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.
Screenwriting 101: Animation vs. Live Action
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writes:
By the way I’m a screenwriter as well—writing a live action and animated project. Both projects are high concept. Any suggestions on writing animation, Mr. Alcott?
Two things come to mind:
1. Structurally, there is no difference between a screenplay for an animated movie and a live-action movie. The exact same rules of drama apply to both.
2. That said, there are reasons why some stories are better animated and some stories are better live-action.
Today’s technology is so sophisticated, there’s nothing that cannot be put on screen. If you want to write a live-action movie about a young deer learning about the joys and sorrows of life, you can do that. Similarly, if you want to write an animated movie about a woman of indomitable spirit who makes her way through the horrors of Reconstruction, you can write that too. However, animation tends to favor the needs of stories about fantastical creatures (talking animals, robots, space aliens) and unstageable spectacle, and live action tends to favor the needs of stories that depend on seeing the faces of real people.
The other thing about animation, of course, is that it needs to be planned out way in advance and once you begin production, there are very few opportunities for improvisation. So if your script is lacking, there is a strong chance your movie is going to suck even if the animation is wonderful. The inverse is, if your script is solid, the animation can have all sorts of things wrong with it and it will still be a good movie.
Because animation is so difficult and time-consuming, it’s important to streamline your screenplay as much as possible before production. When I was working on Antz, Jeffrey Katzenberg often referred to the string of masterpieces he made at Disney (The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Alladin, etc) as models of structure. Jeffrey is a man of strong opinions, but he also knows when to listen to experience, and he told me that when he was at Disney, he saw some pictures of Walt Disney in story meetings. The “board,” he saw, for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, had a total of 24 “story beats” in it — 10 in Act I, 10 in Act II and only 4 in Act III. Jeffrey, being a smart man, said “Well, if Walt Disney figured structure like this, I would do well to emulate him.” As a result, Jeffrey’s Disney movies tend to have comparatively long first acts (40-50 minutes), compact second acts (30-35 minutes) and tumultuous, nuclear-powered third acts (15-20 minutes). As he liked to say, “The third act is a race to the finish line.” By the end of Act II in a Katzenberg movie, all the conflicts have been brought into sharp focus, there are no more reveals or reversals to be had, and the plot is reduced to a set of vectors pitting the protagonist against whatever forces have been arrayed against him, usually with a ticking clock hovering nearby to add tension.
(A screenplay for an animated feature, by the way, should not be longer than 90 pages, and anything over 80 is pushing it. My draft of Antz was 83. I can’t tell you why this is a rule, but it is. There are exceptions, of course — The Incredibles is two hours long and I don’t remember anyone complaining about the length.)
Sam and the Firefly
P.D. Eastman, Wikipedia says, was a protege of Dr. Seuss. His Go, Dog. Go! is a staple of the beginning-to-read set, and his Are You My Mother? is always welcome around my house. But for my money, Sam and the Firefly is not only Eastman’s crowning achievement, it is also a compact, brisk, efficient course in storytelling, a small masterwork of character, plot and dramatic structure, far more accomplished than the much-more-famous, but ultimately-rather-meta The Cat in the Hat, and all achieved with a set of words designed for a 5-year-old to read.
Screenwriting 101: The Gap
One of my favorite terms that I got from reading Robert McKee’s Story is The Gap.
The Gap is simply the distance between what the protagonist thinks is going to happen and what actually happens. The wider The Gap is, the more interesting your story will be.
Example: you’re at the water cooler, and a fellow employee says “Let me tell you about my morning.” He goes on to tell you about how he ate some toast, watched Good Morning America, got dressed, checked his email and then went out to get the bus. This is a protagonist with no Gap at all, and thus his story isn’t very interesting.
(On the other hand, if you are the protagonist in this story, your Gap is a teeny bit wider because what you expect to happen is that your co-worker will tell you a worthwhile story and what actually happens is he’s a crashing bore.)
If your co-worker says that he bit into his toast and discovered there was a dead mouse baked into the bread, his Gap just got appreciably wider. If he says that he turned on the TV and started a fire because he has too many appliances plugged into his outlet, his Gap is wider still. If he says that he sat down to watch Good Morning America and found they were broadcasting his obituary, his Gap is about as wide as it’s probably going to get.
Since Cloverfield happens to be on my mind, and has an exceptional example of The Gap, let’s look at that narrative for a moment:
Rob in Cloverfield is in love with Beth but can’t bring himself to tell her so. He’s moving to Japan soon and doesn’t want to deal with his newfound emotional detour. What Rob expects to happen is that he will move to Japan, as scheduled, never deal with Beth again, and eventually get on with his life. What actually happens is that Rob’s friends throw a surprise going-away party for him, Beth shows up with another guy, Rob finds all his feelings for her coming to the surface, and then a giant monster comes along and destroys Manhattan.
That, speaking as a professional, is some freakin’ Gap.
Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs is an FBI trainee who is asked by her superior, Jack Crawford, to interview Famous Creepy Guy Hannibal Lecter, in the hopes that she will get him to shed some light on a serial-murder case that’s troubling him. What Clarice expects to happen is that Lecter will creep her out, but ultimately help her in her pursuit of her goal, which is to curry favor with her superior. What actually happens is that Lecter creeps her out to a level far beyond what she would have thought possible, and draws her into a web of intrigue so personal and disturbing that it turns out that Clarice, and Clarice alone, is able to capture and kill the serial killer that’s troubling Jack Crawford.
Richard Kimble in The Fugitive comes home one evening to find his wife being murdered by a mysterious one-armed man. That’s a pretty freakin’ wide Gap right there, but that’s not really the Gap of Richard’s narrative. What Richard expects to happen is that he, sober, bearded vascular surgeon, will simply tell the police what happened and the police will then diligently pursue his wife’s killer. What actually happens is that Richard finds himself accused of his wife’s murder, and is thrown into jail, tried and convicted.
Marion Crane in Psycho steals some money from her employer and high-tails it out of town to make a new life for herself. What she expects to happen is that she will probably be arrested, but almost certainly she will calm down, return the money and get her life organized. What actually happens is she gets so murdered by a guy in a dress that the rest of the movie isn’t even about her, which is probably the widest Gap in the history of movies.
The Ticking Clock is one of the most celebrated of all plot devices, but The Gap is sometimes overlooked, which is a shame. Take Alien for instance, a brilliant motion picture which, brilliance notwithstanding, not only takes its sweet time announcing a protagonist (you would be forgiven for thinking it’s Tom Skerrit for the first half of the movie) but, until the goddamn thing bursts out of John Hurt’s chest, The Gap between what the protagonist expects to happen and what actually does doesn’t seem that wide to me. The team is called to a desolate planet to investigate a distress call, and nobody wants to do it, because they all expect to find something horrible. Which, indeed, is what happens. The Gap comes later, when they think they’ve figured out what the nature of the thing they’ve found is, figuring which turns out to be dreadfully, dreadfully inaccurate.
One way to successfully install a Gap in your screenplay is to have a good idea about who your protagonist is, and a good idea of where you want him to end up, and then look at that protagonist and that ending and see if there’s a way to tweak it so that the protagonist is expecting anything other than where he’s going to end up. If Richard Kimble came home to find his wife being murdered by a one-armed man, and immediately thought “I’ll bet my best friend Pharmaceutical Industry Guy is behind this!” he wouldn’t have much of a Gap. And if Clarice Starling was asked by Jack Crawford to go interview Hannibal Lecter and thought “Aha! I’m going to hijack this case from my superior and kick this guy’s ass!” her character wouldn’t have anywhere to go. And if Rob had just gone ahead and told Beth he loved her that day in Coney Island, he probably could have saved everybody a great deal of trouble.
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.)
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?
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!
Screenwriting 101 — The Treatment
Okay. So:
*You have a cool idea for a movie
*You know who the protagonist is and what the protagonist wants and who is in the protagonist’s way
*You’ve sketched out a basic act structure
*You’ve expanded upon that sketch and written your outline.
Now the work begins: it is time to write a treatment.
In my experience, this is the point where screenplays are won or lost. Almost anyone can have, and has had, a cool idea for a movie. A dog accidentally gets issued a credit card — there, I just had one myself!
And a similar number of people could sketch out a basic three act structure for that movie: Act I, the dog gets the credit card and goes hog-wild, buying all kinds of things, Act II, the dog’s bills come due, and he finds he must get a job in order to pay for all the things he bought, Act III, the dog, through his experience, learns that he was happier not having a credit card after all.
Putting together an outline starts to get a little more difficult, but the treatment is where the rubber hits the road.
Basically, a treatment is a prose version of your screenplay, your screenplay, in a way, told as a short story.
You may ask, hey wait, if I was any damn good at prose, what the hell would I be doing writing a screenplay? If I could freakin’ write prose, I’d be freakin’ Raymond Carver, I wouldn’t be scraping around trying to write a screenplay! And I understand your pain, for I have felt it myself.
Okay then, let’s not think of it as prose, let’s think of it this way: you’ve just seen a really cool movie, and you can’t wait to tell me about it.
The movie’s just let out and you’re totally buzzed about it and you meet up with me at a good restaurant afterward and you have to tell me about the movie and get it all out before the food comes. Go!
“There’s this guy, Rob, and he lives in New York, and he’s got a job working for some big-deal corporate thing, and he’s all psyched because he just got transferred to Japan, and he can’t wait to go, but guess what? There’s this girl, Beth, and she’s got this totally awesome apartment on Columbus Circle that belongs to her dad, and Rob has been friends with her off and on for a long time but now he’s, like, totally fallen in love with her, but he decides he can’t really tell her that, because, right, he’s about to leave for Japan forever. So he’s conflicted about that, and then the night before he leaves, all his cool friends get together and throw him a surprise party, and Beth is there, but she’s with some other guy, some douche we don’t know, and all his other friends are there, and his best friend is, like, shooting the whole party with Rob’s video camera, so Rob can’t, like, say anything to Beth, even though he really wants to, because he’s leaving the next day and everyone wants to say goodbye and his dorky best friend Hud is shooting everything with this video camera. And get this — the whole movie? is shown from the point-of-view of Hud, through Rob’s video camera. So it’s this really cool cinema-verite kind of thing, we pick up random pieces of behavior, and we see Hud is trying to put the make on this girl Marlene, and he’s really not doing his job very well, and it’s totally funny and awesome and everything, because Hud’s, like, taping over this tape that Rob made about his one date with Beth, so like he unknowingly is, like, being a total dick. And anyway, Beth leaves the party with the douche and Rob gets really upset and everyone’s concerned and Rob’s brother Jason or somebody tells him he absolutely has to go after Beth, and then you know what happens? A GIANT MONSTER SHOWS UP AND STARTS BLOWING STUFF UP!!”
There. The above paragraph is, in essence, a treatment for the first 20 minutes of Cloverfield. I, personally, would not hand this in to a producer for consideration, but BELIEVE ME, I’VE READ WORSE.
Now, look at that paragraph again. It’s not great prose, it’s barely prose at all, but it describes the plot with a kind of propulsive energy and sense of movement, and what’s more, it does it in a language that gets across the 21st-century, internet-generation sensibility (or at least my 46-year-old’s interpretation of same). And that’s all a treatment really has to do. It has to tell the story, the whole story, and get across the general feeling of the movie. If you were writing the treatment for There Will Be Blood, it would probably be more like this:
“There’s a landscape. A harsh, unforgiving landscape. Rocks. Dirt. Punishing sun. Texas. Or Hell. And there’s a hole in that landscape. A wound. And deep in that wound, silent but for the steady pound of his pick, there is a man. Filthy, strong, mustachioed. Deep in a wound in the Earth, the man slams his pick, a tool of destiny, against the flinty walls of this hole, this grave he has prematurely dug in order to bury his soul. Sparks fly from the rocks, each one a symbol of the life of man, which flares only for an instant before being forever snuffed out.”
And so on.
Again, while the treatment should be readable, the most important thing about it is that it gets across your story points in a voice that gets across the feeling of the movie. The hard part is that it has to get across all the story, scene by scene, all the way through, with no “and then there’s this cool action set-piece I’ll figure out later” thrown in.
Now, what’s the point of this exercise? Why not just write the goddamn screenplay? Wouldn’t that just take less time?
Well, perhaps. But if you’re anything like me, what you will have at the end of your process is a screenplay no one will want to read. Because you haven’t worked out the story ahead of time as a treatment.
The point of all this pre-work work is to iron out all your plot points, character arcs and whatnot so that, when you sit down to write your screenplay, you’ve already done all the work and you can enjoy the process of writing.
Some people, I guess, can just sit down at their computer and open up Final Draft and just go ahead and start in writing their screenplay, and “feel” where it should go next, and those people can allow themselves to wander and surprise themselves and come up with something new and startling and original and amazing, something they wouldn’t have come up with if they had sat down ahead of time to think things out.
Two things:
1. I am not one of those writers.
If I start a screenplay working like that, what happens is I have a great idea for an opening sequence, then I get to page 25 or so and I realize that the great opening sequence isn’t going to work because it contradicts something that happens later in the act, but I’m loath to go back and kill my great opening sequence because I loved it so dearly when I was writing it and it turned out so nice and, well, what if I just typed up some brilliant bullshit to cover up the fact that I started without knowing where I was going?
2. I find that if I have done the difficult work of ironing out my story before I write my screenplay, I am able, once I sit down to do that, to do that creative thing, where I take chances and just “let ideas come” and “fool around” with the ideas and so forth. Once I have the tracks laid and nailed in place, I find that I can make the train engine fancy or plain or asymetrical or goofy and know that it will still get to the station on time.
There is no set length. I’ve read treatments as short as two pages and as long as 42. The ones that are two pages long, I’ve found, favor sensation over logic and leave out a lot of crucial stuff. (My favorite sentence in a treatment ever, written by a very successful writer/director, for a project that didn’t happen, was “And did I mention the radioactive sharks?” I guess you had to be there.)
Screenwriting 101: the Outline
So you have a cool idea for a movie. Congratulations! Now all you have to do is figure out how to turn that idea into a screenplay.
What a lot of people do once they have a cool idea for a movie is sit down at their computers and type FADE IN:… And then they sit there for a few minutes staring at the blank screen until email, eBay or their blogs call them away. The flashing cursor on the blank screen is one of the most powerful inducements to go do something else with your time ever created.
(For a complete list of things one can do instead of writing a screenplay, see me after class.)
Here’s the answer to your anxiety of the blank screen: go back to lesson 1: All Writing Is Rewriting. Don’t try to write the whole screenplay in one go, write it in incremental steps. You rewrite as you go along.
Start with the cool idea. Don’t worry about making it artful, just worry about making it clear.
Here’s a cool idea: a man’s wife is murdered, and he is accused of the crime.
So, you write that down. Nothing else, just that. And maybe that’s your work for the day.
And just keep that file open on your desktop. Call it MURDER GUY or something.
Don’t worry about making it a big hit screenplay yet, just worry about getting ideas down on paper.
Ideas come to you over the days: the man accused of the crime is a surgeon. The actual man responsible for the crime has a prosthetic arm. There’s a spectacular bus crash. There’s a showdown at a dam. There’s a chase through a hotel laundry. So forth.
You write down all those ideas as they occur to you. In no particular order. Maybe you’ll use all of them, maybe you won’t. Carry a little notebook in your pocket so you can jot them down as they occur to you. I ride my bike around Santa Monica in order to think and can often be seen stopped in the middle of a parking lot, jotting little things down in my little trustynotebook.
And the cool thing about computers is they don’t care what order you write stuff down in, they’ll let you painlessly organize it later.
Okay. So you’ve got your cool idea for a movie, and you know who your protagonist is and what he wants. Congratulations! You’ve completed the most important part of writing a screenplay.
Now: who will be working against your protagonist? Well, there’s the guy who really killed the doctor’s wife, and there’s a US marshal who is out to get the doctor whether he’s innocent or not, and there’s the guy who hired the guy who killed the doctor’s wife, and there’s everybody else in the world who thinks the doctor is guilty and should be in jail. That’s a formidable array of adversaries and you’re well on the way to writing a big hit blockbuster.
Okay. So you’ve got a protagonist with a very strong want and a set of strong antagonists to oppose him. Here is where you sit down and rough out an outline.
Shouldn’t be more than a few lines. If you know who your protagonist is and what he wants, it shouldn’t be too hard to figure out a basic three-act structure for his story.
(In case you haven’t guessed, I’ve chosen for my outline model The Fugitive, Jeb Stuart and David Twohy’s masterful 1993 thriller.)
So let’s say that Act I is the doctor’s wife’s murder, the doctor’s trial and incarceration and his miraculous escape from that. That’s some freakin’ first act! You take a wealthy, successful man, kill his wife, take away all his money, his reputation, his freedom and damn near his life, all in the first 40 minutes of the movie. This is what we in the business call a “reversal of fortune,” and it’s one of the story tricks that help make hit movies.
Okay, so you just write down:
ACT I: Dr. Kimble’s wife is murdered, he is accused, arrested, tried, convicted, sent to prison, but somehow escapes.
So, all of Act I’s energy flows in one direction: Making Dr. Kimble a fugitive of justice. We could call this little 40-minute movie “Dr. Kimble Becomes A Fugitive.”
Now then, if you’ve seen The Fugitive recently, you know what happens next. Dr. Kimble runs for a few minutes, but then he realizes that he cannot run forever, and in fact, he has something he absolutely must do that will require him going back to his life and sneaking around. What must he do? He actually announces it at the end of Act I: “Find That Man!” he remembers telling someone, and so he, and the narrative, literally do a 180 and head in the opposite direction, and all of Act II, the next 40 minutes of the movie, are another expertly paced little narrative called “Dr. Kimble Finds The One-Armed Man.” Every scene is about Dr. Kimble’s pursuit of the One-Armed Man, every roadblock is there to stand in his way of Finding The One-Armed Man.
But all you need to write down for now is: ACT I: Dr. Kimble Becomes A Fugitive, ACT II: Dr. Kimble Finds The One-Armed Man.
What’s left? What’s left is Dr. Kimble Finds The Man Responsible For His Wife’s Death. And all of Act III of The Fugitive, every single scene, is dedicated to Dr. Kimble’s step-by-step figuring out who is The Man Responsible For His Wife’s Death.
So that’s just three sentences, but it is, honest to God, the bulk of the work of writing a screenplay. The problem, of course, is knowing what those three sentences are. Once you do, everything else can begin to fall into place.
Once you have those three sentences, then you can start filling in your empty spaces. Don’t open your screenwriting program, you’re not there quite yet. Just concentrate on the next step. Take your time, there’s no rush. Keep jotting things down as they occur to you.
The next step is figuring out your broad strokes. How do you begin to figure out your broad strokes? You go back to your beginning: who your protagonist and what does he want?
Who is responsible for Dr. Kimble’s wife’s murder? Well, Dr. Kimble is a wealthy surgeon — it’s probably someone in the medical profession. Who would stand to lose so much that they would sanction a murder to keep their secret? Probably someone in the pharmaceutical business. How is Dr. Kimble going to find the one-armed man? Well, he’s a doctor, he would understand something about the manufacture and distribution of prosthetic limbs, or at least he would know how to gain access to hospital records.
You see? By simply knowing who your protagonist is and what he wants, everything else begins to fall into place. Who is the US marshal pursuing Dr. Kimble? Well, if Dr. Kimble is single-minded in his goal, so should the US marshal. If Dr. Kimble is filled with moral outrage regarding his wife’s death, well, let’s make the marshal morally abstentious — make it that he literally doesn’t care if the doctor is guilty or not. That makes him a formidable adversary and will most likely win the actor who plays the character an Oscar.
Everything the protagonist does, everyone he meets, everyone who’s against him, everyone who helps him, should be, in some way, related to who he is and what he wants. This relationship can be literal, consonant, assonant, thematic or opposite, but the more you link every possible thing in the script to the protagonist and his goal the stronger your script will eventually be.
But we’re still not ready yet. What you need to do first is build your three-sentence act description into a three-page outline, a document that will give you a rough idea of the order of your scenes. This document should be very loose and informal — don’t worry about sentence structure or wording or anything like that, no one is ever going to see this document except you.
Break each act down into smaller sequences:
ACT I: Dr. Kimble’s wife is murdered, Dr. Kimble is brought in for questioning, Dr. Kimble is suspected of murder, Dr. Kimble is arrested, Dr. Kimble is tried, Dr. Kimble is convicted, Dr. Kimble is sentenced, Dr. Kimble is put on a bus and sent to prison, the bus is involved in a spectacular crash with a train, Dr. Kimble escapes and becomes a fugitive.
There, that’s ten narrative beats, that’s a goodly number for an act. It’s still just the broad strokes. And you do that for the other two acts as well. And you can try to work in the the cool beat ideas you’ve had. The bus crash — hey, maybe that’s how Dr. Kimble gets out of having to go to prison. The showdown at the dam, maybe that’s the scene when Dr. Kimble first meets his chief antagonist. The chase through the laundry, maybe that’s the final struggle between Dr. Kimble and his adversary. So forth.
The point of all this is that you don’t want to sit down and sweat through forty pages of screenplay and then suddenly realize you’ve painted yourself into a corner. Because if you sit down and sweat out forty pages of screenplay before you realize you’ve painted yourself into a corner, the temptation will be to try to come up with some absurd piece of dramaturgy that will miraculously allow you to move on and not have to go back and fix the first forty pages of your screenplay. The end result will be that, instead of spending a little time at the beginning of the process thinking out your outline, you will find yourself at the end of the process with a screenplay that doesn’t work.
You’re still not ready to start yet. Next, The Treatment.