Screenwriting 101: Making the Scene with the Beats
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writes:
“I love reading your blog, Mr. Todd Alcott, and learning about storytelling for the sake of increasing my enjoyment of movies. But I get pretty lost when you start talking about beats. Beats are probably a very obvious concept for writers, like but could you please explain for media consumers like myself what beats are and how to identify them in a story.”
Beats are simply self-contained sections of a narrative, like steps rising up a flight of stairs. The narrative climbs up these beats until it reaches the landing, and that’s the act climax.
You don’t call them scenes because a beat can be made up of many scenes, and sometimes there can be more than one beat in a scene. They’re like sequences, but “sequence” generally refers to the finished filmic product, not to the script itself and usually refers to a larger narrative concept.
“Daniel Plainview mines for silver” would be a “beat” from the first act of There Will Be Blood. That “beat” is made up of several “scenes”: Plainview hacks at the walls of his mine, Plainview crouches by the fire, Plainview sets a dynamite charge, Plainview hoists his materials up from the mine as the dynamite goes off, Plainview falls in the hole, Plainview wakes up in pain, Plainview examines the rocks around him, finds silver. Those are all scenes, serving the beat “Daniel Plainview mines for silver.”
Now then: scenes are also made up of beats. The opening beat of Jaws, “Chrissie Watkins gets eaten by a shark,” is made up of several scenes, and those scenes are made up of beats. The very first scene, “Kids around the campfire,” has three beats: kids play guitars and smoke pot, one of the boys smiles at Chrissie, Chrissie gets up and runs away, and the boy follows. The following scene, “Chrissie leads the boy across the beach,” is made up of a few beats as Chrissie takes off her clothes and the boy gets increasing excited about the encounter to come, ending with Chrissie diving into the surf and the boy collapsing on the beach. The next scene, “Chrissie gets eaten,” is made up of separate beats of Chrissie being attacked while the boy lolls drunkenly on the beach.
Screenwriting 101: mixing genres
writes:
“I was fixin to write an animated western/film noir/horror film. Could you do a short blog about how to fuse genres? I am in a quagmire about what to keep and what to discard in my screenplay.”
I don’t know of any hard and fast rules about mixing genres, but I can point you toward two directors who do it well: Ridley Scott and Alfred Hitchcock. Scott loves to fuse genres: sci-fi and horror, sci-fi and noir, western and chick-flick. He takes elements from each genre and smushes them together so well that it feels completely natural and something new and exciting happens. Hitchcock, on the other hand, loves to upend his audience’s expectations by starting out a movie in one genre and then switching it half-way through. Psycho starts as a melodrama about a woman in trouble and out of nowhere becomes a horror thriller, The Birds starts as a screwball comedy and out of nowhere becomes a horror thriller. Often, great new paradigms emerge from fusing genres, like Barry Sonnenfeld’s Men in Black. And sometimes you get a clumsy misfire like Barry Sonnenfeld’s Wild Wild West.
It’s funny that you’re writing a western/noir/horror film, because I was once involved in the development of just such a project once — at least the western/horror part anyway. What I did was sit down and watch a ton of westerns and a ton of horror movies (well, monster movies really) and kept track of the beats that best exemplified their genres: the wide-open spaces of the westerns, the dark, claustrophobic interiors of the monster movies, the black-hat/white-hat morality of the westerns, the dark underbelly of the monster movies, etc, and tried to think of ways to combine them. How would monsters work in the harsh glare of the western’s sun? Could I turn the conventions of the western to my advantage? Hitchcock found terror in a cornfield for North by Northwest, could I find it on a dusty desert plateau? Is the monster’s desire rooted in the conflict between the white men and the Indians? And so forth.
I don’t know how you work noir into that — three genres is a lot to work with. Plus, you have to deal with the general lack of imagination you find in Hollywood executives. Fusing two genres makes them feel smart, fusing three is liable to make them say “I don’t get it.”
Spielberg: Night Gallery: “Eyes”
Steven Spielberg directed this segment of the pilot episode of Night Gallery. His direction is smooth and adequate to the task.
On the other hand, this is one of the most seriously bad scripts I’ve ever seen, and for that reason it merits further scrutiny. Gather ’round, students of screenwriting, and witness a virtual compendium of What Not To Do In A Screenplay.
Who is the protagonist of “Eyes”? That would be Miss Claudia Menlo. Serling doesn’t like Miss Menlo, and he wants to make sure we don’t like her too. So, before the segment even starts, he describes her to us, in moralistic terms — she’s clearly a horrible, horrible woman.
Once the story begins, we find that Serling still isn’t sure we’re clear on how high is his disregard for the abominable protagonist of his story. So this doctor walks into an apartment building and runs into a portraitist in the elevator, and the portraitist tells the doctor that he, too, finds Miss Menlo to be a horrible, horrible woman. Serling, unable or unwilling to dramatize Miss Menlo’s nature, instead has a character announce her horribleness.
The doctor meets up with the horrible, horrible Miss Menlo, who is revealed rather in the manner of a Bond villain, missing only a white cat in her lap. And here comes the number-one Must To Avoid Dialogue Exchange in the book of bad dialogue exchanges:
DOCTOR: Now then, what are we to talk about?
MENLO: What we’ve already talked about on the telephone.
DOCTOR: Well as I’ve already told you Miss Menlo…
This is bad screenwriting at its peak. Any time you have a character say “Well, as I’ve already told you” or “As you know” or “as we’ve discussed,” you’ve lost the game. It’s good to “come in late” to the story, but if you have to resort to exchanges like this to bring the audience up to speed, it’s time to give up.
Now then: what is the central dramatic situation of “Eyes”? Miss Menlo is a rich woman born blind, and she has discovered that it’s possible to gain eyesight for a few hours if she can find a donor for an eye transplant. That is a strong premise and a solid goal for a protagonist, no matter if she’s Glinda the Good Witch or Leona Helmsley. Why doesn’t the story begin on the day Menlo discovers such an operation exists? Why does the story begin with the doctor showing up and exchanging Menlo opinions with the portraitist? We could see her take the steps she needs to take to find a doctor sufficiently compromised to perform the operation for her, and that would be drama.
Serling has committed a cardinal screenwriting sin: he doesn’t like his protagonist. Worse, he has no interest in her. There are plenty of stories with unlikeable protagonists. There Will Be Blood leaps immediately to mind, Taxi Driver is another, The Godfather another, Doctor Faustus another. The protagonists of these narratives are called anti-heroes, and their stories are compelling in so far as we get wrapped up them in spite of the fact that we’re watching bad people do terrible things. We’re compelled because there is part of us that is evil too and revels in their badness. A good screenwriter cannot help but love his antihero — if he holds his protagonist at arm’s length, the character will be a strawman, unworthy of the audience’s attention. Serling feels the protagonist of “Eyes” is an evil bitch and his lack of generosity shows –not only has he made her a passive protagonist, he’s decided she’s unworthy of screentime. Instead, he squanders most of the screenplay on tedious exposition regarding the doctor’s conscience, the life and sadness of the man forced to give up his eyes, the signing of contracts and delivery of payments. He’s got a protagonist who’s facing the most exciting, most frightening moment of her life and he spends at least a third of the story sitting around in a lawyer’s office, carping once again about how horrible the protagonist is.
For a moment in the first act, it looks like maybe the doctor is going to be the protagonist of “Eyes.” Hey, maybe that would be cool, a story about a compromised man who is forced to perform an immoral operation against his will and the toll that takes on his soul. But no, the doctor disappears half-way through the story, after delivering one more vicious, self-pitying monologue about how evil the protagonist is.
There are a lot of monologues in “Eyes” — here comes one now, as the doctor patiently describes the eye-transplant deal to the protagonist. There is, apparently, no cinematic way to show what will happen to Miss Menlo, it can only be described in a painfully expository monologue. This monologue is then followed by a monologue about how the doctor would never, ever do such a horrible, immoral thing, which is then followed by a monologue from Miss Menlo that puts the doctor in a corner. So now we’re a third of the way through the story and there hasn’t been a moment of action — it’s all been people standing in a room, catching each other up on who they are and what they mean to each other.
Imagine this scene: you go over to your significant other’s house. You want sex. You ring the doorbell. The significant other answers. You go into the house. What happens next? If you are a human being, what happens next is not:
YOU: Well. Hello. What are we to do now?
SO: We are to do that thing we discussed doing on the telephone.
YOU: Do you think that’s the right thing to do?
SO: Well, as you know, we’ve been together as a couple for a long time now —
YOU: Yes, it’s been many months.
SO: And it is, I suppose, normal for people of our age and inclination to engage in some sort of physical closeness.
YOU: I have heard that, yes.
SO: Well, let me tell you who I am. I am your lover, that’s who I am. I love you. I’ve been your lover for some time now. I’ve spent a good deal of time with you and in that time I’ve formed certain emotional attachments, and that has led to us being in this room together.
And yet, that’s exactly what the first third of “Eyes” is. There’s a protagonist who desperately wants something, and is doing everything she can to get it, and the writer doesn’t think that’s a very dramatic premise.
What happens next? Next, we find Sidney Resnick, a Runyonesque New York loser, being tortured by a gangster in the park. How ruthless is this cold-hearted bastard gangster? Here’s how cold-hearted he is: he tortures Sidney by putting him on a merry-go-round. He doesn’t even chain him to the merry-go-round, he just puts him on it and makes it spin around. He even gets on the merry-go-round with him. This has got to be the lamest gangster in the history of filmed drama, yet we’re to believe that Sidney fears for his life from this lame-o. More to the point, this scene, and the scene that follows, is apparently of more interest to the writer than what’s happening to his protagonist.
Sidney meets the lawyer and the doctor, and guess what happens? Everybody tells each other what’s going on all over again. Dramatically speaking, we didn’t even need the first scene with Miss Menlo! We could have started the story here in the lawyer’s office! Serling’s got twenty minutes to tell a story and, incredibly, he pads it out! And then Sidney, yes, delivers a long, self-pitying monologue about his life and his misery. In fact, everyone in “Eyes” has a whining monologue about miserable their lives are — it’s almost as though the writer is trying to tell us something.
We then get a brief montage that is somehow meant to describe the operation. Yes, the central event of the narrative, the thing that the protagonist has been working toward all this time never gets shown.
Now comes Act III. The operation is complete, the doctor leaves Menlo in her apartment (after they’ve exchanged more monologues) and she unwraps the bandages. And, in a “cruel twist of fate,” at precisely that moment there’s a blackout.
Ha Ha! snorts the writer. I have triumphed over my evil protagonist! And we can see that Serling, master of leaden irony, has been building up to this moment the whole time. This was the “point” of the story — “Hey, you know what would be cool? A mean, blind rich woman pays off a loser to get his eyes, and then there’s a blackout!” You can tell that Serling felt so great about this “twist” that he didn’t bother to think of anything to follow it. “Yes! And she’s Plunged Into Darkness! That’ll show her!” Serling is so tickled by his clever twist that he hasn’t stopped to think about whether it makes a lick of sense.
Because Miss Menlo goes down to the street, where we see there’s plenty of light, from all the cars stopped. Why is she staggering around acting as though there’s no light? Why is she so upset? If there was a blackout in New York, she’d be able to see the stars, which is more than any New Yorker has ever seen. She could see the moon, she could see people in the streets with flashlights and candles, she could see the lines of cars with their headlights. The more I think about it, if you only had twelve hours to see, New York City at night during a blackout would be a totally awesome way to spend it.
But Serling hates his protagonist, so he has her stagger around as though in total darkness, and when it gets too close to stupid he simply cuts away from her to have, yes, another tedious bit of exposition from a couple of characters we’ve never met before about what a blackout is.
Where is the doctor? Where is Sidney? Where is the lawyer? Weren’t we supposed to care about those characters? If we were, why aren’t they part of the third act? If we weren’t, why the ever-living fuck did we spend half the running time with them?
Anyway, Miss Menlo gets back to her apartment and sits in the dark, the better to pity herself, then sees the sun as it comes up (in the west, I might add — her Fifth Avenue apartment looks out on Central Park). She has a moment of wonder (always a Spielberg specialty) and momentarily becomes an interesting protagonist. We feel that, in this moment, she’s learned something about the limits of her power and found some measure of humility. So, of course, Serling abruptly kills her.