A nice screenwriting blog with access to a lot of nice resources and free articles.
Enjoy twelvepoint.com.
Friday, December 26, 2008
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
Christmas Thought for the Day
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"
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"
Thursday, December 18, 2008
Apocalypse! And the Lambada!
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.
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.
Thursday, December 11, 2008
Thought for the Day
"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
– Australia's Richard Flanagan
Monday, December 8, 2008
Sunday, December 7, 2008
More on Symmetry
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.
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.
Thursday, December 4, 2008
Ask the Dust and Dating Tips
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.
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.
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