Spielberg: Raiders of the Lost Ark part 1
(For some earlier thoughts on this movie, including my son Sam’s reaction, I direct you to here.)
For the young screenwriter being taught classical three-act structure, the screenplay for Raiders of the Lost Ark would seem like a bizarre, off-kilter mess. There are at least four acts in here, but the more I look at it the more I become convinced that there are at least ten, each lasting somewhere between ten and twelve minutes. This would be in keeping with the movie’s roots in 30s serials — each one of these segments would make a perfect one-reel short, and a few of them would stand as classics of the short form even if they weren’t part of one of the most propulsive, engaging features in its genre. These individual units, or “chapters”, can be grouped together into four acts. What I’d like to do here is walk through each part and chart the path of the protagonist throughout.
CHAPTER 1 (0:00-12:49): The bit in Peru. It would be difficult for me to overestimate the power of this sequence. The infamous “rolling boulder” looms so large in the memories of the audience of this movie and even in the minds of those who have never seen it that it’s hard to remember that the whole gag goes by in a few seconds. It’s become an icon unto itself, as recognizable a symbol as Bogart’s fedora and the prow of the Titanic. The other day I happened to be in a stereo store with my 5-year-old daughter Kit and Raiders happened to be playing on one of the systems. This opening sequence was showing, and Kit, who knows nothing of Indiana Jones, said “Is this the part with the rolling stone?” Indeed it was, and I got to watch her five-year-old face go slack with wonder and excitement as the latter half of this sequence unfolded before her hungry eyes. I don’t know why the rolling rock works, I’ve seen the sequence too many times to analyze it in any rational way, but it’s one of the handful of indelible moments that form the spine of this movie (two others being the shootout in the Cairo market and the melting Nazi faces at the end).
Part of the reason this sequence works like gangbusters is its kinetic brilliance, but none of that would mean anything if the stunts and gags were not rooted in character. As the sequence starts, Indiana Jones is shown in shadow, a mysterious, difficult-to-read figure (“is he a bad guy?” worried Sam, 6, when Indy whips the gun out of the hand of the Peruvian guy). He is calm, authoritative and magnificently prepared. His li’l Peruvian pal Doc Ock is the perfect stand-in for the audience in the early scenes — he is as frightened, amazed and in awe of Indy and his capabilities as we are. Then, once the idol is in Indy’s hand and the temple starts to come apart, all that calmness and skill goes right out the window and Indy becomes panic-stricken and improvisatory, relying on speed and forward momentum to keep himself alive. (This is, of course, an apt metaphor for the entire movie.) Then Indy emerges from the temple cave barely alive, only to have his prize taken from him by Belloq, who has been following Indy’s party for days in hope of exactly this outcome. Belloq takes the idol and Indy runs away, pursued by the savage hordes. We spend the first half of the sequence in awe of Indy, then when the sequence turns we are placed into his shoes, running for our lives as the character who was “us” (Doc Ock) betrays Indy and makes a quick, violent exit. By the end of the sequence we’re laughing at Indy as he’s reduced to a hapless clown, attacked from all sides, scared of his pilot’s pet snake. The sequence is a perfect introduction to the character, compresses his essential nature into twelve minutes, gives us the movie’s villain, outlines the essential nature of the protagonist’s conflict, and creates a miniature adventure drama that leaves us incapable of any response other than instant love.
(There’s a great stunt toward the end of the sequence, where the traitorous Peruvian porter falls down dead, face first, flat and motionless, with two dozen poison arrows in his back. After seeing this scene a hundred times or so, I finally decided to find out who was responsible for this flawless bit of physical comedy. It is, in fact, Ted Grossman, the Estuary Victim from Jaws.)
CHAPTER 2 (12:49-22:18): Indy at his “day job,” teaching amorous young women (and one apple-polishing young man) about archeology. Obviously, no one in the room is there to learn about ancient civilizations, they’re all there to gaze upon sexy young Indy (I wonder if young women still look at him like that in the new movie). We learn about his attitude toward the artifacts he searches for: he is interested in them only for their historical value, whereas antagonist Belloq is interested in them for the power they will convey unto him (which we see instantly in the Peru scene). (The fact that Indy routinely destroys ancient temples in pursuit of religious artifacts doesn’t weigh very heavily on the movie’s mind — the object, not the location seem to be the important thing.)
We also see Indy’s skeptical nature — he doesn’t buy into any religious significance of any of the items he pursues. Religion is folklore to Indiana Jones. He is a modern man, and the fact that he keeps stating this stance in movie after movie regardless of the magical wonders he witnesses, makes him more modern than ever.
Chapter 2 introduces Indy as a down-and-out loser archaeologist in a dead-end job and brings into his life a pair of US government agents who have the unhappy task of drawing poor Indy and his pal Dr. Brody through a sadly tedious expository scene. I probably had to watch this movie fifteen times or so before I even had any idea what the hell anyone was talking about in this scene — the headpiece of the Staff of Ra, the lost city of Tanis, the Well of Souls, the Ark of the Covenant, it all comes spilling out of characters’ mouths with no dramatization and precious little visual stimulus.
The dramatic point of the chapter is that Indy is getting a second chance at glory after having his Peruvian idol snatched from him. He gratefully leaps at the chance, even as Dr. Brody warns him in plummy tones that the Ark is a dangerous, dangerous artifact, “like nothing you’ve gone after before.” Indy starts the chapter as a desperate loser and ends it as a cocksure winner, back on top and reckless as he tilts his head back on the plane to Nepal and covers his face with his famous hat while a sneaky Nazi peers at him over his copy of Life magazine. This Nazi will become a worth Second Villain to the piece, although at this point we think he is First Villain.
CHAPTER 3 (22:18-33:44): Indy flies to Nepal to see Abner Ravenwood, his mentor, but instead finds Abner’s daughter Marion, tending bar and drinking the locals under the table. We had gotten a little Marion backstory in Chapter 2 and we get more here: apparently, “ten years ago” Indy loved the teenage Marion and left her, which destroyed his relationship with Abner and now puts him in a dicey position with regards to his pursuit of his goal. He needs Marion to hand over the Headpiece of the Staff of Ra (the significance of which is explained in Chapter 2, if one can follow the dense exposition). This requires a little sweet talk from Indy, a task he is not prepared for and executes clumsily. Having failed, he exits the bar on uncertain terms. The Nazi From The Airplane, Toht, enters with a team of henchmen and tries a different approach to acquiring the headpiece, Nazi-style torture.
(Spielberg loves to have two different teams pursuing the same goal for different reasons and with contrasting methods. He uses it in Close Encounters and The Lost World, to name two of the most obvious.)
Indy re-emerges in the role of Clumsy Rescuer, bumbling his way through a complicated fight and shoot-out until Marion can step up and prove her worth as partner to the protagonist. His charm fails but his improvisatory rescue does the job, and Indy and Marion get out of Nepal alive and a step ahead of Toht.
So Indy begins this chapter as a cocksure winner, enters Marion’s bar cautiously as a repentant lout, and ends as a clumsy, scorched-earth rescuer, repeating the dynamic of Chapter 1, and once again destroying the building containing his prize. There are, of course, two prizes here, the Headpiece of the Staff of Ra and Marion, and the remainder of the narrative will dramatize Indy’s struggle to balance the comparative worth of the love of the woman he betrayed and the object he pursues.
Spielberg: Close Encounters of the Third Kind part three
Roy Neary has heard the call and correctly interpreted the message. Now all he needs to do is get to the meeting place and keep his appointment.
Roy Neary has broken through a number of psychological and administrative barriers to get where he’s gotten, but in Act III of Close Encounters he breaks through a number of literal barriers as well, crashing his car through fences and roadblocks to keep his appointment. This is good screenwriting, to find ways of making the mental physical, and is of course another of Spielberg’s fortes.
As the Light in the first two acts of the movie stood as a stand-in for the extra-terrestrial, here Spielberg uses Devil’s Tower as a stand-in its own self. Devil’s Tower may be interesting to look at, but let’s face it, it’s just an unusual rock formation, it’s not the throne of God (or the Devil’s Tower, for that matter). But Spielberg shoots it with such awe and majesty and mystery, he imbues it with a primal, almost mystical power unto itself, so that every time we see it in a shot we’re sure that something profound is going to happen there. Very much the same way he gave Water itself the power to make us jump out of our seats in Jaws.
Royfinds Gillian in the crowd and they, literally, head for the hills on a monomaniacal tear toward their appointment with God. Something tells me that there was once, in an earlier draft of the script or even in longer cuts of the movie, something of a romantic nature to their adventure. Roy finding a soulmate in Gillian would explain Ronnie’s jealousy of his obsession, and they give each other more than a friendly pat on the back after they’ve achieved their common goal. If there were romantic sparks between them once, they’re gone now, and it’s probably just as well. It’s one thing for Roy to abandon his family in order to meet God, it’s something else again for him to shack up with the local lonely single mother while on the road to Damascus.
Even though Spielberg has already told us that the nerve-gas in Wyoming is a hoax, he still makes it look like maybe it isn’t, and we still buy that maybe it isn’t. The US government, it seems, is willing to stage a positively enormous hoax in order to keep proof of the existence of God a government secret. (Although given the size of the military operation on display, not to mention the hundreds of scientists involved, I find it hard to believe that the government could keep quiet every single participant in the eventual proceedings. They just can’t all be getting paid enough.)
Roy and Gillian are caught and captured by some Governmental thugs and detained, leading to the Act III centerpiece of Roy talking to Lacombe and Laughlin. The movie’s two primary plot strands come together for the first time and the electricity in the scene is palpable as the two approaches to God, the artistic and the scientific, come head to head. Roy is as inarticulate as ever, sputtering with anxiety, cynicism and rage as he’s interrogated by the calm, unflappable Lacombe and Laughlin. And yet Roy, despite his confusion, already “knows” more about the message and its meaning than Lacombe and his army of scientists (not to mention his army of army guys). And of course, Lacombe senses this, which puts him in conflict with Major Walsh, the head of the military part of the operation. And in some ways they’re both right — the aliens in Close Encounters are happy to appear to all kinds of people, but Roy and only Roy is selected to join them in their spaceship.
I sometimes wonder what Lacombe’s Monday Morning plan is, and Walsh’s too. They have unapologetically assumed that the existence of God (or aliens, if you will) should be protected as a state secret — an international state secret at that. Why? Lacombe doesn’t seem like a bad guy, why isn’t he inviting everyone in the world to come to Devil’s Tower and meet God? Maj. Walsh I understand is an army guy and so is naturally secretive, paranoid and elitist, but why Lacombe? Aliens are coming, they’ve clearly stated that they want to meet everyone, and Lacombe knows that — why does he keep it a secret? Is there some part of him that is also an elitist, that feels that a thing this profoundly significant can only be known to a select few? Or is he worried that maybe the aliens aren’t friendly?
The audience of Close Encounters, of course, totally buys that the US government will be secretive and elitist because that’s just how the US government is. But Lacombe is shown heading up a UN force of scientists — why is he playing by the rules of the US government? The short answer, of course, is that it makes for better drama — Lacombe, nice guy though he may be, must have a point of view in direct opposition to that of the protagonist — if the protagonist has a vision that God is available to everyone, his antagonist must be of the point of view that God should only be available to the select few — in spite of God’s emphatic demonstration to the contrary.
The audience, of course, is also not sure the aliens arefriendly, because they abducted Barry Guiler and, let’s face it, they haven’t been exactly forthcoming about their intentions. Spielberg uses our natural fear of The Other, and our built-in understanding of science-fiction movies, to help keep us in suspense as to the aliens’ intent. He balances Wonder and Terror right up to the closing moments of the movie, keeping us on the edge of our seats, ready for things to turn ugly at any moment.
Now then: here’s an interesting flaw in the screenplay of Close Encounters: Roy and Gillian have an overwhelming desire to get to Devil’s Tower. What do they think is going to happen when they get there? Roy emphatically states that he has no clear idea of what to expect, he just knows that he has to get there, just as Major Walsh emphatically states that it’s his job to keep Roy and his tribe of artists off the mountain. Neither of them really know what’s going to happen there, and that goes for Lacombe as well. Here’s the thing: where does it say the aliens are coming to visit tonight? Roy pursues his goal with great urgency, the army defends their goal with great efficiency, the stakes are high and climb higher as night falls. Who says the aliens are coming tonight? What if they don’t? All we’ve heard about is a set of map coordinates, there was never any date mentioned, the numbers that Laughlin interprets never say “And you guys better get your ass in gear, because we’re going to be there in less than two weeks.” Indeed, if the aliens are contacting people all over the world about their arrival, why are they giving us such a short time frame to meet them? Don’t they know we have lives? We have to book airplane flights, arrange for babysitting, rent cars. Come to think of it, they’ve got seemingly unlimited resources, why can’t they have a number of different meet-n-greets in different locations around the world? I get there’s only one mothership, but surely if they can drop off a freighter in the Gobi desert they can have representatives drop by to say hi in more than one place — what kind of organization are they running?
In any case, Roy keeps pushing, determined that nothing is going to stop him from keeping his appointment with God (even though God thoughtlessly has forgotten to put a meeting time on his invitation — which is, after all, typically God-like. When he invited the Jews to the promised land, he had them wander around in the desert for forty years before finally getting around to keeping his promise. I have this image of the Old Testament God sitting around in Heaven watching TV and eating pork rinds, then suddenly jumping up and saying “Oh shit! I forgot to lead my chosen people to the promised land!”). He succeeds in leading Gillian and Larry to the mountain, but only he and Gillian make it to the other side. Larry seems to be there as a suspense device, to show that even at this late date, not everyone who is called is worthy to receive the message.
Anyway, Roy and Gillian make it over the mountain (who told Roy the big event was going to happen on the other side of the mountain?) and Act IV begins. And the curious thing about Act IV of Close Encounters is that there is very little actual drama to it. The conflicts have all been cleared away, the protagonist has made it to his appointment, and the rest of the movie is, largely, a list of increasingly cool things that happen. It’s like: “Okay, some UFOs have shown up. That’s cool, right? Well what if a whole bunch of UFOs showed up? Now how much would you pay? But wait, before you answer, what if we told you a gigantic, quarter-mile-wide UFO was going to show up? And if you act now, little aliens will come out of the big UFO!“
Here’s a serious screenwriting question: what to the aliens in Close Encounters want?
This is what they do:
1. They drop off all the stuff they borrowed
2. They leave a message about where they’re going to be when they drop off the people they’ve borrowed
3. They encourage ordinary people to please come and meet them
4. They show up at the meeting place, drop off the people they’ve borrowed, then pick one guy to go off with them
Was this their plan all along? Did they only plan on taking one guy? If Gillian had accompanied Roy down to the landing strip, would she have been accepted along with him? It’s clear that the aliens turn their noses up at the “professionals” offered by Lacombe, but would they have taken the rest of the artists on the helicopter as well?
Little Barry Guiler is among the folks returned, of course, and there are few images more sacred in the Spielberg canon than a parent and child reunited — unless of course the parent is Roy and he’s abandoned his family to pursue God.
(A family reunited forms the climactic moment of so many Spielberg movies, which is why the moment in the second half of Schindler’s List where Schindler sees the body of the girl in the red coat is so shattering — there will be no reunion for this parent and child and Schindler lives in a world that doesn’t recognize Spielberg’s priorities as a storyteller. Which is one reason why Schindler’s List is such an important movie in Spielberg’s list, but we’re a long way from there yet.)
The returning of belongings and the dropping off of people implies to me that the aliens are breaking up with us, like they’ve had all they can take of our bullshit and they just want our crap out of their spaceship. They’re going home, but if we can give them one reason to think we’re nice people, maybe they’ll think we’re okay after all. That one reason, of course, turns out to be Roy.
Another thought occurs to me: maybe the aliens aren’t God after all. Maybe they’re an inter-dimensional art school looking for commercial artists to do work for posters and brochures and whatnot, and their message to the people of earth is “DRAW DEVIL’S TOWER! YOU MAY HAVE WHAT IT TAKES TO BE A PROFESSIONAL ARTIST!” And Roy wins first prize. Or maybe he didn’t win first prize, maybe they take him because he’s the only entrant to show up to the prize ceremony.
(Up on the ledge with Barry by her side, Gillian takes photos of the little aliens. Spielberg here is saying, I think, “don’t forget, film is an artform too, and the movie you’re watching is my own attempt to capture the divine impulse in art.”)
The obvious point is that Roy, not Lacombe, not the scientists, not the Army or Air Force or US government, not the UN or any other official body, only Roy is worthy. God chooses Roy out of everyone else to ascend into Heaven, to make it to the promised land. This is an emotional point, not a rational one, which is why Close Encounters is obviously such a personal story for Spielberg. His philosophy is that through hard work, devotion to craft, constant artistic struggle and relentless opposition to obstacles, one can make it. Roy’s devotion to building his sculpture, his intent need to “get it right,” is a corollary to Spielberg’s attention to hiscraft, and Roy’s obstinate refusal to follow orders and sneak through barriers is a corollary to Spielberg’s sneaking onto the Universal lot, pretending to be a director. Close Encounters‘s message is that through hard work, devotion to craft, insistent pursuit and a little bit of stealth, one can overcome any obstacle and be lifted up from the masses to achieve something like godhood. It’s Spielberg’s self-fulfilling prophecy, which is why Close Encounters will always be the cornerstone of his singular achievement.
Spielberg: Close Encounters of the Third Kind part one
Roy Neary sees the light.
(For those who wish to read some of my earlier thoughts on this movie, I direct you to here.)
WHAT DOES THE PROTAGONIST WANT? Roy Neary is a perfectly ordinary man who receives a powerful, mysterious message from above. He is driven To Solve the Mystery of this message at the expense of everything in his life.
WHAT STANDS IN HIS WAY? His wife, occasionally his children, his job, his responsibilities as a husband and father, the mores and customs of his suburban town, the UN, the US Air Force and Army.
To make things more interesting yet, each one of the minor protagonists in Close Encounters has their own little “buddy protagonist.” Lacombe has Laughlin, a cartographer who is pressed into service as Lacombe’s translator, and Gillian has Barry, her three-year-old boy, the kid who has no trouble receiving the message from above and achieves in 48 minutes what takes Roy over 2 hours — to get aboard a spaceship and meet creatures from another world.
Okay, and let’s get one thing straight, for the purposes of simplifying this whole thing — these creatures, the aliens, the extraterrestrials — we’re talking about God here. The inciting incident in Close Encounters is that God makes an announcement that He’s coming to Earth, and anyone interested in meeting Him should show up on such-and-such a day at such-and-such place, ’cause that’s where He’ll be. Roy is given a message from God and spends the first two acts trying to decipher it. Once he has deciphered the message, he spends the third act getting to the rendezvous point against formidable odds, and then, in Act IV, meets God. That’s the movie we’re talking about here. Many are called, few are able to answer, and of all who receive the call, only Roy is chosen as worthy. And look, it’s another Spielberg protagonist whose goal is To Prove His Worth.
Spielberg would make plenty more good movies, but Close Encounters is the first, and in some ways his truest and most deeply felt, most personal work. In this movie he finds a great subject, agreat metaphor and the purest expression of his aesthetic. If you weren’t around in 1977 to experience how new and exciting and original all this seemed, I pity you. There’s a reason why Spielberg is Spielberg and Spielberg qua Spielberg begins here.
ACT I we could call “Roy Gets The Message”, ACT II is “Roy Interprets The Message,” ACT III is “Roy Acts On The Message” and ACT IV is “Roy Meets The Messenger.”
The first thing we note in Close Encounters is Spielberg’s use of light as quality unto itself. Light is to Close Encounters as Water is to Jaws — it’s a stand-in for the creatures at the center of the narrative, creatures we are told about from the very first moments of the narrative but won’t really get a good look at until Act IV. Instead we see their lights, their shadows, the effects they have on things around us. Because not only do the creatures in Close Encounters generate light, they also generate darkness and manipulate light to their purposes. I am reminded, of course, of God’s first words in the Old Testament, and also Henry Jones’s goal in The Last Crusade — “Illumination.”
The first thing we see in Close Encounters is car headlights approaching toward us through a dust storm, and given the buildup we get approaching this image, the creepy music in the blackness building to a crescendo as we cut to blinding whiteness, we are forgiven for thinking we’re about to see something otherworldly. Spielberg will play off our desire to “see the light” to comic effect more than once in Close Encounters.
We meet Laughlin and Lacombe and the first clue to the mystery is discovered. (And here begins Spielberg’s fascination with WWII-era fighter planes, which would return for 1941, Raiders of the Lost Ark and especially Empire of the Sun, where they are elevated to the level of godhood themselves.)
Next we have the air-traffic-controllers scene, perhaps my favorite in the movie, but the screenwriter asks “What is this doing here? What does it get us? Why did they build this set, hire these actors, spend days shooting this scene?” The answer, I think, lies in the utterly brilliant dialogue between the controllers, the unemphatic, technical jargon they monotonously recite back and forth. The point of this scene is to show that THIS IS REALLY HAPPENING. Real UFOs, in a real world, not just some hallucinations in the minds of some lost souls. There is nuts-and-bolts reality to this phenomenon, which is one way Spielberg has of raising the stakes: God is coming, and he’s a measurable quantity.
(The casting in the air-traffic-controllers scene, like all the casting in Close Encounters, is simply perfect. Each one of those dozens of faces we see is exactly right, and each contains worlds of experience that we wonder about long after the movie is over. Spielberg obviously loves all these people and has a real knack for casting, which is why it confuses me that he sometimes casts dull, obvious or uninteresting actors in key roles in later movies.)
It takes until 11:00 into the movie to meet our principal protagonist Roy Neary. That’s a long time but not as long as the 17 minutes it takes to meet Luke Skywalker in Star Wars, the only movie of 1977 to make more money than Close Encounters.
What does Roy Neary want? When we meet him, what Roy Neary wants is to play with his train set and go see Pinocchio. He’s an archetype new to the movies, the Spielbergian man-child. He’s more immature than his own son Brad — when Brad asks Roy to help with his homework, Roy’s response is to say that he graduated high school so he wouldn’t have to do homework any more. He then proceeds to try, not very hard, to help Brad with fractions by wrecking one of his trains. He’s the father and paterfamilias of his brood, but he’s the one who wants to see the “dumb cartoon rated G for kids.” He has obviously stumbled into marriage and children without any plan — his wife is more mother than sweetheart to him and his toys take up more room in the house than his children’s. One suspects that, any day now, Roy is going to have a mid-life crisis where he suddenly looks around and says “Oh my God, who am I and how the hell did I get here?” Which, interestingly enough, is kind of what happens.
(The Nearys are watching The Ten Commandments on TV when we meet them. They watch that sluggish spectacle the best way one can — while doing something else, anything else at the same time. The Ten Commandments is inserted into Close Encounters as the third or fourth religious reference in the narrative, and is there to link together Roy Neary and, of all people, Moses, as men who are contacted by God and must lead a group of people to deliverance in a promised land. Roy falls a little short of Moses’s achievement of establishing a nation in the desert — he only leads two people to the mountain, and one gets knocked down by Pharoah’s army. He does, however, meet God finally and get The Message. It is not recorded whether or not his hair turns gray in the process.)
(Pinocchio, the reader will recall, is about a puppet who longs to become a real live boy. A blue fairy comes along to grant him his wish, but the wish comes with certain conditions: Pinocchio must, yes, Prove His Worth before he is granted boyhood. Young screenwriters, pay attention: familiarize yourself with the classics — they became classics for a reason. Spielberg not only lifts plot strands of Exodus and Pinocchio to suit his purposes, he tells you he’s doing it. They’re classics, they exist to be stolen from.)
The lights go out in Muncie, but I get the feeling the lights were never really on for Roy, and he sets out in his truck to find, yes, illumination.
Next we meet little Barry Guiler, one of the few characters in the movie more childlike than Roy. Spielberg teaches us to fear the light before we understand its meaning, but little Barry understands it immediately and runs to it. The implication, I think, is that Roy would climb in a UFO in his very first encounter if his relative maturity, and its attendant fear, didn’t prevent him from doing so.
(Barry, of course, is a classic Spielberg child — a boy living in a rumpled suburban house with a single mother and absent father. The fact that Roy abandons his wife and children in order to run off with Barry’s mother, only to abandon her, too, in her moment of hesitation, in order to pursue his vision, speaks to a corner of Spielberg’s psyche that is beyond the reach of this humble journal.)
Roy trundles down the road in his truck in the dark. “Help! I’m lost!” he exclaims. Well, when the student is ready the teacher will appear, and as soon as Roy admits to being in darkness, he is shown the light. Roy’s Gap opens wider than any Spielberg protagonist’s yet — he expected to go out and repair some electrical equipment, and instead he is called upon by God.
The architecture of these sequences, of course, is pure cinematic genius, the full flowering of the one critic’s dictum that Spielberg is the bastard child of Walt Disney and Alfred Hitchcock. The impulses of Disney and Hitchcock — Wonder and Terror — are balanced magnificently throughout Close Encounters. Take the first appearance of the UFOs: after minutes of nail-biting suspense, they finally appear and drift along that mountain road, frightening and startling and peculiar. They pass by, then there’s a beat, and they are followed by a little red pixie UFO. Classic Hitchcock meets classic Disney. Throughout Close Encounters Spielberg promises terror then delivers wonder, then promises wonder and delivers terror instead, keeping you constantly on edge, not knowing what to expect. God moves in mysterious ways, and a movie about God that’s all wonder and no terror doesn’t understand its subject.
(The mountain-road sequence also marks, I believe, the debut of what I’ve come to think of as “The Spielberg Shot,” a slow dolly into the face of an ordinary person, gazing in wonder at some incredible thing offscreen, usually from a low angle to give the ordinary person a noble stature. This is not a coincidence, and it’s part of what I mean about Close Encounters being Spielberg’s purest statement — one of the bold theses of Close Encounters, and all Spielberg’s work, is that God is available to everyone, and that the most ordinary of us are sometimes the most valuable. I’d love to see a Youtube compilation of those shots — they can be found in almost every Spielberg movie from here on out.)
Anyway, Roy receives the message, but he receives it in a way that he can’t readily explain. He races home and wakes up his family, in the hopes that they too will receive the message, but he can’t even adequately describe it. “There was a red whoosh!” is the most coherent he can get. His wife Ronnie tries to help, but she is too mired in the everyday world to grasp Roy’s vision. It’s telling that she can only translate Roy’s ecstatic ramblings in terms of consumer products — “Was it like a taco? Was it like one of those Sara Lee moon-shaped cookies?” Ronnie, like Roy, has been thrust into adulthood long before she’s ready — she misses the early days of Roy’s courtship and would rather “snuggle” on the mountainside while Roy watches for signs of God. In another movie, even another Spielberg movie, the protagonist would come to learn that a family is more God than anything that might appear from a thundercloud, but this is not that movie, and in Act II Roy will throw away his job, responsibilities and family to get nearer to God.
Screenwriting 101: Making the Scene with the Beats
![[info]](http://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
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.
Spielberg: Amblin’
It is not generally the habit of this journal to discuss movies that no one can see, but as Amblin’ is Spielberg’s first professionally produced movie and the first flowering of his particular genius, I figured it merits some discussion here. There is no image to accompany this entry because that’s just how hard it is to see this movie — there aren’t even stills from it available on the internet.
So, for those interested, here is a description of the plot. Spoiler alert, obviously:
Night falls and they make a fire. And now I feel I owe Spielberg an apology: I noted a few days ago that it wasn’t until 1993 that he was able to put a credible love scene on screen, without jokes,slapstick or juvenile attitude, but here he is, in his very first movie, doing just that. The fire is lit (so to speak), the girl takes off her shirt, the boy looks scared but desirous, he hesitantly takes off his own shirt, they kiss tenderly and zip their sleeping bags together. Even though the scene is about two adolescents having sex, the scene isn’t adolescent in its approach. Compare the above to the “love scenes” in Raiders, Temple of Doom or Always — or better yet, simply note how Spielberg tends to avoid love scenes altogether, making movies for an audience of 14-year-old boys, without anything “mushy” in them, movies for adolescents made from an eternally adolescent point of view.
(Urbaniak was shocked the other night to learn that the novel Jaws had an extensive, graphic, explicit subplot about Hooper having an affair with Brody’s wife. It’s hard to imagine the movie with it, but it bothered a number of people when it first was released. So much so, I remember at least one critic inserting the subplot into the movie in his own mind, even though there isn’t a scintilla of evidence of it in the film. Try, try to imagine Jaws with Richard Dreyfuss boinking Lorraine Gary half-way through Act II. Yeesh.)
(Oh wait, it just occurred to me that there’s a love scene — a lesbian love scene, no less — in The Color Purple. And now that I think of it, it bears a strong resemblance to its counterpart in Amblin’.)
(One more parenthetical. The campfire-leading-to-lovemaking beat returns, of course, in Jaws, and the two scenes even share a couple of the same shots.)
Anyway, morning comes and the boy and the girl get passed by many more cars, and then finally get a ride to the coast. They reach the beach and their journey is over. It’s the old road-movie dilemma: two souls are joined together by their common pursuit, and when the goal is achieved they face a dilemma — do they now stay together or go their separate ways?
That’s the girl’s question anyway. The boy seems too intoxicated with having reached his goal. He runs into the surf as the girl waits on the beach, wondering what to do next. After some hesitation, she opens his battered guitar case, only to find, surprise, no guitar. Instead, the boy has brought with him to the coast a nice shirt, a tie, a copy of an Arthur C. Clarke novel, a bottle of mouthwash and a roll of toilet paper. In other words, this boy is no hippie at all — he’s a geek, and a square. As the boy romps in the waves, the girl sighs and walks away.
Of course, it’s hard not to identify the protagonist as a Spielberg stand-in. Here it is, 1968, the height of the hippie era, and Spielberg, famously, was sneaking onto the Universal lot, in a suit and tie, in order to pose as a young executive. With an Arthur C. Clarke paperback in his pocket too, I’d bet. The boy, frightened of love, apprehensive about sex, but joyous in the face of sheer sensation, romps in the beach on his way to becoming Steven Spielberg, while the girl moves on to wherever her road takes her.
There is no dialogue in Amblin’, instead there is a kind of over-produced 60s folk-rock soundtrack. No matter — Spielberg would meet John Williams soon enough and wouldn’t need another composer again.
It is, of course, primarily a director’s reel — Spielberg showing potential employers his understanding of film language — jump cuts, dissolves, freeze frames, tracking shots, dollies, zooms, simple optical effects. Images are layered with attention to dramatic flow, so forth. There’s Truffaut all over the place — it feels very much like an extended “date” sequence from Jules et Jim. The best scenes are the ones observing simple behavior — when Spielberg tries to make a “point” he sometimes falls back on a kind of glib jokiness that would never really leave him.
It feels very 70s — and since it was made in 1968, I guess that means it was actually ahead of its time.
The DVD I had access to is a painfully degraded dupe of a dupe of an I-don’t-know-what. The transfer is so bad I can’t even tell you if the movie is in color or not.
Personally, I don’t know why Spielberg doesn’t restore this and his other pre-Sugarland movies and put them all out in a DVD box. Certainly there’s an audience for the material. What is he thinking, that if people see these youthful expressions they won’t hire him to make movies any more?
Spielberg: Something Evil
WHAT DOES THE PROTAGONIST WANT? Marjorie Worden, the protagonist of Something Evil, is a housewife, mother and craftsy person, married to ad-man Paul. She wants a house in the country.
WHAT DOES THE PROTAGONIST GET? Marjorie gets a house in the country. A house…of evil!
Spielberg: The Sugarland Express
WHAT DOES THE PROTAGONIST WANT? Lou Jean Poplin wants what many Spielberg protagonists want — she wants her broken family made whole again. She is willing to do anything to achieve this goal, including a long list of felonies, crimes and misdemeanors. This leads her afoul of the state.
WHAT DOES THE PROTAGONIST GET? The state waffles, but eventually comes down on Lou Jean pretty damn hard.
Ed in Raising Arizona wants a baby from her class superiors, but Lou Jean’s beef is with the state — they have taken her child away from her for being an unfit mother. So the drama of The Sugarland Express is one of the individuals against the state and how the state responds when order is upset by an individual. Especially when the individual inspires thousands of other individuals — in other words, “the people,” the same people the state is supposed to be serving.
The structure goes something like this:
ACT I: Lou Jean busts her husband Clovis out of jail, they hitch a ride out of town, lead a state patrol car on a wild chase, kidnap a Patrolman named Slide and head to Sugarland, where Lou Jean hopes to be reunited with her baby. All this happens in a brisk 22 minutes.
ACT II: The principal antagonist, Captain Tanner, emerges and marshals the forces of the state against Lou Jean. He leads a number of patrol cars across the state on a slow-speed chase behind Lou Jean that lasts into the night. He considers assassinating Lou Jean and Clovis but then thinks better of it. A roadblock trap backfires and creates a traffic snarl that allows Lou Jean to escape into the night. This takes us to 57:00.
ACT III: Lou Jean and Clovis have a respite where they hide out in a used car lot, where they camp in a mobile home, play house and watch a Roadrunner cartoon at a nearby drive-in. In the morning, a couple of unlicensed yahoos show up with shotguns and proceed to blow the hell out of the car lot. Captain Tanner arrives with his men and allows Lou Jean to go free again, while he arrests the yahoos. This takes us to 1:17:00.
ACT IV: Lou Jean leads what is now hundreds of police cars, media vans and onlookers across the state. They are swamped by well-wishers as they pass through a small town and eventually arrive in Sugarland, where, unbeknownst to them, a trap has been set by Captain Tanner. Clovis is shot and he, Slide and Lou Jean desperately try to make it for the border. They make it halfway through the river before Clovis dies and Lou Jean is arrested.
(The end title tells us that Lou Jean finally got her baby back after serving a 15-month prison sentence — that would make her and her son just the right age to become Melinda Dillon and Carey Guffey in Close Encounters.)
NOTES:
A few minutes into the movie, Lou Jean, while visiting Clovis in a low-security prison, pulls him into a bathroom and begins to initiate sex. Clovis is flustered and upset, especially when it turns out Lou Jean doesn’t want sex at all — it’s all part of her escape plan. This is the first time a sex scene is played for laughs in a Spielberg movie, but it would not be the last. It would take, by my estimation, another 20 years before Spielberg would present a mature, straightforward scene of two people having sex.
And as long as we’re here, let’s look at the romance between Lou Jean and Clovis. Lou Jean busts Clovis out of jail against his will, then forces him to kidnap Patrolman Slide, and essentially keeps kicking his ass forward until he’s dead. It’s played well, but that’s essentially the dynamic of their relationship. That, to me, is something other than a mature view of love. It almost seems like Lou Jean would be better off getting her baby all by herself, since she has to boss Clovis into every transgression (much like Ed in Raising Arizona, except here Lou Jean is the protagonist). It’s telling that Clovis’s idea of a romantic evening is curling up on the bed and watching Roadrunner cartoons — he’s still just a kid himself.
Spielberg’s use of lenses and camera movement is as fluid and skilled as it is in Duel; what impresses here is his work with actors. There is a warm naturalism to all the acting, especially among the large supporting cast, which is essentially the yokels and goofballs from the “armada” scene in Jaws stretched out over an entire movie. Spielberg presents these yahoos with great affection and humanity. There is plenty of typical Spielbergian wit and punch as scenes move with an effortless grace created through sheer visual kinetics — Character A moves from point 1 to point 2, carrying prop B which is important to plot point 3, etc. etc. The character scenes all land nicely with only occasional broadness, but Spielberg really lets loose with the car chases and shootouts. You can tell that’s where his real interest lies — or rather, you can tell that action is what he’s more comfortable shooting (this dichotomy of action-over-character is most pronounced in 1989’s Always).
Captain Tanner is an interesting antagonist, as he is essentially sympathetic with the protagonist. As a man, he wants Lou Jean to be reunited with her child, as a peace officer (or tool of the state, if you prefer) he is required to act with lethal force to maintain order. The fact that no one’s life is ever really in danger and the only real property damage caused by Lou Jean is a wreck Buick does not concern the state — she has rebelled against the state and the state must quash her rebellion. One could say that Tanner is caught between the natural law of human families and the man’s law of the state.
Lou Jean and Clovis hit the road with their kidnapped patrolman in an attempt to mend their family, and so become a kind of ad hoc family on the way. Max Slide becomes their punished child, their palling brother and their scolding father at different times in the movie, and even briefly becomes a potential point in a romantic triangle.
There’s a wonderful scene as Lou Jean and Clovis watch the Roadrunner cartoon at the drive-in. They can’t hear the sound, so Clovis begins to supply the sound effects. As he watches the cartoon, he, and we, begin to realize that Lou Jean and Clovis, like the Coyote, are caught in an endless pursuit across the desert, a pursuit that will not, and cannot, end well for the Coyote.
Happy Valentine’s Day from What Does The Protagonist Want
JAWS OF LOVE
I’m a man, I’m an idiot, it follows. I’m a man, I’m an idiot.
I’m human, that’s the problem. I’m human, I’m an idiot, it follows. I’m human, I’m an idiot. You can’t teach me anything, I won’t learn, I’ll never learn, I can’t learn, I’m an idiot, I’m trapped and you can’t teach me anything.
You ever look into someone’s eyes and been reduced to the size of a pin? A pin, a pinpoint of light, been reduced to a pinpoint of light? You ever see someone toss their hair back and it made you fall silent? You could be talking to someone — “Oh, yes, the third episode with the dwarf was the best” — and they do this –
[imitation of hair-flip]
— and you fall silent. Because, you know why? Because Something Important Has Happened. Or, or, you’re talking to this person, this person, this certain person who makes your heart want to get in your car and turn on some rockabilly and drive somewhere, and you’re hanging on every word this person says, and then this person says something like —
…”that would be nice”…
— and it dislodges this rock, somewhere in the deep stream of your subconscious this rock is dislodged, and you find yourself thinking about things you haven’t thought about in years. Am I ugly? Do I need some mints? How come I never read any Shelley? Jesus, do I weigh that much? This rock is dislodged, it sets off an avalanche in your head that wipes out everything else in your brain.
And you fall silent. It’s like you’re in church, it’s like you’re worshipping. Because you are in church. You are worshipping. You are having a religious experience.
Why? Why this person? Who is this person? What do you know about this person? Doesn’t this person have terrible taste in music? Doesn’t this person smoke? Isn’t this person ten years older than you? Isn’t this person not attracted to your sex? Doesn’t this person think you’re an insignificant blot on an otherwise charming landscape? Isn’t this person the rudest, clumsiest, most incorrigibly maddeningly frustratingly difficult person you’ve ever met in your life? Well? Then why? Why are you talking to this person? What is the point? Why are you bothering? Why do I find myself in this exact same position right now?!
Because —
[gesture to body]
— this, you see, this, you know what this is, this is flesh. It’s all I’ve got. It’s all they gave me. I didn’t get a book of rules. I didn’t get a wise old mind that could see into the future and tell me that these feelings would die, that lovemaking would become rote and tiresome, that I would lose interest, that we would get into fights over things like, like white-out!
I didn’t get that mind, my mind doesn’t say those things, my mind says things like YES! My mind says things like NOW! My mind says things like DANCE, like, like, KISS, like, like, GRAB THIS PERSON NOW! GRAB THIS PERSON NOW!
I don’t know what it is, of course I don’t know what it is. It’s not meant to be known, not by us, not by me, not in this life, not in this world. It’s a feeling, that’s all, it’s a feeling, you know it when you feel it, it’s like these jaws snapping shut on you, on me, like they’ve shut on me, and I’m trapped, because, because, I’m a man, I’m an idiot, it follows, like I said, these jaws are as big as the fucking universe, and they’ll chew me up and spit me out, and I’ll never learn, I’m trapped, I’m an idiot, and I’m trapped in the jaws of love.
R.I.P. Roy Scheider
I am greatly saddened by the news of the passing of Roy Scheider.
I was about to say that the first time I saw Mr. Scheider was in the police thriller The Seven-Ups, but that’s not quite true. I first saw Roy Scheider in the Mad magazine parody of The French Connection, which was entitled What’s The Connection?
In any case, by the time Jaws came out in 1975 I was looking forward to it almost as much as a Roy Scheider vehicle as a Steven Spielberg movie. I enjoyed his work in Marathon Man, Sorcerer, Still of the Night, Blue Thunder, Naked Lunch, The Punisher and especially, of course, All That Jazz.
Few people probably know about his work as the voice of Japanese author Yukio Mishima in Paul Schrader’s Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters. That movie blew me away — I was working at a theater it was playing at when it was released and would watch it several times a day for weeks. When the DVD was released, I was shocked and dismayed to find that Scheider’s precise, measured readings of Mishima’s texts were gone, replaced with voiceovers by Paul Schrader. They’re not the same, and to me the movie is greatly diminished because of the change. I’ve never figured out why that change was made (I have read somewhere that there was a rights issue with the translations used), but it is definitely a loss.
Screenwriting 101: The Protagonist
They ask me to come to Hollywood to work on an animated movie about ants. It is 1995.
I’ve written screenplays before, I am not a neophyte, but I this is the big leagues and I have to be smart.
I’m in a room with Nina Jacobson and Walter Parkes and Laurie MacDonald and Jeffrey Katzenberg and Steven Spielberg, and they’re all sitting there looking at me, waiting for me to say something really smart, and here I am, a guy who normally does no-budget experimental plays off-off-Broadway.
And I’m talking about this animated movie about ants and “what it means” and and what kind of world it takes place in and what its central metaphors are and where it fits in with movie history and how it reflects different levels of social truth, and after about fifteen seconds of this bullshit Jeffrey Katzenberg closes his eyes tight and puts his fingers to his temple as though he has a piercing headache and says “Stop! Stop! Stop! Stop! Stop! WHAT DOES THE GUY WANT?“
The “guy” Mr. Katzenberg refers to is, of course, The Protagonist. The reason for Mr. Katzenberg’s mounting anxiety and anger toward my presentation is that I am wasting his time. I am describing the movie we’re making in every way but the way that matters. Because structurally, the only thing that matters in a screenplay is What The Protagonist Wants. There is nothing else.
(Mr. Katzenberg repeats his question to me many times during my work with him, so many times that I finally write it down on a postcard and stick it up over my desk. And if you are an untested screenwriter reading this journal, I advise you to do the same.)
Simply put, What The Protagonist Wants is the reason the movie is happening. Charles Foster Kane wants love on his own terms, Sheriff Brody wants to rid Amity Island of the shark, Henry Hill wants to be a gangster, Michael Corleone wants to distance himself from his family, Roy Neary wants to meet the aliens, Indiana Jones wants to recover the Ark of the Covenant, Luke Skywalker wants to get the hell off Tatooine. The movie is nothing more or less than the protagonist pursuing his goal and the things that get in his way. The stronger the protagonist’s drive, the better the story will be. The more formidable his opposition, the better the story will be.
And that is all a screenplay is. The Protagonist pursues his goal, and forces get in his way. And either the Protagonist gets what he wants or he does not, and sometimes, during the pursuit of the goal, the Protagonist’s goal changes. So Michael Corleone starts off wanting to distance himself from his family and ends up becoming the family patriarch. Luke Skywalker starts off wanting only to get off Tatooine and ends up saving the galaxy. And in some of the best movies, the protagonist’s goal changes so much that, by the end of the story, we are left with a profound, exhilarating sense of life as it is lived.
Is it formula? It is not. It is storytelling. This is how it works. There are millions of possible variations to this idea, but this is how it works. When a movie gets boring, it’s because the moviemakers have strayed too far from the protagonist’s pursuit of his goal. If a movie is uninvolving from the get-go, it’s because the screenwriter has failed to invest his protagonist with sufficient enough ardor in pursuit of his goal. Or worse yet, he has failed to give his protagonist a goal at all. The antagonists are unfocused, the protagonist gets off on a tangent, the big musical number (or action sequence) stops the show but does not raise the stakes.
Somewhere in the back pages of this journal I referred to screenplay structure as a boat. You’re building a boat. If you follow the rules, your boat will float. If you are proficient in your skills, your boat will sail. If you are remarkably talented, your boat will zoom across the water, win the race, impress everyone and bring you millions of dollars. If you don’t know what you’re doing, your boat will sink. And if you are an “artist” with some brilliant “new idea” about what a “boat” is, you will have a work of art that is not a boat.
Why does it have to be this way? Why is this rule so ironclad? Why does it work? I don’t know why it works. I’ve learned through practice and experience that it does and that’s good enough for me.
Let’s go back to that meeting again about the movie with the talking ants. Mr. Katzenberg asks me “What Does The Guy Want?!”
What do I do? This is what I do: I stammer and look at my notes and say “well, he wants to change society,” or “he wants to find a better way to live” or “he can’t help but think that somewhere there is a better world.” All these, it turns out, are the wrong answers. The protagonist’s goal cannot be vague, ideological or symbolic. It must be concrete and physically attainable. John Connor may ultimately fight for freedom, but his goal in Terminator 2 is to get his mom out of the hospital and destroy the evil robot from the future.
Why must the protagonist’s goal be physically attainable? Because movies are made of pictures. A movie is not a novel, it can’t get inside a character’s mind very efficiently. What movies do best is record physical activity: the man runs, the car leaps off the bridge, the dinosaur attacks, the man and woman kiss, the building explodes, the spaceship glides silently across the vast reaches of nothingness. Serious movies about characters thinking deep thoughts are not going to capture a very big audience, but the dumbest movie in the world about people outrunning orange fireballs and large metal objects flying through the air will capture an enormous audience.
This is not to say that a movie cannot be about serious things. Ingmar Bergman made some of the greatest movies ever made about very serious things indeed, but his movies work because, beneath his experiments in formalism, he has a remarkably strong, even old-fashioned, sense of drama.
And if you can find a movie about subjects more serious than the ones in The Godfather, let me know.
The protagonist’s pursuit of his goal can be drawn clumsily or with great subtlety and sophistication. It can be boldly stated from the first scene (“All my life I wanted to be a gangster”) or it can remain mysterious and unsettling to the end (I’m looking at you, Daniel Plainview). It can be done so elliptically as to confound (remind me to tell you about the structure of 2001 some time) or it can be hammered home with a big iron mallet (“Let My People Go”).
Can there be a movie with a passive protagonist, where the protagonist doesn’t want anything in particular, and things just kind of happen to him? Yes. I can’t think of one off the top of my head, but I’m sure there’s one out there somewhere.
Oh wait, I’ve thought of one that comes close: Bambi. I can’t tell you why a movie with no plot and a passive protagonist can be such a classic narrative and a crushingly emotional experience, but Walt Disney (Walt Disney!) pulled it off somehow.
(I often imagine Walt Disney finally becoming unfrozen one day and showing up at the studio that bears his name, and everyone there is so glad to see him and they ask the master if he has any great new ideas for movies and he says “Yeah, how about a 2 1/2 hour plotless movie that celebrates the art of symphonic music and a 61-minute cartoon about a baby elephant who learns how to fly while he’s in the middle of an 8-minute-long alcohol-induced hallucination?”)
(Perhaps we could say that Bambi wants To Learn. He wants to learn the names of things, how to behave, how to be safe, how to have fun, so forth, and in the end he learns a few lessons he would have rather not learned, and finally, through experience, achieves Wisdom. Boy, that movie blows me away.)
Even The Dude wants something — to solve the mystery of the missing girl. It takes him 90 minutes to arrive at this desire, but he finally gets there. And I would say that if there is one solid reason why a movie as brilliant as The Big Lebowski failed at the box office, The Dude’s lack of ambition would be it.
Can there be movies with multiple protagonists? Yes there can. As a rule, they don’t do as well as movies with single protagonists. Pulp Fiction would be the exception to this rule. Hannah and Her Sisters is another one.
The key to analyzing a movie’s structure is to identify the protagonist (not always as easy as it appears to be) and then trace that character’s path through the narrative. The protagonist’s path through the narrative is the meaning of the movie. I can’t think of an exception to this rule.
When I get done writing the ant movie, I sit down and watch all my favorite movies again. Now that I have the key to analyzing structure, somehow they’ve all become different movies. Things that once seemed weird or mysterious or confounding now seem obvious and baldly stated. Narratives that were once gorgeous and sweeping now seem as dry and clinical as a schematic. For a period of time, all movies are ruined by this process, I’m not seeing a movie anymore but a structure with pictures hung on it, but finally I am able to absorb this idea into my gut and enjoy these movies again, not just for their screenplays but for the moviemakers executions of their screenplays. If you have an interest in writing movies, I suggest you submit to this process.
There are many many books out there about screenwriting that have all these terms, dozens of them it seems, for all these different beats that every successful screenplay supposedly has, and I’ve tried reading a few but I can’t make any sense of them. On the other hand, I found Robert McKee’s Story to be hugely illuminating and useful. McKee gets a lot of stick from the screenwriting community and I’m not quite sure why. What Story did for me was not promote formula but identify tools. There are names for all the different parts of stories just like there are names for all the different parts of a boat, and up until reading the book I was just kind of fumbling around in my toolbox grabbing hold of whatever felt right, sticking my boats together in whatever way pleased me, whereas after reading Story I was able to look at my work and see where I had built well, where I had patched over a hole with a bit of shiny metal, where I had forgotten to attach a tiller, et cetera.
Also, I found David Mamet’s On Directing Film extremely helpful.