What Does The Protagonist Want hits the big time
This humble journal is mentioned, although not by name, in today’s EW.COM Popwatch Blog. I take particular pride in this because Entertainment Weekly is my magazine of choice whenever I’m flying on an airplane. Which I mean as a compliment.
The only other thing I have to add is:
Don’t make me angry, Entertainment Weekly. You won’t like me when I’m angry.
Screenwriting 101 — Some Thoughts on Dialogue
Yesterday’s discussion of Le Trou led to some worthwhile questions about the nature and purpose of dialogue in movies. So as long as folks have questions about dialogue, I thought I would offer some thoughts of mine and we could have a, um, I don’t know, some kind of thing where we talk back and forth about it.
Here’s what I know:
(This goes for scene description as well. I once wrote a play that took place in “an empty room.” I showed up on the first day of rehearsal to find a set that looked like the set for The Mary Tyler Moore Show. The set designer took “an empty room” to mean a room with tables and chairs and a sofa and a nice rug on the floor and nice pictures on the wall and a cunning ceiling lamp. So in addition to writing the action of the play into the dialogue, I took to writing the set description into the dialogue as well. “I can’t believe how empty this room is! There isn’t a stick of furniture in it!” and so forth.)
In a play, you can have scenes that go on for hours, characters talking about ideas, on and on, and as long as the dialogue is interesting you can sustain an audience’s interest. Try that in a movie and the studio reader won’t get past page five.
2. Conversely to plays, I discovered, to my dismay, that dialogue is the least important aspect of a screenplay. I say “to my dismay” because, as a playwright, I found I had a felicitous talent for dialogue, a talent developed to the point where I could have plays skate by for 90 minutes or more without a decent story, and this talent would simply not sustain me in writing screenplays. No, to write screenplays I had to learn structure, and structure, I found, was a completely different animal to dialogue or scenework.
(This is, incidentally, why writers who do a dialogue polish on a screenplay often do not get credit — because the WGA knows that dialogue is the least important reason why a screenplay works or not.)
A reader yesterday brought up a scene from The Wire, where instead of having the characters blather on about a bunch of stuff the audience doesn’t care about, the writer simply had them say the word “fuck” and its variants for the entire scene. That sounds like a good idea for a scene to me, and I’m here to tell you that the scene probably would have worked just as well if the characters had been barking like dogs instead of saying the word “fuck.” You can watch foreign movies without subtitles and generally figure out what’s going on. That is one reason why Hollywood movies are so wildly successful overseas — who needs to understand what the people are saying in Star Wars?
Think about the Shakespeare productions you’ve seen. All right, now think about the good Shakespeare productions you’ve seen. If you’re like me, you spend the first ten minutes of the play thinking “Oh shit, I have no idea what they’re saying! I’m a moron! How am I going to make it through this play?” and then, after the shock wears off, you find that you can understand what they’re saying, even though the poetry is dense and the play is about things that happened a long time ago to people wearing doublets. The reason this happens is, if you are seeing a decently-directed production with relatively intelligent actors, the character’s intent will become clear even if you can’t really understand what the actors are saying. One character wants something from another character, the other character is giving in or not giving in, complications come along, the broad outlines of the story become clear, and (as Shakespeare is an excellent dramatist) we stay and watch because we want to know how it will turn out. And I promise you that the effect was very much the same in Shakespeare’s time.
In a screenplay, the thing you’re striving to do is write a silent movie, a story told only in moving pictures. Now then, we live in a very verbal time, people yakking all over the place ceaselessly, so in general, if you write a scene where a bunch of people are doing something and they don’t say anything to each other, it’s probably going to feel untrue. So you do have to put some dialogue in or else your screenplay will look pretentious and “arty” (believe me, you do not want a studio executive to say your screenplay is “arty”).
(Not to harp on it, but There Will Be Blood and No Country For Old Men are excellent examples of screenwriting — it’s almost a shock when a character goes ahead and speaks. And even then they don’t say much that’s important. The characters in No Country threaten and intimidate, say “yep” or “nope,” and that’s about it. Daniel Plainview in Blood speaks rarely and almost everything he does say is a lie designed to extract money from someone.)
This is one reason why the treatment is crucial. When you write your story out in prose form, revealing only the actions of the characters (“Luke lives on the desert planet of Tatooine. He hates it there. His uncle makes him work in the moisture fields,” etc) you begin to learn how unimportant dialogue is. If you get to a point in the treatment where the plot-point must and can only be made in dialogue (eg “No, I am your father,” for instance) then you know that that’s an important line that absolutely must be in the screenplay. There should be no more than five or six instances like this in your treatment — if your characters are talking so much that their speeches become the action of the narrative, your screenplay is going to be too talky.
(Incidentally, let’s take a look at that line, and the economy of that scene. VADER: Obi-wan never told you what happened to your father. LUKE: He told me enough. He told me you killed him! VADER: No, I am your father. The dialogue is plain, simple, straightforward, unadorned and even blunt. Our hero George Lucas is not always on the ball dialogue-wise, but this is very good movie dialogue.)
(Shakespeare, of course, also knew when to be flowery and when to cut to the chase. It doesn’t get any simpler than “To be or not to be.”)
If you do happen to have a gift for dialogue, it will serve you well, presuming you can use your gift to make characters say things that are brief, to the point, unadorned and revealing of character, in as few words as possible.
3. To every extent possible, characters should not tell each other how they feel. Any time a character tells another character how he or she feels, the audience is going to wonder “what the heck is he or she getting at?” Any time a character says “Here’s the truth of a matter:” what should follow the colon is anything other than the truth of the matter. Think of it: any time someone comes to you in your daily goings-about and says “Let me tell you something about myself” or “I have some feelings I want to share with you” or “The fact of the matter is…” you want to turn around and run in the opposite direction. Because the only reason someone would come up to you and offer you some kind of truth is because they want something from you.
And I’m sure I’ll think of more but this is enough for now.
Screenwriting 101: Le Trou, and The True
I’m very angry that I’ve gone this long and nobody ever bothered to tell me about Le Trou, Jacques Becker’s exemplary 1960 prison-break movie. What am I paying you people for?
Yay SAG!
No Country cast takes top acting prize. Congratulations are in order to Mr. Gene Jones.
Meanwhile, Ruby Dee kicks ass all over Cate Blanchett for thinking she can get away with stealing her hairdo.
Metablog
As my “Screenwriting 101” posts seem to be developing a loyal following of their own, I have gone and given them their own tag for easier reference.
Try it now!
True Hollywood Story: Famous Older Director
Not Famous Older Director.
I’m working on a picture. We have a script everyone likes, a Movie Star who will justify our budget, an excellent supporting cast, and we have just found a Famous Older Director, a real icon of 70s-era moviemaking, to direct the movie. Everyone is very excited about this: a miracle of miracles is about to occur, we are actually About To Make A Movie.
FOD has some ideas about the script. Some of them are good ideas about the script. The meeting is going well. I’m sitting there thinking “Omigod, I’m actually going to have my name on a movie directed by FOD, I’m going to go down in movie history.”
FOD has an idea for the ending. Everyone wants to hear it.
Here is FOD’s idea for the ending — “What if we show two of the main characters, in a romantic climax, kissing — “
— yes, we’re with you so far —
” — in the mists rising from Niagara Falls?”
A beautiful image. Indelible. One problem: the movie is not set at Niagara Falls. The third act of the movie isn’t set at Niagara Falls. The climax of the movie isn’t set at Niagara Falls. In fact, none of the movie is set at Niagara Falls. In fact, there isn’t even a single reference to Niagara Falls anywhere in the script.
I’m puzzling about this as Producer and Movie Star exclaim to FOD about what a beautiful image it is. Then all three of them turn to me and say “So, Todd, what do you think?”
And I say “Um, I think it’s a beautiful image but, um, I’m just wondering, why Niagara Falls?”
And FOD expounds upon the iconic glory of Niagara Falls, and how gorgeous it will be to see the two characters kissing in the mists as the mists rise from the falls. And he still hasn’t told me why Niagara Falls, except he thought of it.
And so I say “Yes, I see, I totally get it, but, um, why Niagara Falls?”
And now FOD starts to get a little impatient, and starts putting down my script, which everybody loved when we first got into the room fifteen minutes earlier, but which is now apparently a steaming pile of crap in bad need of an overhaul. Which, as far as I know, it is, but in which case, I’m wondering how it attracted Movie Star and FOD in the first place.
And I assure FOD that I have nothing against Niagara Falls, or his shot, but there’s no reason why these characters would suddenly be kissing in the mists of Niagara Falls at the climax of our movie.
So FOD, on the spot, makes up a reason why they might be there, which involves rearranging a few of our third-act scenes in order to justify the change of location.
And I say “Okay, but then why do these scenes in the third act take place in Niagara Falls?”
And FOD makes up a bunch of charming nonsense about why these third-act scenes take place in Niagara Falls, which involve changing the nature of the second-act climax.
And I ask why the second-act climax needs to change, since it was working perfectly well before, and if we change it then we will need to change the action of the second act, since everything builds to that second-act climax.
And FOD says no problem, we can just change who the protagonist is and what his goals are, and what his conflicts are, and who the antagonists are, and that will give us a different first act, which will of necessity create a new second act, which will then allow us to set our third act in Niagara Falls, which will give us this wonderful shot of the two characters kissing in the mists of Niagara Falls. QED.
And Producer and Movie Star are sitting there going “Yeah, that sounds great, let’s do that, sure, wow, this is going to be some movie,” and they all turn to me and say “So, what do you think?”
And I furrow my brow and purse my lips, because I’m just Shlub Screenwriter, I’m not Producer or Movie Star or Famous Older Director, I can’t just say “but this is the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard!”
So instead, I take a moment, and a deep breath, and say: “Well, everything I understand about film theory tells me that The Shot serves The Scene, and The Scene serves The Plot, and The Plot serves The Story, and The Story is the whole point of the movie being made, and now you’re asking me to change the entire story of our movie because the director has an idea for a shot.”
And everyone glares at me like I’ve just pulled down my pants and shat on the floor.
And Producer sternly reminds me that Famous Older Director is Famous Older Director, and How Dare I Speak That Way, and Who Do I Think I Am, and Apologize To All Of Us. And now I’m beginning to think that maybe I’m not going to go down in movie history after all, and I say “I mean, that’s fine, I don’t mind, I’m not afraid of work, and if we can make this work, then for Heaven’s sake, let’s do that.”
And that seems like a much better attitude for me to have, and everyone is pleased, and arrangements are made for me and FOD to travel to Niagara Falls together to scout locations for what has now become a major overhaul of our script.
And I do travel to Niagara Falls with FOD, and we do scout locations, and every location we see gives FOD another idea about a new direction for the plot of our movie, and by the end of the day the movie bears absolutely no resemblance to the screenplay we already have, the one everyone loves, the one that a week ago was all ready to shoot. And I’m looking at at least a month of rewrites on a movie that’s supposed to start shooting in a couple of weeks, and new characters and plot complications are being added by the minute and I don’t even know what the hell I’m writing any more.
And Producer calls me in my hotel room in Toronto after my day of scouting locations with FOD and he asks me how it’s going. And I do my best to relate to Producer this new movie that FOD is laying out in our travels, and he says “No, no, this is ridiculous, why are you letting him get away with this?!” (To begin with, FOD’s plot changes are about to double the budget of the movie, which will kill the project right there.) And I remind Producer that I tried to point out the absurdity of FOD’s changes at the earlier meeting, a fact that Producer has now forgotten. “You have to tell him, Todd,” he says, “You have to tell him that this won’t work. I mean, my God, he’s changing the entire story just for the sake of one shot!” And I remind Producer that I am only Shlub Screenwriter, it’s not my place to tell FOD that his ideas aren’t going to work. That would, I think, be Producer’s job.
In any case, FOD and I fly back to New York and, the next thing I know, I’m going to a meeting at Producer’s office, and it’s me and Producer and Movie Star again, and FOD and I talk about our trip to Niagara Falls and what we learned there and how our movie will be affected by the changes, and I say that if this is what everyone wants, I’m happy to dive right in and change the entire script. And Movie Star has brought a book that FOD wrote, so he can get FOD’s autograph, and FOD is charming and eloquent and everyone tells FOD he’s a genius and FOD has to leave to go meet his publisher or something and the second FOD leaves the room Producer and Movie Star tell me that FOD’s ideas are ridiculous and unworkable and they’re firing FOD and replacing him with someone else.
Yay DGA!
My heartiest congratulations to the Coen Bros for winning the DGA award for their work on No Country For Old Men, a decisively victory over the frail, diminutive Italian Martin Scorsese, who won last year for The Departed.
In accordance with DGA tradition, after the award is announced the previous year’s winner is always given a chance to defend his title in a kind of improvised cage match. (In 1947 John Ford easily fended off an attack from that year’s winner Vincent Minnelli.)
Reports indicate that Scorsese did not give up his title easily. Although an asthmatic child, Scorsese has known a lot of “tough guys” in his time, and was heard remarking that “The DGA must be nuts if they think I’m gonna hand this thing over to a couple of skinny Jews from Minnesota.” He reportedly tried to enlist the aid of Robert DeNiro (who famously trained as a boxer for his role in Raging Bull), but DeNiro is a strict observer of DGA rules — there can only be one great director of motion pictures in any given year. As Joel and Ethan Coen are now officially two great directors, they were both allowed to take on the 90-year-old, 4’10” Italian-American. (Joel was heard snarling to his brother “Now I know why they call it Little Italy” as they entered the ring with Scorsese.) Scorsese pulled out an impressive home-made shiv at one point, which made Ethan Coen laugh. “Leave it to an Italian to bring a knife to a cattle-gun fight,” he sneered, as sibling Joel turned the handle on the oxygen tank they had cleverly concealed in a hollow leg.
PT Anderson, who had brought a bowling pin with him to the ceremony, “just in case,” declined comment.
There Will Be Syrup
Daniel Plainview and his madeleine.
Several loyal readers have written in to ask me to analyze the plot of Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest masterwork There Will Be Blood. This is a daunting task for your journeyman screenwriter, but, as Blood is obviously an important new movie and will inevitably be seen as a lodestar of the cinematic movement that will, no doubt, spring from it, I figured I would give it ago.
As this movie is still very much in theaters, I strongly caution the unlearned reader against advancing below the cut — vital spoilers are involved in every sentence.
Movie Night With Urbaniak: Inland Empire
The only things I knew about David Lynch’s Inland Empire, before sitting down to watch it with
![[info]](http://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
, was that it is a David Lynch movie, it was shot on video, it is three hours long, it has been called quite boring, and it did not enjoy a traditional studio release (in fact, it had not played anywhere near me during its patchy run last year). All of those things pointed toward a movie that could be easily dismissed as the work of an artist with not enough control imposed upon him, who has run amok with his creative energy and gotten lost in his own little aesthetic curlicues.
So it pleases me greatly to say that not only is Inland Empire a very good movie, it is also something of a breakthrough for Lynch, who succeeds in making an essentially plotless three-hour psychodrama riveting cinema.
Something about Inland Empire kept reminding me of Pinter, the oddball scenes full of oblique dialogue about mundane topics, suddenly turning fierce and weird when you least expect it. And the more I thought about it the more apt the comparison became. Pinter was looking to move theater beyond “a show” that has some kind of “meaning,” where the audience could all pat themselves on the back afterward for “getting” whatever “message” the show was trying to impart. He wanted his plays to be a kind of provocation, a deeply unsettling event that didn’t have a “meaning” beyond the absurd, terrifying actions presented on stage.
I think Lynch has accomplished something similar with Inland Empire. More so than any of his earlier movies, which eventually “make sense” after enough viewings, he seems to have finally thrown off the shackles of “meaning” and “plot” to present something like experience itself, outside of “meaning,” and have it not only work on its own aesthetic level but over a period of three hours.
While the movie was running, I kept a running tally of ideas that seemed important at the time, in the hopes of, by the end, “figuring out” what the movie was “about” and thus appearing to be a smarty-pants.
(My list reads, in part: Record, Poles, Polish whore, Rabbits TV show, Blurry video, New neighbor, Wealth, Actress, Mulholland Drive-like moviemaking, Story of little boy, If it were tomorrow, Cursed remake, Purgatory of ex-girlfriends, etc.)
But the longer the list got, the less I feltI understood, and yet I was never less than entertained and always intrigued and sometimes horrified. And I finally thought, well, maybe that’s the point, that ultimately there is no “meaning,” no final “point” to the thing, ie “Laura Dern plays Nikki Grace, an actress who gets a part in a big movie and it messes up her mind so much that she doesn’t know who she is anymore.” I mean, that statement certainly covers most of the “action” of the movie, but it doesn’t really explain anything. Nikki (if the movie is, indeed, about Nikki) goes from being an actress to being the character she’s playing in the movie she’s making, to being a lower-class woman married to a Polish man, to being a prostitute who (I think) turns out to also be the character in the movie she’s making, but the way that all this information unfolds is so poetic, mysterious and alarming that it defies not only summation but rational explanation. Why do people keep talking about how they’re “good with animals?” Why is the movie’s producer so broke that he needs to ask crew members for handouts? Who are the people dressed as rabbits and how did they get their own TV show? Who is the Polish whore crying on the bed?
Inland Empire, it seems to me, if it is “about” anything, is about identity, and how extreme emotional circumstances allow/force us to alter our identity. So the actress getting into her role may find herself becoming the character, and the character may echo back to an earlier version of that character, and that earlier version of the character may find herself in the shoes of the “real person” the character is based on, and a distressed woman watching the finished movie on TV may find herself identifying so strongly with the character the actress is playing in the movie that she may imagine herself the actress playing the role. And even this paragraph only “explains” about fifteen percent of what we actually see unfold in Inland Empire.
To put it another way, you could say that Inland Empire is a David Lynch movie for people who thought Mulholland Drive was a little too pat. It’s not that it’s impossible, necessarily, to explain what it’s about, but Lynch shifts perspectives so often and peels back so many layers of perception and possible meanings that I think, in the end, it’s folly to try to nail the damned thing down. When the movie started, I was bracing myself for a three-hour bore, and by the end of it I thought I could probably see this movie a dozen times and not get to the bottom of it.
Nikki, and Laura Dern’s performance of the character, also reminded me of Vonnegut’s Billy Pilgrim, who was “unstuck in time” and who spent his whole life in a state of anxiety, not knowing from moment to moment what part of his life he was going to be expected to perform. Dern moves through the movie with a similar level of apprehension, not knowing if, the next time she goes through a door, if she’s going to be herself, the character she’s playing, one of the other characters, or a Polish prostitute, or what, until by the end of the movie she really isn’t sure who she is any more.
Now then: it’s not all peaches-n-cream. Whatever freedom Lynch seems to have found with his video camera has not resulted in a thing beautiful to behold. Which is a shame, because if nothing else, a David Lynch movie is always absolutely gorgeous. But the picture in Inland Empire is blurry and smeary, and Lynch’s shooting style has changed to the point of being almost unrecognizable. Where his scenework is usually graceful and enigmatic, here it is sometimes remarkably clumsy, even amateurish, as though he didn’t have the coverage he needed and had to steal shots from other scenes to compensate. Extreme, distorted close-ups of actors’ faces dominate, and some sections of the movie are so dark as to be essentially invisible. Those technical aspects aside, Inland Empire is a unique, powerful experience.
W.H. Macy appears, for one shot, as a TV announcer for a Hollywood talk show. I’m still puzzling over that one.
Urbaniak and I improvised the following:
LYNCH (loud, flat Midwestern twang). Bill! It’s David!
MACY (ibid). David! How the heck you doin’?
LYNCH. Great! Great! Hey listen, you know I’m doing this crazy Inland Empire thing —
MACY. Yeah, yeah Laura was telling me all about it! Sounds like a gas!
LYNCH. Well listen, I think I’ve got a part for ya!
MACY. You’re kidding! Me?
LYNCH. Yeah, whaddaya doin’ tomorrow?
MACY. Well actually, I’m traveling tomorrow for a shoot in Vanc —
LYNCH. I’m sorry Bill, I’ve got a bunch of static on this end! Can you come by Paramount around ten?
MACY. I — well —
LYNCH. It’s a great part, it’s the star part, it’s practically a second lead to Laura!
MACY. Really? Because I heard Justin —
LYNCH. Can’t hear ya, Bill! No, it’s a key role! You’re gonna steal the picture! You remember Dean in Blue Velvet? It’s like that!
MACY. Sure, he’s great in —
LYNCH. My girl here is telling me eight! Can you be at Paramount at eight instead of ten? We should be able to get you out of there by two!
MACY. Uh, sure David, sure! What — I’m sorry, do you have a script or something?
LYNCH. I’m sorry David, I’m heading into a tunnel! It’s gonna be great! Oh hey!
MACY. Uh huh?
LYNCH. You have a bow tie? Because the character wears a bow tie, and we don’t have the budget for it! Thanks a lot babe, love ya!