seagulls for their ability to fly. The depth is secondary, but it does play a vital role. It allows you to sit down and watch 90 minutes of improbable and impossible developments without looking up and wondering whether the plants need watering.

It takes a really good movie for me to put aside my structure-head and simply enjoy a film. Quantum of Solace is not one of those really good movies. I marveled at how carefully it was put together -- watching the clockwork spin around. What struck me is that the movie did in fact shoot for a bit more than I was expecting.

I've talked about how knowing the climax of your script can usually lead you to the inciting event, or vice versa. You look for what's the same, and what's different. You want the two scenes to resonate, to set each other up. But Haggis went a bit beyond this. The climax doesn't have much to do with the inciting event. Instead, it resonates with the backstory of Monica, the Bond girl. It resonates with a story she tells us at the low point. It allows us to go a little bit deeper with her, and therefore with Bond as he helps her and frees her from her demons. There's something there that matters, if only for a while.

The resolution actually resonates with Casino Royale (which I never saw). He solves the problem of his earlier betrayal, and the fact that he actually fell in love with someone who's now gone. There's an attempt to build something here -- to make Bond not just a dashing fellow with a troublesome libido and a penchant for throwing people off buildings. He changes. He undergoes growth. And he grows from story to story. I think Ian Fleming was aiming for something like this. It's not exactly The Lives of Others, but it does toss a bone to old romantics like myself.

Ask the Dust and Dating Tips

2008-12-04T14:34:00.000-08:00

My creative writing class is drawing toward the end of the semester. We hit that awful end-of-the-semester question last Tuesday: How do you make this work in the real world? After 12 weeks of getting them to follow their own lead, dig for their own inspiration, and express their innermost freak outs and tender moments, I turn around and dare to bring up the fact that they'll be writing for other people if they stick to this.

Writing for other people sounds like a drag at first. In fact, it can be a drag. Not every idea is a winner, but you have to pursue it faithfully. You have to find someone else's voice, and then proceed from there.

Now, every week I expose these unsuspecting teens to literature that they probably would not otherwise see. There's a value to pushing them a little out of their comfort zone. William S. Burroughs, it turns out, was a lot out of their comfort zone. Still valuable, if slightly traumatizing.

Last class we read an excerpt from Ask the Dust by John Fante. In chapter 12, Arturo Bandini, a self-proclaimed mix of Casanova and Rimbaud living on the cheap side of Downtown LA in the fifties, slithers his way through the bedroom of an aging, self-hating bachelorette in an attempt to build himself back up for another shot at the woman he's stalking. Then he sits on the beach when an earthquake strikes -- which he's convinced is the earth buckling under the weight of his guilt. Arturo's a real prize.

So, I had them imagine they came upon a writing job on Craig's List or guru.com -- posting to Arturo Bandini's dating tips blog. In other words -- a truly dreadful way to make a living.

Except, well, it's not so bad if you approach Arturo Bandini, employer, with the same respect you would any character. There's a way of thinking yourself into another voice. It takes practice. But it frees you up. There are how many different voices in your script? How many employers to write for? Now you've got it.

In three hours we had several months' worth of dating tips, all written fairly convincingly in the style of Arturo Bandini. Mr. Bandini took on a life of his own -- a kind of weird feedback loop between the original text and the different students' take on him. After weeks of fiddling around with character -- theoretical approaches, free-writes, structural techniques, backstory-driven, dialogue-driven, on and on -- I think I hit on something valuable just when I expected it least.

Convergence, Structure and New Energy

2008-11-28T13:47:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure where to start this post.

I went to see The Sisters of Mercy in concert on Wednesday. They're a band you would have known about had not grunge music drop-kicked goth into a corner in the early 90's. Goth music's found a strange and peaceable immortality in that corner. My boyfriend, an otherwise respectable individual, can't quite free himself from the lure of the drum machine to this day. I try to stay tolerant.

Now, Goth came out of the same musical explosion/implosion that brought about a lot of good musicians. Think punk, post-punk, hardcore, art rock -- on and on. There was a huge upwelling of talent in and around Birmingham, UK, that made music what it is today. It was real, creative, new. Just watch this documentary about Joy Division. You don't have to like Joy Division to understand that something important happened when Ian Curtis got on stage.

None of this made me excited to see The Sisters of Mercy, of course. Nothing sadder than a bunch of people older than yourself singing along with a drum machine. But something amazing did happen before they came on.

Hypernova.

What's a Hypernova. It's a star exploding, like a supernova. But larger.

It's also a rock band from Iran. And a damn good one. They played with a kind of excitement I haven't seen in a long time. Two guitars, a bass, drums and vocals. The lead singer, Raam, sounded like an Ian Curtis coming down off the lithium -- more and more excited, excitable, out of control. The band kept growing into the night. It was remarkable.

On stage you couldn't help but draw parallels to Joy Division. Their album sounds like a cross between The Strokes and Joy Division.

Now, neither of these groups demand a significant portion of my attention. But that's what made me think about screenwriting.

I'm doing more and more teaching these days. There's a great deal of screenwriting that needs to be taught -- how a character is constructed. How a plot works. How readers read. There are 32 rules that all point toward One Thing. I get tired sometimes. You can follow all 32 rules and come up with a passable story. But that's not something worth spending time with, is it?

Hypernova beat the pants off The Sisters of Mercy because they cared more. There's probably nothing as corrosive to The Islamic Republic as Joy Division. Nothing so liberating to hear than the voice of a few post-punk Birmingham artsy types singing for the right to live. It'd be wrong to speak for them, of course. But it's hard not to see them at 12 years of age caught up in something illicit, beautiful and alien as rock music. And understanding better than almost any poor American soul who grew up surrounded by it, with full access at record stores and friends' houses.

They studied it. They used the structure. They write good songs. Then they pour something meaningful into it to communicate to an audience in San Francisco, decades later.

This is why we write. This is what's worth caring about. But you can't get there without knowing how it's put together. You can't break the 32 rules until you've mastered them first.

Putting the Important Ahead of the Urgent

2008-11-22T12:03:00.000-08:00

The holidays are upon us -- waiting just outside the door, leaving cloven hoofprints in the snow. The end of the semester looms -- with pages and pages of grief and anxiety before the final projects even hit. And then there's football. And way too much scotch, butter, and really bad music in the offing. Then, on December 24, there's the shopping.

It's a dreadful time. Each year I debate my approach -- whether to officially put the whole thing off, remove it from the calendar, or gamely smile and step in on the right foot. Of course it doesn't matter. The holidays will win. We will all be sodden with drink, sleep deprived, and weepy with family drama before long. It's been lovely knowing you all.

Needless to say, writing suffers. But does it have to to?

I try to follow a basic plan throughout the year. "Important comes before the urgent". This means writing for myself, going outside, breathing, and similar activities get a place in my life even when they don't seem fated to happen. Stopping to smell the roses is important because it works. It keeps you functional. The rose of the day might be dinner with your boyfriend, or going to see a play, or simply a day at the desk with the wifi turned off and your screenplay in front of you.

Inevitably these things end up making life run more smoothly. Sure, you'll spend all morning suffering through what should be an easy scene. But you'll remember what the scene's about or maybe even learn something about your character. Inevitably you'll listen to the rest of the day with a new ear.

Please don't quote me on any of this in a few weeks. But I do try to formulate a survival plan for the important around this time of year. I'll spend an hour writing before I hit email. I'll make food at home. I won't go to more than two holiday parties in a row. I'll spend some time choosing presents and trying to remember what this is all supposed to be about. There's an abundance out there worth being grateful for -- even around the holidays.

Lord of Obstacles

2008-11-21T12:02:00.000-08:00

I've always had a fondness for the Hindu god Ganesha.

He's not a god of war or the harvest or fertility. He's his own god, a kind of deity without portfolio. He fits in where he's needed -- a kind of generous, humorous personality that understands human nature. Plus, he's got an elephant head, anywhere from 2 to 16 arms, and he rides around on a rat.

Ganesha is the son of Shiva, who created the universe in Hindu mythology. Shiva's a bit more lively than our Judeo-Christian god. He didn't state the universe into existence. He danced it into existence. There are numerous myths around how he came to have a son. One is that Ganesha was born of his laughter.

And Ganesha couldn't quite stop laughing soon enough. He loves to tease, and in fact made fun of his dad and his dancing. The end result? He dances the arts and music into existence. In some myths, Shiva chopped off his human head out of anger at this impertinence. Ganesha's mom had to make do with an elephant head in a pinch. If that's not a recipe for character sympathy, I don't know what is.

Ganesha is a trickster. He likes to play. He's the god of obstacles. He both places them and removes them. He brings about change. You can pray to Ganesha if you want to make things move smoothly. But Ganesha might just stick an obstacle in your path if it's going to teach you something in the long run.

By all rights, that should make Ganesha the god of screenwriting.

Ganesha knows something about what makes an obstacle effective. He knows what draws us on is often the same thing that draws us astray. It's important to remember this when you're struggling to make your character compelling and complex. There's a simplicity at the base of all complexity. Ganesha knows it.

I wrote in my previous post about trying to get a little girl into a car in time to hear a conversation the whole script hinged on. There didn't seem to be a way without pulling back on the conflict and forcing the characters to back down on their misbehaviors. I teased myself that perhaps they were all learning something -- getting past their problems. But I knew it wouldn't work. I got the square block halfway into the round hole, then spent the afternoon trying to extricate it.

A good obstacle forces you to think. It forces you to admit something important. The story isn't about you. It's not there to make things easy on you. It's there, primarily, to help you learn. That's why we write, even if we've got visions of first-look deals dancing in our heads.

And you realize at some point that your character can be lead astray quite easily. And that 'astray' is often exactly where you want to be. You can trick your character. You can force them to confront things they'd never look at. You can force them to grow.

There's something fascinating here, like watching a parrot figure out how to get a nut out of a tube, or a toddler figure out how to use a doorknob. Something greater than you planned on comes out of nowhere. And writing is worthwhile again.

Always remember your character's goal. Always remember their in-the-moment context. And always remember their problem -- even when it seems to be working against you. And remember that there might just be a fat guy with an elephant head giggling just above your head at that very moment.

Finishing with Symmetry

2008-11-16T12:56:00.000-08:00

For me, good screenwriting is largely a question of modeling complexity effectively. Good characters are complex. They have a depth and a resonance to them. But they arise out of two simple traits -- a misbehavior or flaw, and a goal or desire. It's not that those two completely define the character. It's that those two give the audience access to the rest of the character.

Take a good conceit, also known as a strategy for unity. It's what gives a script its 'thingness', its identity. How do you know you're watching Wall-E or Jaws? There's a key concept that permeates every good script that gives it uniqueness. It's present at virtually any moment in the story, but it's not the story. It gives the audience access to the story. For that matter, it gives the WRITER access to the story. It helps you find the tale. It tells you where it is, or what it might be, rather that what's right or wrong. You find association and affinity with a story through a well-derived conceit. You go beyond the fact of the matter and find a dynamic with your conceit.

Plot is no different. Screenwriters plot and plot (or plod and plod) through synopses and loglines and treatments before actually tackling a script. There's a reason for it. For one, it's actually less work in the long run, because you work out most of your problems on a single page rather than in 120. Second, it lets you know what's important. It helps you find the unity.

But then, sooner or later, you actually start to write. Now, if you've worked out most of what's happening, it's relatively smooth. But small problems and shifts inevitably occur. There is no science here. It's like ironing a shirt or laying down a piece of carpet. You roll out one small wrinkle, but it never quite makes it all the way out. As soon as you think it's gone, it's popped up on the other side. You attack and attack, but that wrinkle just moves around to wherever you aren't paying attention.

I'm drafting a story now with this problem. In my synopsis, I let a little girl eavesdrop on an adult conversation. When I got to the scene, she ended up on the wrong side of a car door. No big deal, you think. But of course, she doesn't know what happens inside the car anymore. Which affects the next beat, which affects the beat beyond that, and so on.

You might try solving the problem by putting the little girl in the car. No big deal, right? You've papered over the crack, and saved yourself an awful lot of work. You go onto the next beat. Everything seems fine. You aren't quite as sold on how the whole thing fits together as you might be. But it works. And you write another beat. And you wonder if maybe you need to rethink the misbehaviors a bit. This, of course, means you stare at the ceiling for at least an afternoon. And then your thirty pages down, and the little girl and the old man have to steal a car. And there's absolutely no way to make it work. They just wouldn't do it. They wouldn't think about it. They aren't that crafty or resourceful. They don't fight that way. And strangely, somehow, that's all because you let the little girl in the car to hear the conversation.

Huh?

What happened when you let the little girl into the car. First, you probably sidestepped some necessary conflict. You were choosing your own needs over those of the main character, who really had no desire to have the little girl in the car. You lost a chance to express their misbehaviors. You muddled the whole question of what the characters ultimately want. You didn't let them fight for it.

And thirty pages later, it comes back to bite you.

How do you find your way out of the wilderness?

The blanket answer is you go back to your tools. There's plenty you could do here with character, but just for today, let's talk about symmetry.

If you've read anything about screenwriting, you know something about the three-act structure. If you've read this blog before, you'll probably know that virtually all the gurus and schools of screenwriting essentially rehash Aristotle.

Aristotle was big on UNITY. Why can't you start a rom-com halfway through Jaws? Because you're breaking unity. You're working against expectations. You're deflating your own drama. The audience wants to see dramatic distance covered -- real developments. And those changes, those developments, are all contextual. They are relevant to the story. If Sleepless in Seattle ended with Tom Hanks becoming president of the United States or defeating a gigantic shark, he'd be a good guy. But the story wouldn't make sense.

Symmetry is the activation of that unity within the plot. The inciting event has symmetry with the climax. The opening has symmetry with the resolution. The first plot point has symmetry with the second, and so on. What does this mean? It means that SOME things are the same, and some things are different. You can gauge the differences -- and therefore the dramatic distance -- by measuring them against the elements that are the same.

There's something incredibly key here for a writer. Say you're struggling with your climax. Where do you find a cue? In your inciting event. Or the reverse. Say your little girl character is outside of a car you thought she'd be in. Look at the symmetric beat. And, voila, you find the bigger picture. In this case, the older male protagonist is pushing the little girl away and damaging himself. In the symmetric beat, he more or less rights that wrong -- by having another secret conversation, and learning from his mistake.

Say you find yourself at a loss when your characters just won't steal the car they need to steal for the plot to move forward. Take a look at the corresponding beat earlier in the script (i.e. equidistant from the midpoint). Guess what. They're actually taking a car that doesn't really belong to them.

Surprise! We have unity in our heads. We aim for symmetry, even when we don't realize it. Look at any story -- your own or someone else's. Find the structure, and I'll bet you'll be able to locate symmetries you hadn't noticed before.

Suddenly you're master of your universe again. You look to the beat, what's same and what's different. And soon you've deepened BOTH beats, and found a lot more story.

How does this affect the reader/viewer? Listening to a story is more or less recognizing a pattern. When you see a character in a parallel situation, but acting differently, you can gauge where you are in the story. And you settle in, relax, and wait for that pattern to unfold.

The Lives of Others

2008-11-09T11:52:00.000-08:00

I've finally cleared out some space in my head. It's been a week to remember. The end of the Bush administration now at hand. Friends of mine who woke up Wednesday morning uncertain if they're married anymore. It tears you apart.

I've been obsessed with the election, and very nearly broke out of my screenwriting blog mode to pursue something more general about media and narrative. That may happen, but not today.

I finally saw The Lives of Others. It's a German film about a famous playwright and the State Security officer who put him under surveillance. It's a deeply moving film, and a picture of careful, passionate screenwriting. If you desire to be a careful yet passionate screenwriter, check it out.

The script answers some critical questions for new writers. I'll delve into a couple today.

It's common for new writers to reject any kind of formula for their main characters. How can it be as simple as a misbehavior and a goal? My character is so much richer than that! (And I have 100 pages to go! How am I supposed to fill that with one trait?)

I'll give a class on dramatic distance -- setting your main character as far back from the finish line as possible. New writers nod and agree that's a good idea. Then you start seeing their drafts and you realize the slightly distant look was as long as you don't put them *too* far away from the goal.

You go on and on about symmetry, about how knowing your ending can tell you how to write your beginning, or how one plot point can flesh out another. That's all well and good, they think. But it's too damn hard. Or it's a recipe for formula.

Watch The Lives of Others.

The main character, Wiesler, is a fairly unpleasant individual at the beginning. He not only interrogates enemies of the East German state, he trains others to do it too. He's a whiz at his job because he understands human nature only too well. He knows how to listen.

He's ruthless at his job. He in fact fingers the playwright, Georg Dreyman, for surveillance when all others considered him above reproach.

Did you see the flaw? He knows how to listen. He's obsessed with listening and finding the subtext. He worships at the altar of human nature. And that's not necessarily a good thing when you work for the Stasi. He's too good at his job.

As Georg's best friend commits suicide and his wife gets pawed by a powerful politician, Wiesler can't help but feel sympathy for the man. When he encounters Georg's wife by chance, he knows exactly what to say to her to strengthen the marriage. And the drama continues.

Georg and some friends discuss smuggling one of them into West Germany. Wiesler hears the whole thing, and decides not to report the future crime "just this once". But Georg and friends were simply running a test -- to see if the apartment was bugged. They never counted on Wiesler's sympathy. And they start to hatch a bigger plan without taking precautions. He's put both Georg and himself in greater danger.

Now Wiesler has a choice. Come clean or continue the lie. He continues the lie -- in fact coming up with a fake play to cover up real work his subject doing. He gets another security man off the case, arousing the suspicion of his boss. Soon Wiesler is risking literally everything to save the couple -- all without their knowledge.

At the end, Wiesler is the interrogated, not the interrogator. He's come full circle. He's covered more dramatic distance than you can imagine. And you believed it every step of the way.

I've summarized here. I've taken a hugely dramatic script with multiple storylines and subplots and turned it into the answer to an essay question. That's a problem with blogging. It's not finding something new. It's reporting what you saw.

I'm going to insist that you watch this movie with one thing in mind. Not merely "can I identify the screenwriter's tools?" Look a little deeper, and see that a beautiful, true story is beautiful and true BECAUSE it has these tools. They aren't tools once they've left your head anymore. They're simply true. They're simply beautiful.

Vote Obama

2008-10-25T09:54:00.001-07:00

Rebuild our democracy.

Gigantic Releasing

2008-10-24T12:03:00.001-07:00

The indie film world has been on the cusp of a distribution revolution for...years and years and years. There's always a big bold world of endless availability for even small filmmakers just around the corner. Somehow it never quite happens. I'm not sure why. We all thought Netflix would be a huge boon. Not so much. Itunes Movie Store. Hmmm.

The latest iteration of the coming online revolution is here now. Gigantic Releasing is moving into distribution of independent films online the day of release in theaters. So, you'll be able to see the tiny little flick with a heart of gold that never gets to your town. And it'll cost $2.99 (popcorn not included). It's higher picture quality than you're used to. No ads. And they're throwing in a freebie: unlimited free access to a huge library of documentary and short films. Who knows? It might just work.

Check out this article in Indiewire.

What the Audience Understands

2008-10-20T15:08:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking a lot about what the audience understands implicitly about a story. Knowing what the audience gets immediately is a big part of the writer's toolbox. And so today I want to talk about conceit.

No -- not conceit as in conceited. Conceit as in concept. Conceit is an approach, a strategy, a pose. Conceit is the way you bring unity to your work.

I went to see Max Raabe and The Palast Orchester last Saturday. Mr. Raabe and his band are some of the foremost advocates of the music of the 1920's and 30's. They dress in period coat and tails. They play original orchestrations and they take it very seriously. It's almost strange not to hear the scrapes and scratches of the old victrola recording. The concert took place in Oakland's art deco gem, The Paramount, and it was hard not to feel a bit of nostalgia for a time I never actually experienced. The immersion was total. It didn't matter if you weren't particularly a fan of music most of us remember from The Great Gatsby. You were caught up in the experience. You were rewarded for going with it.

That's what conceit is.

Conceit is following a good idea to its full unfurling. You might mistake Raabe's music as a nostalgic play at first. But it's done with incredible care and attention to detail. You might mistake the outfits as kitsch -- until you see that he's truly aiming for the kind of elegance that contemporary music has lost. He wants to regain that. He wants to bring something back. He wants to make something new again.

I took my seat with a grain of salt at first. I hadn't chosen the concert -- just to go along. But within a song or two I couldn't help but feel I was back in the Weimar Republic, that time of loose morals, political strife, and great fun before Hitler came to power. You could hear something real from then in the music. It made you think. It made you compare your own time to that period. It made me teeter back and forth between optimism and pessimism about where we might be in five years. My Little Green Cactus actually got me thinking about history and the world and what's going on in it. I don't know if Mr. Raabe had that in mind, exactly. But any strong conceit -- any idea worked out organically -- has that kind of resonance. It means more. It's dynamic. It has a dynamic that gives it life in a listener.

Raabe got a standing ovation that night. He came out for his encore and played a cover of... Britney Spears. It's worth a listen.

Quote for the Day

2008-10-12T10:00:00.001-07:00

"If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn't matter a damn how you write."

– Somerset Maugham

первый блин комом

2008-10-11T10:21:00.000-07:00

For some reason I had a class from 1987 stuck in my head all yesterday. I was studying in the Soviet Union, and locked into an incredibly torturous class on Russian aphorisms. The teacher was writing a dissertation contrasting English and Russian sayings, and the class basically consisted of her trying to milk us for as much new material as she could come up with.

We'd sit there, she'd fire off a saying at us, and grill us into providing an English language equivalent. Then she'd scribble it down in her notes -- "A steetch een time saves nine... steetches?" -- then she'd pretend to teach us another aphorism. This went on for weeks.

One day she offered up this little gem of Russian wisdom: "The first blini is комом." I've never come up with a good translation for комом. It basically means a misshapen mess. We sat there in silence. She demanded an answer. Finally one student said, "The first pancake always sucks." And she wrote it down. "Socks?" No. Sucks. The first pancake always sucks. She seemed skeptical. Then we explained that 'sucks' has an idiomatic meaning. "Ah!" A two-fer. She scribbled frantically.

I think this stuck with me because "The first pancake always sucks" probably should be an aphorism. The first pancake is either burnt or undercooked. It runs too much to one side. It sticks to the griddle or bubbles in the butter. The purpose of the first pancake is not to be eaten. The purpose of the first pancake is to prepare the way for the next pancake. The first pancake gets the amount of butter adjusted correctly. It probably adds a microscopic dose of batter to the griddle that paves the way for better pancakes down the line. It tells you the pan's too hot. But it's not a good pancake.

First pancakes are like first drafts. You can't aim for too much. You have to get it down on the page -- but there's no doubt that the second draft will be better. You can mix your batter all morning but you won't get to the perfect pancake until you've made your way past the first one. It's just a fact. For me, it makes writing easier.

Now, I firmly believe in planning. There's no substitute for it. You MUST work out a strong concept before you begin. It doesn't matter how many cauliflower pancakes you make -- they aren't going to get significantly better with practice. But even the best concept won't get you past the testing stage. And that's all a first draft really is. You'll adjust the batter. You'll adjust the temperature. Maybe you'll add a bit of vanilla, or some berries from the freezer. But you won't know until you try it out.

We Are What We Repeatedly Do

2008-10-04T11:03:00.000-07:00

It rained for the first time in six months last night.

This is normal for the Bay Area. All summer long the fog rolls in nightly, but not a drop will fall. By October everything is dusty. There's a collective crick in everyone's throat. Worries about drought fill the airwaves. You (and everyone around you) physically crave rain falling from the sky. By law, meteorologists must predict rain four times before it actually falls. It's torturous. And when it finally arrives no one wastes time to find their raincoat to run outside and breathe in the astounding smells of wet pavement. The trees seem to take a collective deep breath. The earth opens up. Dogs dance around frantically.

Last night was the meteorologists' first prediction of rain. You see clouds, but you know the rain won't come. I went to an outdoor Sigur Ros concert. The band is much like the weather -- it takes it's time getting there, but you're glad when it finally happens. They open up a great, gorgeous sound. The lead singer is a counter tenor. It's all quite ethereal and quirky. Toy pianos and weird meters eventually give way to guitars and drums. But like I said, you have to wait for it. I sat in a great Greek amphitheater as gigantic eucalyptus trees bowed in the wind. It wasn't until the encore that it all made sense. They played a crowd favorite: Track 8. The song repeats some Icelandic phrase over and over. Droplets started to fall. And as the song built to its incredible climax, the rain started to pour down. I'm a very modern person, but I couldn't help but feel they'd called it down, demanded it from the gods, made it come down and quench California's thirst with the proper offering.

There was rock concert ecstasy. There was crazy Norse raindance ecstasy. It all fed together like some well thought out movie plot. They called the rain down. It made me think about Aristotle.

Aristotle had a surprisingly simple view of human nature: We are what we repeatedly do. He applied this to every field of endeavor he touched. He believed that the ethical basis for a human being was repeated good action, that habits would bring out the best in people. He was an optimist in this. He believed we were basically good, and that it just took some work for us to realize it and make the best of ourselves.

Aristotle also laid the foundation for our understanding of drama. He is the first to sketch out the three-act structure. He is the first to dig into the relation between character and plot. Almost all western drama goes back to Aristotle.

And, in a way, it's all about uncovering what is best in humans through repeated action. When you start a movie, what do you see? The main character's world is defined by his repeated action. There's something healthy and good there, or there's something not so good there. Then he reacts with the same basic reflex at the inciting event. His world is thrown out of balance. He hews to his basic reflexes even more -- and gets stuck in the plot. He continues down this path, repeating the same basic reflex action over and over again. It keeps him from getting the girl. It gets him punched in the face. It makes him rich and miserable. It drives him to hate himself. It doesn't matter. It's the same action, over and over. Only the context really changes. Until the climax.

And in the climax he wakes up. He overcomes that action. He sees he past his little world. He opens up. And the reward comes down upon him. (Or, in Greek drama, he doesn't -- and pays with his life).

The protagonist wins a battle by overcoming the self. He connects to something bigger. It's the repeated act that drives him to a better understanding.

Back when Aristotle was bopping around the acropolis, drama was part and parcel with magic and religion. He saw this repeated action as a call for intervention from above. We'd laugh and say that you can't call rain down from the sky with a song that repeats the same phrase over and over. But we seem to agree with everything else he had to say, so maybe it's worth at least wondering if he was on to something here.

Foot-Foot and Butt-Butt

2008-09-29T16:25:00.001-07:00

I was exercising my god-given right as a writer to eavesdrop the other day when I stumbled upon a conversation. It made me think of a quote from Mark Twain:

"The humorous story is told gravely; the teller does his best to conceal the fact that he even dimly suspects that there is anything funny about it."

I actually remembered the quote as its converse: that a grave tale is best told with humor. That's just me.

As I sipped my coffee, a laid back Californian-style hipster chatted with his very east coast fiancee. His dog, Foot-Foot, had eaten the strap off her handbag. It was a disaster. Foot-Foot was a terror, and clearly jealous of the hold the fiancee had on her master. The young man was of the no-problem-without-a-solution type. They spend Saturday finding a new handbag, make an adventure of it. She'd be happy. I think he was stoned.

She was not convinced. There seemed to be a bigger problem in general: dogs. She would brook no opposition, least of all from canines. Failure to prosecute Foot-Foot for his crime was a serious issue. Just as serious: the very name of the young man's second dog: Butt-Butt.

Now, these are great dog names, if you ask me. You can see Foot-Foot, Butt-Butt, and the young man having a great time, making a mess of the kitchen, chasing slobber-covered tennis balls, barking at passing fire engines. It all makes sense.

But she was putting her foot down. She doesn't like slobber-covered tennis balls, or scratches on the door, or midnight pee runs. The man tried to lighten the moment by joking that he planned to get a third dog and call it Nut-Nut.

Like I said, I think he was stoned.

Was she expected to call out to Nut-Nut in public? What about when her parents came to visit? You sensed that Nut-Nut would have complete power to chew up any accessory. She wasn't about to shout Nut-Nut out loud. It was completely unacceptable.

Nut-Nut quickly rose up, like a scowling head of Putin in the airspace over Alaska. The issue of Nut-Nut became, you sensed, the main conflict that would either break this relationship, or test it for many years to come. The young man had never realized just how serious this was. It was incomprehensible to him. But it was becoming very clear now. The plot was moving forward. We'd learned more about the characters. More importantly, the characters were learning more about each other.

Many new writers of drama do their best to shove as much drama as possible into a dramatic scene. It's as if the presence of a joke (or, god forbid, a humorous premise) will shake the scene's gravitas to its core. Scripts move from unrelenting conflict to unrelenting conflict... that's what the screenwriting books tell you to do, right? Never let up? It can very quickly become unrelentingly monotonous.

You'll find higher highs to contrast with your lower lows if you allow your audience to breathe, to laugh, to enter the situation. Tell a story, enjoy yourself, and find what sounds true.

Thought for the Day

2008-09-27T14:38:00.000-07:00

"Character gives us qualities, but it is in actions -- what we do -- that we are happy or the reverse. All human happiness and misery take the form of action."

Aristotle

Misbehavior and Desire

2008-09-25T10:33:00.000-07:00

There's a basic structure to almost every movie you've ever seen. It doesn't matter if the movie you're watching is Killer Klowns from Outer Space or 3:10 to Yuma or Kung Fu Panda. It doesn't actually matter if it's The Godfather or a commercial for laundry detergent. There's a common structure there. It's present in 'serious' indie stuff and Disney films (and their spoofs).

Why is the structure there? Because people expect it. It's a chicken and egg thing. It's vaguely disturbing how prevalent the three-act structure is. If I were in a better mood, I'd find it endlessly fascinating just how productive this structure is. I'd wonder if humans weren't hard-wired for this story structure. I'd go on and on about how formulaic films do everything they can to fit into the structure, while more challenging films merely use the structure to help create new and better story. But it's been a long week, so it's just vaguely disturbing right now.

What is this structure, exactly? You can find a description of it in Aristotle's Poetics. You can find reams of paper written on the hero's journey, the writer's journey, George Lucas' journey. Syd Field will bisect the middle act, and make three acts into four. Individuals throughout history have produced incredibly insightful and careful analyses of the basic story structure that has fueled drama and literature for as long as we've existed.

If you're not up for a big research project right now, let me sum it up for you. Your hero walks carefree and/or miserable through the equilibrium of his life until wham -- something throws everything out of balance. The hero reacts indignantly -- as any of us would. But things get worse -- he can't get away from the plot. Just has to power through. Things start looking up -- our guy even learns a bit about himself -- but it lasts just long enough to find a bigger problem. "Hey -- here's something I didn't know I could do!" he thinks. And of course, he can't actually do it. It's all going to hell now. The train's riding down the tracks, the alien forces are massing overhead, or you find yourself facing a debate in front of 100 million people right after humiliating yourself with a transparent political stunt. But lo and behold, you learn how to escape what got you into trouble in the first place. You overcome it. You gain knowledge. You gain love. You gain That Which Means Most to You. Or, in some dreadful cases, you don't.

How does this all fit together? Well, the character is usually constructed from two main elements: the goal of the story and the inability to reach that goal. That inability is usually neatly summarized as a flaw or misbehavior. Even in fairly complex characters there's one main defining trait because it helps the audience recognize the character.

Now why on earth would that appeal to human beings? Like it or not, we're all tied up with our own misbehaviors and desires. We're tied up in our own cycles. We usually are responsible for these cycles because of some behavior we can't get past. We drink too much. We surf the web too much. We avoid conflict, or race toward it. We're bullies, or we're wimps. We've got a basic nature, and that means the stories we experience tend to repeat themselves. Every Tuesday afternoon I teach for six hours. Every Tuesday morning about 10 AM I'm frantic with worry about what I forgot to do. Every Tuesday at 10:15 I remember it's eating and bathing that I've forgotten. At 10:45 I'm running out the door to catch the train. It doesn't matter how much I plan. I'm bound to do it.

Think about it.

There's something hugely cathartic about people escaping their cycles. Watching others do it is powerful. It's rare in real life. But it's a gorgeous thing when it does. Maybe that's all movies are really about.

Prodigal Sons

2008-09-12T15:25:00.000-07:00

A few years ago I met Kim Reed at a screenwriters' conference. She was working on a story about three siblings: a high school football star and class president who underwent a sex change, a gay man, and an adopted brother who found out he was the son of Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth. Naturally, I assumed this was a rather far-fetched feature.

It's not. Prodigal Sons is a documentary about the true story of Kim's family, and it's bursting onto the indie documentary scene after an incredibly successful debut at the Telluride Film Festival.

Here's what Variety had to say. If you get a chance, check it out.

Getting Unreasonable with 'em

2008-09-11T12:19:00.000-07:00

I was rooting around this morning for pithy online resources for my Creative Writing students. This is the kind of activity which engenders far more ambivalence in me than you might expect. I'm not down with pithy advice to writers. I'm firmly of a mind that writing is more or less like teaching a rider to become the horse. You have to learn to to let the animal take the reins. But that's much too frightening a reality to teach new writers, and so I spent the morning looking for comforting baby steps that'll keep them writing long enough to find out the dirty bits themselves. And I stumbled upon this in an article entitled Five Tips to Avoiding Total Disaster as a Novelist:

Tip #5. Ignore all reasonable sounding advice like “write about what you know,” “read as much as you can,” or “try to write every day.” If you need to hear this advice you are in the wrong game. But more importantly, reasonableness won’t get the job done. One day in an ice-stricken back alley in Boston I saw a fat little Irishman beat the daylights out of four larger, stronger assailants. When it was over, and it was over astonishingly quickly, he brushed himself off and said simply, “I had to get unreasonable with ‘em.” Unless you are willing to face the unreasonable in yourself -- unless you are willing to entertain some strange notions (and deal with them when they stick around) -- unless you are willing to get lost, confused and even terrified -- then what you’re doing won’t have any meaning. The famous device of conflict upon which all stories are supposed to hinge starts within the writer. You are all the characters in your dreams and so too with a novel. You can’t put your creations into jeopardy or into embarrassing or miraculous situations without going there yourself, and that is not a sensible ambition for a grown person to have. As a writer who has made more mistakes than most, my goal above all else is to be very, very unreasonable.

I'm less than convinced about some of his other tips. As he says, spending years collecting odd material and playing with weird writing styles is absolutely a waste of time. He's entirely correct. I just wish it wasn't entirely necessary to the development of a writing style. I nevertheless hold author Kris Saknussemm in a high regard. You can find out more about his novel Zanesville here.

Mr. Gary on the Feedback Show

2008-09-10T14:00:00.000-07:00

Mr. Gary is playing in the ATA Film and Video Festival Friday, October 3. If you're in San Francisco, check it out! It's in a pretty decent line up of underground and indie films. Well worth a day away from the multiplex, if I do say so myself.

Mr. Gary on the Feedback Show is the story of Flora, an elderly shut in who calls in to a surreal Dr. Phil-like radio personality and ends up controlling the universe. It's shot in a set designed by Megan Wilson.

Immediate and Real, like a Dream

2008-09-06T13:05:00.000-07:00

Writing is one of those things nobody really understands. We can build devices that shoot our thoughts and words off across great distances. But we can't really understand how we form those thoughts, or how they're rebuilt in the mind of the listener. We're in the middle of some information age -- be it evolution, revolution or death spiral -- and somehow we still dawdle around wondering if words came first or images or meaning. Sooner or later you're right back praying to the muses, just like the Greeks a couple millenia ago.

Things get no easier when you try to build a life around writing. You think you get your head around it, then it humbles you again. You dare to 'teach' it -- and wham, there's always something more. You foolishly rush into the profession of writing, and there you are with your toolbox full of plot and character and elements of drama, standing dumbfounded by the monster in front of you. Writing is like love. It pays to recognize ahead of time that you'll be regularly dumbfounded.

I've settled on the comfortingly obtuse idea that our brains are basically quantum machines. We bring things into being by observing them, by making choices about them, by pointing our intention at them. It explains to me why a character that I've constructed roughly out of a couple basic elements can just start chattering back at me one day. There's a real act of creation here. It doesn't matter that the character isn't standing there in front of you. Apparently we can't directly experience seven of the ten major dimensions anyway. What's another protagonist or two?

There's a lot of research implying that as far as the brain is concerned, dreams and memory are pretty much the same as actual experience. "Show, don't tell" indeed.

Play/Work/Screenplay/Scene Work

2008-09-04T09:28:00.000-07:00

I'm of the belief that you're not truly a writer until you've been dumped for shouting "I'm working!" at a loved one through a door as you stare at an empty page one time too many. Writing is work.

I won't bore you with the old chestnut that writing is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration, because you've heard it before. But it is true.

I know that writing is several kinds of work. From planning it out to developing characters to revising and editing to ruthless self-examination to god-knows-what the next script will demand of me. Few jobs require as many different skills as writing does. And I'm not even counting the business end here.

Writing is work. Writing wears you out. Writing builds muscles. Writing is The Man. Some days you need a few beers and burgers just to feel normal again afterward. I've done every imaginable job from Fedex courier to cab driver to teacher to manager to waiter at snotty, understaffed restaurants. Writing is the hardest.

So don't look at me funny when I tell you that writing is play.

Writing is play. Writing has to be play. To wit:

You can plan a screenplay to within an inch of its life. I mean this. While you must plan out your script if you hope to get anywhere, you can also kill a script by overplanning it. Where's the balance?

I know I've hit the limit on planning when I stop finding toys to play with. I plan to increase my enjoyment. I plan to find scenes I want to write and characters that will surprise me. I plan to take a trip that I want to take. I plan ahead. I plan to be surprised. I plan to be happy.

I used to plan for careful symmetry. I used to plan for Syd Field. I used to plan for meaning, for significance, for something literary.

Now I plan to tell stories. In a shockingly straightforward kind of way, that's all most storytellers really want to do.

Last night I was watching The Seventh Seal. For those of you not familiar with Ingmar Bergman's opus, it's the story of a crusader's return to a Sweden ravaged by the Black Death. I didn't actually choose to watch it. The boyfriend wanted to, and it seemed like a reasonable alternative to the unbearable pathos that Brooke Knows Best inevitably brings on.

What caught me up was the scene where the traveling band of actors is singing this very silly song about sheep laying eggs and hens meowing while Death goes for a walk on the beach. Off behind the stage, the actor who plays Death is busy seducing an entirely willing milkmaid. And I realized just how much fun Bergman -- yes, Bergman -- must have gotten from putting this all together. The Seventh Seal stopped being something you're supposed to watch. Something very heavy became very light.

How do you apply something like this to the work you've got in front of you?

I was coaching a student on building climaxes before the all-too-numerous act breaks in a Movie of the Week script the other day. It's one of those things that seems terribly complex until you get the hang of it. (Then it's a bit too boring/restrictive for words). And I remember back -- way, way back -- to when I was a grad student, and a friend visited me from the Soviet Union. He'd never seen a commercial in his life.

We were watching a movie of the week. He didn't speak English, and I was providing a kind of running translation. Just as we reached the first act break, the movie of course went to commercial. What? "What the $%^$?! Who is this woman on the TV? And why is she having an orgasm folding her laundry?!" How could anyone do something so mean-spirited, so tricky, so evil as to build the tension then try to sell you detergent?

I still don't have a good answer to those questions. But I don't think I could write an MOW without thinking of him.

Changing "The Narrative"

2008-08-30T08:57:00.000-07:00

I do my best to avoid topics that will likely turn off readers. I want everyone to feel welcome here, whether we agree or disagree. It's nothing more than a screenwriting blog, yo. My politics aren't the issue.

I have been thinking about starting a blog about how the fundamentals of drama are moving out into the broader world. Now that we're all connected by intertubes, it seems only natural that this tendency will grow. You can control how people see events and characters by framing their context. There are some extremely effective strategies for doing this, and they've been around for thousands of years. Who wouldn't access this knowledge?

This is why Republicans and Democrats are constantly screwing with each other's back stories. This is why they're always muddying each other's inciting events. On and on. And this is the only conceivable reason I can think for McCain choosing Sarah Palin.

Unless you're staunchly anti-abortion, you were probably scratching your head on this one. Google got a bit of a headache from everyone trying to figure out who she was. Apparently McCain met her once before this week, so he wasn't exactly sure who she was either. For that matter, she wasn't too clear on what the VP job entailed.

So even if you think she's a great pick, you have to ask yourself how she got picked.

From a screenwriting standpoint it does make sense.

Old screenwriters love to sit around and talk about 'setting traps'. How do you do this? McCain's rewriting the narrative to make it more difficult for Obama. He's setting traps. It's not how well known she is, or what she stands for. Her main asset as a trap has more to do with how powerless and out of her element she is, in a way.

To wit: Obama attacks her for being inexperienced. McCain keeps the 'inexperienced' meme in the narrative. Obama's slogging through sand here. It's not so much that he's defeating his own argument as making it harder for Obama to make his.

The Obama camp attacks her for getting her ex-brother-in-law fired -- i.e. allegations of corruption. McCain keeps the Tony Rezko issue in the debate.

Whenever Obama's surrogates reference the excitement at a first black president, they're now cutting against the excitement about a woman in the White House.

In other words, all the obvious attacks backfire. In other words, this is not a stupid or reckless choice. It's not a choice made from a position of power. But it is a crafty choice. When does a screenwriter make a choice like this?

A screenwriter builds a trap by giving the trap a number of analogous traits to the hero. And they give the trap to the opponent. The hero can't really attack the opponent without damaging someone like themselves. They have to find a way to get to their goal without endangering this person like them.

The trap is a hostage. And I think this may well lay at the base of McCain's thinking. This is Princess Leia captured by Darth Vader, in a way. It's Saddamn Hussein's 'human shields'.

Yes, I know. She's a gun-toting Christian hockey mom who appeals to the Republican base. I know. Could he really not come up with someone better to make his point? I don't think he's interested in having someone he views as an equal on the ticket. Yeah, she'll pull a couple Clinton voters. But I can't see them really crossing over in droves. No one can.

In my view, McCain's probably made a mistake here. He's basically reacting to the hero's plot. He's thinking like a villain. He's casting himself as the villain in Obama's narrative. And villains have a knack for not winning in the end.

Or maybe that's just in the movies.

Film Arts Finally Goes Under

2008-08-25T09:46:00.001-07:00

Film Arts Foundation, after a long history of supporting the creation of independent film in San Francisco, has officially gone under. This is a surprise to no one. It's been hobbling along for years now. It was always one of those organizations that you felt should be and do more than it is. But, as a friend of mine put it, there's no 'there' there. You tried to be good and faithful member. You'd try to see how you could access them for help making a film. But they weren't as relevant as they could have been.

The news is that the SF Film Society is taking over their filmmaker services. This seems a bit of a stretch. SFFS puts on the San Francisco International Film Festival. They have fancy screenings and the like. But their mandate has been about bringing independent film to viewers, rather than working with the film community here. That's a real shift in culture for any organization, but I'm cautiously optimistic.

Why? There are a huge number of filmmakers in this town, with a great deal of energy. Most of them had run up against the limitations of FAF shortly after signing up for fiscal sponsorship. They ALL want a more vibrant center for filmmaking. I think most of them will give SFFS a shot.

Here's hoping, in any case. If you're interested in reading more, check out this article. It's well worth your time even if you aren't in San Francisco. There are a lot of changes going on in indie film. Some are great, some are not. The pattern is the same all over the country.

Immanuel Kant and Why You're Procrastinating

2008-08-23T11:49:00.000-07:00

... or why we're both procrastinating, actually.

This is a posting about two of the most central elements to any rewarding writing life: intention and concentration. Just want to lay that out there before I crawl out onto a limb and hang myself.

Back in the 1700's The Enlightenment was in full swing. More happened to shape who we are in this century than most people realize. The arts, philosophy, science all snapped the tether that had leashed them to the church for over a millenium. Reason took hold and life in many ways became what we know today. This was the time of "I think therefore I am". It was the time of the Declaration of Independence and the birth of the scientific method. It let Mozart write Don Giovanni one day and a mass the next. Isaac Newton and the apple. It was an astonishing time. Humanity saw itself in an entirely new light. Not all of it was good, of course. The French Revolution comes to mind.

There was an explosion of philosophers. Most of them can be seen as engaging in the untethering of thought from the church. It's like they're figuring out how to untie the boat from the dock. Some are cautious. Others not so much. 'I think therefore I am' replaces 'God made me, and therefore I am'. The Enlightenment allowed us to measure and manipulate knowledge without falling back on some mystical unknowable relying on faith.

Immanuel Kant was at the head of the pack. He came up with a couple swell ideas. We can't truly know the reality of other individuals -- only our perception of them. And we can't act on objects across a distance.

This adds up to a couple problems. First, well, you can't really know anyone else. There's a loneliness there. We're all separated out. It's depressing. This has been sinking in for a few centuries now.

Second, it makes no difference what we intend. By intention, I mean things like prayer. We can pray, but we're not affecting anything. Some supreme being may observe it, but we're not really doing anything but bouncing thoughts off our own craniums.

Like I said, it's depressing. (And by the way, I don't think he really even believed it. He just had to say it in order to win an argument.)

Frankly, I think Kant was dead wrong on this one. If he was right, we wouldn't be praying anymore. We'd probably distantly remember religion at best. We'd have truly outgrown it. If Kant was right, then quantum physics wouldn't exist. But it does.

If you have a positive mental attitude, you know the power of intention. If you meditate, you know the power of intention. If you worship in a church, you know the power of intention. If you psych yourself up before the big game, you're using intention. We all use intention in some way.

And of course, if you write, you know the power of intention. You can bring a world into being. You can create characters that breathe and act and doubt in the existence of their creator. Writing exercises that same capacity -- that muscle of thought. We all settle into cliches of 'being creative' and forget that we are truly creating something. And we're creating it out of pure intention. Readers recreate that world out of their own intention. So screw Kant.

Of course, intention requires concentration. And why is it so damn hard to concentrate? Why are you surfing the internets right now instead of writing that story? To my eyes, we're busy 'pinging'. We're putting out beacons, seeing if the real world is out there. We're fighting that loneliness. And most of the time we're losing. We're confirming everthing Kant

Writing is requires more concentration than the average individual has anymore. It works a capacity that our culture has largely forgotten we have. It takes work and practice to learn it again. So pray, intend, meditate, wish well, whatever it takes. Do it every day. And get writing.

The Dark Knight

2008-08-19T09:55:00.001-07:00

I'm a little late out of the blocks on this one, so I'll keep it short. This is one of the films that managed to catch me up as a screenwriter and scare the pants off me. And it does it while largely centering on some fairly heady thematics about the nature of a hero in a society governed by random acts and raw power, an effective response to nihilism, America's deepening fear that it's about to eat itself, and, well... I'll stop now. The film searches for meaning in a way that few indie films dare without diminishing the blockbuster impact in the slightest. If you've got a budget of $185M, you can do both! It seems there are more and more big movies willing to mean something these days. It's a very good thing.

I'm overcoming my kneejerk reaction to John Truby here and linking to his post on The Dark Knight. I'd post a spoiler alert, but I think everybody's seen the movie anyway..

Check out Truby's article in Storylink.

Saturday Morning Inspiration

2008-08-16T10:38:00.001-07:00

I was thinking I'd make this somehow screenwriting-relevant with some comment about planning being a boon to creativity or the like, but I'll pass. Living in a head full of visions is always better than a head full of nuthin. Next time you grimace at revision, think of this video and how much beauty there is in erasing it all and starting again.

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

For more on the artist, check out the website.

Finding Perspective and Clarity

2008-08-15T11:42:00.000-07:00

One of the best screenwriting tips I ever heard was this: write your synopsis for a distracted teenager. And, if you're lucky enough to have a distracted teenager at your disposal, test it out on them.

Why is this valuable advice? Studio readers aren't distracted teenagers (we hope). Big producers, directors, and agents don't watch TV while simultaneously playing Nintendo, texting friends, and updating their myspace page.

But they are busy, distracted people. They live in the 21st century, and therefore have short attention spans and an unquenchable need for constant information input. This makes them anxious and lazy at the same time.

Writing for your probable reader, rather than your optimal reader, forces you to be incredibly clear about your story. It requires you to think it through so it

1. makes sense and

2. is something other people care about.

(I forgot about #2 for the first decade of my writing career. But enough about me.)

This is very difficult, of course. Many (mostly new) writers punt on the whole synopsis issue, and wait to write it only after they've written the script. I'm not sure why they do this. Why wouldn't you want to sort out story problems on one page instead of spending months writing and rewriting a hundred or more just to get it to make sense?

But if writing for a difficult teen just isn't your bag, then consider some other options.

I'm working on a script that's aimed at an adult audience. It's about family and loneliness and all that good stuff. I tried writing it for a child. I made it a fairy tale.

What happens? The same thing that happens when you talk to a child: you break things down into simpler and simpler chunks. Often there's no way around the honesty that arises out of that process. You have to explain things carefully, and lay them out gently. My boyfriend's 6-year-old niece once froze me with the question, "Why do you and he sleep in the same bed?" Then I got on the kid level and answered, "Because he's my favorite person in the whole world." And she smiles and runs off to play. It's that simple. And it's true.

Do that with your synopsis and you're liable to find what you're really writing about, and why it matters. Your characters hew to type a bit. All your three-act gobbledygook transforms into some beautiful archetype.

Next I tried imagining the story from the perspective of my main character. He's a fifty-year-old functional drug addict who's shut himself off from the planet. It's a daydream as he glazes over in front of the computer. Some more issues come into focus: why he'd suddenly sacrifice his safe existence; what he truly cares about and won't let himself have; what he WOULDN'T do that I've been trying to make him do.

It's a worthwhile exercise. It's also very close to what professional writers do regularly when they tailor their synopses, treatments, and query letters to specific individuals.

But for now, realize that this is a tooling for *creating* your story, rather than selling it. These shifts in contexts remind us just how infinite stories are. One slight shift in perspective, and it's all new again.

Breathe In, Breathe Out

2008-08-07T18:25:00.000-07:00

Have you ever written a beautiful scene that mysteriously turns to nonsense overnight? Have you ever found a brilliant solution to a story problem one day, only to find it unbearably ridiculous the next?

If you have, you're in very good company. If you haven't, well -- the rest of us don't like you very much.

Insecurity it a part of writing, of course. But why does it happen so often? Why must it happen so often? My theory is that we go to bed as writers and wake up as editors. With the glow of inspiration behind you and a long slog ahead things start to look very different.

Getting past this unfortunate phenomenon is part of becoming a professional writer. Embracing this phenomenon is the mark of a happy writer.

Let me explain. When you wrote the scene or reworked the synopsis last night and all was light and brilliance, you were discovering something about your story. This morning when you were trying to re-enter writing head, you'd changed. You'd acquired the knowledge already. You assimilated it last night in a sea of beautiful, technicolor, exquisitely structured dreams. And this morning you woke a new person. You had new eyes. You had new knowledge. You had a new perspective. You woke a little bit smarter.

And it hurts. Thank god it's exactly where you want to be. You never would have had the opportunity to look down your nose at this brilliant idea otherwise.

Writing is all about gaining knowledge. It's about incremental gains and the occasional giant leap. When your inner editor puts down his coffee, gazes wearily out over his bifocals and asks, "What were you thinking," you need to answer honestly and fearlessly. There's a dialectic at work here. You need to respond. How do you respond?

When I'm developing a story, I work and rework synopses and loglines. I'll scratch out back stories and then slowly, maybe fiddle with some scene work. Somewhere along the line the synopses and so on start to build up on top of each other. One document decides to become the story encyclopedia. Things start to take on their own weight. I get away from my structure. I let things fall where they may. It starts to feel organic. I am enjoying the process.

But as I prepare to actually write the script, I see all the things that I've stepped away from. The SIMPLE structure. The conceit that conveys itself in a few words. The careful and straightforward construction of the main characters. Minor characters have stepped out of their place, and are mucking up the garden, building digressions and gossiping away about back story. It's a mess. The editor is asking unavoidable questions, and the writer is terrified.

But you pick yourself up and respond. You go back to your ideas about character -- the misbehavior and the goal -- and you start to apply it. You look at your 4.5-act mess through the eyes of your three-act model. You relax. You embrace the art. There's something speaking here, and it's not your conscious mind. The story is more important than your structure. The story had better be more than you had in your conscious mind.

I've wanted to write a posting like this for a while. I hit my readers over the head with the need for structure even when I don't remotely believe they somehow always magically hold the answers. Structure and careful back story development and good character hygiene and all that can make you productive, aware, even professional. They're a pretty good way of telling you when you're screwing up. But don't expect them to write the story for you.

Thought for the Day

2008-08-05T23:12:00.000-07:00

Half Nelson

2008-08-05T09:09:00.000-07:00

I finally saw Half Nelson last night. A tremendous film about a white progressive teacher teaching black youth at an inner city school. As he devolves into a serious crack addiction, he clings to the only thing that won't die -- his unlikely friendship with a female student.

I'd actively avoided the film. When your main character is a white, well-meaning liberal teaching history in an inner city school, you're going to get preachy sooner or later. Add drugs and you'll have difficulty not sailing that ship into the shoals of escapism from white guilt. No matter how sensitive and well-drawn the characters, I just knew that sooner or later he'd be busting down a door and saving her from an evil drug lord.

But it wasn't like that. Not at all. It's a beautiful, well-written film. It can teach us a lot.

This movie had to deal with some heavy expectations (see above). The filmmakers clearly didn't want to make that film. So a lot of making it was AVOIDING that easy, hackneyed interpretation. I want to point to three issues here.

First, structure. The white liberal drug movie set in the inner city makes fairly straightforward use of the three-act structure. In other words, it's predictable. You'll see the well-meaning liberal teacher. You'll get a nice inciting event, act break, midpoint, blah blah blah. It'll be darkest before the dawn -- his students reecting him and running off to a life of crime and inhumanity. And he'll save the day. Yada yada.

So the writers had a task here. Subvert that. Subvert it quick. And keep subverting it. And use it too.

What do I mean?

The audience is EXPECTING these beats. You're expecting a high point, where it looks like the teacher might get off drugs and make things work. It doesn't come -- and so your pulled into the character. The events of the script are open: you can't necessarily predict where the plot is going, because it's more of a life shape. Things fall into place as they go. It's open to interpretation. When we see the teacher stepping over the line physically with the student at the dance, we learn to watch the moment, rather than check the mental box for midpoint.

The teacher will likely get fired. We know that. It isn't the point. The viewer is still cradled in the plot, but not as a passive observer. You need to watch carefully since you have no idea what's coming next.

Second, character. One of the most interesting moments for me was when the teacher DOES have the face off with the drug dealer over the fate of his friend and student. He knows he has no moral ground to stand on. But he's got to do something. And he says that: "I'm supposed to do something, right?!"

What happens? The drug dealer is also a complex character. He's not just evil. He is -- in his own way -- looking out for her when he brings her into his business. And when the teacher keeps fighting his losing battle to stop him, he realizes that they do share something. They both want what's best for her. He invites him into his house (and yeah, gets him high).

It's an incredibly dramatic shift. And while you'll find evidence of it on the written script page, it's really the hard work of some determined screenwriters to produce this set up in the script *up to* that moment.

Third, dialogue. How do a teacher and student speak about the teacher's drug habit in real life? They don't. And virtually none of the dialogue in this movie is driven by the screenwriter's desire to get the issue down on the page. It's driven by the set up. There's not a single moment of 'stop doing the drugs or you'll die'.

Many screenwriters would insist on that scene, or at least not see a way around it. What happens when you do away with it? The audience member wonders what's going on with the kid. They remember that fear of seeing your teacher in a non-school environment. They remember the first time they really saw into the world of adults. They remember when they lost a friend to something they couldn't stop. They remember feeling powerless in their own environment.

It's an astonishing thing when a movie can have us both dig that deep into our own past AND get us that involved in a character.

And isn't that why we go to see movies?

What's a Beat?

2008-07-31T11:13:00.000-07:00

I apologize for jumping around a bit with my blogging. One week I'm dwelling on my own fairly esoteric musings, then switching over to very basic stuff the next. I'm sure I'm boring the working screenwriters and confusing the beginners. So, apologies to all.

Today's a day for the beginners with maybe a warm fuzzy moment of recognition for the more advanced readers as well.

What's a beat? Virtually anyone new to dramatic writing asks this question. And there are many answers. A beat is first and foremost a unit of drama. It's a pearl in the necklace. It's a step forward.

It's scalable. When talking about structure, screenwriters are talking about 'big' beats -- your act breaks and midpoint and low point and so on. When you're deep in scene work, a beat means the same thing it does to an actor. It's a shift in action, objective, or circumstance. It's the moment to moment shifts, the step by step modulations that make a scene work or fall flat.

A beat is universal. Everyone involved in drama talks about beats. It's a way of connecting your work to other people's efforts. You learn to find the beats very quickly. You know a beat when you see one.

It's a beat, as in music. Beats have to line up correctly. Beats define pacing. Beats create tension or excitement. Beats invite the audience into the song of your story.

A beat might be a line of dialogue. A beat can be a new shot. A beat can be action, or a simple, intuitive shift in a character's objective. A beat is what makes the story make sense moment to moment.

It's the hard stuff. Beats will always call bulls*** on what seemed like a good idea when you were working out your synopsis. Beats are what sell or sink your scene. If the reader just doesn't believe what's going on (or even if she isn't particularly engaged), there's usually a problem with the beats.

What's that problem? Usually the writer is forgetting (or ignoring) something that's perfectly obvious a beat or two before. A character is on the verge of starvation one moment, then chatting amicably about Augustine's use of Aristotle the next. Or a character's bent on wooing a beautiful girl one moment, then when given the perfect opportunity a few beats later, steals a car instead. We've all done it. It's inevitable. Reality is slippery. Stories are slippery. It's always more complex than we know starting out.

For me, screenwriting is about working out the big beats first -- in a careful synopsis I write and rewrite until I'm happy. Then I move down into smaller beats: getting each 'big' beat to work. And after I'm happy at that level, I'll get into the really tiny beats that make a script sing. It takes a lot of work. But it keeps you focused on where the audience is. It keeps you locked into a couple absolutely central issues that are too easily forgotten.

CHARACTER. Who is the character? How does he or she react? What's his misbehavior? Her overall goal?

RELATIONSHIP. What's the power dynamic between the characters? What's really going on beneath the words on the page? How well do they know each other? How do I communicate this to an audience?

OBJECTIVE. In almost every good scene, the characters' objectives are in conflict. Frequently one character doesn't understand the other character's objective. But you do. Write to make it clear.

WHERE. Where are they? Do you REALLY know where they are? What's going on? Work hard to make that space less cloudy. Make some good choices. You'll find the beats you're looking for in the comforts and obstacles inherent in the location. And you'll be grounding the audience in the space too. They'll feel it. They'll buy it. And that'll do more to sell your script than you expect.

You've no doubt heard a million times that a winning script reads quickly. Readers will read the entire thing in a couple houra. They'll eat it up, take it in, absorb it, and remember everything. Yeah, you need a brilliant idea to start. But you also need to get everything working beat to beat.

You can lose a reader in a moment. There's always a distraction. The moment something doesn't ring true they'll be up checking their email or putting on the stereo. The moment the action feels guided by the writer's objectives rather than the characters', the reader's thinking about their aching back, or the fact that they haven't been to the gym all week. One beat out of tune can do that.

And the moment they're thinking about that stuff, you're sunk.

Shameless Plugs

2008-07-24T12:48:00.000-07:00

I'm consulting on a couple projects, and both are highlighted in the latest edition of SF 360. I'm on board as a script/creative consultant for Lise Swensons's Saltwater, which goes into production next February. And I've been helping out unofficially on Laura Lukitsch's Beard Club also.

Check out the article here.

Narration

2008-07-21T15:31:00.001-07:00

It's hard to go to a movie these days without Morgan Freeman dropping in on the experience to tell you all about what the characters are thinking. While he's at it, he might be framing the audience question oh-so-neatly for us. Or priming the pump for the next big plot point. It's a drag.

Many, if not most, screenwriting classes harp away on how our art is visual storytelling, and that narration is really a crutch for weak and half-baked stories. It's having Morgan Freeman do the audience's job of exploring the characters. If screenwriting teachers are to be believed, Morgan Freeman would be better off reading his lines back to the screenwriter, rather than the audience. They're notes on what's not clear, and therefore what the screenwriter hasn't accomplished yet.

So why the heck is Morgan Freeman so busy these days?

There are many reasons. Many of the reasons have not so much to do with the screenwriter's choices. Producers risking bazillions of dollars on these mere words like to see the careful framing of the plot on the page they're betting on. They want to dumb it down. It's safer.

But that's not what this post is about.

What are the positives and negatives of narration in your script?

I've laid out the basic argument against. Narrators ARE a crutch for lazy writers (and early drafts). It's simply easier to tell the audience whats going on than to work up a really compelling set up and conflict that would affect them more deeply. I've critiqued hundreds of scripts with this problem.

To look at the same problem another way, a narrator just adds another level of mediation between the audience and the story. If Morgan's been busy through the first act, we won't quite buy into the action on the screen until he's added his two cents. Morgan always points to the right way to view the action on screen. And so there's less to explore.

So why would any self-respecting screenwriter include a narrator?

Narration is an extremely economical device. You can accomplish very cumbersome narrative tasks in a quarter page. You can set up hundreds of years of galactic history. You can make sure that the audience is all on board, even if any number might have missed a very clever act of deceit on your protagonist's part. You can recap and add something while doing it. You can, yes, frame the all important audience question of What Happens Next.

Good narration works hard to not merely shape, but to be a real contribution to the story. When the narrator comes into play in Magnolia, it deepens our understanding of the philosophical underpinnings of the story while keeping us on track with the multiple storylines. The audience has been moving along with a whirlwind of developments. Anything less clever would insult and bore them.

Some great narrators are characters in the movie. They offer a point of view on the material. They aren't necessarily credible. But you do have a clearer view on what's going on in at least one character's head -- and therefore a better betting angle on what might happen in the future. In other words, the narration becomes more a way to explore assumptions and objectives than it is to accomplish the ostensible task of keeping us up to date. The writer is doing a sleight of hand here. Nothing fancy here. Move along. But human beings pick up on this stuff. Evolution and entertainment rely on it. We're walking social calculators.

Sometimes a narrator is just dead wrong about events. This can be entertaining for an audience. No less a figure than Lev Tolstoy introduced this little trick when he had a little girl describe a ballet for us.

What happens if a little girl narrates the story of her parents' divorce? What happens if a little boy narrates the tale of his teacher's work travails? Or a gullible young man tells the story of his first coke deal? When narrators understand less about the plot than the audience, there's great potential for building emotional depth into the story. This requires that narrators do their narrating in the moment, of course.

In all these strategies, the writer chooses to add something to the story with a narrator, rather than simply relying on him to do the dirty work. Writing a good narrator isn't easy. It doesn't save work, but it can take you deep into a story if you're lucky enough to find one. And if you've got a crummy narrator in your script right now, listen to him or her too. There are probably some great notes in there on what your script is missing.

Lantana

2008-07-19T10:00:00.000-07:00

Just watched Lantana again. It's a tremendous Australian film starring Anthony Lapaglia. The plot revolves around the disappearance of a woman and how it reverberates through the lives of everyone from the detectives to her husband to her clients. It's one of those smart films we're always complaining don't get made anymore.

I like to watch movies a couple times. Even if I don't enjoy a film the second time, I get to learn something from it. It struck me halfway through that Lantana almost had to be based on a play. The characters all seem to be hanging out in the wings, ready to walk on stage in combinations you hadn't considered. There's an economy to it that allows you to believe that the cop's wife's shrink might run across his mistress's awkward fascination one night. And there's an awful lot of what I call 'pearly' dialogue: dialogue that's been worked and reworked until it shines with its own light. You see it in plays more than movies. Both the unlikely combinations and the unnatural pearliness of the dialogue can turn a viewer off in a movie. But the writer Andrew Bovell (who did in fact base the script on a play of his own) turns both to his advantage.

Not a lot of scripts really survive the transition from stage to screen. The two arts are much more different than they appear. One big difference, among many, is the audience. We too often assume movie audiences aren't that smart. We play down to them. We give them too much of a hand in understanding exactly how we want them to see the action. Genius can work there too, of course -- I've certainly marveled at it in this blog. But there's something incredibly refreshing about a playwright who intelligently and respectfully retunes his devices to work for film.

One thing to always watch for in ensemble pieces is transitions. Andrew Bovell does them remarkably well. You'll watch a scene coming to a head, a character coming to an unavoidable decision. And then you cut out and over to a new scene, and you see the *results* of that decision. The writer is employing dramatic lift -- and the audience lifts with him. The writer employs metonymy. One character walks alone at the end of a scene, her high heels clicking against the concrete. The next scene begins with a woman in heels walking down a road. Nothing said -- and everything explained. The audience naturally and unconsciously compares and contrasts the two characters. What affinity is there? Now the action is taking place in the viewer's head as much as anywhere.

We talk so much about drawing viewers in. Pages and pages are written about it. I've lectured about it. But when you get right down to it, it's really the simple, practical choices that come out of our *own* absorption in our work. Writers right now, all over the world, are overwriting scenes to express an affinity between two characters in opposite scenes. Don't be one of them. Stop, listen, remember why you're writing. And never assume the audience is dumber than you are.

Growing and Knowing Characters

2008-07-16T10:44:00.000-07:00

I'm taking an acting class this summer. I did some acting once many years ago, but I'll always be an amateur. It's more or less a chance to challenge myself. I've been a little too complacent about writing and creation and drama. Too much teacher, not enough student.

Actors and writers come to know characters in very similar ways. You listen. You create. Actors, especially stage actors, spend a great deal of time working up back story. It helps them to find something analogous in themselves -- a hook to attach their own psyches to the character's. It's important to figure out if a character is, say, telling a joke to lob something over another character's head, or to entertain him, or to entertain himself, or...whatever. It's not always a simple answer. It's like life. There's usually several answers at the same time. Back story lets an actor engage that complexity in a visceral way.

Writers create back story too, of course. I've known writers who go through very organized processes to find it: writing out lists of the contents of pockets and carefully constructed childhood memories, and comprehensive psychologies and all that. I've never gotten that far with those methods. Yes, they can help. But I usually find my characters' back stories in my own journal. When I'm coming up with a new story, the journal shifts back and forth between me and my characters. It's messy. It takes more time. But it feels more organic to me. I can rely on what I've learned rather than consulting my notes.

If you've read my blog before, there's a good chance you've heard me go on and on about the value of a structured process to capture and streamline the chaos of creation.

And as I'd worked up this new story, I'd been following my own structured process very carefully. Each day I work up a new synopsis and logline from scratch. Each day I take what's in me, add a good night's sleep, and try to refine the conceit into something more compelling. Some days you make a lot of progress. Some days you make none.

After three or four weeks, I'll usually start building a kind of miniscript. I won't write dialogue. I won't write what I don't know. I'll concentrate on getting good, strong set ups down on the page. I'll make the conflict clear. I'll make the characters' objectives clear. I'll make my own goal clear. I'll work through an entire script that way.

But this time it didn't quite work that way. I kept writing and rewriting the synopsis. I kept wriggling around through back story in my journal. The characters, who *should* be leaping off the page (if I say so myself), just weren't.

I took the leap, and just decided to write. And while the characters did follow the basic shape of the synopsis, they inevitably had better ways of getting themselves in trouble than I'd found on my own. They spoke more sharply. They acted from their own problems.

And there were more problems than I counted on. I found myself writing quickly. But then I've been going back, more like an actor than a writer, and finding more back story. More ways of looking at them. Finding what's true.

And here I am, more student than teacher, humbled by what these characters have to offer me and the story. So much more than I imagined. I'm humble again. And I'm happier writing than I have been in a long time.

And yeah, I'll probably end up chucking out months of work. So what? It's a first draft. And I'm happy.

Ira Glass on Storytelling #3

2008-07-09T08:58:00.001-07:00

Ira Glass of This American Life talks about starting out in radio storytelling. It's good advice for anybody still maturing as a writer. By the way, this is one of several youtube posts he made about storytelling. Check him out..

Wall-E

2008-07-08T09:35:00.001-07:00

It's summertime, and that means I've been slacking off on the blog lately. Summer means a couple things in San Francisco: barbecues, swimming pools, oh wait. Summer means a couple things in San Francisco: fog, the smoke of distant forest fires, and the painful, self-loathing early stages of a new script. We're still looking at an ugly duckling this morning, but no doubt it'll turn into a beautiful swan later this afternoon. Summertime means crappy movies -- big, obvious Hollywood fare that makes you feel used as the multiplex spits you back out onto the street. And my partner has devoted all three Netflix films to the execrable work of French director Catherine Breillat. Sadistic, poorly written, egotistical stuff, if you ask me.

So naturally I was looking for a mindless little kids' movie, preferably in primary colors, to cheer myself up. Wall-E fit the bill. Right? Something simple. Rehashed. Safe. I mean we've all seen this plot a million times: a trash compacting robot still functioning 700 years after humans have abandoned a decimated Earth falls in love with a probe, finds a living plant, and pulls humanity's head out of its collectively obese ass. Not again! Ah, Pixar!

I want you to put your screenwriting cap on for a second and think about that. How easy would it be to make this script a complete and utter disaster? Forget about Wall-E for a moment, and ask yourself how YOU would approach the idea. And remember, it's for kids. Now try it with a main character that can't speak. On a barren landscape that looks like Wall-Mart exploded, with no one to communicate with except a cockroach for the first half of the movie. For the second half of the movie, we'll move the action to a giant space ship that looks like a multiplex, and attack consumerist culture for destroying the earth. And remember your prime directive -- entertain those kids!

Now take your hat off, and bow to the writer-director, Andrew Stanton. He's had his hand in most Pixar successes, from Finding Nemo to Monster's Inc. to Toy Story and Toy Story 2. He's a pretty smart guy.

How does he do it? How does this story not fall apart, drift into unbearable longing for the end of time, leave the kids wailing uncontrollably five minutes into the film?

Very, very careful application of some very clear rules of screenwriting. That's how. There are very few things that are 'proven' about writing. And half of them are in screenwriting. Take advantage of them. And don't tell the novelists!

You can map out the beats of the three-act structure with a remarkable degree of accuracy with this film. Wall-E meets the unachievable girl of his dreams right on time. She's a 42nd generation iPod, and she fires a death ray at him. Take that, Pretty Woman. Wanna lock your characters into the second act: she shuts down and awaits transport when he gives her the living plant. Want a big frying-pan-into-the-fire midpoint? Holding onto the OUTSIDE of a shuttle in outer space, he finds himself on the space cruiser that houses what's left of humanity. Want to see how all is lost at the end of the second act? Want to learn how to speed up the action as you approach the climax? Yep. It's all there.

Think about character. Wall-E can't really say much beyond an approximation fo his own name and his girlfriend's. But his misbehavior is incredibly clear. He's a roving trash collector. He collects. His problem? He's lonely. How does Stanton communicate that? Well, he's alone on a toxic earth. Sounds like a problem to me.

I could go on, but I won't. I usually grimace my way through a couple blockbusters a year, trying to allow myself to be somewhat surprised by the almost mathematically predictable story. Wall-E gave me hope. It fits the algorithm. But it *exploits* the algorithm, rather than playing safe slave to it. And guess what:

The movie actually has deep meaning.

And guess what:

There wasn't one unruly kid in that audience. No questions for mom. Total, rapt attention. The kids knew what was going on. And they listened.

Central Station

2008-06-26T11:36:00.000-07:00

I've been studying the Brazilian film Central Station this week. It's always been a favorite of mine, but I never looked at the mechanics too closely.

I'm studying it because I am working out a story idea with a similar main character. Dora, the lead in Central Station, is a bitter old woman who makes money writing letters for illiterate people at the bus station. She's a liar and a cheat. She usually doesn't bother to mail the letters and just pockets the money.

One day a mother with a young son is run over by a bus and killed right after paying for a letter. Unmoved, she refuses to help the boy with a new letter. She refuses to help for days as the boy sits helpless and alone in the bus station.

But slowly she cannot help but care, and there the story begins. Most of her attempts at help are more or less ways of assuaging her guilt as cheaply and easily as possible. But there's really no way to dump the boy off on someone else. Every time he calls her on her lies and cruel behavior, and slowly she's drawn in. They begin a bus journey together halfway across Brazil to find a father who seems to either not exist or to have nothing to do with the boy.

The script is based on a story idea by the director, Walter Salles. This is not an American movie. Dora lies, cheats and shirks her duty practically up to the climax. She's no Julia Roberts. Rene Zellweger would run screaming from this script. Meryl Streep's agent would hide this script from her.

I'd started studying the movie by looking for how the writers maintain character sympathy for this tough old broad. They employ a couple strategies. Dora's punished every time she lies or cheats, and usually by the boy. So her amoral behavior moves the plot forward (and it's often very entertaining).

Her best friend functions as a kind of Greek chorus with an on/off switch. She's brought a voice of conscience into her life, even if she has no conscience of her own.

When she's faced with her own cruelty, she reacts and moves to fix the situation -- very quickly. We're not allowed to think she's abysmally bad for more than a scene. There's always hope for redemption, no matter how unlikely.

But I realized that all these are more or less strategies for keeping Dora in the ballpark with character sympathy. Why is it so deeply moving?

Dora crosses an astonishing dramatic distance, from unfeeling, dishonest and selfish to someone who sacrifices herself completely to find this boy's family. It's much more moving than if she'd been plucky, with a heart of gold, slightly obscured by the fig leaf of some tepid misbehavior. The writers found the heart of the story. They knew why they were writing it. They aimed straight at it, rather than at carefully balanced character palettes and all that. They saw the big picture, and the mechanics fell into line.

There's a lot I could say here, but I won't go on. If you read this blog regularly, you might want to think about the movie in terms of the quantum theory mumbo jumbo I was going on about: each beat somehow recapitulates the overall structure. On a more mainstream level, the structure of the script clearly lays out the standard 12 beats of the three acts. The writers are true professionals who are clearly profoundly aware of theory and practice of screenwriting.

But what's important is that they clearly wanted to write the story on a deep and personal level.

The Anthropic Principle

2008-06-22T14:09:00.000-07:00

I've been reading through more of the Wordplay site, and I have to say that a number of the articles are a bit dated -- but often still good advice. There's an article about how to fudge page length -- with an IBM Selectric and a Xerox machine. The writer seems to appreciate the arrival of these word processing programs everyone's so crazy about.

That doesn't mean you shouldn't look it over. Have you been doing your widow hunts? And if you're using final draft you can fudge your page length pretty substantially by going to DOCUMENT -> PAGE LAYOUT -> OPTIONS -> LINE SPACING. Then choose tight or very tight, depending on how chatty your characters are. And of course, get rid of your MORE'S and CONTINUED'S.

One article reminded me of some great lessons on how to work coincidence into your script without it seeming contrived: The Anthropic Principal. Yes, it should be 'principle', but that's how the writer spells it. At some point in your script your protagonist will probably need a lucky break. This article will tell you how. Hint: it's at the worst possible moment, when you're moving your plot forward at full speed.

What's cool about the article is that it takes the issue of coincidence and pushes it forward to something a little deeper. The Anthropic Principal is a response to the incredible set of coincidences required for life to actually exist on earth. If one constant, from the strength of gravity to the speed of light to the relative strength of electrons and protons was even slightly different, life could not have developed. The anthropic principle suggests that it's therefore INEVITABLE that we exist.

Why does this connect to screenwriting? Well, you're creating a universe. The forces need to be balanced -- sometimes in conflict and sometimes working together like a machine. You need to create this balance. It ain't easy. But build your characters correctly and give them enough time, and they'll give you a story.

Website for Screenwriters

2008-06-20T10:06:00.000-07:00

Thought I'd share a pretty cool website with you all: Wordplay.

It's basically a collection of articles on everything from creating meaningful story to what a real contract should look like and whether to write on spec.... all those questions that fuel the screenwriting seminar industry. It's definitely worth a peek.

I found Story Molecule pretty charming. The article follows how you initially shepherd a story idea into existence, but unlike most articles, keeps going as the story molecule runs into powerful people, feasibility, dumb ideas, money, and god knows what else. If you've reached the point of working with producers, you'll understand. If not, then prepare yourself.

Eleanor Roosevelt and Mrs. Alf Landon

2008-06-17T12:29:00.000-07:00

PBS broadcast a tremendous documentary about Eleanor Roosevelt as part of their American Experience series last night. Catch it if you can.

Mrs. Roosevelt has a lot to teach writers about character. She was a hero both in a historical sense and in a narrative sense. What made her a hero? What makes her a good character?

She began life in the shadow of a grandmother who felt she had not lived a fulfilling life. She was a woman of wealth and privilege who had raised a large family. But for some, that's simply not enough -- even for a grandma in the early 20th century. Eleanor saw this, and immediately identified what a screenwriter might call her universal desire: the need to make her life into a contribution to something larger.

Eleanor Roosevelt isn't the first or last person to feel this. We all feel it at some point. But very few of us have either the drive to make ourselves happy or the will to bend away from what's socially expected of us. Eleanor very quickly developed that will. This is what screenwriters might call a misbehavior, or a character 'flaw'. This is the trait in the character that they are unable to resist. They must fight. Or they must love. Or they must steal. That's who they are.

So Eleanor has the two very clear traits that a screenwriter might use to structure her character around in a narrative film. She's also got tremendous character sympathy, because she's fighting for her own happiness (something we don't always do ourselves..) and she's fighting for those less fortunate.

Eleanor fought to make an independent life for herself within her marriage. She fought to make a role for herself that her high social class would not allow her to have. She found her way into politics almost by accident. When she started to win battles within the New York Democratic Party, she was surprised as anyone.

And she found a new identity for herself. She found new friends and colleagues. She grew more exposed to problems of the poor and minorities in the Great Depression. And then when her husband was elected president, he asked her to give it all up. No more politics. No more charity work. No more advocacy. Time to serve tea to heads of state.

The adjustment threw Eleanor into a depression. She was nothing like the picture of a First Lady. She wasn't pretty. She wasn't proper. She jaunted around with lesbians and a slightly too dashing bodyguard. All gone.

But only briefly. Enter the misbehavior and the universal desire. Eleanor reasserts her power in her marriage. Before anyone can say anything, she's back to advocating, and now on a much grander scale. She's pushing forward new planned communities in West Virginia, fighting poverty in Puerto Rico and supporting mine workers in Pennsylvania. America has never seen anything like her.

I don't need to recount her whole life -- most of us know that she supported her husband as he fought polio, the Great Depression and Germany and Japan. She chaired the UN committee that created the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

But one very small moment in the documentary really struck me as getting to the heart of good character. In the 1936 election, Eleanor's unlady-like behavior became a campaign issue. The Republicans put together newsreels of her covered in coal dust hanging out with the boys, or slogging through mud and chatting with farmers while dressed almost mannishly. They opposed her to Mrs. Alf Landon, the wife of the Republican candidate. Mrs. Landon plays a harp, fondles orchids, and pats toddlers on the head while smiling demurely at the camera.

Mrs. Landon is a picture while Mrs. Roosevelt is a journey. When we start writing, often our characters look like Mrs. Landon when they should grow and breathe like Mrs. Roosevelt. I don't think Eleanor ever really planned to become the person she did become, but somehow it was also inevitable. It's scary to embrace that in a character. How can you include a free radical like that in your carefully thought out structure? But it's that uncertainty that IS drama. That's what brings a story to life. It's the reason we're writing.

Bird by Bird

2008-06-04T11:26:00.001-07:00

I'm coming up with plans for a creative writing class I'm teaching this fall at Cogswell College. I'm going through all the things a good writer goes through as they enter into a new project: neurosis, insecurity, mental block, self-doubt. No fun. Screenwriting is so different from prose and poetry. I do write in all three forms, but hey -- who died and left me the expert? I'm not even much of a fan of writing classes. I took one once when I won free tuition in a competition. Writers with academic training tend to impress me like good Swedish furniture. Well made and little boring. Writing's always been an anarchic process for me. All the really good stuff comes from the weird characters and memories you forget you have. The structure of a screenplay more of less tells you where to put it. But if you let it guide too much of your creation, you're predictable.

I needed a textbook. I never used a textbook. I've certainly read a lot of writers discussing their creative lives, but I don't know if William S. Burroughs running far afield -- to drug use, geopolitics and god knows what is going to bring a lot of structure to class time. I'd love to read William Gass' On Being Blue because I think it's an essential view into a writer's mind. But it doesn't explain how to get there. Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet might be perfect, except if you've never written creatively before (because you're unlikely to start after reading it).

After a few days of what-the-hell-did-I-get-myself-into, I found exactly one book that might work to build a class around: Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott.

Lamott highlights two invaluable pieces of advice: short assignments and, as she calls them, "shitty first drafts". Just for today, let's talk about short assignments.

This is breaking off something you can actually chew. It's limiting your scope to what's manageable, but also what's at the right level of magnification, if you will. You can find the right details without them overwhelming you or your story. It's the sweet spot.

I had a dream last night. It was fairly apocalyptic but not well remembered. I know I was on a Soviet-era passenger jet, and it had to get somewhere like New York in time, but there wasn't enough fuel and we were flying from the past. Or something. I remember best the icy clouds out the window, and the cold seeping in around the windows, and little cushions and too much metal and the smell of strange cigarettes.

So where's the small assignment? I sat down with my notebook and recalled flying out of Tbilisi in Soviet Georgia in 1987. I remembered one single moment: getting off the bus on the tarmac in front of the plane that was supposed to carry me back to Moscow. It struck me as the strangest looking plane I'd ever seen: low to the ground, with gigantic engines on short, stubby wings, it looked like a plane morphed from a wrestler. It sat in the middle of an almost endless tarmac of weird looking Soviet planes ringed by the Caucasus mountains. And I was there.

I sat down and described that moment. It felt good to get it out, of course, but as I wrote, I remembered so much more. This all happened over twenty years ago. But one detail brings the whole story back into focus.

The runway in Tbilisi is (or, at least, was) rather short for large aircraft. I remember sitting over the wing as the pilot set the brakes and revved the engines up to maximum. I thought the engines would tear the wings off. As he released the brakes, I was thrown back against my seat and before I knew it there was a mountain perilously below, speeding by much too fast and somehow horizontal.

Jumping the Chasm

2008-05-29T12:13:00.000-07:00

If you've ever struggled to get a script both true to your vision and into production, you understand the basic problems with 'development'.

Writers are an odd breed. They don't think like most people -- and especially development executives. It's almost as if development developed as a counterweight to the writing process. Good writing is fueled by risk. The development process is intent on removing risk. It's a cliche, but development generally produce a more broadly accessible but less original story. As long as film is an industry this will probably be the rule. It's the same as any other industry. If your market can't identify your product quickly as something they want, you're out of business. It's just the way it is, and no amount of writing brilliance is likely to change that.

So it was with great joy that I read this article by Barbara Schock in Filmmaker magazine. Not only does she lay out the basic genetic divide between writers and the industry, she also prescribe a fairly tremendous solution for the situation. It's an education for all of us.

So read it.

Cleverness

2008-05-27T11:06:00.001-07:00

I went to see The Life Before Her Eyes last night. It's Uma Thurman's latest performance, and it's well worth seeing. The script must be a fascinating read.

I'd actually wanted to go see one of the blockbusters -- Indiana Jones or Iron Man -- but Rafael vetoed that. So I dutifully sat down in my little independent cinema seat and... got swept up. While the script does start a bit slowly -- establishing the main characters as fairly standard high school friends -- it quickly finds new meaning and depth in ways you simply don't expect. It's one of those movies where you end up watching backwards and forwards at the same time, with new layers of meaning revealing themselves the deeper you sink into it. And I wanted to see Iron Man!

When I sat down to blog, I meant to write about how remarkable it is to find a script that has BOTH surprise twists and a great degree of emotional depth. That's certainly true of this movie. What's delightful here is that the writer, Emil Stern, took his time and worked out a beautiful web of truth that connects Uma Thurman's 30-something character to the 17-year-old who suffered the traumatic event that defines her life.

I've been extolling the virtues of the three-act structure as a heuristic guide on this site for a while now. It's time for me to eat some crow here. While it's absolutely present in The Life Before Her Eyes, I bet it's not that central to the creation of the piece.

I bet the key for Mr. Stern (a new writer, if imdb is any guide) was knowing why he wanted to write the script. He knows what's important to him. It matters. This is how you choose a good strategy. It's how you find the feel. It's how you make a piece your own.

Mr. Stern found the power of metonymy (basically a fancy word for association), and it allowed him to sew up the storylines of the Uma Thurman character as an adult and a teen seamlessly. It's masterful stuff. There's conscious metonymy on the part of the characters: a character encounters a reminder of the past, and the script moves to that moment. There's metonymy on the level of structure, as when the young Diana reconciles with her best friend in front of the house the adult Diana lives in. It's delicate, subtle -- and it provides all the structure and coherence the audience needs to engage the story on many levels.

Getting that metonymy working is no easy task. As with any kind of structure, you have to be consistent and you have to plan it out. I bet I caught about half the clues. But somehow I was still overwhelmed by the twists at the climax. I was still caught up in the drama right up to the end.

When you know a bit about screenwriting, it's not easy to get bored with climaxes. You figure that this, that and the other element is going to come roaring back. There's usually an obvious way to do it, and the end result is usually pretty close to that.

Every once in a while a movie wakes us up to what real storytelling is. We don't take a story somewhere. It takes us to where it wants to go. Listening and knowing what that path is is hard under the best of circumstances. In a world of emails and work and too much TV and thirty-two other distractions, it's nearly impossible. But it's worth it. Take half an hour. Write. Find something to hold with you through the rest of the day.

Mr. Gary playing at Artsfest

2008-05-21T12:30:00.000-07:00

For those of you near Harrisburg, PA, my most recent collaboration with director Lise Swenson, Mr. Gary on the Feedback Show, is showing in the John Waters-centric Artsfest. More info here:

Artsfest

Programming is always a mystery to me, and since Mr. Gary is such a unique piece, I'm happy to see it on any program. Nevertheless, it's heading up a collection of shorts about identity, surviving ovarian cancer, and Zorro in the workplace.

Enjoy!

Three Acts and Go!

2008-05-17T16:18:00.000-07:00

Back when I first started writing, my eyes would quickly glaze over as screenwriting types would go on and on about three-act structure. I didn't care if it was Syd Field or Joseph Campbell or Linda Seger. It all boiled down to the same thing: answers that are too simple and too rigid. I don't take commandments well.

Only later did I come to realize the real power of three-act structure lies not in WHAT we write, but how we write... and in how readers and viewers receive your work. I believe that there is a sense of narrative hardwired into our brains, and it looks an awful lot like set up-conflict-resolution. You got it: three-act structure. It's in the way we tell stories. It's built into the language.

I'll probably always nod politely when a disciple of screenwriting guru X tells me that in this beat the protagonist absolutely must be separated from ally Y by the scheme of opponent Z because of his misbehavior blah blah blah. But I almost never write a scene or think through a beat without being conscious of my three-act structures. Yes, structures -- plural.

There's your overall structure -- the one you wrote up and reworked forty-two times in your synopsis before you even started to write the script. (You did that, right? Well done.) And then there's the three-act structure of the particular scene event. Finding a resonance between those two almost always helps me tell a better story. It's sometimes a tricky thing, and it does take practice. But it will help you find unity and reinforce your main conflict at every stage.

Why shouldn't it work? Think about it for a second. Let's get downright logical for a moment. Take a look at your climax. It should perfectly reflect the main conflict of the whole movie, right? It should absolutely resonate with your overall message. This means that your main character must be fighting the same internal and external battles on a grand scale. There's a set up, a conflict, and a resolution that feel almost pre-ordained by the rest of the script.

Now look at the inciting incident (the event at the beginning of the script that sets the action in motion). What is the hallmark of a good inciting incident? It plays out the same issues as the climax, just on a (usually) smaller scale. It tells the audience how to watch. It tells the audience how to watch. If it doesn't resonate with the climax, you're probably not satisfying the audience as much as you think you are.

Take any other major beat of the script -- the midpoint, the low point, inner cave, what have you. There's a set up, a conflict and a resolution to each of those. And you got it: each must resonate very strongly with both the overall three-act structure and the events that precede it. From a single idea you can generate huge amounts of story.

New writers often bristle at the importance of loglines and synopses. I certainly did. What I didn't understand is that a trained reader does more or less what I've done here. They take a few traits and a controlling idea (expressed in the logline) and they unfurl a huge story in their own heads. They look for story potential. They are often way ahead of new writers. Wanna catch up? Think through three-act structure from the ground up.

Finding Stories

2008-05-12T11:51:00.000-07:00

Writing is a chaotic process. Writers, especially screenwriters, usually bring as much structure as they can to their process. Strong structure doesn't necessarily make a story better. But it does help a writer sort through the huge and varied mess that the creative process inevitably coughs up as you sit down to write. Structure helps a writer more than it helps the story.

My own process has been more chaotic than usual. I've been deeply engaged in student and client scripts. It skews things for your own work sometimes. I've also been working and reworking on several scripts that are moving toward production. So there hasn't been enough time for something new.

What's worse -- what new stuff I've been writing hasn't been screenwriting. The little demon that sits behind my inner desk has been drawing with crayons. It's been hitting the page mostly as poetry and sketches of plays. It feels unproductive. It *is* unproductive. But I don't think that voice is going to come to heel until I let it run free for a while. Maybe it's time to knock off with the hopes for a nice series of shorts and just listen to myself write for a while.

Like a lot of writers, I think in narrative. My brain creates a story that becomes the framework for all my thoughts, feelings, and memories, both in real life. I can't remember actors' names -- or even connect them well to what other movies they were in. But remind me of the character, and I remember him as well as the day I saw the movie. I have trouble remembering the names of movies I saw six months ago. But drop the slightest hint of the plot into the conversation, and I'll rebuild the plot from end to end.

So it hurts a bit when your creative voice keeps you on a ration of little blips and images rather than something you can really sink your teeth into. It's hard, even a little disorienting. I was struggling with this when I came across this quote in CS Weekly:

"Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don't see any."
– Orson Scott Card

I walked out of my house and found a juicebox laying on the sidewalk, still dripping. I wondered what the story was. And as I walked down the street, I found out. I saw a young mother with a screaming four-year-old and a sullen 12-year-old. The younger child had dropped the juicebox and then picked it up again. And the mother had thrown it down on the ground and screamed at the little boy. Now the 12-year-old was finding a moment of weakness in her mom -- blaming her for the problem. And as I watched, mom broke down and started to cry, and the whole thing turned on a dime. The daughter shifted gears. They held each other. And the child got a new juicebox. The mother and daughter saw each other in a whole new way. I think this story is called Mother's Day.

Next time you're struggling for a story, just remember to look. There's a reason you're a writer, and chances are it's right in front of you.

This Week's Movies

2008-05-03T11:56:00.000-07:00

I managed to see three very different movies this week. Sometimes you want to turn off writer head. But it's not always possible.

Zombie Strippers is a great deal of fun. It's funny just how self-referential zombie movies have gotten. It's almost strange how they (sometimes) manage not to get real old real quick. Zombie Strippers is one of those movies. You'd think it had already been made -- but apparently not. Everything is a spoof -- right down to George Romero's anti-Bush throw-away lines and the dumb-as-shit paramilitaries and soul-less corporate scientists. Every amateur move is thoroughly dissected and played to comedic effect, right down to a recently dead stripper reading Nietzsche and announcing to herself in the mirror, "This makes SO much more sense now!"

You'd think that a zombie movie would be fairly easy to write. And you'd probably be wrong. Movies, high and low, commercial and art, all require the same basic things to be successful -- structure, character, action, genre. Playing to all those things effectively makes or breaks the experience for an audience. Simply being consistent and remembering the audience is most of the fight. And Zombie Strippers does a remarkable job here. There's a lot of work in that script, even if at times it's intending to look terrible. And for those of you who are not homosexual script consultants, there's also Jenna Jameson dancing on a pole for about half the movie.

Shortbus is a remarkable film. It's probably the most graphic movie I've ever seen -- maybe ever made. What's remarkable about it is that the sex is truly not pornographic. It's simply a story about sex and connection, and the point is clearly not arousal. The writer/director John Cameron Mitchell wrote about the piece:

"In the old days, when you couldn't show sex on film, directors like Hitchcock had metaphors for sex (trains going into tunnels, etc). When you can show more realistic sex, the sex itself can be a metaphor for other parts of the character's lives. The way people express themselves sexually can tell you a lot about who they are. Some people ask me, 'Couldn't you have told the same story without the explicitness?'. They don't ask whether I could've done Hedwig without the songs. Why not be allowed to use every paint in the paintbox?"

And I believe him. While your mouth hangs open through the opening, soon you're caught up in the characters and the sex does become a way of telling some genuinely moving tales.

The script and characters were largely a product of improvisation workshops with the actors. I've worked this way before and I like it, even if I'm not sure the end result is necessarily better than a more conventional approach. Stories reached by committee, even very creative committees, have definite limitations. So when I truly got caught up in the climaxes (if you'll pardon the pun..) of all the stories at the end, I was a bit surprised at myself. I'm thrilled when films that try something new succeed. Shortbus is definitely one of those.

I capped the week with some high art at the SF Museum of Modern Art. The Rape of the Sabine Women is the latest work from art goddess Eve Sussman. Sussman and her coterie The Rufus Corporation specialize in taking classic art and reworking it into post-modern inscrutability. The rape of the Sabine women is a founding myth of ancient Rome. Sussman has reset the stage to 1960's Greece, Tempelhof airport in Berlin, and a modern-day meat market in Athens. While there's a great deal of attention to detail in the visuals and the soundtrack by Jonathan Bepler (who also works with artist Matthew Barney on his films), you get the sense that Sussman can't quite complete a sentence. A half hour later, you get the sense that she doesn't *want* to complete a sentence. You'll watch a camera move through a meat market for twenty minutes. You'll travel about a classical sculpture gallery listening to people cough for another twenty minutes. You'll watch women in 60's dress sit on couches with G-men not saying a word for another twenty minutes. While you can attach meaning and interpretation to each visual, there just doesn't seem to be a sense of elegance or economy to any of it. There seems to be either a disregard of the audience, or perhaps even an attempt to set up a pretty nasty power dynamic here. In the end I couldn't see it as much more than the artist showing her power and prestige. And communicating clearly would work against that goal. If we understood her, she wouldn't be the presence she's asserting.

Feh.

I'm going to watch Shortbus again just to get it out of my system.

The Counterfeiters

2008-04-23T10:05:00.000-07:00

A friend and I went to see The Counterfeiters yesterday. The movie won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film. It's the story of a Jewish counterfeiter forced to fake dollars and pounds for the Nazis in a death camp during World War II.

Have you ever walked into a film with the completely wrong idea about it? I only had the vaguest sense of the plot, and something about the title 'The Counterfeiters' just made me think of a 60's comedy caper or musical or something. In other words, I thought the Nazis would be of the Captain Klink variety, or at least know how to dance in a line.

Uh, no. These were some decidedly more authentic Nazis. But after I readjusted my entertainment perspectives in the most drastic of ways, I got swept up in the movie and its main character, Salomon Sorowitsch. He's a funny choice of a hero for a Holocaust movie. He's a career criminal. He's not remotely interested in the plight of his own Jewish people as the Third Reich decimates it. He's not much of a talker. He's completely out for himself. Most heroes in Holocaust movies are morally upright, steadfast and true. Not Salomon. He knows who he is. He's the first Holocaust anti-hero.

The main action of the film involves a plot by the Nazis to produce mass quantities of British pounds and American dollars to flood and destroy the Allied economies with. Salomon was a career counterfeiter with a huge reputation, and he's forced to manage a crew of printers and engravers and whatnot to fill the Nazis need for fake bills.

Salomon sees the deal: survival in return for counterfeiting. And he likes it. While some of the other prisoners grumble and struggle with the moral dilemma, Salomon knows exactly where he stands. In his words, he'd rather be gassed tomorrow than shot today. A day is still a day.

As you read this? Do you care about Salomon? Does he have character sympathy? Would you keep watching? Not necessarily. In most Holocaust movies, he'd be a side character. He'd get his just desserts about 2/3 or the way through.

But if you watch the film, he has a great deal of character sympathy. Why?

First and foremost, he's consistent. We can see how he thinks. How he thinks is constantly going to bring him into Faustian deals, both with the Nazis and with the prisoners who want to resist and undermine the whole operation rather than help the Nazis. For all the pages and pages written about character sympathy, I'm beginning to suspect that simple scene-to-scene consistency is the most important (and a tremendous tool for a writer).

The more satisfying reason is some very crafty writing. Writers have trouble with anti-heroes. They don't have all the neat bag of tricks that a regular hero has. And many writers simply keep hitting the same 'anti-hero' note over and over again.

Not writer Stefan Ruzowitsky. What happens to Salomon is remarkable. He is the only prisoner not crippled with moral qualms, so he rises to the top of the camp. He's got fewer qualms than the Nazi who runs the counterfeiting operation. And he overcomes him. And he manages to keep all the counterfeiters relatively healthy and safe right through to the end of the war.

His choices are fascinating, and in the end they reach a nice three-act climax. It's not a script I'd teach beginning screenwriting from, but it has something to teach all of us at some point.

Writing Other People's Scenes

2008-04-09T15:53:00.000-07:00

We all know movie scenes that feel like magic. We've all been overpowered by scenes that somehow are more than the sum of their parts. We've all seen something ineffable on screen that stayed with us. And we all feel that somehow we'll never attain something like that ourselves.

But there's something about ineffably powerful scenes -- they're usually the product of some tremendous but fairly straightforward thinking by a writer who knew what tools he had on hand. There's something incredibly economical in the use of those elements, just like in any other great art. And a writer can learn from the masters by taking apart how the whole thing works.

Most great scenes have a powerful set up: say, two priests talking in a bar (as in the Exorcist), or a cop hitting on a cokehead (in Magnolia), or a police line up with five guilty men (as in The Usual Suspects). That set up is usually a direct and simple expression that springs from the conceit.

Most great scenes -- okay, ALL great scenes -- are based around conflict. That conflict is visual, so there's the setting coming into play. The writer knows the two main elements that make up her main character. She also knows that they need to be present throughout as a way of making a character's complexity accessible to the audience.

All these things are tools, and the greater the scene, the more likely that there's a seamless union of conflict and set up and conceit and character and plot structure. It's simpler in great scenes than it is in your average scene.

As an exercise, try watching your favorite scenes. Write down as much of the toolkit as you can surmise. Look at what's going on in the foreground and the background. Look at all the actual, physical acts and objects in front of you.

Now, write the scene. Take your time with it. Maybe watch several times. Try to get the visual beats down so that a fresh reader can understand them.

Can you pull it off? Test yourself. See if you can create the sum greater than the parts. And while you're at it, see what a great scene really looks like -- in all its humility and simplicity.

I like this exercise because it forces my students to really engage creativity, even as you're trying to simply re-create someone else's work. You need to think down into someone else's thinking. So many new writers slip straight into what seems quicker and faster -- thinking the scenes out through dialogue. Most great scenes aren't written that way, if only because that kind of writing doesn't allow you to think down into your OWN thinking.

When you're done, you can check your work against the actual script (or some version of it) by doing a search on scriptcrawler.com.

Quote of the Day: Tax Time Edition

2008-04-05T12:09:00.000-07:00

"Writing is the hardest way of earning a living with the possible exception of wrestling alligators."
– William Saroyan

New "Best of..." Sidebar

2008-04-05T12:07:00.001-07:00

I've just added a "Best of Scriptwrangler" section to the sidebar on the right of your screen in celebration of my first year of blogging. Enjoy!

Listening and Learning

2008-03-31T15:22:00.000-07:00

I was recently commissioned to write a short script. A director had roughed out a story idea. Her producer found me, gave me a few ground rules, then told me to run with it.

The story idea was interesting enough, but broke a number of rules of good storytelling, and seemed to require a few too many crowd scenes and hard-to-access locations. I wrote a lot of notes on the idea and came up with a list of the tools I had to work with. If you've been reading my blog for a while, you realize that 'tools' are really just problems viewed from a better angle. Often you can take two problems and find one good solution for both. For example, say you've got a character that drops somewhere before the midpoint. The script also bogs down and loses pacing somewhere after the midpoint. I look for the dropped character to jump in and kick the pacing back up. (or remove that character, and thus maybe the storytelling swamp it creates down the way).

I was pretty proud of myself. I managed to eliminate the prohibitively expensive locations. I made the piece feel more unified -- full of expectations that could be subverted, transcended, and otherwise played with. I shoehorned a story that covered weeks of real time into 15 minutes of narrative.

The producer was thrilled with the story. The director, however, was not. I'd drifted too far from her original idea. It wasn't going to work. There was no reason to try to convince her that this script was a stronger project. If you've ever helped make a script into a movie, you know that the director has to be 100% engaged in it. There's no reason to make something you aren't deeply committed to. It's too much time, money and effort. It's too much stress.

So I sat down with the director, and we hashed out what works and what doesn't. And I learned a great deal. She had a strong sense of what she wanted. She knew how it looked in her head. She'd secured a few locations that I thought she wouldn't be able to get.

But as we spoke I realized something deeper. While I'd read and reread her story idea, I hadn't been able to read past my own assumptions about it. And as she spoke about the script idea, I realized I'd fallen in to the trap of writing for accessibility and entertainment.

The director wanted something more challenging. There wasn't to be a neat little plot escalation. She wanted the audience to make the jumps between scenes for themselves. She wanted the visuals to tell the story more than the conflict. The story was set immediately after the break up. So I'd decided it was a break up story. It's not. It's about people searching for themselves when their assumptions about themselves have been stripped away. Suddenly it all made sense.

She had an aesthetic worked out that supported the whole story idea. Once I understood it, I fell in love with the idea.

There's good news here for me. It looks like I'll get two short scripts made instead of one. I've made new contacts and moved my career forward. But beyond that -- I learned a little humility. It's easy to look to your training or your experience and think you can solve any problem by spiffing up the three-act structure or honing the character's misbehavior.

But the world is bigger than that. Storis are wilder than that. And thank god for that.

Acting is Ecstasy

2008-03-29T13:56:00.000-07:00

I used to be a stage actor years ago. For some reason I was thinking of a particular performance today, and I thought I'd blog about it.

The play was Angels in America by Tony Kushner. It's a pretty magnificent ensemble play about AIDS and the mysteries that lie at the base of American culture. The central character is Prior Walter, a gay man whose descent into sickness leads him to ecstatic, terrible visions and an unwelcome kind of prophethood. I played his lover Louis, who runs away from him when the sickness becomes too much to deal with.

I didn't care for the actor playing Prior Walter at all. He seemed too young. He wouldn't take the role seriously. I remember him in the dressing room on the night of the last performance, yakking on about whatever would annoy the rest of the cast. At one point, as he put a fake Kaposi's Sarcoma (an AIDS-related skin cancer) on his arm with purple magic marker, I nearly told him to shut up and let me concentrate. He was just one of those guys, and it was hard to play his lover.

We went out for a scene that takes place after my grandmother's death. We're talking across each other, every comment a barb or play for dominance. And I used that energy -- that 'shut up' energy -- letting it seep into the sadness about my dead grandmother. Before I knew what was happening, I was more caught up in the role than ever before.

And that night when Prior Walter pulled up his sleeve, I didn't see purple magic marker at all. I saw a horrific cancerous lesion. I don't know how to describe it. It was real. I burst into tears, and while we screamed at each other, we also looked into each other's eyes and started to cry together. The closest thing I could compare it to is descriptions of possession in voodoo rituals. Something just came over and took control of me -- the spirit of this character. There's a lot written about this. There's a lot written drawing parallels between voodoo and Greek drama.

Why am I telling you this? Because it's been too long talking about conceit and character misbehavior and all these other manipulable terms that make screenwriting seem more accessible. What we need to remember is that there's magic here: in writing as in acting.

Conflict in a script allows the actor to channel conflict from his life into the art. He turns structure into dramatic energy. Character misbehavior and goal bring conflict inside a character. They set up a dynamic which allows an actress to enter in and explore. Conflict allows the muse to descend.

There's something easier and purer about acting than writing for me. You simply practice and practice until the character knows where to go. Then you let the character take over. I still wish I had time to devote to the craft.

It's ecstasy to find a few words that invoke a spirit in the minds and hearts of a reader. If you've ever seen a character become real, you know what I'm talking about. If you haven't yet, take a moment to remember what all the screenwriting 101 terms are really about. Writing, especially screenwriting, isn't about what happens on the page. It's a magical process that brings art to life (and vice versa). It's an ecstatic process, and so you need to dare yourself to feel some ecstasy every now and again.

Mr. Gary Screening at SFWFF!

2008-03-29T11:48:00.001-07:00

My San Francisco Bay Area readers might want to know that Mr. Gary on the Feedback Show, an experimental short I made with director Lise Swenson, will be screening as part of the SF Women's Film Festival!

It's screening in a program of experimental shorts along with a live video perfomance by Kerry Laitala at Oddball Film and Video, which is a pretty unique and wonderful space for film. It should be a tremendous evening. I'll be doing the Q&A, and I'd love to meet any scriptwrangler readers.

Here's the info:

Experimental Shorts Program
Saturday, April 12 at 7:30 PM
275 Capp St, between 17th and 18th streets

You need to email events@sfwff.com to reserve a ticket at the door. More info here.

Mr. Gary is one of the quirkiest, most visually arresting and challenging pieces I've ever worked on. Here's the basic storyline.

Flora, an elderly shut in, maintains careful control over the universe of her apartment, a glorious and phantasmagoric manifestation of her inner world. Flora shares this claustrophobic environment with her closest friends, the television and the radios, which seem to feed her most intimate thoughts and fears back to her -- sometimes affectionately, sometimes mischievously.

On this night, Flora repeats her bathing ritual and dons her best dress. Little does she know the center of her universe, the radio personality Mr. Gary of Mr. Gary on the Feedback Show, will be hosting a special call in edition which is to be broadcast live on TV. As forces from inside and outside her environment conspire to stop her from joining Mr. Gary, she finds the courage to pick up the telephone and re-establish order by creating her own transcendent feedback loop.

One Year Anniversary

2008-03-25T15:49:00.001-07:00

I realized the other day that I started blogging here back in March 2007. I've been blogging for a year! I want to thank my readers -- from 1247 different cities in 77 countries -- for a remarkable experience. It's been a pleasure to meet and work with so many new people. I've learned a lot, made new friends, and refined a lot of what I think about screenwriting.

It's time to do some spring cleaning around here. I was thinking about setting up a "Best Of Scriptwrangler" section. If you'd like to nominate a favorite post, please email me or add a comment to the blog. I have some idea what posts are perennial favorites, but it's funny how a certain subject will jump out at me in a conversation months later.

I'm also going to revamp scriptwrangler.com. It's a pretty bare bones site right now. If you've got some ideas for that, I'd be thrilled to hear them.

Writing in the Moment

2008-03-19T15:53:00.000-07:00

I often feel a twinge of jealousy toward songwriters and poets. They get to churn out as much exposition and naked thematics and context-less emotion as they want. Add a few guitars and a talented voice, and you've got yourself a hit. No worrying about plot structure and set ups and actions, and character misbehavior, and..and.. They have no idea how easy their job is!

Of course poetry and songwriting are not easy. They're just a very different kind of writing. Drama evokes meaning not through statement, but by conflict and its resolution. To generalize broadly, songwriting and non-dramatic poetry are largely about finding the perfect statement of the subject. This is about as far as you can get from screenwriting. Apples and oranges. Separate animals. The Greeks in their wisdom gave each its own muse.

So a Leonard Cohen can find depth and meaning in his songs by drawing a particular vision in his head, or rolling a metaphor through a series of frames. kd lang can talk about love, and know that it's her voice that makes some pretty quotidian stuff suddenly strike deep in your soul.

Many new and not so new writers get caught up on this. Most writers have had a class or two in English composition. You know how to write an essay. You write a short story or two. Maybe you stick with it and learn a lot. Then you turn to screenplays with no idea how little you know.

Often writers like this have a tendency to indicate emotion, rather than showing it. A character scowls. Or a character stares at the sea. Or she crosses her arms and harumphs. And, while the situation is harumphable, something just doesn't ring true about it. It falls flat.

Let's examine where this comes from. If you write prose, then you probably had your character harumph, cross her arms, and then you stepped in with a long internal monologue or similar. If you write poetry, this is maybe an act that describes a situation very precisely -- a miracle of language.

But it doesn't work in a screenplay. Why? Because we watch a visual differently from how we read a book. Scene to scene, we expect to be inside a character's head. We're making unconscious bets about what they'll do and how they'll react, and oh no, what will happen then! While this does function in some prose, it's not as central as it is in dramatic writing.

If you drop that ball -- if you lose where the character is IN THE MOMENT -- you lose your audience as well.

Relatively new writers have a tendency to write with their own goal in mind rather than character intention. The character feels the way they do because that's (consciously or not) where the writer needs them to be.

Screenwriting is just the first step, and if, god forbid, your script full of indicated conflicts and emotions makes it through the production process, it will stand out like a sore thumb. It won't be believable, because it doesn't correspond to the audience's understanding of the character and his plight. It will look like the writer needed the character to stop breathing long enough to harumph.

Let's look at it from another perspective. Why do some writers rely so heavily on indicating? Usually it's a lack of conflict. The details of the plot aren't worked out. And the writer is terrified to let his character wander away from his plot line.

In other words, character intention has nothing to do with the writer's goal. They usually are in conflict. The new writer thinks: let's just sweep that character intention under the rug. I don't care if he's hungry and needs a bath, he's going to ask his teacher on a date.

The more experienced writer sees a huge opportunity. This pesky problem with the character is exactly what a scene needs to bring conflict. The character needs a bath -- great! He's doing everything he can to shy away from his teacher. She's getting angry that he's giving her the cold shoulder. Maybe she's eating a hero sandwich, and he can barely think he's so hungry. You've just made it next to impossible to ask this woman out. And you've done yourself a huge favor. You've grown the dramatic distance he covers. You've given yourself numerous chances for him to act and express what's going on, rather than simply indicating them. When somebody harumphs, we believe it.

If you feel your scenes falling flat, look at the scenes before them, and ask yourself what you're sweeping under the rug. It's usually exactly what you need.

The Power of F@!# It

2008-03-09T15:37:00.000-07:00

Some mornings I wake up, read through my notes on a job, and then very methodically work through a carefully defined problem -- sharpening the character's misbehavior, or building stakes, or clarifying the conceit. That kind of thing. It all works just like it's supposed to. Story problems obediently present themselves just where you'd expect to find them. And they respond to your treatment just the way they should.

Then there are other times when problems pile up on each other and it's difficult to see the elegant solution underlying all the big issues. There's a big knot somewhere in the middle of the script, and you don't know which end to start picking at. This is when the f***-it copy comes in handy.

A f***-it copy is a duplicate file where you are officially allowed to f*** up. You're allowed to play. You're allowed to try things out. You can pull out a character and see if the story still balances out. You can pull out a scene, or reverse a polarity, or try the easy solution. You can try simply playing with it -- as far away from screenwriting orthodoxy as you please. And when it doesn't work -- f*** it.

F***-it copies are never the final solution, but they almost always teach you something you didn't know before. Why? Because you are utilizing one of the most under-taught skills of any kind of writing, including screenwriting:

Modeling

Scripts are like any other big project. The more possibilities you look at, the better the finished work. It's within your power at this very moment to see what your script looks like without all that dialogue. You can flip scenes around and take a page out and let your characters fail and everything else. You're modeling your story. And your computer doesn't mind. It will store as many f*** it copies as you can come up with.

I often wonder why we don't teach this skill more. I suspect it's because most screenwriting gurus learned their craft either on a typewriter, or from someone who used a typewriter. Hard and fast structures (and ideologies about what goes where) were a safe bet. I remember rejecting a lot of gurus fairly angrily when I read them. Why must the Refusal of the Journey go here? There's nobody going into the Innermost Cave in my script. Anybody telling you that your script MUST be shaped around their methodology is just selling books.

But that same methodology is absolutely, utterly, invaluably useful as a modeling tool. You'd be foolish not to try it out. If it works, great. If it doesn't you'll still figure something out. And well, if it doesn't work at all, then f*** it. You spent the day writing and thinking about your story.

Conceit and Structure

2008-03-07T10:39:00.000-08:00

Sorry for the lack of posts recently. I've had a couple ideas tumbling around in my head, but nothing ready for the blog. Then there's work and teaching and... writing for myself. It's been a busy few months, and it feels amazing to have a moment or two to work out some new material and reread some old stuff.

My students have been getting a real handle on conceit recently -- realizing that it's got to be a simple thing: a unique strategy for unity in your work; a strategy that brings 'thingness' to your story. There are a million ways to define a strategy. There are a million paths to conceit. You might have to try most of them before you really find the 'thingness' in your story. But once you have that, you have better answers than you ever imagined to your story problems.

Conceit, once achieved, knocks your writing, and your thinking about writing, up to the next level. It's more than a good idea. It's a good idea that's been fully developed. A reader sees it on page one. They miss it if it's not there. An experienced reader (or producer or filmmaker..) knows that conceit is what sells a piece. You can think of studio readers as armies of prospectors sifting through rivers of scripts, looking for a speck of gold -- a well-developed, marketable conceit.

But enough about them. This industry stuff gets boring quick.

What I want to talk about today is conceit and structure. Structure is obviously important to a script. Structure is key in any storytelling -- visual or written. There are many, many individuals who claim to know the keys to structure. For the most part, I think they are reiterating the same basic structure that's worked for the first 10,000 years of human development... with a few added bells, whistles, and purely academic distinctions.

Most screenwriting teachers, myself included, will harp endlessly on drilling your conceit down into your structure. For the vast majority of cases, it can only help you to model your conceit across the the beats of the expected structure. And it's true. If you reinforce your conceit at every turn, with every major conflict, you're solving audience reception problems before they even arise.

But conceit can also function as a kind of anti-structure, and it's worthwhile at least to model and brainstorm through those possibilities as well. Why?

Because conceit is a more or less direct connection between you and your audience. It can pull you along through and past all kinds of plot issues. Take The 40-Year-Old Virgin. Does that plot make sense? No. No, it does not. Do you care? No. You're being entertained consistently with the conceit. (Or some of us are.)

Another place that conceit can really come to the fore is music videos. Narrative structure is of more limited use in a music video, because the visual story is just supporting the music. Quite frequently there's one strong, simple, central idea that drives a music video. That's the conceit. If it's good, you remember the video. If it's not thought out, or is a cliche, then you don't.

The band Sigur Ros, in my opinion, does a fairly remarkable job with this. People either adore them or despise them -- I'll leave that to you. But consider watching videos for Hoppipolla, Saeglopur, Glosoli, and Svefn-g-Englar. For some reason Hoppipola always brings tears to my eyes. Not sure why. I guess it's the old people playing in the graveyard. All these videos are available on youtube, and you deserve a treat for reading this far into my post. Just watch them full screen.

In each, you have a remarkably clear, developed conceit. The viewer can name it quickly and clearly. And it's very carefully worked into the structure. And it's very carefully used where structure doesn't apply.

Sigur Ros recently produced a concert film, and did a call for submissions for fans to submit videos. It's fascinating to see what amateur filmmakers did with the band's basic conceit. Some get it. Some don't. Some add something more. I learned a lot. Check that out this youtube search.

Film Susu Update

2008-03-05T10:18:00.001-08:00

I talked with Doug E. Doug from Filmsusu.com yesterday about my posting about his site. I'd given him a very short interview, and was surprised to find it posted as a benefit of paid membership.

When I gave the interview, I'd been under the impression that the site was a new, free site for the film community. Doug was genuinely sorry for the miscommunication, and I am sorry for not checking it out with him before posting. Things change as you develop a website, and I'd talked to him at an early stage. When he saw my discomfort he immediately removed my name from the page, and made very sincere efforts to make sure I understood no harm was intended. I do appreciate that, and wish him well with his site.

Metaphors and Equations

2008-02-23T10:52:00.000-08:00

I watched a program the other day about Einstein's equation e=mc2. Einstein captured the nature of the relationship between energy and matter in the simplest possible way. The equation was a remarkable success, of course, but Einstein felt true grief and guilt when the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. If only he'd never mentioned the equation and its potential to FDR. The equation opens a path to utter destruction within the tiniest sliver of matter.

Only after Einstein's death did thinkers really plumb the depths of the reverse side of the equation. Energy can be transformed into matter. This led to the Big Bang theory. Utter creation and utter destruction on opposite sides of an equal sign. Equations are reversible.

Equations are also metaphors. Einstein's genius was to find a relationship that defined the world in ways no one had really even conceived of previously. One equation changed how we thought about the universe -- about what it even was. Einstein didn't invent e=mc2. He named it, and in naming there is power.

Many of us are a little hazy on what exactly a metaphor is. We learned something about how "my love is like a rose" is a metaphor in high school English. Or was it a simile, or are similes metaphors? It's why most people stay away from the pink spaces in Trivial Pursuit.

Metaphors are equations. They take chaos and turn it into knowledge. There's nothing hazy or high-falutin' about them. And they work by shifting energy and meaning back and forth. The writer writes the equation into the script. The audience reverses the equation, and finds where the author started. A metaphor isn't a flower, or a dream, or a feather. A metaphor is your engine block, your transmission. It's how a little pressing of the foot against a pedal moves the car forward.

Metaphor is all around us. The War on Terror was all about creating a metaphor that fed power to the Bush administration. When those metaphors started falling apart, you get where we are now. Barack Obama is building a metaphor. Hillary Clinton is building a different metaphor. John McCain is trying to rebuild the old metaphor.

A writer is lucky in that they do understand the power a metaphor has. They do understand that a metaphor can suck a viewer in and get them identifying with a rat chasing an empty potato chip bag. Most people never really think about it. A metaphor is the thing they can't remember from high school.

Metaphors are equations that move power and meaning from one person to many. And a good writer knows they're reversible as any equation. Think about how you see the world. Metaphors are real, and they're all around us. The good news is that we can write new ones ourselves.

Writing the Frame

2008-02-22T11:12:00.000-08:00

There's a lovely conundrum at the base of screenwriting -- writing for a visual medium. Your words don't make it to the ultimate audience. But your story does. Most aspects of good screenwriting relate back to this basic issue sooner or later. I remember with near grief a script I wrote coverage for. The writer was clearly under the influence of 20th century American poetry, circa The Sins of Kalamazoo.

Yes, Kalamazoo is a spot on the map
And the passenger trains stop there
And the factory smokestacks smoke
And the grocery stores are open Saturday nights
And the streets are free for citizens who vote
And inhabitants counted in the census.
Saturday night is the big night.
Listen with your ears on a Saturday night in Kalamazoo
And say to yourself: I hear America, I hear, what do I hear?

-- Carl Sandberg, "The Sins of Kalamazoo"

The writer had a true gift for poetic description, and I spent half the script in awe of it. The other half I pictured a cranky production designer complaining, "What the %$#@&% am I supposed to do with this?!"

The writer as a good poet, but he didn't understand the paradox of screenwriting.

There IS a place where screenwriting does come around and meet poetry again, and most screenwriters give it short shrift. There's an economy of images and description that determines if both are successful. There's metonymy -- using associations to convey meaning. There are resonances, and building conflicts and dynamics that work in the audience's mind, and not just on the page. There are beats, and rhythm, and voice. Both open up a structure that's greater than the sum of its parts.

How does a screenwriter achieve this in their script? One way is to write your frame.

Take this still from Children of Men:

There are many very carefully composed shots in this movie. Clive Owen is often at the center of the shot -- framed very precisely by the controlling elements of the script -- be they the commuters in the coffee shop, or a room papered over with news headlines, or a man escorting a woman and a baby through a sea of soldiers who'd been trying to kill him minutes ago.

The protagonists are surrounded by everything they're fighting against. The writer knows that the baby has come to symbolize hope. We know well that the soldiers are fighting for the fascist state. The audience has a profound reaction to this scene, because it more or less expresses the hope at the heart of the whole movie.

Now, many of you are probably objecting that the composition of the shots is the job of the director, the DP, the production designer. It's the job of everyone but the screenwriter, in a way, right?

Wrong. While there is a cardinal rule (especially in spec scripts) not to call the shots, you do in fact want to SUGGEST the shots. You want to inspire the next stage of creation. You want to put the idea in the reader's mind. You want the director saying, "I know exactly how to shoot that."

How do you do that?

Compose the picture of contrasts. USE the props that tell the story. Instead of worrying about lines of dialogue, worry about the thousand words the picture is worth. Compose all the elements in your head so they're as all working together to express the controlling idea.

This all goes back to the Fractal Theory of Screenwriting I was talking about earlier. When you know your structure, it starts to pervade everything. The structure within the beats starts to recapitulate the overall structure. The on-screen actions start to have more of a resonance with the main action of the script. There's a kind of ecstasy in this kind of writing -- it all ascends to something greater than you planned.

We all know how a photograph or a painting can tell a story. There's power in bringing your knowledge about the story to a micro level. Beyond that, there's a joy in finding a new and fertile level for expressing yourself. Write the frame. Compose the picture.

Strike Tales

2008-02-18T15:59:00.001-08:00

Ever wonder what your favorite writers did while they weren't writing 'Heroes'?

"I began the strike with lofty plans to write a novel, which soon turned into a novella, which then turned into 13 solid weeks of playing "Guitar Hero III" in my underpants."

Creation Loves Constraint

2008-02-17T17:16:00.000-08:00

I saw Once again today. What a marvelous little film. It's a musical. It's Irish. It's made for under $100K.

It's nominated for an Oscar.

It's competing against films made for five hundred times as much money. In a way, those other films are at a terrible disadvantage. When you've got that much money, and that many interests fighting for supremacy, it's hard to shoot a good story. You're showcasing too much. You're selling too much.

With a $100K, you have your story and not much more. It's got to be stripped down and direct. It has to be evocative. It has to invite the audience into the characters.

So often when I'm struggling with a scene, I realize that I'm trying to tell the audience everything about the characters at once. I'll put in a nice little touch that tells us what's going on. Then I'll go back and underline it. Then something else looks out of balance, so I'll get clever with that. Then I need an extra line of dialogue as well. Then I go for a walk because I'm frustrated.

When I get home, I either throw the scene out and look for the simple solution -- one scene idea that speaks immediately and tells us all we need to know. Often it's there, but something the best scene is no scene at all. What's great about a good story is how the audience builds it in their own head.

With a $100 million budget, you can't afford to take that risk. You need to drill that sucker into the audience. There needs to be one clear meaning, no matter how banal, that keeps the audience contented as consumers. And that's a heavy burden when you're trying to tell a story that matters.

So many novice screenwriters are hell-bent on winning a competition and then landing the big development deal and all that stuff. I've evaluated so many scripts that are at a real beginner stage. When we're done, they tell me they'll be sending it off to Spielberg next, and how soon should they expect to hear from him?

You probably have just as good a chance sending a mock up of a new car idea to General Motors. This is a business, and you're not going to get anywhere without a lot of hard work and a subprime mortgage on your soul.

Of course, if you want to get to the Oscars, it's probably easier to tell a simple, great story.

No Country For Old Men

2008-02-16T11:30:00.000-08:00

*Spoiler Alert* If you haven't seen this movie, don't read the post yet. Put your coat on and go see the movie. I've seen it three times now, and I need to discuss it.

I am fascinated with this movie. When it first came out, acclaim for the movie was more or less universal. But once the buzz factor started to ebb, voices of dissent started to rise up. Screenwriters' sites and discussion groups are full of conflict over the film. Writers either love it or hate it. What side of the debate you fall on says a lot about how you approach writing.

Those who hate it are almost universally dissatisfied with the ending. It simply isn't the big Hollywood thriller ending that they're looking for. The script very carefully lays out a kind of cat and mouse game between the protagonist, Llewelyn Moss, and the grim reaper figure, Anton Chigurh. And then, well, somebody else kills Moss. There's no final showdown between the good guy and the bad guy. There's no victory. To some viewers this feels like a betrayal. To others, it's deeply affecting.

There's a great deal to talk about in this movie, but in this post I'm going to focus on the one big lesson I think writers can take from this movie:

All rules on how to build story elements, from plot structure to characters, are tools. They don't magically tell you what the story is. They help you find it.

No Country For Old Men is adapted from a novel by Cormac McCarthy. The book is not a thriller. It doesn't have a neat three act structure like a screenplay. Ninety percent of writers and studios adapting the book would turn it into a thriller. The Coen Brothers knew better.

This is a movie about old men. For me, the Ed Tom Bell character, played by Tommy Lee Jones, provides the unity and the true three-act structure to the piece. But, like the rest of us, he's watching this fascinating cat and mouse game. And he knows he's outgunned. This is no country for old men. In the words of his father, "You can't stop what's coming. It's not all about you. That's vanity." It's a horrifying message delivered without flinching.

There's a thriller inside No Country For Old Men. But the movie's not a thriller in itself. It uses and plays with our expectations to take us somewhere deeper. How do they do this?

From the standpoint of structure, there's a carefully laid out, very Coen Brothers kind of cat and mouse game being played. I think it climaxes in the scene where Moss wounds Chigurh in El Paso. That's your big chase scene if you're looking for it. There's still forty minutes of film to go, of course.

At that point, the Coen Brothers systematically start to deny your expectations. The Woody Harrelson character, who came in incredibly late, is killed incredibly early. Even more emphatic is the way we cease to actually see the murders. Chigurh keeps killing, but there's no need. It's not about that. Humor starts bubbling up through the cracks. Llewelyn Moss tells Chigurh he's coming after him, but well... he doesn't.

Before he can even get started, he's killed by Mexican gangsters. We don't see this murder either -- just the result. The murder comes out of left field -- basically the result of a comic scene with his mother-in-law. Chigurh himself is late to the scene.

When we see Moss dead, it's a huge shock to the system. My heart just crumbles each time. The reason, I think, is good screenwriting on the level of character. Every screenwriter knows that you have to engage a very clear, simple strategy for maintaining audience engagement in your main character. The Coen Brothers are masters of this, of course. And they do a tremendous job with Moss. In his first series of scenes, he shows us how to watch the movie -- how to enjoy it. Follow the blood tracks on the ground. Read the clues. He's not a good character or a bad character. He's ambivalent. As Ed Tom Bell puts it, he could be involved in drug running, but it doesn't sound like him. He's just a human being -- good and bad rolled up into one. This makes his role as the underdog uncommonly affecting.

He's us. And while the real main character here is Ed Tom Bell. The Coens know we're watching Moss. The decision to take him away from the viewer, to force us to reevaluate the whole story through different eyes right at the end, is deeply dislocating. And it's incredibly effective for 90% of viewers. As you search for the thread -- for the meaning of the story -- Ed Tom Bell steps to the foreground and delivers his carefully laid out message straight to your undefended heart.

There's true passion here. A true need to communicate. Listen for this when you write. You don't always feel it in yourself, but it's there.

Film Susu

2008-02-08T10:25:00.000-08:00

A few months ago I gave an interview to a new indie film website named filmsusu.com. The interview was pleasant enough. Just really, really short. Like 30 seconds long. I expounded on screenwriting in response to one fairly vague question. And then we were done, apparently.

I went to the website the other day to see if it was up. To my surprise, access to this interview is now a benefit of 'premium membership', along with another interview and 'technical and creative support'. If readers of this blog are seriously considering dropping forty bucks on the chance to hear me... they should know I'll gladly answer emails for free.

Toward a Fractal Theory of Screenwriting

2008-02-06T11:26:00.000-08:00

I've been sitting on my students for the last few weeks to build their toolkits, which are lists of elements that they know about their story. They know what the unity is. That is a tool. They know their conceit (well, they better). Conceit is a tool for solving script problems. They've learned how to define a character through an essential conflict that's locked into the overall plot. They've learned to balance character palettes and all that. They know the basic beats of the 3-act structure. My sense is that the toolkit idea is a little hokey for them -- it's all so simple, in a way. Who needs to break it down so much? Takes the fun out of it, right? Next class is where it all gets complex and fun again. And they'll want the toolkit to get there.

A fractal is a geometric shape that looks the same no matter the scale you view it at. Crystals form in fractal shapes. So do cows, apparently:

And so do stories. Any good screenwriter knows that a strong story looks like itself no matter how you look at it. The overall three-act structure resonates like a crystal. Its structure is replicated in all the smaller beats. Within the beats, the three-act structure plays itself out, and with each vibration on every level, the story becomes more and more significant, whole, and moving. Wow, dude. No really.

There's nothing stoner about this. An experienced screenwriter thinks about this stuff. A good writer builds it in. You start with a good overall structure, and some strong conflict to drive the character. But then you continue, driving down through into the microscopic worlds that blow up into whole universes also known as good scenes.

When we watch a movie, we expect to find those resonances there. There's a tendency to think through them, but you only get so far without keeping the elements that define your script on the tip of your mind. And that's what separates the good stories from the ones you forget. Some need to resonate. Some make us resonate. And some make us want to check our email.

There's a method behind keeping things simple and carefully laid out. There's also a madness. A really joyful, wonderful madness.

Kismet

2008-02-03T13:19:00.000-08:00

Kismet is that wonderful property of fate that typifies successful projects. You know when a project has kismet. You definitely know when it does not. Kismet is probably what dragged me out from behind my desk and away from my very serious prose and brought me back into connection with actual human beings through screenwriting. Kismet means that everything works together. Everything somehow fits.

I fell into my first screenwriting job with next to zero experience. I knew how to write, but I didn't know how to write drama. I was used to being in complete control of what I wrote. I hadn't dealt with actors before. I hadn't had to describe every little thing I wanted to do to the director, and again to the producer who wants to be the writer, and the wardrobe guy. And so on. It's incredibly humbling. Your characters suddenly talk back to you. They have flesh. And you can't gloss over what you don't really understand about them. I was lucky enough to be fascinated by it and not overwhelmed or dismissive or lacking in confidence.

At the time, I really thought that kismet was something that just happened. You hoped it was there, but there was no way to invoke it. You had to patiently stand by and hope that the director saw the same thing the actors did. You had to hope that the production designer could figure it out. There was something both frustrating and magical about working with actors. They don't deliver lines the way they should. But then they'll just nail a glance, or simply be there, in a way that explains the whole scene.

Now that I'm a bit older, I've learned that kismet is something you do your best to lay into a script. You sow the seeds. I've learned two paths to kismet. The first is being obvious. Being incredibly obvious. Everyone is on the same page because everything is as simple and basic as possible.

There's something to this, of course. Things need to be simple and clear as they encounter a variety of different people doing a variety of different things to the script. But obvious is also boring.

The higher path to kismet has to do with finding a sweet spot where everyone can do their best work. Each individual, no matter how small his or her role, wants to shine. Knowing this fact about your reader is key.

If you write for a director, think about what will entice them to excel. Think about what they want to shoot. Nine times out of ten you'll find more action, more drama, and more entertainment for the audience. In the tenth instance, you're probably working with a director who likes boring, talky stuff.

This is where you sow the seeds of kismet for the other filmmakers to reap. Your job is to make the overall skeleton of the story deeply, profoundly dynamic. You are building the overall structure that keeps everyone's assumptions on the same page. The first block in the foundation has to be a strong and clear character desire. We know what the scene is for. We know how it fits into the overall plot. The second keystone is probably use of setting. Having the story present on the set in the shape of a prop is incredibly useful. The third keystone is probably a nice tight edit. I'm getting into the 'probably' range here. It's probably a little foolish to rank kismet-related tasks. Every aspect of a script deserves to be sown with kismet.

I try to do all these things with others in mind. I try to stay both in my own head, but open to other thoughts as I go along.

Many new writers don't have access to directors or knowledge of production. That's okay. Imagine you do. Build your own director in your head. Start using actors -- even the ones you'll never actually know. Very soon you'll stop worrying about whether to furrow their brow in an action line, and start worrying about making the story as dynamic, original, and enticing as possible.

Symmetry and Contrast, Unity and Conflict

2008-01-30T12:49:00.000-08:00

Ask a prose writer what they think about screenwriters, and they're liable to respond with a harumph, a scoff, or a snort. Perhaps even a chortle. Whence this skepticism?

Many prose writers have dabbled in screenwriting, and it left them cold. There's very little room for their internal monologues. They're suddenly constrained by things like budget and audience and feasibility. Many prose writers, myself included, are infatuated with a stream of words, and how it can build up references and resonances and unique meaning. What starts out as something linear can spontaneously arrange itself into a cathedral of meaning somehow independent of time or space. There's just a beautiful new structure slowly turning in the mind of the reader. But you can't do that in a script, at least in the same way. You can't derive all from a stream of words. Naturally that bugs the shit out of prose writers.

Jeanette Winterson is the latest in that vein, upsetting British screenwriters with a recent comment about In the Valley of Elah: “Script?! There IS no script! It’s just more of that dreadful VISUAL WRITING which is gradually taking over from real writing.”

"Real" writing is, of course, prose. "That dreadful visual writing" is, well, drama. It's hard to underline just how different these two spheres are. Back in ancient Greece we each had our own god. No longer. Now we have Ms. Winterson, a very emphatically smart person, confusing the two, and finding screenwriting coming up short.

So today I want to talk about some aesthetic principles that go back to the Greeks -- some basics of visual aesthetics that are too often overlooked by ALL writers.

SYMMETRY is the quality of balance in an artwork. It's the relationship of an object to itself. Something is symmetrical if you can fold it down a line that passes through its middle, and have both sides line up with each other.

It's an essential element of unity. It tells a viewer if a piece is whole and complete. It allows a viewer to make judgments about the work. And, of course, it lets them know where they are in it.

How does this intersect with the plot structure of a script. At the center of the work we find, of course, the midpoint. Usually this is where the main character finds him or herself thrown from the frying pan into the fire. This is where a whole new level of danger and risk comes into the plot.

On the far ends of the script, we have the introduction and the resolution. In a very standard view of script structure, you'll find just inside those book ends, the inciting event and the battle scene, respectively.

What does symmetry tell us here? There can and should be parallels drawn between these stages of the script. Take the opening and the resolution: they are both equilibriums. They are relatively static states. They correspond. A writer can *build up* those correspondences as a way of underlining the contrasts between them. This is why a character breaks down in a shitty car all alone on a pre-dawn stretch of freeway in the opening, and ends up driving into the sunset with the mechanic/love object in the same car, now souped up and running smooooth.

Similarly, you've can look for symmetries between your battle scene and your inciting incident to enhance your dreadful visual writing. Often we know what the battle scene looks like better than how we get our character out of balance and into the plot. A battle scene can tell you how the inciting incident might look. Some elements will be parallel, while others will mark the dramatic distance by contrasting each other.

To make this useful, break your scenes down. Know what's actually there, on screen. If your battle scene takes place on the city square, then your inciting incident may well take place there too. Or maybe it takes place in the opposite of the city square -- say, just outside the city walls, with the other freaks. If your battle scene is all about singing until the girl falls in love with you, then maybe your inciting incident has to do with singing your way out of the heart of the same girl, or singing yourself into meeting her. Or whatever. If your battle scene is an actual battle as intricate as a chess game, then maybe your inciting incident is a chess game.

There's no science here. This is a heuristic -- something to try out to see if it's productive. There's no right answer -- just a good place to look.

Misbehavior

2008-01-26T09:14:00.000-08:00

Would there be a script without misbehavior? Of course not. But we're talking about something a little more precise today. Misbehavior, like a lot of good words, has an almost too particular meaning in a screenwriting context.

It's what used to be called a character flaw. Or a character's 'mode'. Or any number of different things. Most books on screenwriting talk about the central trait of the main character, and how it works best when deliberately set up in opposition to the character's goal at the end of the script. In a typical Hollywood movie, you can define virtually every beat of a main character in terms of the conflict between the defining trait and the overall goal. Work up escalating conflicts built around this dichotomy through the 12 beats of the three-act structure and you've got yourself a movie. There. I just summarized most major screenwriting gurus on plot structure. That was easy.

But why, exactly, does misbehavior work? Does misbehavior exist in real life? I think it does, in a way. We all have traits that define how we relate to the world and how it relates to us. If you're an angry person, then it probably trips you up repeatedly on your universal goal of human understanding. And no doubt there's a climax coming in which you'll need to rise above anger if you have any hope of surviving. Don't worry about it: you'll rise above it, and have a beautiful resolution, not to mention all kinds of realizations about anger. If you're a drunk, then yes, drinking will drive you through an inciting incident, plenty of second-act complications, high points, low points, and so on, before you get off the sauce just when you need it most, and manage to salvage your relationship, or graduate from college, or land your dream job.

Of course, our real life misbehaviors rarely play out as dramatically as they do in Spiderman 3. Okay, maybe that's a bad example. As in Perfume: The Story of a Murderer.

Perhaps that is why misbehavior works. We want to see a trait we can identify (and identify with) play out through a series of conflicts. We want all the rote behavior and recurring cycles and humdrum realities of our lives to play out in some way we can vicariously enjoy. This may or may not be true.

I think that answer is just a little too simplistic, because it rests on an unexamined paradox: the best route to universal appeal is through particularity. A character must be distinct to function. He must feel 'real', even though that's the one thing he or she is not. The character must be an individual -- even though what makes her an individual is precisely what makes her universal.

Most films, in one way or another, are about people becoming more human, more evolved. It's about stepping out of a role. And THAT is where the universal appeal comes in. The filmmaker knows some basic truths about society. The average audience member spent his day fitting into an exchangeable role. We're educated for a work force. We're identified as consumers. We're groomed for interoperability, because it's much easier to sell to such a population. We're made interchangeable, because that's how you glean the most productivity from a population. We go to the gym to meet a single ideal of beauty. We dress to look more alike -- to assume a role.

Most of use, knowingly or not, identify ourselves by traits that are completely independent of us. The make of car you drive does not depend on you, but everyone knows what it means when you drive a Lexus. I am a devoted Mac person. Yes, they're better computers. But they also place me in a context. I consider myself far too smart to fall for that consciously. But I do fall for it.

I could go on. The food we eat. The religions we believe in. Our political parties.
They all function without us. They don't need or want our particularity, no matter how much they say they do. I'm not saying they're good or bad. I'm saying that their reliance on you is limited to what is general, and not what is particular.

Stories do want your particularity. They require it. It defines them. This is why writers write. And suddenly I'm a lot less jaded about how easy it is to sum up a couple decades of screenwriting books.