Attention Variety
I am available for writing post-Oscar-ceremony headlines.
Here are some examples:
QUEEN CATE APPROXIMATELY
Blanchett wins for two historic roles
NO OSCARS FOR “OLD MEN”
Surprise shut-out for Coen pic
THERE WILL BE OSCARS
WGA reaches agreement in time for broadcast
DEPP DRINKS DAY-LEWIS’S MILKSHAKE
Surprise upset for Blood actor
LINNEY “SAVAGES” CHRISTIE
Takes Oscar “Away From Her”
Screenwriting 101: Pop Quiz, 2001: A Space Odyssey
The protagonist of 2001: A Space Odyssey is:
a) Moon-Watcher
b) The Monolith
c) Dr. Heywood R. Floyd
d) Dr. Dave Bowman
e) Dr. Frank Poole
e) HAL 9000
f) The frozen astronauts
g) None of the above
Congratulations to RJWhite, who, although he is confused as to the character’s name, correctly identifies the protagonist of 2001 as “whomever was trying to propel the human race forward.”
2001 is, essentially, an education drama, not unlike Blackboard Jungle or Dangerous Minds. There is a wise teacher who has been put in charge of a bunch of wild students in the inner city, with their gang wars and primitive ways, and the teacher must show them the beauty of learning and betterment while hoping they don’t use their new intelligence to kill each other. Kubrick’s bold stroke was to make an education drama where the “wise teacher” goes unseen. If you can imagine Stand and Deliver with a big black slab instead of Edward James Olmos, that’s pretty much 2001.
“Humanity” is, in fact, the antagonist of 2001. The protagonist is trying to teach them, and while humanity is capable of learning, their “background” continues to “keep them down.” The drama of 2001 is, “can the protagonist change the antagonist, given that the antagonist is probably evil to its core?”
“Dave” is indeed a “main character,” but his story is, basically, a subplot. Dave is the student who advances to the State Finals and must “prove himself.” The movie, essentially, ends when the student walks out onto the stage to prove what he’s learned, how far he’s come — but then doesn’t show us the speech.
Eronanke supplies a mind-blowing answer to a mind-blowing movie and suggests that “destiny” is the protagonist, which is an intriguing idea, if “destiny” is indeed what the movie is about — which I don’t think it is. But I also think that “destiny” is no kind of protagonist to hang a 2-hour, 20-minute movie on — even if that movie’s prime directive is to blow one’s mind.
Mr. Noy correctly identifies the four large-scale story chunks that give the movie its shape. I’m going to go ahead and call these chunks the acts of the movie, even though they don’t really function as acts in the traditional sense. This is typical of Kubrick’s approach to story structure — three or four very long sequences instead of three acts made up of short scenes — and is, to me, the thing that makes AI such an odd movie-watching experience; Spielberg made Kubrick’s script his own, but kept the decidedly Kubrickian structure.
Here is the plot of 2001, as told from the protagonist’s point of view.
_____
ACT I
There is this bunch of extraterrestrials. They have a machine that makes creatures smarter. Let’s call them the Invisible Extraterrestrials (the IET).
They spot Earth. Earth has relatively intelligent creatures on it called apes. The apes are doing okay but they’re eating vegetables and living in caves and getting into fights over resources (plus ca change). The IET, for reasons unknown, decide to help the apes along in their evolution.
They uncrate three of their smart-making-machines — small, medium and large. They leave the small one on the planet Earth, in the middle of the ape community, they bury the medium-sized one beneath the surface of the moon, and they put the large one out in space, somewhere near Jupiter.
The scene we don’t see is the IET discussing their plan: “So, we’ll put the small one in the middle of the ape community, and the machine will do its thing, and the creatures will either become smart or they won’t. If they do become smart, we know that they’ll eventually fly to their moon and discover the one we bury there. We’ll stick a light-sensitive device in the second one, so that when it gets hit by sunlight it will send a radio signal to the big one next to Jupiter, and if the creatures are smart enough to make it to the big one, then we’ll give them all the intelligence in the universe, and if that doesn’t totally blow their minds, they will evolve to the next step.”
So they leave the small monolith in the middle of Apetown. The apes wake up in the morning and see the monolith. Moon-Watcher (the lead ape) touches the monolith, the monolith does its thing, makes Moon-Watcher a little bit smarter, and the first thing Moon-Watcher does with his new intelligence is to pick up a bone and beat his enemy to death and use his new intelligence to stop eating vegetables and start eating meat.
So, here we have the central conflict of 2001 — the protagonist (the IET) want to make humans intelligent, but humanity (the antagonist) has this thing where their nature is, at its root, homicidal. The question of the movie, which is left unanswered, is “can people evolve to the point where they don’t kill each other any more?”
(The novel, in my opinion, answers “no,” but that is not the concern of this journal.)
But that’s it — that’s the whole movie. There’s a bunch of invisible extraterrestrials who want to educate humanity but humanity may just be too homicidal to survive the process.
(Each one of the four acts dramatize this central conflict in different ways. In Act I, we see that an ape, given a little intelligence, kills another ape. In Act II, we see that humanity, given a few million years of evolution, has advanced to the point where they can destroy all life on the planet with atom bombs and every bit of human interaction must be rife with suspicion, secrecy and coded language. In Act III, we see that humanity has gotten smart enough to create a machine capable of killing people on its own, and in Act IV we see that a man, even after gaining all the knowledge in the world, still has to eat and still spills his wine. So the answer to the question “what happens after the end of the movie,” it seems to me, is a very pessimistic one — and indeed, Kubrick once said that he wanted to end the movie with a scene showing the world destroyed by atom bombs but decided it was too much like the ending of Dr. Strangelove.)
ACT II
It’s the year 2001 or thereabouts (the rest of the movie covers an 18-month time-span, so obviously the whole movie doesn’t take place in 2001). Dr. Floyd goes to the moon. And we see how sophisticated people have become, and how boring — they glide across the surface of the moon and can talk about nothing but what kind of sandwiches they have. (Intelligence and food again, stuck together. No matter how smart you get, you still have to eat, and something still has to die for that to happen.)
And there’s a bunch of hugger-mugger about “The Russians” and so forth, but the whole act is basically a bunch of “plot” about uncovering the second monolith and getting it exposed to the sunlight — once that happens, the act ends abruptly and we never hear about any of those people again.
ACT III
A lovely subplot on the spaceship Discovery about Dave and Frank and the frozen astronauts and the murderous computer. There are more scenes with food, and more scenes showing how, no matter how intelligent humans get, no matter how bloodless and dispassionate, they are still animals who eat and piss and shit and sweat. HAL 9000 doesn’t have those problems, of course (and here Kubrick points toward AI — machines as the final evolution of humanity) — he is more bloodless and dispassionate than any of the humans on board, although we find that that only enables him to kill more bloodlessly and dispassionately, leading to Dave having to take matters into his own hands and kill HAL.
At the end of Act III, just after Dave kills HAL, the video comes on and Some Guy on the video tells us the story of the movie. The scene comes after so many mind-blowing visuals one is forgiven for missing it, but the guy on the video actually takes a few minutes to sit there quietly and patiently explain the plot of the whole movie to us.
ACT IV
Dave takes his pod to go investigate the extra-large monolith out in space. His encounter with the monolith gives him all the intelligence in the universe (that’s the big famous mind-blowing psychedelic freakout scene), but he’s still human. He still has to eat and his body will still decay.
That’s okay, as it turns out. The IET give Dave a place to relax and grow old. The scene where Dave “sees himself” getting old is a misdirect — all that’s happening is that Dave is growing old, over a period of years, and Kubrick is trying to think of an interesting way to shoot that bit of exposition. The fact that the inside of the monolith looks like some kind of postmodern French hotel suite is just the IET’s way of trying to think of something to make Dave comfortable while he grows old and dies.
Finally Dave dies and, because he’s obtained all the intelligence in the universe, he is reincarnated as the “Star-Child,” the big green fetus who is seen approaching the Earth at the end of the movie.
Now that the IET have given humanity all the knowledge in the universe, what will humanity do? Will the Star-Child do good works and teach the world to sing, or will it use its super-intelligence to wipe out all of humanity? That is, will the protagonist’s goal be reached or will it be frustrated by the antagonist’s inherent self-destructiveness?
(This, of course, assumes that the protagonist’s goal is for humanity to better itself. For all I know, the IET’s goal is to get us to wipe ourselves out so they could come and steal all our resources. That would make the monolith not an intelligence-generating machine but a homicide-generating machine.)
I predict
I predict that, in the movie that gets made about the historic 2008 presidential campaign, John McCain will be portrayed by Bill Paxton.
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.