What the Audience Understands

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.

Conceit and Structure

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.

Forests and Trees

"But everything is like we think it is, don't you get it? Out of the million little things happening on this beach, you can only be aware of seven things at once, seven things at any given time... We never really get the whole picture. Not even a microscopic part of it... Our delusions are just as likely to be real as our most careful scientific observations."

-- Denis Johnson, quoted from Solid Ground: Earthquakes, Prediction, and the Fault Line Between Reason and Faith by David L. Ulin.

I love this quote. It explains why stories are so important. In a world of infinite complexity, we select the elements that stand out. We create our own narrative.

We tune out noises and smells that aren't relevant. We tell stories without details that don't apply. We go through life looking at the same things over and over again. The mail on the table by the door. The same television channel. The same spouse.

It's not a bad thing. It's how our brains work. We must limit the complexity that we perceive if we're going to function.

The same is true in a story. The storyteller must limit the details and define the context. The story has to have a certain unity that allows the audience to gauge the dramatic distance traveled.

Managing complexity is more or less the definition of filmmaking. If you've ever been involved in a production, you know well how one fallow assumption can explode into an incredible number of choices at the hands of a lot of different people -- the director, of course, but also the actors and the DP and the gaffer and the editor and wardrobe.

If a script is strong, everyone involved will be on the same page. The story is shared. Things move forward. If a script lacks that cohesion, then it shows itself in a million ways. The actor has one idea for the scene, but the gaffer lights for another mood. The discussions between DP and director get longer. The editor can't quite cut it all together, because he's cutting together a different idea of the movie from the one shot.

So how does a screenwriter handle this issue?

CONCEIT

Conceit is the 'thingness' of a thing. It's the correspondence between the moment and the overall concept about the thing. Say you take a trip to sunny Hollywood, expecting to see stars sharing their chihuahuas with paparazzi beneath palms swaying slowly on a summer day. But when you arrive all you see are endless strip malls and run-down bungalows inhabited by speed freaks. That dissonance is a failure of conceit.

In a story, a writer needs to create that thingness. Usually that thingness is encapsulated in the logline. It tells the reader what to expect. It tells them if it's stars with chihuahuas or rows of nail salons. It sets up expectations.


I won't amaze anyone with my perspicacity underlining the importance of a logline. But it is an underreported fact that you must actually bring your logline into your script. It's a tool for you. It can help you solve your script problems.

Take a look at your script. How many beats *actually* sound like they come from a script with your logline? Now look at what beats you're actually happy with. See any correspondence?

No, the correspondence is not 100%. For some, there are bigger issues -- a lack of conflict, inconsistent characters, and so on. But not infrequently the solution to the problem with the beat is all about a lack of conceit. Why?

Because if you've worked your conceit out carefully, then it perfectly expresses your main characters in the main conflict and how that resolves into your message. Everything you need to move your story forward can usually be inferred from a truly good logline.

Your conceit suggests solutions. But it's also a great leveler. It tells you what works -- and usually why.

300 year old Tequila

Had dinner with a friend in the liquor business. He's a true epicurean around wine and liquor. Good wine matters to him. He can sip a scotch and know where it was made. He's been in the business for years -- and the history of the Californian wine industry opens up for him like a brilliant novel. There aren't a lot of people like him anywhere.. real professionals who take true joy in their profession. And no -- this is not a sly way of saying he's a drunk. He's just a smart guy.

Ten years ago most liquor was produced by individual companies -- often family-owned -- that produced something that they really cared about. But the business has been 'consolidating'. Large conglomerates are buying it up, finding economies of scale, rebranding for the yuppie market.. and so on. They're buying the right to slap a name on a bottle, basically, and marketing to a much broader audience than the old company could have dreamed of.

A few years ago it was scotch. Now it's tequila. And suddenly a bottle of the stuff is going for an ungodly sum of money -- $300 or more. How do they do that?

Well, they started selling aged tequila. As my friend is quick to point out, the older tequila gets, the more it's likely to lose exactly what makes tequila good. If you know about tequila, you don't want to drink a ten-year-old tequila. If you're in the liquor business, you know very well that aging tequila is a good way to sell at a huge margin, but makes for a lousy margarita.

So why do they do it? This is something every screenwriter should understand. Very few produced scripts fail to consciously incorporate a winning strategy from a previous script. It's not necessarily a bad thing. It's not a sell out. In fact, it's important to build an audience strategy on what you know about your audience. The strategy doesn't always fail. And just because old tequila makes a crappy, expensive margarita doesn't mean you should disregard what the audience is looking for.

But the strategy often does fail -- and that's why buying an overpriced drink feels a lot like watching Hollywood dreck. Some fancy director is hired to direct Blade II because, well, he's a fancy director. But it's still going to be Blade II. Or Jaws 3. Or whatever else they're convinced will sell.

It happens in screenwriting when characters in your script start looking more and more like characters in successful movies. Or when you start making your structure look a little too slavishly like Die Hard's. It's happening when your script starts to have so many bells and whistles that the story can barely hold itself up.

It happens when you read one too many screenwriting books about 'can't miss' tips to take your script to the top, but you haven't actually read your script through recently.

When does this approach NOT fail? If you know your conceit, you can build it up with almost any tool -- and knowledge of your audience is a great tool. This isn't a really deep thought, but it is a common problem. If you're making a great scotch -- make a great scotch. If you're trying to make tequila, make tequila. You won't make tequila better by trying to turn it into scotch. And if you'd like to sell tequila as scotch, well, then you probably don't really care about how it's written.

Conceit and Fake Plastic Grapes

One of the hardest elements of drama to communicate to new writers is the idea of conceit. No, it doesn't mean conceited. It does have to do with the word 'concept'. If I had to put a definition on it, it would be something like 'a writer's distinct strategy for unity.' It's what makes a piece of work identifiable as itself. It's what holds a piece of work together. High concept movies, like Jaws, Star Wars, or Snakes on a Plane, have clear appeal which is immediately communicated. This means that the writer came up with a strong, focused controlling idea that both holds the script together and distinguishes it from other scripts. And then they exploited that idea in every conceivable fashion.

I used to teach conceit by talking about how the term is used in poetry. I'd go on about how it might be an extended metaphor, or sometimes a pose used by the poet. But now I rely on Italian restaurants to get the point across.

Say you walk into an Italian restaurant. It's modern... low track lighting, ambient music, and designer accents left and right. Everything about it says 'cutting edge'. You order the persimmon-infused organic tomato tapado and free-range lamb casse-tete over barley-flecked tagliatelle. The waitron suggests a delicate yet assuming Sangiovese with overtones of minerals and citrus from the Abruzzo region as the perfect complement.

Your food arrives, and it's spaghetti and meatballs a carafe of house red wine. You're upset. Why?

On another day, all you want is a good family-style Italian meal like they make back in Jersey. Your friend tells you there's a great place out of town a ways where the matriarch who cooks everything herself won't let you eat until you wash your hands. You get there, and she welcomes you in with a kiss, tells you to wash your hands and have a seat. The music is Frank Sinatra and Perry Como. There are fake grapes and red-checked table cloths. Italian kitsch, family photos from the 50's. But before your family-style dinner for two arrives, mama brings you an amuse-bouche made with an organic fig, goat cheese and a balsamic reduction. The spaghetti and meatballs are a labor of love. But you just aren't sure if mama needed to braise the free-range lamb with cumin and coriander before smoking it over mesquite before adding it to a miso broth specked with heirloom baby tomatillos.

You're dissatisfied. Why?

Mama might be a whizz at incorporating divergent elements into a deconstructible edible, but she failed to follow through on her conceit.

Conceit, for screenwriters and restaurateurs both, is telling your audience HOW TO ENJOY the experience. It's inviting them into the story. It's getting them where you want them to be. It's not an easy thing to do, and new writers inevitably spend too little time with it.

If you open a restaurant, you don't have the leisure of skipping lightly over the issue. Have you ever stopped to wonder why so many Italian restaurants have fake plastic grape vines and pictures of Frank Sinatra and Connie Francis and Joe DiMaggio? They're there for a reason. They frame the experience. They tell the diner what to expect.

Ever wonder why crap movies like Tyler Perry's Why Did I Get Married? or Pool Boy IV or Alien vs. Predator or Talladega Nights not only get made, but make money? Ever wonder why they get regurgitated and make even more money? And so on and so on, until our entire culture is steeped in their aroma of rot?

They tell the audience how to enjoy them. They're dead clear about how to enjoy them.

Depressing, huh?

Structure is Everywhere

I've been a little light on posting recently. Mr. Gary is done tomorrow, at which point I can clear out the mental real estate I need to blog properly.

For now, watch this trippy video. It's magnificent. What's it got to do with screenwriting? Well, it's beautiful. And when a writer or artist sees a beautiful thing, they should watch it and see what it can teach them.

What does it teach me? That three-act structure is hard-wired into our perception. That symmetry between the set up and the resolution is innately satisfying. That when a setting is a creative reimagining of a world we've seen before, it excites and moves us. It reminds me that great narrative usually arises from a simple conceit, not ornate structure. Enjoy.

More Than a Feeling

I know a guitarist who refuses to learn Boston’s ‘More Than a Feeling’ because it would destroy it for him to know how it works. I can respect that. I’ve overanalyzed many favorite books and movies. There’s way too much good poetry that is forever tainted with the odor of grad school seminars for me. I miss it.

Yesterday I was rushing over to the studio to record some jingles and voice overs for Mr. Gary. The I Ching that is my iPod decided to play ‘More Than a Feeling’. Two days with an audio engineer and sound designer had me tuned into recorded sound, and I started pulling apart the recording in a way I never had before. I heard the overdubs. I heard the backing tracks. I could even figure out some of the lyrics!

And before I knew it, this song was separating out into its component elements. I saw how the bass line works with the guitars. I heard how all this was built around the singer’s voice quality and octave range. Half way through the song “Smells Like Teen Spirit” suddenly came roaring into my head, and I knew that Kurt Cobain must have heard this song when he was still a nice boy, and that it had percolated for years before re-emerging triumphantly fifteen years later.

The song came out in 1976. I was nine. It boomed all around me the first time I went skiing. I was in love with the sport. Everything about it. We stayed with some family friends at a little wooden sky house. All very standard, but all new to me. The whole house seemed somehow oriented to dumping people out onto the slopes. More Than a Feeling boomed from the older kid’s stereo. It played on the loud speaker at the bottom of the slope. It was in the wood smell of the walls, and the smoky smell of the fireplace, and the steamy humidity of just inside the back door, where you pulled yourself out of your ski boots.

Everything was about joy. The adults all acted different. And I’d learned how to fly. I didn’t know you could fall, or that falling might hurt. So I didn’t fall. I shot out of the house and down the slopes as much as I could. I slipped away and went to the harder slopes. I remember the top of the big hill. I remember seeing nothing but joy. I took off down the slope, faster and faster. I felt this joy rising in me as I went faster and my legs felt like they couldn’t touch the ground, but I couldn’t fall. I got to the bottom of the hill feeling like I’d never felt before. And I saw my friend’s mom giving me a look of disapproval mixed with a little smirking good-for-you. I pulled off my goggles and warm tears rolled out and down face. I was ashamed. I picked up a handful of snow and wiped it all over my face to hide the tears from her. She asked what I was doing. I didn’t know. I didn’t know you could cry tears of joy. But I did know what ‘More Than a Feeling’ was. I’ve been chasing after that moment for the last three decades.

This is a screenwriting blog, so I’ll bring this around to what this means to writing. The reason that song stands out so clearly in my mind has a lot to do with how it was constructed. It’s the perfect example of the conceit (i.e. concept) of 70’s American rock. You can analyze it in almost any way you want, and there’s that spark of genius in the composition. But it’s a simple thing. Many, many groups tried to capture it. Boston tried to re-use it. But it was no longer original. It was no longer simple, honest, straightforward. It took Kurt Cobain to find it years later. Fifteen years after that, it made me remember the smell of my glove as I wiped tears from my face with snow thirty years ago. This is the power of a good conceit.

Screenwriting is a huge paradox: visual writing. Writing about visual writing is necessary, but it’s a slippery thing. Just for today, remember that our world is full of conceits and tools and good and bad dialogue and second-act complications. You know it when you see it. Don’t worry about how to label it. Worry about why it matters, and how you can bring it to the screen.

Simplicity = Conceit

I spent most of Friday returning gear to various places around San Francisco. I'm not sure what resonated about this Talk of the Nation broadcast about simplicity, but I'd imagine it had something to do with the painful irony lodged in my lower back after returning two 300 lb. generators and thousands of watts worth of lights I'd used to capture images of an elderly woman walking down a hallway and sitting on a couch.

John Maeda wrote a book laying out ten rules of simplicity. While I think true simplicity would probably imply less than ten rules, he was nevertheless spot on about what makes an object successful, workable, and a joy to use. I think it's also what makes a movie enjoyable, and what makes a production smooth. It's an invaluable perspective for a screenwriter. There are almost always simpler, cleaner, more effective ways to do things. Almost all the rules of screenwriting (and good writing generally) boil down to the beauty of economy sooner or later.

When the call-ins started, much of the conversation of simplicity turned to discussions of Apple, and I was reminded of my posting about conceit. Conceit is what makes a work instantly recognizable. It's what makes a work unique. A strong conceit makes a script high concept. And what makes a conceit strong?

Simplicity. As writers, we gravitate to the subtle. We underestimate the brilliance of a concept that states itself as clearly as, say, "a giant shark terrorizes a beach town." But it's the simplicity that allows a writer to make the impression.

Conceit in the Wild

I worked all day on the Fourth of July. Ah, freelancing! As the day drew to a close, I tried to get excited about fireworks. Not easy in San Francisco. While most of the country is enjoying a warm summer night, hot dogs, watermelon, and sky rockets in flight, July 4 here is all about dressing in layers and watching the fog light up pretty colors. And traffic. And crowds. And braving hills and frigid winds. So after pasta and a glass of wine, the couch and Robot Chicken was looking pretty good. I coulda drifted off to sleep were it not for some awfully large explosions awfully close to my living room window. I might not be going to the fireworks, but the fireworks were coming to me. I stepped outside.

I live in the Mission District. It's a hugely diverse neighborhood that crosses class and ethnic lines without thinking about it. And tonight the Mission was alive. Huge fireworks zoomed into the sky from backyards. Moms set off roman candles for their kids in the middle of intersections. Car alarms wailed. Smoky paper rained down from the sky. Police cruisers zoomed by lights flashing, unsure who to make an example of. The Fourth of July was everywhere. Unstoppable. It was the best fourth I've had in years.

I'd been thinking of blogging about 'conceit' -- which is a literary term for the strategy a writer takes, or, more broadly, the quality of a thing that makes it instantly recognizable. (It's got nothing to do with 'conceited'. It is related to 'concept'.) Conceit is an important concept for a screenwriter to understand, because it helps you frame your story, and to come up with fairly objective ways of improving it. Conceit also exists in the real world, of course. I thought I might talk about the reigning masters of conceit (in both meanings): Apple. Conceit is what makes an iMac seem special next to a similarly equipped PC. It's what drove the design of the iPhone and the iPod. They are instantly recognizable and unique. Their conceit is worked to completion -- you know when you're holding an Apple product.

But this July 4 made me think. What was so special this time? Why wasn't I concerned about the gang members launching M-80's? Why WERE those normally conservative mothers setting off illegal fireworks for 8-year-olds? Where the hell did the people up the street get those pro-level fireworks, and were they going to set my house on fire?

For me, this evening's conceit was much closer to what I think July 4 should be. Rebellion. Independence. Community -- a whole neighborhood out in the streets. The smell of the powder. A bit of danger. Really, really loud booms. That's what brought this country into being.

As M-80's exploded two doors down, I thought about war zones, and the fact that this is probably as close as I need to get. I thought about Iraq and the Fourth of July. How this country was born in fire and is probably doomed to look to war as a solution to its problems. The conceit of the night was all tied up in jubilation and fire. And I understood my country a little deeper. I understood the depth of my love for it more. It reminded me that true love -- of country, spouse, family -- is made up of many conflicting things.

Conceit is why this fourth was special. The conceit was complete -- from 1776 until today, right now, in front of my house. Conceit sets off a process in the viewer's mind. Conceit is powerful.

It's also elusive, and I'll talk about how to locate it in future posts.

Night at the Museum

I was visiting with family and friends this weekend. I saw Night at the Museum in a small living room filled with three generations, two languages, piles of food, misbehaving kids, and no beer.
We all watched the whole thing. The two year old watched it. Her grandmother, who speaks no English, watched it. I watched it after spending nearly four hours in a minivan on a crowded California highway with aforementioned kids. If you think about it, this is pretty amazing.
Night at the Museum is a remarkable movie.

Now, by remarkable, I do NOT mean 'good'. By remarkable, I do not mean 'original'. By remarkable I just mean 'effective'. It does exactly what it sets out to do. And it does this through the awesome, awful, awe-inspiring power of the three-act structure. Love it or hate it, it must be reckoned with.

The conceit of the film is simple: a night watchman finds that the museum comes to life each night. It is, plain and simple, a vehicle for a series of comic sketches based around the conceit. There's not a lot of dramatic import unless you find suspense in hoping that the lions will devour Ben Stiller soon. The three-act structure pretty much gives us a reason to sit there, to engage his otherwise not terribly real, believable, or even sympathetic character.

At first I was a little shocked at how long the first act ran. We're treated to this unbelievably textbook protagonist set up. Ben Stiller needs a job or he'll lose the respect of his son, who's gravitating to his mom's jerk of a boyfriend. There's a suitable love interest/history docent conveniently located behind the information desk, but she thinks he's a loser who won't amount to anything, and gee, if only there was a way he could bring history to life for her.

If you're a screenwriter, you're groaning. And for some reason, the first act just won't end. But as soon as the second act gets rolling, you realize why. The audience will be getting NOTHING but Ben Stiller playing fetch with T-Rex, spanking monkeys, and arbitrating fights between dioramas for the next 45 minutes. They WANT the story to be as simple as possible. The simpler it is, the more that question is out of the way. The story here is nothing more than the stakes that hold up the tent. When this is the case, all you have to do is drive them deep into the ground.

I hear lots of people, often very new screenwriters, say that "they could write something better than that". And it's true sometimes. Why does Hollywood hire these morons? Well, because they aren't morons. They realize when a simple, painfully obvious story is the goal. What separates the men from the boys is mostly a matter of how conscious you are of your story elements, and how you exploit them as tools. And in that sense, Night at the Museum is no less remarkable a film than Magnolia, or Midnight Cowboy, or even Shaun of the Dead.

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.