Writing the Frame

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.

Fresh Eyes and Sea Monkeys®

I've been off the blog for a week or so because I've been off email, phone, laptop and anything other tool of technology that might be useful for my career while I trekked about the Eastern Sierra Nevada. I made the plan for the trip. Got the boyfriend to take time off from work. Got clients in a happy place. And just as everything was set in stone, wham! Work piles in just the way it's going to right before a vacation. Suddenly it's the worst possible time for a vacation. Which is, of course, exactly when you NEED a vacation.

Most of us are wedded to our jobs. If we aren't wedded to our jobs, we're wedded to schedules, or routines, or some narrative about what must happen or not happen before life continues on. We like to build narratives around our week because that's what humans do. We're apes that tell stories. And mostly we tell them to ourselves. It got us through millions of years of evolution, but lately it seems to be a mixed blessing. We get trapped in our own narrative.

You know the feeling of the end of a vacation. You sheepishly open the laptop and the emails start to download. You turn on the phone and the voicemails appear. I had this moment driving back into the Bay Area watching driver after driver deeply focused on a phone conversation. I'd been away long enough for that to seem weird again. Thank god for that. And when I turned on the laptop and the phone I got the real message: neither the world nor my work life had collapsed despite the fact that I had enjoyed a lazy, timeless, and magnificent trek through one of the most beautiful places on earth with my favorite human being.

I've felt a creative block for the last month or so. I've been in production, which is hectic and time-consuming and all-around rough on a writer. I've been teaching a college class. And scriptwrangler.com's been busy. None of these things are good for a creative life. I couldn't get out of my own narrative.

Vacations are all about resetting the frame -- getting away from your Monday deadline mentality and back to what makes a writer write. I saw a 150 year old town that died away sixty years ago. I saw a 600-year-old volcano on the shore of a million year old lake. I saw three-billion year-old creatures that have had their entire existence replaced with a truly humiliating alternative narrative. I wandered lakes at 10,000 feet above sea level. I saw a sea at 6,500 feet above sea level, where life thrives like it might on a distant planet. I met people who looked like stories to me, and who saw me as a story. I saw how astonishing and bizarre and beautiful and overwhelming California truly is. And it's all real. And it's all beautiful. And I'm thanking god and her life-partner I'm alive in it.

What Happened to the Pig?

Rafael and I went to see The Simpsons Movie last week. Eh. I laughed a few times. There were some great lines and decent moments. But I don’t really remember it that well, and there were long stretches that more or less felt like filler. I asked Rafael what he thought about it. “What happened to the pig?”

Rafael’s got a weird thing about that pig. The pig is Homer’s best friend and ally-in-crime in a couple episodes. He displaces Bart in Homer’s affections for part of the movie. He’s a nice tool for a writer to have -- humorous in a non-human way. He’s a good, safe addition to a series episode, because he can throw the family out of equilibrium, then disappear at the end when it’s time to get back to the square one.

But Rafael really likes that pig. He has a little smile on his face whenever the pig does something cute, or bristles at Homer’s stupidity. Any episode with that pig is a good episode. While I hadn’t even really noticed that the writers had failed to resolve the pig issue, it more or less kicked Rafael out of the flow of the movie.

Now I’m not going to criticize the writers for recklessly dropping the pig issue willy-nilly. But I am going to suggest that dropping the pig issue is at the root of a lot more problems than you might expect.

That pig is a tool for the writer. It provides a very particular kind of laugh. It frames Homer’s rejection of his son in a relatively comfortable way for the audience. He’s familiar, and so he frames the drama for us. And like I said above, he’s great in a half-hour episode, because you can easily subtract him from the equation. But a feature doesn’t work like that. You can’t just subtract. Viewers read characters in terms of their development. Even if that character is a pig.

While I watched, I didn’t really notice or care that the pig issue was dropped. But I did unconsciously go through a period of adjustment -- from watching for the pig to not watching for it. While I did that -- even if I wasn’t thinking it consciously -- I was reframing the story.

That reframing period is a very unstable one for the viewer. They’ve lost an anchoring point, and they’re looking for another. While they’re re-anchoring, they aren’t quite sure where to get the entertainment from. They’re looking for the pattern, and so everything that doesn’t fit stands out. What doesn’t fit? Plot discrepancies. Jokes that fall flat. Characterizations that fail. Soon your problems are magnified -- and the lack of pig is the least of your problems.

One of the main complaints about The Simpsons Movie is that it pretty much feels like three episodes pieced together. While almost no one is going to blame the problem on the lack of pig, I think the way they handled it drew our attention to the structural problems of the script.

The writers took great pains to frame the material for the audience. The opening is a clever frame for transitioning expectations to a feature. But they fell down on one really minor point here, and it may have cost them millions of dollars. One small chink in the armor can open up a whole host of questions that the writers do not want in the viewer’s head. Any writer knows just how difficult it is to anticipate readers’ questions. Many bristle at the idea that giving the audience that kind of power. “Who cares about the damn pig? Can’t you see I’m telling a drama about a family struggling for happiness in an unfair world teetering on the brink of ecological collapse?!” Yeah. We see it. Now fix the pig.