Very Animated Spokesbees

There's clearly something deeply weird going on in our culture right now. I'm not going to delve into simplistic statements about attention span or media saturation. But clearly we're riding a real cleft in the culture between people who grew up in a world of linear, carefully structured narratives and the young ones, who fall into a pit of worry if they aren't blasted by three or more narratives and/or image streams at the same time. There's something entirely new going on in human history right now. It's just beginning to play out.

But there are some things that are basically constant in how narrative is constructed. I don't care how non-linear or avant-garde your movie is, chances are it really sucks if you didn't sit down and work out the chronological structure of events. Non-linear narrative doesn't free you from the requirements of drama. It does the opposite: you MUST plan that stuff out well if the audience is going to stay with you through your ever-so-elegant leaps and breaks.

Characters also are constructed in the same basic way they always were. It doesn't matter what terminology you use -- character arc and flaw, misbehavior and desire, mode and need -- you are pretty much talking about building a clear, strong conflict that makes a character both "feel" real, and propels them into and through the plot. It doesn't matter if it's Shakespeare or a detergent commercial. The character is carefully constructed to garner sympathy (read: our attention) and drive the plot to the resolution the writer's aiming for.

That's why the protagonists in soap ads mirror a very specific image of a suburban housewife. That's why the protagonists (germs, grass stains, her smelly family) swarm down. And each resolution is her overcoming her character flaw -- she didn't know there was this wonderful substance named Boraxo.

So what to make of the Nasonex Bee? Have you seen this bee? Who hasn't? It's a computer animated bee that speaks with a somewhat gay Mexican accent. And you gotta ask: how on earth did they decide that this particular character would sell allergy medication?

I puzzled over this for a while. The bee isn't a protagonist per se. He's more of a narrator. So his main job is to get us to listen. But what's his inner conflict? How does the writer construct the character sympathy? Why should we care?

My guess is this. Bees have an association with pollen and summer. When an allergy sufferer sees a bee, they make a link to their stuffed up nose. Perhaps there's something a little deeper. Bees eat the pollen -- and make something useful out of it.

Now the bee is obviously animated. If you're going to employ a spokesbeee, you probably want one generated in a computer. For me, it's still creepy when the bee helps pop the cap off for the suffering human. Who's going to grab a bottle with a bee on it? There's a particular connection between bees and allergies: reactions to bee stings. I'd think you'd want no bees in your allergy commercial. But someone decided this was a good thing.

Next step: choosing the voice. Anyone who works in animation will tell you that this is a critical choice. Audiences want to know where to put your character. If the voice is too loopy... you look for a bit of humor, but put little investment in the bee. You've got a cartoon. If the voice contrasts sharply with the visual, you can build humor, but you also risk a certain dissonance. If you want to get your audience engaged in the character, it helps if the voice is distinctive or even well-known. That's why Robin Williams still has a job.

So picture the ad exec bigwig types sitting around a table in their Madison Avenue skyscraper, deciding on the voice. Someone says, "Let's mirror the voice to our target audience: white females, 30-49". (This is an example. I have no idea who buys Nasonex.) Great. They test it out. The audience just thinks it's strange.. or feel put down somehow.

Hmmm. What'll make the bee work? "Let's get Robin Williams in the studio!" They try it, but the audience is now looking for a joke, and start laughing when he tells us Nasonex causes swelling of the brain lining and hallucinations involving talking insects (Nasonex does not cause this. I'm sure it's a delightful, completely safe allergy medication.). So no go. Thousands and thousands have been spent on this ad.

"I know. We need a voice that sounds helpful and polite, yet knowledgeable around the subject." Someone thinks of the concierge at their day spa. And you've got yourself the first gay Latino spokesbee in history.

I'm obviously speculating here. But someone really does make choices like this. Someone thinks through this stuff. And they're paid well for it.

Yer kiddin' me. Nope. And they probably earn every penny. They know about these memes and types and characters floating around in Americans' heads, and they know how to play them. Rush Limbaugh probably wants to run a check on the bee's work papers. The Nasonex bee would probably get fired if we found out he shares a well-appointed duplex hive in West Hollywood with another male bee model.

But with the right touch, that bee does exactly what it's constructed to do.

Mexican Idol!

I stopped off at my local taqueria on the way home the other day. The TV was blaring the Mexican version of American Idol. Quite a sight. There were twenty contestants of so -- ten teens of each gender, all wearing these quasi-prep school uniforms reminiscent of the Mexipop trainwreck known as RBD. You rarely see so many effusive, happy, blond Mexican 16-year-olds in one place, and the effect is somewhat disturbing, like a dream I had once after falling asleep watching a Kelly Clarkson special and eating a bag full of cheesy fried jalapeños.

As I sat down to my tacos, they were winding up the big group song -- all tweaked and tweezered -- singing like little angels, with all kinds of emotion 'n' stuff. Choreographed dance moves. Choreographed smiles. Choreographed good clean living happy teens. And then the winners were announced.

The winning teen boy burst into this almost breakdance-style victory dance. You knew this kid had Justin Timberlake's picture on the wall. When the announced the winning girl, she broke down into near hysterics, and was unable to sing. But they pulled her together, and the two sang a big duet finale.

This is where it got interesting. While American TV would have shunted the losers off to the side, or they would have forced themselves to wear smiles and look like good losers, here you had two singers, and a camera milling about the 18 losers, all with red eyes and tearful hugs. And jealous stares. And comforting hugs kinda going in another direction.

The entire taqueria was mesmerized. The servers stopped serving. The customers stopped ordering. The eaters stopped eating. We watched as these 18 visions of the ideal Mexican pop star of tomorrow all suddenly broke down and became real people. They became individuals, outside their set frame. They became full-blown characters.

Suddenly there was something interesting going on. The camera was clearing focusing in the losers. The winning boy kept jumping into frame and singing his little heart out. The winning girl was back up to speed, and they did their little safely choreographed mock-flirting as they grabbed for screen space. You could feel the taqueria turn against them. All anybody wanted to see was how these other kids they'd known all season really were. Did she just put her hand on his ass? Is he really crying? Score one for reality.

What does this tell us about screenwriting? Good writing resonates with the viewer by making sense, but surprising him. Good drama is not about imitating or representing. It's about doing. It's about real action. We put our characters through a lot, but too often we lose the audience by letting the consequences fit what makes it easier for us. Don't do it. Push yourself. Follow your characters. Don't make them follow you. They will always surprise you.

Crutches and Assumptions and BS

The other day I got one of those infuriating "you've got to read this" emails that get forwarded to entire address books all over the place. It was a sincere appeal from an American Airlines pilot to Muslim Americans. He can't tell them apart from the terrorists. And he wishes he didn't feel this way, but the rules have changed since 9/11. And so he needs them to pledge allegiance to the flag.

Now I'm as susceptible to easy answers as anybody. And anybody who's seen the marvelous, undeniable success of George W. Bush knows that wrapping yourself in the flag is the answer to any difficult question. A drunk once accosted a dark-skinned friend of mine with this exact same demand for a pledge of allegiance at a Raiders game, so clearly the pilot was onto something. While we're at it, maybe we could ask all law abiding minorities to pledge not to mug nice upper middle class white people? Freakin' moron.

Oh yeah, screenwriting. If it teaches you anything, it's that characters rarely conform to what they want you of them. The answers will usually surprise you. The audience will ALWAYS question the assumption you're making. Even if your main character is a little blond-haired orphan who sings like an angel, you need to work hard to make sure the audience believes her, engages her, likes her.

In other words, the audience will always call you on your bulls***.

One of the fun parts of being a script consultant is that you have to work on a lot of stories that you would never write. You have to engage a wide range of assumptions that are not your own. I've worked on right-wing apocalypse militia type scripts. I've worked on Christian inspirational scripts for African-American audiences. I've worked on homophobic action scripts. It's my job. I need to put aside my own assumptions, and find what works for the client and the target audience.

One thing I've always found a little comforting working with homophobic scripts is that the opposite of the happy singing orphan problem is also there. The action lines invariably describe the bad guy as the gay homosexual leering at our hero. But simply being something, rather than doing something, won't make a character negative in a viewer's mind. The writer never tests his own assumptions, and so the negative character doesn't really come into focus. I'm thinking of a particular case where a poor, unsuspecting Christian teen accidentaly sits down next to a bisexual classmate. A fellow student shakes her head and mouths "No!" silently. But alas. The poor teen sits within easy grasp of the bisexual.

The writer doesn't actually give any visual cues for the movie audience to know that this character is bisexual, and the viewer can only speculate as to why this unnamed fellow classmate is so concerned about the seating arrangement.

Beyond that, the bisexual never quite gets around to doing anything that bad. There's an assumption on the writer's viewpoint that you simply shouldn't associate with homosexuals. I pointed out that this supposedly bad character was actually a better, more understanding friend than many of the character's assumed friends. If her message is that you shouldn't hang out with homosexuals, she was just going to have to dig a little bit deeper. I'd like to think that's why the relationship ended up being more complex, interesting and realistic in later drafts.

I'm gay, but I'm not what you'd call a gay writer. I just don't write many gay characters. It's probably for the very same reason. The assumptions around a positive gay character in "Queer as Folk" or the like are no more real to me than the assumptions around a negative gay character in a Christian script. I don't want to get locked into a particular genre read of my work. There's always something deeper, more immediate, and more compelling staring you in the face as soon as you get past your own assumptions. It helps you write more interesting characters.

And it keeps you from spouting embarrassing buls*** in emails that get forwarded to thousands of strangers.

Quote of the Day

Found in CS Weekly..

"As you think about a character, to some extent what you're talking about is just the psychological makeup of the character -- what is he like and how does he relate to other characters. But then when you start to talk about 'What is his behavior?' in my mind that's where you get into the aspect of characterization. That's when you're into the dramatization, what the character does and what he says. That's his behavior. So, you have the psychology, and if you have some grasp on some fundamental psychological truths about the character, you want to leave yourself enough room to allow the behavior to evolve naturally. "

– Ted Elliott, screenwriter for Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End

Conversation continued..

A client of mine had a great follow-up on the last post. He noted that a lot of people aren't really listening to what the other party says. For them, conversation is more or less a way of making their statement -- dominating the other party, or impressing, or whatever else. And guess what? A conversation like that probably would have a lot of exposition. They WILL tell friends about facts that are already understood between them. They WILL lay out the basic relationships. They will repeat a son's achievements. They will rub a friend's nose in the basic problems of a friendship.

Sometimes exposition is inevitable. And there are ways to make it feel natural. The key here is the same as with any dialogue: context. So the tip for today comes courtesy of my client and buddy, Doc:

Explore your characters for traits that help you communicate necessary exposition. Are they the kind of character who never listens? Are they boastful? Dominating? Do they repeat themselves? Do they like rubbing people's noses in their mistakes? Are they dying for a chance to do it to another character? Let 'em!

300

I finally saw '300' last night. You'll have to indulge me a small rant here. Or jump ahead a couple paragraphs if you prefer your scriptwrangling straight up.. The film is a bloody, stylized retelling of the Battle of Thermopylae, where an elite force of 300 Spartans managed to hold out against 150,000 Persians in one of the most dramatic battles in history. The film tells the story about how these 300 straight white guys defend country, truth, democracy, and family against the Persian Empire, which was apparently a rainbow coalition of transvestites, muslims, black people, and the handi-capable. More than half the movie takes place at this mountain pass, which, especially in the long shots, is rather disturbingly Freudian. The 300 fight an assortment of effeminate brown people, stopping only briefly to announce that freedom isn't free, and how they of course get all their strength from their women. Then it's back to defending the hole.

What's particularly galling is that the 300 Spartans in real life were actually 150 homosexual couples, chosen to fight together because they would die defending their lovers. Guess that wouldn't make them too sympathetic for the average red-stater this seems targeted at. Alas. it makes me realize just how screwed up our culture is -- literally -- how things get stuck somehow, then twisted around on themselves several times. They aren't gay warriors. They're straights fighting transvestites. But they wear leather underwear and long crimson capes. And they cackle heartily whenever they say "sculptor", or "boy-lover". Yeesh. And then boring.

I thought this would be a good place to talk about "character sympathy" in screenwriting terms. "Sympathy" is one of those terms -- like conflict, misbehavior, flaw, etc. -- that are NEUTRAL. Hannibal Lecter has sympathy because he promises surprise, and he's extremely dedicated to his task.

For the screenwriter, it's absolutely paramount that the viewer have sympathy for the main character. Doesn't have to like him. But he has to care what happens to him. He has to invest in him. There are a couple ways to do this.

ENTERTAINMENT POTENTIAL. The character conceit is so strong that the audience just wants to get to the next laugh, or murder, or whatever. There is the potential for surprise, or strong choices. I got bored with 300 because I realized all I was going to get was another battle scene, more platitudes.

STAKES. The harder you make a character fight, and the more you make him fight for, the more we care. It's natural. People like underdogs. I think this was the writer's (Zack Snyder) approach with the 300. They need to defend Sparta's rear pass against the effeminate brown masses. Didn't work for me, because I knew they were going to lose, and they seemed to crave nothing more than death.

MERCY. HUMILITY. When audiences see a merciful act, they have a hope that it will be returned to the deserving main character. This is one place where 300 especially failed for me. He comes from a society without mercy. He rejects the pitiful cripple who wants to fight. And frankly, I'm glad when the cripple takes his revenge.

AUDIENCE IDENTIFICATION. We see ourselves in the character. This is the Erin Brockovitch approach. She's got more kids than she can handle. She's got a checkered past. She's not the brightest crayon in the box. But she's loyal, and she'll fight -- for us. I think 300 tries to do this. The Spartans spout the catch-phrases from the war on terror. Fear and barbarism are all full of homosexuality. Xerxes all but mounts Leonidas at one point. Uh oh! There's a real drive to get all the team thinking alike. If it wasn't so pitifully screwed up it mighta worked.

There WAS one character I had strong sympathy for: the young Leonidas. Following Spartan ritual, the seven-year-old is taken from his mother, and forced to live in this army camp for kids. We know he's a sweet kid, the apple of his mother's eye. We don't know what will happen to him. We don't know what he'll become. We don't know if he'll survive. And this is the one place where the violence is really affecting. He punches another boy, and blood flies from his mouth. The transformation has begun. Two little boys fighting can engage an audience better than armies of elephants plunging over an ocean cliff or dudes in burkas throwing hand grenades (hundreds of years before Islam or the invention of gunpowder). Yes, it can.

The Birds!

I sat down to write a post about "Airplane!" last night but Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds" was on. This counts as a rockin' Friday in Scriptwranglerville.

It's a tremendous movie, and you can't watch it without thinking that modern day horror movies are basically cheating with all the gore and torture and ever more traumatizing visuals. I guess audiences expect it, and they're delivering. I just wish you could make movies like "The Birds" now. They're a lot harder. Maybe you need to be a genius like Hitchcock. But you get a lot deeper into a viewer's consciousness with his approach.

The first thing that struck me is just how long it takes to get into the horror material. The first real attack doesn't occur until fifty minutes into the film -- almost halfway. You almost forget you're watching a horror film because there's this really delightful little love story with in the (still) delightful little town of Bodega Bay. Tippi Hedren's character is one of those perfect balancing acts. She hot. She's rich. She's proud. She's sort of a Paris Hilton of 1963, only she's not as dumb as a martini in a Mexican restaurant. And the only thing she wants more than the smart ass she saw in the bird store is to show that she's smarter than him. Doesn't sound much like a horror movie, does it?

But it is. The ONLY reason it works as a horror movie is that Hitchcock exploits some strong ideas about story. He exploits his conceit.

Conceit here has nothing to do with "conceited". It means a storyteller's strategy. The conceit behind the Birds is that birds are omnipresent, and aren't normally threatening. But maybe there's something about US, humans. And if the birds were to band together, perhaps we wouldn't be at the top of the food chain for long.

"Exploiting the conceit" is very much a nuts-and-bolts issue for a screenwriter. In t he first fifty minutes, bird activity interrupts the activity, and brings the scene to a neat conclusion, or forms a nice bridge between scenes. It's always on the periphery, but it always improves the pacing. And it builds suspense.

Hitchcock also exploits his characters. Tippi Hedren is a walking story. She's just about the only woman alive who could come into a strange town, ask the name and address of the resident town bachelor #1 and his 10-year-old sister, then get these suspicious small town types to actually help her secretly delivering a gift of lovebirds. She gets his jilted ex-girlfriend to give her a bed for the night so she can continue the seduction. She doesn't need dialogue.

He exploits the location. Hitchcock wrote the script very much with Bodega Bay in mind. He knew that a car can move across the circular bay faster than a boat. He knew the geography. He probably knew what it looked like from the bird's eye view.

He exploits the camera. Lovely shots from the bird's eye view every time the humans are trapped inside a building. How else could you capture the idea that windows are no longer a way to see -- they're a point of entry?

Hitchcock once said, "After the script is written and the dialogue added, we're ready to shoot." Dialogue was added. It's not how he thought through his story. He could have, but then we wouldn't still be watching it. Dialogue is the least powerful tool in the screenwriter's toolbox. It's the most malleable element of a script. Choosing your conceit, and building your locations, characters, and visuals will get you miles further.

"Leave the gun. Take the cannolis."

I saw one of those documentary miniseries about the human body the other day. They say that blushing is actually the limbic system -- that animal brain that controls our baser instincts -- sending a rush of blood to the face as a way of signalling arousal. It's depressingly unsubtle, like those baboons whose hindquarters swell into rainbow-colored balloons when it's time to mate. There's an evolutionary value to maximizing any attempt at mating, even when the rational brain sees no reason for the limbic system's heady optimism. When you embarrass someone, their limbic system responds by flooding the body with chemicals, preparing to mate, or fight, or whatever it needs to do to keep a finger in the gene pool.

A young woman giggle at a forty-year-old CPA trying to still pull off the hockey jersey and backwards baseball cap look. He blushes. Why? Because his lizard brain, which doesn't get the joke, senses a mating opportunity, and it's making the most of it.

The 40-year-old gets drunk and announces to the bar, "Damn, her tits are nicer than Jennifer Tilly's!" She blushes. That little lizard brain is flooding her brain with chemicals to maximize her evolutionary potential.

What does this have to do with screenwriting? Everything. It shows that there's conflict in just about every situation, in just about every human being, most of the time. Every situation, no matter how simple it seems, has numerous layers, and those layers often produce the kind of conflict that makes a scene real. Being flustered isn't really one condition. It's different drives at war with each other. It's the rational brain and the lizard brain at odds. It's wanting to tell off someone you can't tell off. It's wanting an ice cream sundae when you know your dieting boyfriend can't have one. Most of our lives are governed by forces and desires in conflict.

Good screenwriting reflects that. So often I read screenplays where, in the end, most of what the main character did was talk about what he's doing. Many writers try to capture that inner conflict with dialogue about the conflict. It never works. Nope. Never. The answer is always simpler. Let your characters speak to you. Let them be hungry. Let them be horny. Let them be you. You think you're not getting it down on the page, because it's not there in so many words. But it is there, right where an actor can find it.

The quote from the Godfather above is a great example. You could write pages of dialogue and never get the different, conflicting thoughts that happen in anybody's head. All Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola had to do is remember that Clemenza wouldn't just leave a box of fresh cannolis in the car.

Most of my good writing comes from the days I shut up and stop telling the characters what to say. On a good day, I can watch them blush, or remember there's cannolis on the back seat, or make a fool of themselves with the girl who finds them appalling.

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.

Tools and Character

Now we've identified a set of problems in our story with X's. And, by describing and building out our characters, we've got some solutions. Wha?! We do?!

Yes, we do. One more rule for a good story, not only must the story be identifiable throughout, so must the character. Think about it. What would happen if you watched an action film all the way to the climax, and then the hero got himself out of his pickle because of something that wasn't established earlier? It would seem like a cop out, right? Characters need to be organic, and they need to grow. The audience wants to explore them, whether they're fighting aliens or dealing with a divorce.

So take your X's. And take your list of character traits. What can your character DO to solve the problem? Find a trait and try matching it to a problem, then brainstorm possibilities.

Inevitably, action and visual convey information much better than dialogue. They are also more entertaining. Let's go back to the hedge fund trading issue -- an issue that's complex and difficult for the audience, but necessary for the plot.

What's the hedge fund trader like? He's ambitious, driven, ruthless, greedy. He's a womanizer and he's got a penchant for expensive gadgets. His weak spot? He feels guilty about his mother, who lives alone and misses him, but he never has time for.

How do you match these two problems?

Bob the hedge fund manager is in his office. He stares at his computer screen.

His secretary arrives with an important file. He tells her to get out.

He watches the numbers on the screen tumble.

His wife calls. He doesn't answer.

The numbers fall further. Beads of sweat form on his forehead.

His mistress calls him from the restaurant. He's late.

As the price on the fund drops to 25,000, he sends in his order.

As it goes through, he holds up his hand in triumph. The phone rings again.

He picks it up, expecting his wife.

"What do you want?"

His mother answers, "Bobby? Is that you?"

He shuffles to get off the phone, but fails to notice that the price is now moving in the wrong direction.


We know all we need to know, and we've learned more about him.

Next time: The instinct to go with dialogue.