The Actor's Job

Years ago I took a beginning stage acting class. The teacher one day asked us to play the part of someone looking for a five dollar bill. We looked around, put index fingers to chin in looks of questioning and sudden realization, jumped into action and looked behind the chair. Then the teacher said, "Okay. I've actually hidden a five dollar bill in the room. Find it." You've never seen a room full of grad students move so fast.

The lesson: acting is not imitating. It's doing. Actors want a role they can get inside: something that makes sense, holds drama, and lets them experience life from a new perspective. The last thing they really want is a screenwriter to act like a puppeteer. They don't want you to tell them what to do. They want you to create a compelling character through a series of actions. Then THEY want to interpret them.

Let's take the scene we talked about earlier, when Ratso Rizzo invites Joe Buck to stay with him. Do you think it's full of action lines telling us about the subtle details of their faces? Nope. Do you think it's full of dialogue where they hash it out? Nope. It's dead simple. Six lines or so. Then screenwriter Waldo Salt hands it off to Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight. And he wins the Academy Award for screenwriting.

What he's handing off to these genius actors is, of course, some genius writing. These are great characters not because of how they're described, but because of the situations they're in. Rizzo is dead lonely. He's broke and starving. The only guy talking to him wants to kill him. He needs to convince him to stay with him, or he'll die alone. Joe Buck's more or less in the same situation, and he's finally got a place to live if he can push his pride down one more time.

Don't tell the actors what to imitate. Just give them juicy roles to explore for themselves. That's what makes the drama spring to life.

Screenwriting is just the first step in a long creative and collaborative process. Working with filmmakers quickly teaches you that EVERYONE, from the actors, to the directors, to the gaffer, is trying to tell the story using their own creativity. Screenwriters have a very special role at the beginning of this process. You're creating the space for these other professionals to express their own creativity.

STICKING WITH THE CONCRETE

One thing I find repeatedly, both in my own writing and with clients, is that there's a huge tendency to explain what's going on. This is especially true when the script is emotionally intense. Bob can't just sign the divorce papers in the third beat of act II. No. Bob, driven by his irrepressible rage at his unfaithful wife while subconsciously also allowing himself to begin thinking about Maizie, the sincere but homely doughnut shop clerk, in a new way, heads to the lawyer's office, almost gets in an accident, where his rage bubbles to the surface, and then he suddenly realizes he's at peace.

It goes without saying that the first is easier to write. And easier is always better.

But there's a deeper reason for STICKING WITH THE CONCRETE. That's what's on the screen. That's what the audience sees. Not only does the human mind gauge actions and characters. It does it better than you can explain. And it does it instinctively.

When you explain the internals in the synopsis (or, horrors! in the action lines), you're working against yourself. You're actually sapping energy from the structure of your story.

GENTLE READER

But it's right there on the page!

RICH

But the movie viewer doesn't have your
script in his lap.

Take a look at Joe Buck and Ratso Rizzo. What do they do? Not a lot. Steal some food. Go to a party. Try to get paid for sex. What we all do everyday, right?

We're drawn in by what they don't say. There's a series of actions, and they're written with a strong through-line. This tells the writer how they'll react. It tells the actor how to approach the part. And it tells the viewer how to look at the movie. The single biggest reason Midnight Cowboy works is that we know what drives the characters. Once you get that nailed down, step back, and just let the characters steal fruit, or sign the divorce papers, or flirt with the doughnut girl. It's a whole lot easier.

It's hard to let go of that level of control, of course. That's why I'm going to talk about the actor's job in the next post.

MIdnight Cowboy

I watched Midnight Cowboy last night. It's a wonderful film, and the screenplay won the Oscar in 1969. It made me think about tools and character, and just how important it is to REALLY think about character, and then use what you've learned to bring your character to the screen.

Midnight Cowboy tells the story of Joe Buck, a vain and naive kid from Texas, who moves to New York to try his hand as a gigalo. Once there, the rich women aren't the easy pickin's he'd been planning on, and he sinks into a seedy world with probably the only friend he truly ever had, the hopeless loser and petty thief Ratso Rizzo, played by Dustin Hoffman.

Both characters are defined by their inability to see their problem. Neither can admit that they're truly lonely, and that they, in many ways, hate themselves and have no real prospects. This is what keeps them in the plot. When a religious closet case asks Joe if he's lonely, he can only bristle at the questioner's directness.

A lot of screenwriters get their characters asking about each other's problems because that seems like the easiest way to get them out in the open. But that dialogue homogenizes the characters, and makes it too easy for them. If they can describe the problem, it just isn't that big. Worse yet, the answers are clear.

How does Waldo Salt (the screenwriter) use his characters to get over this problem? Neither have any real prospects. Neither have a good reason to leave their condemned apartment except to steal some food. Neither can admit his place in the food chain. These are some hard characters to write.

Take the movie's opening. You get this long sequence of Joe trying to say goodbye to a town that's not really interested. You get a long bus ride to New York, with more more or less meaningless contacts. And Joe listening to his portable radio. At first you think: what the hell. Nothing's happening. Then you realize it's all coming from Joe's perspective. The greatest sop to his loneliness was the young mother asking for a piece of gum for her child, and the old woman who won't let him turn the light off. He's frickin' lonely. Does he say he's lonely? Nope. And before you know it, old Waldo's got his main character in New York with very little dialogue.

Let's take Ratso Rizzo. The guy's more or less scum. He hustles Joe for twenty bucks the first time we see him. He invites Joe into his house. Very few characters could explain why he does this. Rizzo definitely not. But he does it, and WE understand why. He says it's ostensibly to make up for ripping off Joe. But he's just made it clear he doesn't really care about that. When Joe pushes him, he plays the respect card: I'm inviting you. I don't do that kind of thing. How dare you refuse? And Joe, who's got nowhere to go, accedes. In five minutes or less, Joe Buck goes from wanting to kill Rizzo to living with him. No attempt to explain. But it makes perfect sense.

Take another plot point. By the midpoint of the film, it's been established that Joe just isn't going to make it as a gigalo with women. But that's what the movie's about. So what are you going to do? What's a character trait that Joe has that can move this forward? His clownishness -- the cowboy hat and the bandana around his neck -- actually work to his favor in a certain setting, and it gets him an invitation to an underground party full of whackos. There he meets a woman who's enough of an explorer and free spirit to more or less take Joe up on it on a whim. It's twenty bucks. No big deal. It gets us to the next plot point, and it makes perfect sense.

By solving the problems by turning to his characters' main traits, the screenwriter made sure that both his story and his character were true to themselves and entertaining within every ten page beat.