The 3rd Act

Tips For Tuesday - Grab a CUP

2012-01-31T06:38:00.000-08:00

One of the biggest challenges in screenwriting is revealing character to the audience. It’s much easier in a novel. The narrator can simply tell the reader all about the character, including their deepest, darkest secrets. A screenwriter has no such capability, short of the use of voice-over, and one should avoid using voice-over if it’s only employed to reveal character. I’ll talk about voice-over in another post, but suffice it to say that it’s always best when it has a primary purpose other than revealing character.

Fortunately for the screenwriter, there are a number of ways to reveal character in a screenplay. However, without question, the best and truest revealer of character is “action”. You have no doubt heard some form of the advice that “action reveals character” or “character is action”. All true. But for me, that advice simply doesn’t go deep enough.

Here’s why: it is not just any action that reveals character. For instance, if I hold the door open to let somebody into the Dunkin Donuts before me, does that mean I’m a great guy? Hell, Adolph Hitler probably held the door open for somebody at some point. Case closed.

No, we have to go back a few steps to trace the action to see of it is character revealing. To me, an action cannot be character revealing unless it is put in motion by conflict. There must be some form of conflict facing the character before any action can reveal character. Let me give you the evolution to help you see how this unfolds.

What does "conflict" always create? Pressure. What does "pressure" almost always lead to? Choice. What does "choice" force to happen? Action! It’s that action that almost always reveals character. To me, instead of “action reveals character” think of it this way: “choice under pressure reveals character”. It has to because choice almost always forces an action. For those who love mnemonic devices, think CUP.

Back to the Dunkin Donuts example. If I approach the store with no conflict or pressure spurring me on, my holding the door for someone else tells you nothing more than perhaps I’m in no hurry that day and maybe in a good mood.

However, if there’s a crazed gunman firing an AK-47 in the parking lot and the Dunkin Donuts is the nearest form of shelter, that’s a form of conflict. And if there are a number of people in that lot who want to avoid getting ripped apart in the crossfire, then it’s certainly creates pressure. And as I get closer to the door and safety, it forces me to make a choice: cut off someone else who wants to live or let them in the store first. The action of allowing them to enter before me reveals something about my character, does it not?

Now if you add in some story element about the gunman’s relationship with me, such as I’m the target, that makes it even more character revealing. Throw in a bit about the person I’m allowing to enter before me, such as I hate them because they slept with my wife... well you get the point.

For a better (and more serious example) than mine, go back and watch the third act of Casablanca and see how Rick “acts” when he is under pressure. Those actions reveal his true character and, in the process, make him one of the most heroic and sympathetic characters in film history.

As I said in the beginning, the screenwriter has a number of different ways to reveal “character”. Even words. But as your mother always told you: actions speak louder than words. So if you really want to let your reader know about your character’s true “character”, force them to "grab a cup" and make a choice under pressure.

Tips For Tuesday - Sweet Sixteen

2012-01-24T06:30:00.000-08:00

In this post I want to talk some more about dialogue.

Writing dialogue is an art. An acquired one, in my view. Few writers are born with the talent, the ear or the innate ability to write great movie dialogue. It takes years of practice. Which means years of writing. More than one script. And more than one draft, as I preached in my last post.

One of the problems I often see from new screenwriters is the over-writing of dialogue. Put another way, there’s simply too much of it. One of the principal functions of dialogue is to carry information. Beginners see this as the only function of dialogue.

I’ve seem numerous instances where the writer will have a character saying multiple ideas in the same dialogue exchange. Often they’ll ask and answer their own question. It’s clear that they’re trying to tell their story through dialogue, filling in back story or advancing the action in the most obvious and awkward manner.

When a reader doing coverage on your script picks it up, they will leaf through it to see if your description is short, three lines or less. However, they’ll also do the same with your dialogue. Just like when they see dense blocks of description, if they see multiple lines of dialogue, they’re going to peg you as a newbie.

I said before that “movie speak” is an exaggerated form of “real speak”. If you eavesdrop on conversations, you’ll see that people just don’t talk like that. In real life, we ask a question and wait for an answer. We offer an idea or thought or notion and another person responds in some manner to what we’ve just said. We don’t tell someone our life story when they ask us what we had for dinner last night.

To help you learn how to write great dialogue, watch a film written by someone like William Goldman or Susannah Grant or Scott Frank. What you’ll invariably find is that their dialogue is short. Often spoken in incomplete sentences. They won’t use proper grammar. Characters will often finish the thoughts of others. And, of course, they will never be “on-the-nose”.

I once read somewhere that after sixteen words, a listener begins to tune out the speaker. I wish I could remember the source of that quote, but I recall enough to know that it wasn’t a rule of screenwriting. Nevertheless, I think it’s a great one to employ when you write dialogue. Remember: screenwriting is saying the most in the fewest words. That includes your dialogue. If you live by that sixteen word standard, you’ll force yourself to use fewer words to make your story point. And that will get you noticed as a writer of good dialogue.

Now whenever I tell a beginning screenwriter about keeping their dialogue short, they almost always bring up the famous scene in Good Will Hunting where Will is being interviewed by the NSA and he goes on for about five minutes explaining why he doesn’t want to work there. Terrific scene, but it makes my point, not theirs. The scene is memorable because it runs against all other movie dialogue, even the dialogue in that film.

Want further proof? Google the most famous lines in movie history. Notice how short they are. Then go back and watch the films those lines come from and notice also how those lines come in an exchange and not some long solioquy. You may remember the NSA scene from Good Will Hunting, but undoubtedly the most quoted dialogue from the film begins with “Do you like apples?” Will then waits for the affirmative response and continues with “Well, I got her number. How do you like them apples?” All together, fifteen words. Right in the sweet spot.

Obviously, sticking strictly to the sixteen word rule would be foolish. There may be times in your story when a character has to speak more than sixteen words in a single dialogue exchange. You may also create a character who speaks non-stop, not waiting to hear what others have to say. Fine. Go for it. Just don’t do it often. Not if you’re hoping someday to write one of those memorable movie lines.

Tips For Tuesday - The Nose Knows

2012-01-17T04:14:00.000-08:00

In this post I want to talk a bit about dialogue. Obviously, when it comes to screenwriting, the subject of dialogue requires more than a 700 word blog tip. That’s why I am specifically limiting today’s advice to re-writing and dialogue.

You may recall that when I spoke about writing your first draft, I said that your dialogue would be rough. “Bad” is the word I used. And that’s just a fact of life. You don’t fully know your characters yet. You don’t have your story down completely. Plus, it’s likely that you’ll race through your scenes to get everything down, and racing is what often leads to bad dialogue.

Just accept this as fact. It happens to the best of screenwriters. But having accepted that, you must then be sure to use your re-writes - all of them - to improve that dialogue.

In my experience, there are two ways in which your first draft dialogue will suffer. First, your initial dialogue is more likely than not to be on-the-nose. If this is an unfamiliar term to you, it simply means that the characters are saying exactly what they’re thinking and feeling in the most straightforward manner. There’s no subtlety or nuance. What you hear is what you get.

The problem with this? Most of us don’t do this in our daily lives. It’s not how we talk. We phrase things in a less-direct manner, leaving whoever is listening to figure out what we’re really saying. Think of any conversation you may have had with your boss in a serious setting. Or your spouse. On the other hand, if you want an example of on-the-nose dialogue, watch a soap opera or two. It won’t take you long to hear the difference between that dialogue and, say, The Social Network.

I’ve heard it said that “movie speak” is an exaggerated version of “real speak”. I believe that to be true. Therefore, you should avoid on-the-nose dialogue whenever possible in your script. That means that when you re-write your first draft, and each successive draft, examine each line of dialogue to see if there is a way for you to say the same thing in a more interesting and less-obvious manner.

This will take some time and get easier as you get to know your characters and story better. But let me say once more that you should look at every single line of dialogue. That doesn’t mean you will have to change every line. Some you will have gotten right the first time. Other times, dialogue actually should be direct. Nevertheless, look at each line to be sure of your choice.

The second area of concern involves your characters. One of the most common mistakes I see from new writers is that all the characters in their script sound the same. And guess who they sound like? Yup. The writer.

If you want to separate yourself as a writer, this is something you must master. Your characters should all have distinct voices. Ever notice how your friends are all a little different in how they speak? How they have their own favorite expressions and language? The same should hold true with respect to "movie speak". They say you should be able to cover the character’s name above the dialogue and be able to tell who’s talking simply by reading the dialogue. Now that’s probably a bit of an exaggeration, but it’s still something to strive for.

Again, this is something you should examine in your re-writes. Look at each character’s lines and make sure that they are not only consistent with that character, but also different enough from the other characters so that they have their own “voice”. Fortunately, this part of dialogue will improve with each re-write, as you get to know your characters better and begin to "hear" their voices.

I should note that you are also likely to get better at writing dialogue in your first draft as you get to be a more accomplished writer. You’ll be less likely to write something on-the-nose the first time since your ear for good dialogue will have improved.

By the same token, with experience, you are more likely to have a good grip on who your characters are before you write that first draft, so that giving them a distinctive voice will almost come naturally, even that early in the process.

In my next post, I'll offer up another tip with respect to dialogue. Hint: it's a number thing

Tips For Tuesday - More Sausage

2012-01-10T04:35:00.000-08:00

In my previous post, I wrote about the three stages of screenwriting. In this one, I want to focus on the third of those stages – namely, re-writing.

I think that for most screenwriters, this is probably an individual thing. I’m not certain that it is something that can even be taught. The best I can offer is an approach I’ve used and one that I think might be beneficial to try.

Let me say at the outset that once you finish that first draft, you will never again have “fresh eyes” with respect to your script. The closest you’ll ever come to that is reading it for the first time after that first draft has been completed. And that is something you should take maximum advantage of.

To get the most out of that one opportunity, I recommend that you put that first draft aside for at least two weeks after its completion. Longer if you can. Don’t even think about it. Go off and do something else entirely for whatever period of time that is.

Then, when you’re ready, shut the blinds, turn off the phone, hang up the do-not-disturb sign and sit down and read that draft straight through in one sitting. Treat it like you’re reading someone else’s script.

When you’re through, take out a pad of paper and pen and write down everything that comes to mind. Don’t take notes as you go. It will impede the flow of the read. Do it after. Trust me, you’ll have plenty to write about and you won’t forget anything important.

The very next day, repeat the process. Only this time, have that pen and paper with you as you read. Takes notes along the way. Anything that you didn’t write down the day before, you will catch here, even the smallest of things.

The next day, compare those notes and priortize the changes you think you have to make. Prepare a plan for re-writing your script. Make a list. Just as when you prepared before writing the first draft, do an outline. Draw a timeline for your script. Lay out the structure, complete with turning points and the midpoint. Look at your story laid out in linear fashion.

Be sure also that you have laid out a question at the end of the first act that is to be answered in the third. Examine your third act in its entirety and make sure that you have hit each element. Make sure that the final battle has a clear outcome and that the outcome answers the question you raised in the first act. (Take a look at my book The Third Act – Writing a Great Ending For Your Screenplay for help with this.)

When you’ve completed that re-write, repeat this process. And continue to do it until you have only minimal notes after reading your most recent draft. That may take six or seven tries.

At that point, it will be time to turn over your script to a trusted reader. I recommend that you find three. These need to be completely honest and knowledgeable folks. Not your mom. Compare the notes you get back from them. You don’t have to change everything they suggest. You’ll know which notes ring true and which seem like they can be dismissed. Caution though – if you get the same note from all three, alarm bells should ring and you need to take action.

Repeat the whole process all over again after incorporating those notes from your readers. When you have done so and are satisfied with your latest draft, that’s when you may want to consider getting a script consult and/or purchase coverage. I’ll speak about that in a later episode/draft.

One of the biggest improvements you will make from first draft to last will be with your dialogue. That is to be expected. First drafts produce bad dialogue. That’s just how it works, unless you are Aaron Sorkin or William Goldman. I’ll talk more about dialogue and what you should aim for in the next post.

Tips For Tuesday - Making the Sausage

2012-01-03T04:18:00.000-08:00

In this post I want to talk to you about the process of screenwriting. The sausage-making if you will.

I believe that most beginning screenwriters and perhaps even some experienced ones tend to look at writing a script as a singular thing. And when you look back after finishing it, that may seem to be the case. After all, you’ve written a "script" not "scripts". It’s not plural. There’s just one of them, right? However, when you set out to write, you would be far better served to think of screenwriting as something that happens in three distinct stages.

The first stage of the process is “preparing to write”. That’s that early part where you take your idea and begin to decide upon your characters and your important story beats and even some of your individual scenes. Some folks call this outlining. Fine. Whatever you call it, I believe it is absolutely essential to prepare extensively before writing your first draft. Unlike a novel, where the writer can literally begin with an idea and just start writing, a screenplay has to be planned. With my legal background, I liken it to a lawyer preparing for a big trial. No self-respecting lawyer goes to trial without preparing. Extensively.

By comparison, if you take the novelist’s approach, I can almost guarantee that you’ll hit an impenetrable wall somewhere around page forty. Your story will stop dead. Think of it like driving across the country. You don’t just get in the car and point it east or west and step on the gas. You pick a route, with stops along the way. You may alter the route or decide upon different stops, but at least you begin with a map and plan.

This isn’t a sales pitch, but if you have trouble with this stage of the writing process, I have a workbook that I developed over my eleven years of teaching screenwriting at Boston College that might help. It contains all the exercises you need to help take you from your idea to story to writing the first draft. You can find more about it on the sidebar to the right.

In my own writing process, this preparation stage can last anywhere from weeks to months. How do you know you’re ready to move on? Simply put, you have answered all the questions and can’t think of anything else to ponder. You’re raring to plunge ahead. You should have no fear of hitting a wall since your map is clearly laid out, although with plenty of room to make adjustments as you go.

The second stage then is writing the first draft of the screenplay. Here is where you take that map or outline and start writing your scenes. If you’ve done the first stage properly, you should be able to plow through it pretty fast. I’ve done so in as little as ten days. Two to three weeks is normal. Depending on your own personal schedule and responsibilities, it may take longer.

The third stage is what follows and, in my opinion, it’s the place where all the best writing happens. That is “the rewriting” process. Beginners are often so excited at finishing their first draft that they think they’re all done. In fact, they're far from it. The number one mistake new writers make is showing their script to a decision-maker before it is ready. And I can assure you that after the first draft, it isn’t ready. It isn’t even ready after two or three rewrites.

You should know that professional writers NEVER show their first draft to anyone – even their spouse. That first draft is just a starting point. It’s rough. Oh, it’s got all the characters and story beats, but it’s nowhere near as good as it will eventually be. Re-writing is hard work. But rest assured, it is the work that will make your script better.

In terms of overall time one should spend on each stage, I’d break it down like this:

(1) Prep: 25%

(2) Writing the first draft: 15%

(3) Re-writing: 60%

This may seem out-of-whack to you, but I can assure you that if you follow this method you will write a script that has the best chance to sell or get you noticed by the people who matter. If you stop after stage two, or scrimp on stage three, you’ll fail to get the most out of your idea. I guarantee it.

So how many re-writes should you do? How do you even start? We’ll talk about that in my next post.

Tips For Tuesday - Somebody Wants Something

2011-12-27T10:25:00.000-08:00

In this post, I want to continue our discussion of the starting point of your script – the idea.

In my previous post, I talked about how to measure the strength of your idea. Namely, should you invest the time and effort to pursue that idea and turn it into a screenplay.

Now I want to talk about how to think of and frame that idea so as to attract the attention of a studio and, by extension, an audience.

In doing so, I want to emphasize that I am talking about a commerical idea. One that will be told in three acts, following the classic myth structure. If you want to write the next Source Code, by all means do so. I’ll be first in line to see it. Source Code was one of my favorite films of 2011. But in this post I’m limiting the evaluation of the idea to classic three act stories.

When you come up with your idea, see if you can frame it so that it fits into this paradigm: “somebody wants something badly and goes after it against great odds”.

That is a simple description of what all great three-act stories have in common. Eleven words that sum it up nicely.

Think about it. “Somebody”. A single main character (protagonist). As in the classic myth “hero”.

“Wants something”. Has a desire.

“Badly”. A strong desire.

“And goes after it”. Takes action.

“Against great odds”. Meets resistance. Bigtime.

It also contains all three acts.

Act 1: “Somebody wants something badly”. The setup

Act 2: “and goes after it against great odds”. Conflict.

Act 3: implied. They either get it or not. Resolution

It has all that you need for a classic myth story. Person. Desire. Thing. Urgency. Action. Conflict.

Whatever your idea, you would be best served if you can express it along the lines of that paradigm. Once you can do so, that then becomes your log line.

To help you with this, take some of the bigger grossing three act films of the past few years and see if you can express their “idea” in that fashion. Think The King’s Speech. Think True Grit. Think any of the Toy Story films. Animated films especially follow this expression of the idea. (Think Up. Or Finding Nemo. )

Most writers tend to come up with ideas that are situational. For example, an asteroid is racing toward earth and it must be destroyed before civilization is wiped out. However, there must be a main character who is chosen to complete the difficult task. Go back and look at Armageddon and see if you can frame the idea by using Bruce Willis’ character in the logline. (Which you should easily be able to do. Probably why Armageddon did better than Deep Impact which had the same idea behind it.)

If your idea is similarly situational, you then must decide upon and develop your main character so that you can express it to fit the paradigm. Once you can comfortably do so, you will be on your way to writing a more commercially viable screenplay. In other words, think “somebody” at the start.

Tips For Tuesday - First Day, First Show

2011-12-20T06:00:00.000-08:00

Screenwriting is both an art and a craft. Interestingly, one can show incredible proficiency at the craft and still fail to succeed on a professional level. Why is that?

You might think I would answer that you have failed at the “art” portion. And to some degree that may be true. Plenty of screenplays fail because they lack artistry. Art to me simply implies a personal, unique approach to craft. However, one can write with both proficiency and a unique style and still fail to sell their script (though they may get hired to write a script on open assignment).

I think most screenplays fail not because of craft or art. They fail because the “idea” isn’t good enough or commercial enough for a studio to invest $80-100 million dollars in it. Today in Hollywood, the idea is king.

So how do you come up with a “good idea” for a movie?

I wish I knew.

One thing I can tell you is how to evaluate the idea before you start investing time and effort into writng it. For years, I instructed my students to write the movie “they would go to see on the day it opened, first show.”

Think about that for a second. It implies that you cannot wait to see it. It’s that unique and good and worth getting off your couch for. Surely, you have gone to see movies on opening day. You probably have gone to the first showing in some instances. Why? Something about that film – most likely the idea behind it – appealed to you more than others.

Now it may just be that you like Tom Hanks. Or Johnny Depp. Or whomever. But surely you’ve seen bombs that those actors have headlined.

No, I think it is idea that brings in the crowds in most instances.

So how do you know your idea will do that? Well, first, it has to do it for you. Unless you are a crazy person who has a love for collecting Hummels and thinks that someone searching for a rare Hummel is spine-tingling stuff, you’re probably like most of the movie-going crowd. If you really like your idea, so will they.

You also have to like it enough that you are willing to spend the next six months or so (depending on what’s going on in the rest of your life) working on that idea, turning it into a story and then a screenplay. You have to stick with it through thick and thin. If you get bored with it early on, it stands no chance.

I hear screenwriting teachers and gurus say to imagine the poster. It’s not bad advice. If you can picture the poster for your film idea, that’s certainly a head start. But it’s not the whole shebang. I can picture the poster for the Hummel hunter, but I doubt I’d ever want to see the movie.

No, there has to be something in the idea that stirs your insides. Makes you want to explore the characters within that story.

So is that all there is to it? Hardly. That’s just where it starts.

Unfortunately, I don’t know where to tell you to go looking for that “idea”. It’s floating around out there. Or more likely, in there – meaning inside you. What’s going to make it come out is anybody’s guess. I only know that sitting in a room and trying to think of an idea for a movie is about the worst way to come up with one. Ideas strike at the strangest times and in the strangest ways. You simply have to be on the lookout for it. Then write it down as soon as possible before it escapes you.

In the next post, I’ll tell you what the best ideas for commercial films all have in common and why.

What Went Wrong

2011-12-17T06:24:00.000-08:00

Let me start by saying that I’m a Jason Reitman fan. He took a hard-to-like main character with an even harder-to-like job and made a fine film with Thank You For Smoking. He followed that up with a personal favorite of mine in Juno, transforming Diablo Cody’s script into a Best Picture nominee. He did slip up a bit with Up in the Air (read my take here), but it was still a noble effort.

This Christmas he and Cody have reunited for Young Adult. I wish they hadn’t.

What went wrong? Like the Tin Man, this film has no heart. Not even a smidgen.

As professional a performance as Charlize Theron gives, it is truly uncomfortable to watch. Her character has not a single redeeming trait. She is oblivious to the feelings of others, even as she realizes that she is incapable of any herself. It goes on to the point of tedium to watch her abuse and mistreat former classmates and her own family. She even looks at a baby like it’s a horned toad. OK, I got it. The expression "less is more" came to mind by about the thirty minute mark.

Now I’m not one of those people who thinks every movie should feature a main character we can “root for”. (The Godfather and Scarface did OK with anti-heroes.) At the same time, I also don’t think that watching a film should induce suicidal thoughts in the viewer.

At the second act plot point of Young Adult, I actually thought we were getting the moment where we realize why Mavis is a sociopath. I was almost to the point of sympathy and empathy. But it didn’t last. Instead, Mavis wakes up the next morning somewhere where she shouldn’t be, after doing something we know she regrets, and turns right back into Cruella DeVil. Oh yeah, and we are left with a huge unresolved subplot in the process.

And, by the way, the bit of back story that is supposed to "explain" why she is the way she is, doesn't do so. Her reaction to that factoid - or Buddy's maybe - might have done it. In other words, who broke up with who and why? But we never get that reveal. Kinda important.

I don’t know what Reitman and Cody were trying to accomplish with this. I can understand not wanting to make another “chick flick”. But Juno wasn’t that. Neither was Bridesmaids. And I didn’t want to check into a mental health facility at the end of either of those. Sadly, unlike both of those films, I think this main character and her story will prove to be an audience repellent.

Tips For Tuesday - Don't Be a Birthday Girl

2011-12-13T06:00:00.000-08:00

In this post I want to talk about one of the most important things you need to establish in the beginning of your script.

I’m talking about tone.

What is it? I’ve never heard or read a satisfactory definition with respect to screenwriting. All I can do is tell you that tone and genre are inextricably linked. They’re not exactly the same, simply because there can be different shades of tone in the same genre. But you can’t talk about tone without talking about genre. The best way I can describe tone is to say that it the manner in which genre is expressed.

For example, if you are writing a comedy, you obviously don’t want your writing to be somber and serious. This applies both to the description and dialogue. By the same token, if you are writing a drama, you don’t want your tone to be light and comical.

To me there are two important requirements with respect to tone. First, you must establish it in the first act. As I suggested in an earlier post, it's best to do it in your opening scene. It’s what the reader sees first. Remember, readers doing coverage on your script don’t know what your genre is when they pick up your screenplay. The title may give them some idea, but that isn’t always the case. So it’s imperative for you to let them know early on what type of story you’re telling. The best place to do that is in your first ten pages.

The second requirement carries this notion a bit further. You have to be consistent with your tone. This means both in the first ten pages as well as throughout the screenplay. If you set the proper tone for your genre in your opening but then go on to switch to something inconsistent with that tone, you’ll confuse the reader. As I always say, it’s death to your script if you confuse the reader.

Consistency throughout the script does not mean that you can’t ever deviate. For instance, in just about every drama, there are light moments. Laughs even. Think of The King’s Speech or The Social Network. I guarantee you laughed a time or two in each of those films. And yet neither of those could be categorized as comedies. However, what you want to avoid is going overboard with the laughs taking over a drama or pathos taking over a comedy.

I can’t give you many examples of films where this happened, for the simple reason that professional film makers know this and don’t make this mistake. Which is why you shouldn’t either.

The best example I can come up with is a 2001 British film entitled Birthday Girl starring Nicole Kidman and Ben Chaplin (whatever happened to him?). Birthday Girl is the story of a lonely guy who orders a Russian mail order bride. It starts out quite comical and light. Then somewhere around tha halfway mark, it gets more serious and dark. Finally, it turns into a thriller. It’s almost unsettling to watch, which is probably why it didn’t even make half its budget back at the box office.

So remember, set your tone early and stay consistent throughout. An occasional change-up is acceptable, just don’t turn into a Birthday Girl.

Tips For Tuesday - Not So Ordinary

2011-12-06T06:00:00.000-08:00

In this episode/post I want to talk about another structural element that isn’t discussed very much but one that I think is crucial to setting up your story.

I spoke before about the inciting incident and the irrevocable nature of that event in the main character’s life. And I advised that it should come between 10-18 minutes into the film these days. So what happens before that?

I have heard this period of the story referred to as the main character’s “ordinary world”. In other words, the writer should show the reader what the main character’s “world” is like before the inciting incident takes place. And that’s correct.

The reason for this is simple. If the inciting incident is supposed to change the main character’s life irrevocably, then we better have a pretty good idea of why that is. And the only way to do that is to have some understanding of what their life is like before that event happens.

For example, to continue using Rocky, we see him boxing a bum in a dingy athletic club, trying unsuccessfully to woo Adrian, failing as a leg-breaker for Gazzo, being ridiculed by Gazzo’s driver, living by himself in squallor, having his locker taken away by Mickey and having his advice rejected by the neighborhood girl who might just grow up with a bad reputation. Wow. A guy like this being offered a chance to fight against the reigning world champ at the biggest event (the bi-centennial) on New Year’s eve? We immediately see how this “upsets the apple cart” in this guy’s life.

Similarly, forcing Will Hunting to meet with a therapist and the MIT math professor might not be so life-changing for an MIT student. For an MIT janitor hiding his genius? Big stuff.

Or consider Steve Carell’s character in The 40 Year Old Virgin before it’s revealed to his friends that he is a 40 year old virgin.

Now not every one of those ten to eighteen pages you will write before the inciting incident will feature your main character. After all, there are other things that have to be established in the first act. (I'll have more on that in another post.) However, even those scenes can be considered a reflection of your main character’s “world” before that inciting incident. So don’t feel as if you have to feature the main character in every scene before the inciting incident (though the actor playing that part would love you to).

Again, note with those examples I just gave how what happens in the main character’s life before the life-changing event makes it pretty clear just how difficult, if not impossible, it would be for the main character to ignore that event or try to live the same life after it happens.

One final note on this. I hate the use of the word “ordinary” in calling this part of the script the main character’s “ordinary world”. It implies that what you should show the reader is something ordinary. Again, in those examples I just gave, there is nothing “ordinary” about the lives of those characters. While it may be “ordinary” for them, as in status quo, it is not ordinary for you or me or the rest of the audience.

So perhaps it might be better to simply refer to this portion of the first act as the main character’s “life before”. No need to say “before what”. That will become crystal clear once you present the inciting incident.

What Went Wrong

2011-12-04T06:30:00.000-08:00

In a word? Nothing.

Oh, I could quibble about the long and overly expository voice-over at the beginning. Or the leisurely pace of the first act. Or maybe even the bad hair transplant on Robert Forster. But I’d be picking nits.

The Descendants in simply another winner from Alexander Payne (director and co-writer) and Jim Taylor (producer). Just like Election and Sideways, The Descendants is an adaption from a novel. And it proves to be great source material. In those previous two, Payne and Taylor took the best of the novel, trimmed what wouldn’t work well for a screen story, and in each made changes to the ending so as to make an already great story even better.

I didn’t read the novel on which The Descendants is based, but I suspect they performed similar magic with this. There is a pretty big subplot here involving Matt King’s family’s ownership of a huge parcel of prime Hawaiian real estate and its pending sale. It’s the kind of story line that could take up a huge chunk of pages in a novel and probably do so to the reader’s delight. However, in the film, it is featured just enough, and tied into the main plot almost perfectly, all of which indicates to me some more great choices by Payne and Taylor.

Of course, it helps to have George Clooney at the top of his game in this, playing a husband whose wife has been unfaithful to him at the most inopportune time (hard as that may be to imagine for most of the female audience). And the three actors playing King’s two daughters and the boyfriend of the oldest one all deliver the goods. In fact, Shailene Woodley almost steals the spotlight from Clooney. She’s a star. And despite the distraction of Forster’s hairline, he gives his usual pro performance as King’s angry father-in-law.

The ending may leave some feeling that there are a couple of unresolved sublots. I disagree. I think they are resolved just enough to satisfy, and the final wordless scene is pitch-perfect.

I don’t know what to tell aspiring writers to learn from this, since it is an adaptation and obviously has great source material. The best I can offer is to look at how those characters were written. Observe how little dialogue was needed to convey emotion and reveal character. Note also how what little dialogue was there was never on-the-nose and required us to interpret rather than just listen. And how even the smallest and subtlest of actions managed to give us a glimpse into the characters’ thoughts and feelings. When writing your own story, those are all good lessons to follow.

I know this post may run counter to the theme of this blog, but The Descendants simply gets it right.

Tips For Tuesday - Upsetting the Applecart

2011-11-29T04:48:00.000-08:00

There are a number of critical elements you need to have in a properly structured script. I talk about the importance of all of them in my workbook Idea to Story to Screenplay, which is a step by step guide to writing the first draft of your screenplay.

In this post, I want to talk about the most pivotal of those elements:the inciting incident. Simply put, without it, there is no movie. And placed in the wrong part of the script, your story falls apart.

First of all, for those unfamiliar with the term, the “inciting incident” is the event that occurs in the main character’s life (in the story) that changes everything. The term was coined by Robert McKee and he describes it as something that changes the main character’s life irrevocably. That means they can’t ignore it. It’s huge. They have to deal with it in some fashion. It will not simply go away.

Some examples? Think Rocky being offered the chance to fight Apollo Creed. Think Will Hunting being arrested and told that the only way he can avoid prison is to accept the court’s order to see a psychologist and work with the MIT math professor. Think Charlie Babbit’s father dying and Charlie learning that his father’s estate is going to go to the autistic brother that Charlie didn’t even know he had.

The inciting incident is why we watch the movie. If it doesn’t occur, there is no story. The main character just goes on with their life as before. Rocky continues to box in the dingy athletic club and work for Gazzo. Will continues to hang out with his friends in Southie and not pursue his genius.

Whatever your idea, the inciting incident has to be contained in there somewhere. If it isn’t, you must create it in order for your idea to be the basis for a three act film.

In addition, it as to come within a certain time in the script/film in today’s Hollywood. It goes without saying that it must come in the first act. In days gone by (Rocky), it could come late in a long first act. And even today there might be exceptions. However, the studios making commercial films today expect the inciting incident to take place no later than eighteen minutes into the film, which means eighteen pages into your script.

Notice I said “no later than”. Eighteen is the outer edge. Ten is the earliest, in my view. Most often these days, the inciting incident comes at around the twelve minute mark.

Now you may wonder what the big deal is with this timing. You say you write “art”. You aren’t restricted by rules. Great. Go ahead. You may be one of those writers who can pull that off.

However, you must be aware that audiences are accustomed to “receiving” the inciting incident somewhere between 10-18 minutes into a three act film. That’s just fact. They have been watching movies their entire life. Without even being aware of it, they’ve had their brains wired so as to “expect” a change in the story sometime in those eight minutes. That change is the inciting incident.

Again, if you have an idea for a film, that inciting incident is either already in your mind or else it is implied in the idea somewhere.

If the original idea for Rocky could be said to be something like “a down-on-his-luck club fighter is given the chance to show who he is when offered a title fight with the world heavyweight champ”, then the “offering” is the inciting incident.

On the other hand, if the idea for Good Will Hunting is “a South Boston genius is forced to confront his troubled past and his own intellect in order to escape the trap of living an unfulfilled life”, then the inciting incident had to be created – namely the arrest resulting in him being “forced to confront”.

Whatever your idea, make sure you’re clear on the inciting incident and make it strong enough that the main character cannot ignore it and go on living as before. Make it “upset the apple cart”. Then make sure you place that scene somewhere between page ten and page eighteen so as to “hook” the reader into your story.

Tips For Tuesday - Save the Pet Shop

2011-11-22T06:00:00.000-08:00

In this post, I want to talk a bit about your opening scene.

Beginning screenwriters are often under the mistaken impression that they can or should open their screenplay in some leisurely fashion. When asked about it, they often claim they want to “build up to” their character or the plot or both.

Wrong-o.

Here’s the thing. This is a movie. Time is of the essence. We don’t want to waste time. Or film. In a novel, it’s just words on a page. We can ease our way into the story. Not in a movie. Never.

Your goal should be to bring your reader (and hopefully the viewer) immediately into the story. If possible, you also want to give them more than a glimpse of your main character. No pussyfooting around. Drop them right smack dab into the story.

For example, in the opening scene of Rocky, our main character is fighting in a smoky, dingy athletic club against some lowly opponent. They clutch and grab and box inartfully for awhile, until Rocky gets headbutted and unleashes a furious barrage of blows on the poor guy, knocking him halfway out of the ring. After Rock climbs out of the ropes, he bums a cigarette from a spectator. Then, as he walks away with his smoke, another spectator we don’t see calls him a “bum”. Scene over.

Now think of what this does. We know immediately what the movie is about – boxing – and we get a real picture of what Rocky is like at the beginning of the story. Let’s just say he’s not at the top of the boxing ranks. He shows very little in the way of technique, but at the same time he can really punch. Oh, and he's hardly at the peak of his conditioning either, as evidenced by that cigarette. Perfect scene choice to start the film.

Soon after the opening scene we see Rocky at the pet store trying to flirt with Adrian. It’s a nice scene. More leisurely. Also character revealing. They could have opened the film with that scene. But how would that have played? Think they made the right choice?

As I often advise, readers are jaded. They read tons of scripts. They’re just looking for reasons to give your script a “pass”. In fact, they’re often told by their superiors to stop reading as soon as they’re bored or have determined that they don’t think the writer can write or that the screenplay is any good. So why start your script with a slow boring scene? It’s the same as when you go to the theater to watch a movie isn’t it? You’re looking to be grabbed. Taken into the story. You wait through all those previews for it to start. I doubt you’re looking for some la-di-dah scene when it does finally open.

And it doesn’t have to mean you have to start with an action sequence either.

A great example of a non-action opening scene is in Little Miss Sunshine. Before introducing us to all those great characters in the family, Michael Arndt chooses to open on eight year old Olive. She’s wearing over-sized eyeglasses and watching a tape of the Miss America Pageant, mimicing the reaction of the winner, playing it over and over again. Something about the contrast between the adult beauty contest winner on the TV and the little girl who is hardly beauty pageant material is intriguing. And it both draws us in and lets us know what this movie is going to be about. No need to show Olive at school or on the playground. Instead - boom – right into story.

So remember: when it comes to your opening scene, write something compelling, something that “takes us into the story”, something that “grabs” the reader. There’s still room in your first act for that “pet shop” scene. Just don’t open with it.

(Reminder: all of the Tips For Tuesday columns are available as podcasts at the iTunes store. Just search under my name or "screenwriting".)

What Went Wrong

2011-11-17T10:19:00.000-08:00

I actually liked Hanna. I just didn’t love it.

When the previews came out, I thought it looked really interesting. Certainly an intriguing idea. But I believe it could have been better. Here’s why.

In my opinion, there was a big second act problem. As most of you know, the second act is when the main character struggles in their effort to obtain their goal. Which should be established in the first act, leaving us with a question in our mind at the end of that act: will they get it?

In Hanna, it seemed to me that Hanna’s goal at the end of the first act was to kill Marissa (Cate Blanchett) and then reunite with her “father” in Berlin. The problem? She thought she took care of the hard part of that two-part goal when she killed the woman she thought was Marissa. Except we know she didn’t. That left her only with the secondary goal of reuniting with her father in Berlin.

Now one could say that her goal at the end of the second act was to escape the “bad men” who were after her following what she thought was the successful completion of the hard part of her task.

Are you beginning to see the problem?

Yes, getting away from the “bad men” is a viable goal, except that we in the audience see the uncompleted goal that she doesn’t. Audiences prefer stories where they and the main character are on the same page when it comes to what their goal happens to be.

In the preview I saw, they showed the woman pretending to be Marissa talking to Hanna and we knew she was pretending to be Marissa. And one could easily surmise that Hanna killed her. I know I did. Except I was also certain that Hanna would have known it was not her. Her “father” was pretty damn thorough about preparing Hanna for the task. Wouldn’t he have shown her a picture of Marissa? I know that Hanna gave the “test” regarding how they had met, but wouldn’t he also have given her some other way of identifying her physically?

I think the story would have been improved greatly had Hanna figured out that it was the wrong woman and killed her anyway in order to make her escape. Maybe it was just me, but Hanna’s encountering and traveling with the tourist family seemed to lack the necessary urgency required in a second act. Had Hanna been aware that Marissa was still alive and desperate to kill her and her “father”, I think there would have been more at stake.

Except for the mistaken belief on Hanna’s part, the first and third acts were good. It was in the second where this one went wrong.

Tips For Tuesday - Description, part 3

2011-11-15T06:00:00.000-08:00

We have already talked about what doesn’t belong in description. And we explored the “look” on the page, meaning the effective use of “white space”.

Today I want to talk about some other tips that will help you write your description so as to both maximize that white space and make the description read like watching a film.

(1) For starters, unlike in narrative fiction, which is most often written in the past tense, description is written in present tense. It is immediate. And it describes both the setting and the actions that will be taking place on the screen. This is something that even beginning writers pick up on early in their efforts to write screenplays. However, I can tell you that I often see scripts where the writer will lapse into the past tense on occasion. I can only guess that it is habit from writing in other forms, but you must make sure not to do it.

(2) Forget everything you learned in freshman English in college. Your composition class won’t be your friend when it comes to writing description. You want to write short sentences. In fact, incomplete sentences are not only OK, they are often the best form of description. Drop the “subject” from the old saw of “subject, verb, predicate”. Instead of “John picks up the gun”, write “Picks up the gun”. Of course, this assumes you have described an action involving John just prior to that. In which case, writing John’s name again (or the pronoun) when there is no other character who could be performing that action simply takes up space in description and slows down the script.

(3) The object in writing description these days is to say the most in the fewest words. Like haiku. To accomplish this, drop your adverbs and adjectives as well. Use “active” verbs to promote the feeing of action and eliminate the need for adverbs. Every word you save in description helps to keep the reader’s eyes moving and the script to feel like a “moving picture”.

(4) Avoid the use of “is” with the action. Don’t say “Mary is racing down the aisle”. Instead, write “Mary races down the aisle”. I’m guessing you can tell the difference in the two examples, particularly when you read them. Search out all of your description for instances where you use “is ___ing” and replace them with the single word/verb.

(5) Avoid the use of “we see”. For instance, writers will often write something like: “we see a car pull into the driveway”. Just say: “a car pulls into the driveway”. Again, you are going to find exceptions to this. Even credited writers use the “we see” from time to time. It’s not a death knell to your script. However, it is frowned upon for writers who have yet to establish themselves. First off, it is implied that we will “see” whatever it is that you are describing. That is the whole point of description. Second, as I said earlier, you want to use the fewest words in description while getting the same point across.

(6) Do not write out every single facial expression or movement of your characters. In most instances, it is unnecessary and impedes the flow of “the read”. Only describe an action or expression if it is essential to the point of the scene or to helping convey some aspect of the character. Furthermore, you want to leave room for the actors to act. Telling them every single action is intruding on their talent and function.

If you do all of those things, your description will have a rhythm to it, which will make your script feel like a “quick read”. It will take some effort to get a handle on this, but the more you work at it, the more it will pay off for you.

Tips For Tuesday - Description, part 2

2011-11-08T06:00:00.000-08:00

“Whitespace”.

Sounds like some sort of science fiction thing, doesn’t it? Or maybe an ‘80s big hair band. But no, I’m referring to the amount of “white” that shows on the pages of your screenplay.

This is one of those areas where screenwriting has changed quite a bit in the last thirty years or so. Certainly in the past fifty.

If you go back and read older screenplays, you’ll likely see description written in dense blocks consisting of six, seven or even more lines of description. Apart from the dialogue, you won’t see a lot of white space in those scripts. In that way, the description will resemble more traditional narrative fiction.

Over the past three decades, the trend among writers has been to show more white space in their description. Ten years ago, I used to advise writers not to have blocks of description longer than five lines. A few years ago I revised that to four. Now I tell them three should be the limit.

Now you may wonder what the big deal is. Well, I think it is partially a matter of looks. However, I think more than that, it has to do with the simple fact that the screenplay is a written version of the movie, and readers and writers alike have discovered that there is a psychological effect that occurs when reading description set out in smaller paragraphs.

You may have heard readers and professionals talk about a script being a “quick read”. In part, what they are referring to is the use of white space by the writer.

I believe that for some reason, the human eye moves quicker over short paragraphs than long paragraphs. Makes sense. Over the course of a number pages written in that style, there is the cumulative feeling of movement as one reads. That is particularly effective when it comes to a screenplay, since the hope is for that screenplay to become a “movie” which is short for moving pictures.

Now I have had writers argue with me about this. They question whether it makes any difference if there is one six line paragraph versus two three line paragraphs. My simple answer is that it does. Furthermore, I advise that they can still write all the same words, just separate them into two or more paragraphs. There is nothing to lose in doing that, unless you are worried about page count, in which case if it’s that close that separating paragraphs is going to put your script over 120 pages, you’re probably overwriting to begin with.

There are two other things that increased white space accomplishes besides making for a fast read. The first is that you can, without saying so, almost force the director to shoot what you want in your scenes. As you may already know, you can’t write shots into your screenplay. Shots are the purview of the director. If you write them, you give yourself away as an amateur. But by separating your description into small paragraphs, particularly a single line paragraph, the shot is implied, hopefully leading the director to shoot what you envision.

The other thing white space can accomplish is something we refer to as “writing down the page”. This is particularly useful in writing action. Here you write even shorter paragraphs, again one line. And you use even shorter sentences. This technique accentuates the quickness of the read, forcing the reader’s eyes to move even more rapidly “down the page”. Once more, even though one is reading, it almost feels like watching the action.

Again there are always exceptions. You may come across screenplays that haven’t utilized this approach of using “whitespace”. But those are just that – exceptions.

If you want your writing to feel current and professional, my simple advice is to break up your longer paragraphs into shorter ones, no longer than three lines. When you give your finished draft to a trusted adviser to read before sending it off to a decision-maker, ask them how it read. I have no doubt they'll respond favorably, which should be all the convincing you need to adopt this method of writing description.

(Note that all of these tips are now available as podcasts at the itunes store. Just search under my name.)

What Went Wrong

2011-11-06T04:25:00.000-08:00

In a word: tone.

I wanted to like this one. I really did. I love Ben Stiller. I love Eddie Murphy. I like the rest of the cast. Brett Ratner does good stuff. The previews worked. Hell, they got me to the theater on the opening day, early showing. But it just didn’t work.

To me, the big problem was that they were tackling a pretty serious subject. People losing their life savings ala Bernie Madoff is not exactly The Hangover. As a result, the first act of this film was long and pretty damn serious. The laughs came later and were surprisingly few and far between.

When you look at a cast that includes Stiller, Murphy and Broderick, the expectations are that you will laugh. A lot. Nothing brings a film down faster than not meeting audience expectation. And tone and expectations go hand in hand.

I think the film makers probably had to walk a thin line in deciding how to approach this material. In the end, they couldn’t commit fully to comedy, for a variety of reasons. And it is showing at the box office, where the weekend numbers are not good,

The lesson here is: be careful with your tone. Choose and commit. Don’t waffle.

Tips For Tuesday - Description, part 1

2011-11-01T06:00:00.000-07:00

In this next series of tips, I’m going to talk to you about writing “description”.

I realize that a lot of these might seem elementary for some of you, but my experience has told me that even writers with a few scripts under their belts slip up from time to time. That applies to what I’m going to talk about today.

First of all, description is one of the three elements of a scene. The first is the scene heading (often called a slug line). And the second is dialogue, which is the only one of those three elements not required in every written scene.

So what is “description”? Simply put, description is what the audience will see and hear as it is taking place on the screen. This post is about what doesn’t belong in description as much as what does.

For instance, I often see writers put history or back story in their description. You know, they’ll describe their character and tell us that he was the captain of the football team and dated a cheerleader back in high school. That’s nice, except it doesn’t belong in description. Why? Because we can’t see or hear that. It’s back story. It happened to the character before the start of the film. It’s not taking place on the screen right now.

If that part of a character’s history is essential to the story you’re telling, it’s going to have to come out some other way. You can’t just write it in your description. In a future post, we can talk about how to get back story in front of the audience. But for now, know that you can’t simply write it in description. If you do, you'll give yourself away as an amateur.

Another mistake writers sometimes make is writing in description what a character is thinking. Again, no! Remember: description is only what we can see or hear taking place on the screen. We can’t see or hear what people are thinking. Therefore, it doesn’t belong in description.

That's not to say that what a character is thinking isn’t important. It just means that you can’t simply tell us in description. Telling the reader a character’s thoughts is perfectly fine in a novel. In fact, that’s what that form of storytelling is best suited for - narrative and internal dialogue, meaning thoughts. Film is moving pictures. A story told in images and action.

As with back story, I will tell you in a future episode how you can show an audience what your character is thinking without simply writing it in description. Until then, just know that you can’t write thoughts into your description.

Similarly, you cannot tell us in description what a character feels. Once more, that is internal. We can’t see it or hear it. It’s inside and therefore can’t be shown on the screen.

Or can it?

There’s a difference between thoughts and feelings in this regard. Namely, you can’t tell us that your character is “sad”. That’s a feeling. However, you can tell us that your character “looks sad”. That is perfectly acceptable. Why? Because any competent actor can show a “feeling”.

The same doesn’t apply to thoughts. There isn’t a way for an actor to “play” a thought. They can look to be deep in thought, but you can’t write what that thought is because thoughts aren’t as easily expressed facially or physically. There are methods by which you can convey what a character is thinking. But they go beyond simply “looking” a particular thought.

In sum, when writing description, only tell us what can be seen or heard and what is taking place in the moment. Forget history, thoughts and internal dialogue.

(Please note that all of these tips are available as podcasts at the itunes store. Just search under my name.)

Tips For Tuesday - Names, part 3

2011-10-25T06:48:00.000-07:00

So far, we’ve talked about making your character names distinctive and memorable. We’ve also discussed which characters should actually have a name versus just a generic label.

In this post, I want to talk about the actual names and how they appear on the page and how they might eventually sound on the screen should you be fortunate enough to sell your script and get it made.

Let’s talk about that first part first because this is one of those seemingly small things that writers don’t give much thought to but that actually can make a big difference in how a reader will respond to their script.

I’ll begin by giving you a recent example from a script I recently consulted on. It featured some pretty good writing and some great characters. But there was one big problem. Seven of those characters had a name that began with the letter “B”. Because of that, I found myself confused as to which character was which. Think about this: Bobby. Brian. Billy. Bradley. Buster. Ben. Bart. Imagine if you had to remember all those characters and which was which. Oh, and they’re all men.

About every five pages, I had to go back in the script to figure out who was who. That is not good! Like a shark, a reader has to keep moving forward.

Here’s my simple bit of advice to avoid this: don’t have two or more characters with names that begin with the same letter! I told you before that you want your character names to be distinctive. Well, if they begin with the same letter, you run the risk of making them that much more difficult to distinguish. Remember, you don’t want to confuse the reader or make their job harder than it is.

Think of it this way. There are twenty six letters in the alphabet. There shouldn’t be twenty six named characters with speaking parts in your script. Again, there are always exceptions. If so, you’ll have to give a few of them names that start with the same letter. And admittedly there aren’t many Xaviers or Zachs you can use. If you absolutely have to have characters with names beginning with the same letter, then make one name short and the other long. Have them sound different and look different on the page, the idea being to help the reader have some way to help distinghuish them in their mind.

A corollary to this is to avoid names that sound alike or look alike, even if they start with a different letter. Don’t have a Stan and Fran. Or a Tim and a Jim. Again, the potential for confusing the reader is too great and there are plenty of names out there to choose from. And, as I mentioned before, should your script sell and get made, you don’t want the names to SOUND the same.

This is a simple rule and, thankfully, there’s a simple fix. Go through your script and list the names. If you have more than one beginning with the same first letter, change one of them! As I told you in the first episode on this topic, there are plenty of places where you can find names. So make life easier for the next person who reads your script. It may just help move your script up the ladder.

Tips For Tuesday - Names, part 2

2011-10-18T04:40:00.000-07:00

This is the second in a series of three on the often underappreciated topic of character names.

In the previous post, I wrote about using interesting and memorable names for your characters, in particular, your main character. In this one, I want to talk about which characters you give names to.

I once read a bit of advice from a screenwriting guru who said that every character in the screenplay deserves a name. I think his line of reasoning was something like: “hey, they’re people too”.

Bullshit. Trust me on this, if you do that, you’re going to piss off the reader and “dilute” your story.

Why is that? Simple. Every time you give a character a name in your screenplay, you are – implicitly – asking the reader to remember them. Now you may not intend to do so, but trust me it will happen. The reader will store that name and look for them later on in the script. If they don’t find them, they may confuse them with another character or characters. You don’t want that. Confusion can kill a script.

A corollary of this is that every time you create a character – and name them – you are creating a potential subplot. Why is that? Well, subplots arise out of characters and their relationships with the main character and/or other characters. If you don’t want to create a subplot, then don’t name the character.

What’s the risk in creating a potential subplot you might ask? Well, there are several. If the reader thinks a subplot is developing, that's just another thing they have to keep in mind, which will not serve your story if you have no intent to explore it. And since you don’t intend to pursue that subplot, you won’t resolve it, leaving the reader feeling that there is a "loose end". I’ll talk more on subplots in another post, but for now remember their connection to naming characters.

So if you don’t name them, what do you do? Again, simple. If the character is – let’s say - a waiter, then simply call them “WAITER”. If they’re a cop, then call them “COP”. If you do so, the reader will understand immediately that they need not remember those characters.

So who gets names? I use a simple rule. If the character is going to appear in more than one scene, I’ll give them a name. An exception would be a recurring generic character, such as that waiter, assuming you aren’t establishing a subplot with them, in which case they should be named. Otherwise, if you’re sure the character isn’t going to be in more than one scene, then just give them that generic label name.

I also use another measure for naming that applies here. If the character speaks, they probably should be named – unless they only appear in one scene and have solely a generic purpose (i.e. “waiter”).

Is there a limit to how many named characters should appear in a script. Look, I don’t have any empirical data to base this on, but I believe that once you get over twenty characters who speak and appear in more than one scene, you’re getting dangerously close to the point where you’re testing the reader’s capacity for remembering your characters. That doesn’t mean you can never exceed twenty under any circumstances. It's just that you better write a heck of a script and make sure your names are distinctive enough for the reader to remember and differentiate them.

In my next post I'm going to talk about one final aspect to choosing character names. It’s one that’s often overlooked and a problem I see all the time, even with veteran writers.

What Went Wrong

2011-10-15T13:48:00.000-07:00

The problem? In two words: the ending.

(As always, be warned that there are spoilers ahead.)

This movie raises the question I often ask, which is: is it possible to love a film and not like the ending?

I really liked this film all the way until Steve (Ryan Gosling) was on the set waiting to talk about the big news that his boss “the governor” had secured the Democratic nomination prior to the Ohio primary. When the film faded to black without him uttering a word, my feelings about this film faded as well.

To be more specific, this film vioIated William Goldman’s rule for endings, namely that they be “surprising and satisfying”.

I suppose that it was surprising that Steve had corrupted himself in the process of securing the top job in the governor’s campaign following the intern's death and his firing. However, that same transformation is what made the ending unsatisfying to me. That and Clooney’s failure to take a stand and make it clear that Steve had truly corrupted himself. (Of course, it was hardly gratifying that Molly, the intern who slept with both Steve and the governor, became the tragic victim of both men.)

Now you may disagree with my assessment of the outcome here, but I attended this film with someone who is both educated and intelligent. When it was over, they were actually convinced that Steve was going to go on in the interview and reveal the governor’s affair and the whole sordid process that had taken place. My friend wasn’t alone in this belief. As we left the theater, I heard others discussing “what was going to happen” as well, revealing similar disagreements among them.

Here’s why I think Steve was thoroughly corrupted and was not going to blow the whistle on the governor: simply put, to do so would mean the end of his career in politics. First of all, if he did reveal the affair and everything around it, the governor would no doubt lose the nomination. Senator Thompson, his chosen running mate, would get taken down in the crossfire as well. That would leave Senator Pullman as the eventual nominee, something Steve clearly didn’t want. Moreover, Steve would be admitting to criminal behavior (extortion), leaving him potentially at risk of prosecution, not to mention killing all of his career prospects. If he wanted to do all that, he could have done so with the recordings on the phone and not have gone through the whole deal between the governor and the running mate.

So why did Clooney choose not to have Steve speak at all and create the confusion that some had with this ending? Beats me. It’s the Up in the Air ending all over again. And that’s what sunk that film eventually at award time.

I believe that there was a perfect opportunity for Clooney to have Steve say something and settle the matter completely. It also would have been a nice bookend with the opening scene, where Steve, as a sound check, mutters the governor’s future speech without emotion. Except in that instance, while he may have appeared bored, we soon learned that he was completely sold on the governor as political savior.

At the end, had Steve spoken to the reporter without revealing any of the truth regarding Molly’s death, he would once again be speaking without emotion, only we would know for certain that he had become corrupt, just like Paul Zara (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and Tom Duffy (Paul Giamatti).

I believe that showing the naive and pretty intern coming to work on the campaign just prior to Steve sitting for the interview was meant to show the contrast between the Steve-before-Molly and the Steve at the end. But I’m not sure everyone got it. So why not just have Steve say a few meaningless words and settle the matter?

You may disagree, but for me, The Ides of March provides further proof that one can't truly love a film while disliking the ending.

Tips For Tuesday - Names, part 1

2011-10-11T03:36:00.000-07:00

This is the first in my new series of screenwriting tips to be featured here every Tuesday. They will also soon be available as podcasts at the iTunes store.

Today's tip is the first in a series of three about the often overlooked topic of character names.

What’s in a name? Everything. OK, a bit of an exaggeration. But when it comes to screenwriting, how you choose and present your character names can have a significant impact on how your screenplay is received.

Oftentimes I’ll read a script and the characters will have the most ordinary names imaginable. Joe, John, Mary, Susan...

Look, there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. People have those names. You probably know people with those names. Except you’re writing a script that you hope will convince a reader that you have talent. You want to make them keep reading. Above all, you want to impress them.

One way to do that is give some thought to the names you use. You want your script to be memorable. So why not help do that by giving your characters names that are memorable?

When it comes to choosing names, lots of writers get hung up on the sound of those names. And that's not a bad thought. Except it’s a long way until your script gets to the screen, if ever. I advise writers to make their names not only sound good, but look good on the page. After all, that name is going to be read first. It has to pass that test before it goes anywhere.

Now I’m not suggesting you go overboard here. I’ve had writers in the past come up with names that have some sort of derivation. You know, it’s Gaelic for “one who carries the world on his shoulders”. Forget that. Just take some time and effort to choose interesting names.

How? Well, there’s a couple of ways. Nicknames. We all like nicknames because they aren’t ordinary. And they’re memorable If you describe one of your characters as fat and you call him Sticks, the reader is likely to recall that.

Another trick is last names. You can give your character an ordinary first name coupled with a memorable last name. Then use the last name for the character in description and dialogue.

One of my favorite examples of this Harrison Ford’s cop’s name in Witness - John Book. John couldn’t be more ordinary. But Book isn’t, at least as a last name. Plus it seems to have a few associations with the character. Recall that Book is pitted against some corrupt cops. Compared to them , he goes “by the book”. Then again, he roughs up a suspect and beats up a guy when he is disguised as an Amishman. He doesn’t go by the book. And, of course, cops “book” suspects. On top of all that, Book is a strong sounding one-syllable name that the writers wisely chose to use in description and dialogue instead of “John”.

Notice I picked a main character in my example. This is where naming is most important. Again, you don’t want to go overboard with giving every character in the script an unusual or uncommon name. There may be story reasons why you would select a rather ordinary name for a secondary character. For similar reasons, you may want to give your main character an ordinary name. However, in that case I would advise you to give more uncommon names to the other important characters.

Where do you find names? I’ve heard of writers using all kinds of things. A book of baby names. The Baseball Encyclopedia. The phone book. Those are all fine. But I think we hear all kinds of names everyday in our lives. I recommend you keep a notebook handy and write down names you hear that grab your interest. Hey, if they grab your interest, they’ll do the same for a reader. When you start your script and you’re searching for names, you can open that book and look for ones that might fit your characters.

Next week we'll talk about another important aspect of character names, namely, who to name.

What Went Wrong

2011-09-24T04:47:00.000-07:00

This is the first in what will be a (semi) regular posting about movies I’ve seen that just don’t quite make it. And why.

Today’s subject will no doubt piss off a number a folks. I’m talking about Drive. Lots of buzz around this one, ever since its appearance on the festival market. I was looking forward to it. Looked cool. A getaway driver is inherently cool. Sadly, for me, Drive didn’t deliver.

For starters, I suspect there were some structural issues. Hard to diagnose those on one viewing, particularly when I like to just watch the damn movie the first time. But leaving that aside, the big problem for me - and I felt this as the movie unfolded – was the questionable motives and actions of almost every character in the film. Here are just a few examples (spoiler alert):

- in the opening sequence, the driver (Ryan Goslin’s character is given no name) cleverly drops off the getaway car in the LA Convention Center garage as the Clippers game ends, thus eluding the police who are hot on his trail. Except that he leaves the two robbers in the back with the dough, and we see the police entering the garage as the driver leaves. How does he get paid and why does he not say a word? Is he just happy driving and getting away? Please.

- Irene (Carey Mulligan) goes on date with the driver days before her convict husband is coming home after being released. Her kid is old enough to know what is going on. Indeed, he tells his father (off-screen) about it. No real repercussions.

-in the elevator of their apartment building, Irene and the driver descend along with a guy who is clearly there to kill both of them. What does the driver do? He kisses Irene long and hard. Takes his time. All after seeing the gun inside the assassin’s jacket.

-on the same subject, what does the assassin do while this is going on? He watches apparently. Pretty shitty assassin if you ask me. Here’s his chance, and he’s thrown by the kiss? Please.

-in the final battle, the driver agrees to meet with Bernie (Albert Brooks) in a restaurant. OK. Public place. Makes sense. But then he agrees to go out to the abandoned parking lot to give him the money which is in the trunk of his car. He knows he’s going to be killed. He tells Irene this a scene or two before. So why do it? Nothing prior to this shows him to be suicidal. I guess because she doesn’t agree to go away with him he just gives up. Really? And then he allows himself to be stabbed in the stomach and kills Bernie and then leaves the money in the parking lot? Right. I get it. He’s sacrificing himself to save Irene and her son. That’s the deal Bernie offers, informing him that the Philly mob will kill him eventually. Except the Philly mob has to know about Irene. Bernie made her part of the deal. So what happens when they don’t get their money (hey, he left it in the damn parking lot!)? How can he be sure they won’t touch her. It’s the freaking mob!

-continuing this muddled line of reasoning, the driver then gets in the car and drives away. OK. I get it. He’s the driver and the movie is called Drive. Deep. Real deep. Please. Don’t make a movie that purports to be “authentic and real” and then have people act inauthentic and unreal.

I really wanted to like this one, but all those questionable actions and motives just annoyed me. Sorry. The driver pretends to care about the kid, but is the kid better off with a dead father, a dead driver, no money and the Philly mob about to show up at any time? I guess to some it’s art. To me it’s just pretentious.

My Top Ten in '10

2011-01-11T06:29:00.000-08:00

It’s time once again to give my top ten list for the past year. The key word there is “my”. I’m not suggesting these are the ten best, by some objective standard, nor do I suggest you should agree. This is me and how I saw it. Or saw them, I should say. Without further ado...

1. The King’s Speech

How Tom Hooper managed to make a film about a member of the British royal family struggling with a speech impediment, and make that thrilling, remains a mystery to me. Except he did. I was literally on the edge of my seat for the last ten minutes. Simple story well-told. The hardest thing to do.

2. True Grit

I hated the Henry Hathaway 1969 version. Loved the novel, which I read back then, before John Wayne ruined my idea of Rooster Cogburn. Jeff Bridges and the Coens breathed life back into that wonderful book. A top ten Western of all time.

3. The Social Network

Hard to believe that all this Facebook hooey wasn’t even on anyone’s radar screen six or seven years ago. Harder still to believe that it would be fodder for a terrific film about how a Harvard student used the internet to make us all feel more connected when he himself had so much trouble making any kind of lasting connection with anyone who mattered.

4. The Fighter

Full of remarkable performances, this film shows how family can be your best friend and worst enemy. And how love can save the day.

5. Toy Story 3

Damn. I forgot how sad if it was to have to give away all those toys I had. Especially the battleship. I really liked my battleship.

6. The Town

Ben Affleck did an amazing job with Chuck Hogan’s novel. Three great set pieces that provide textbook examples of why we go to the movies in the first place.

7. Winter’s Bone

I love a movie that takes me somewhere I wouldn’t have any reason to go and makes me feel like I was actually there (and happy to get out alive). Jennifer Lawrence gets my vote for best actress.

8. The Kids Are Alright

So is this movie.

9. The American

Flawed, but a nice film about a lonely assassin. By the way, we don’t need any more films about assassins and how tough the job is. We get it. Let’s just retire that sub-genre with this one.

10. Kick-Ass

Ordinarily, this genre is not my cup of coffee, but I got a hoot out of this one. Maybe it was the foul language spewed by a ten year old girl. Maybe it was the deranged Nicolas Cage.

If you check with me next week, I might reorder those top three again. It was that close for me.

Also, you’ll notice that I left off Inception. Confession: I didn’t like it. Just didn’t buy the whole thing. Felt the same way about The Matrix when it came out. Both of those films felt to me like that scene in Animal House when Pinto (Tom Hulce) is smoking dope with the college prof played by Donald Sutherland and he says “so that means that our whole solar system could be like one tiny atom in the fingernail of some other giant being”. Just about that deep, philosophically-speaking.

2010-12-11T07:00:00.000-08:00

Screenwriting is hard.

That’s hardly a news flash. It doesn’t matter if it’s your first draft or thirteenth. It doesn’t matter if you haven’t sold a single script or have a list of credits as long as your arm. It’s hard. There’s a reason why Academy Award winning screenwriter Matt Damon chooses to act instead of write. Not that acting isn’t hard. It just isn’t as hard as writing.

Awhile ago, I wrote about how much more difficult it is to write screenplays today given that the prime movie-going demographic represents the most experienced “story receptors” in the history of mankind (see Story Receptors). Well, I was thinking the other day of something else makes it hard.

Every semester in my introductory screenwriting course we do a script-to-screen analysis of the film Witness. As we were watching it recently, it occurred to me how differently that story would have to be written today than it was just 27 years ago. At one point, I asked my class a simple question: how would this scene change for today’s screenwriter given the existence of cell phones and the internet? There was silence for a moment, then the answers started flying. The consensus was that entire scenes would have had to have changed. In which case, so would the story.

Go ahead. Give it a try yourself. Watch any movie from fifteen years ago or earlier. I’ll bet there are countless moments where you would be forced to question the writer’s choice back then had the technology been the same as today’s. Indeed, there are entire movie plot lines that can’t really be written today given our technology and how connected we all are. Looking for a lost love? Yeah, log onto Facebook, make a few keystrokes. That’s one short movie. Sleepless in Seattle? Apply Google and watch it change entirely.

Today’s writer has to not only consider technology when thinking about their movie’s premise, but has to take it into account in every scene along the way. Want to disappear these days? Good luck. There’s GPS in your cell phone. And just try negotiating today’s world without a credit card. Need cash and think you can do so without leaving a trail? When is the last time you asked a bank teller for a withdrawal from your account. Hell, when’s the last time you saw a bank teller. Everything has changed.

So what to do about this technology angle, beside whine? Well, for starters, recall that we have the most experienced story receptors in history ready to read your script and they will have iphones on their nightstand and Facebook open on their laptop and they will be thinking about technology while reading. So you best make sure that you thought of how Google, Facebook and cell phones might affect your scene and story choices.

Then again, you can look at this as an opportunity. We have technology today that even Blade Runner hadn’t envisioned. And that provides you with story possibilities that didn’t exist outside the sci-fi genre just fifteen years ago. So use it! Remember those cells phones and the internet when you write your rom-com or drama. Make them an essential part of your story.

Of course, remember also that in about fifteen years, that film you write today will look about as dated and quaint as Witness does now.

Setting a Different Tone

2010-08-26T06:58:00.000-07:00

I was switching channels on a rainy morning while on vacation and came across The Apartment on one of the HBO channels. I love The Apartment. It’s one of my all-time favorite movies. Even though I own the DVD and have seen it countless times, I watched from where I tuned in until the end.

If you don’t know about The Apartment, it was written and directed by the great Billy Wilder. That’s the Billy Wilder who also directed and wrote Some Like it Hot, Sunset Boulevard, Double Indemnity and The Fortune Cookie, to name just a few of his other incredible films.

The Apartment came out in 1960 and won an Academy Award for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay. Deservedly so. Given the subject matter, it was ahead of its time and, in my opinion, still holds up 50 years later. Of course, as with any movie from an earlier era, you have to watch it with the time period in mind and from that perspective.

However, what struck me this time was something I had never considered before. Namely, it appears to me that The Apartment contains all of the necessary beats of a romantic comedy, although it is most definitely not that. Most critics and scholars label The Apartment a “dramedy”, that hybrid genre that is clearly defined by that simple and succinct term.

I say that it meets the simple requirements of a romantic comedy because the main character C.C. Baxter (Jack Lemmon) wants Miss Kubelik (Shirley McLaine) and has to overcome a great big obstacle in order to get her: she happens to be sleeping with Baxter’s boss Mr. Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray) and doing so at Baxter’s apartment which he has agreed to let the executives at his insurance company use for their trysts, in exchange for a promotion.

Without giving away the rest of the story, Baxter and Miss Kubelik do end up together, just as in the vast majority of romantic comedies. And the movie is most certainly funny. So why isn’t it considered a “romantic comedy”? Good question.

I think the simple answer is “tone”. It’s not what happens or how it happens. It’s the tone with which all of that is delivered. “Tone” equals genre, or at least it helps us to determine it. In The Apartment, Wilder manages to give us both romance and comedy, without sacrificing the mordant tone he wants to convey.

You will probably agree that most romantic comedies made in the last twenty years or so have been less than classic. Certainly not classic the way The Apartment is a classic. And none have won an Academy Award, nor should they have.

Why is that? I think it is because in recent romantic comedies, there is too much emphasis on “comedy”, which most often translates into some sort of slapstick or goofball brand thereof. (See The Bounty Hunter. Actually don’t. Please. Don’t.) Those types of romantic comedies underestimate their audience. Something The Apartment never does. So why do I bring this up?

Simple. If you’re writing a romantic comedy that you hope to sell to Hollywood, you have quite a challenge before you. Hollywood has seen everything in that genre. They want to make them, but they’re afraid of making another box office dud, like most of those of the past 20 years. They buy few and make even fewer.

So let me make a suggestion for setting yours apart. Keep the same idea. Use all the same beats, if possible. Just change the “tone”. Make the characters have “real” feelings with “real” problems. Use pathos instead of slapstick to go along with your one-liners. For a primer on how to do that, just pop in a DVD of The Apartment and study the master Billy Wilder.

Hell No I Won't Go

2010-07-30T10:31:00.000-07:00

You know how it is. You want to go to the cineplex to see something, but you just never get around to it. Before long, you say to yourself: “I’ll just wait for the DVD”. This phenomenon is what is changing the movie business, making it harder for exhibitors (i.e. the theaters) to make money.

The reason is pretty simple. With the advent of big, high-def, flat-screen TVs, the movie-watching experience at home is becoming preferable to going to the theater. Think about it. Your own family room, your own bathroom, your own snacks (at a third of the price), clothing optional or at least flexible, pause-stop-rewind capability. What’s not to like? The NFL is already having the same concerns as the theaters, as attendance at games is becoming less attractive, for those same reasons.

This is also why you tend to see the kind of films that are being made these days. “Big” is the operative word. Theaters need to lure folks (mainly young ones) and the only way to do that is with “spectacle”. The exhibitors tell the distributors which is pretty much the same as telling the studios/producers/agents and the message becomes crystal clear. Hence, you get Iron Man and all the other big-budget, special-effect driven films. Dramas do get made. But not like they used to. TV has become the place to see “drama”. At home, of course.

I bring this all up because I recently watched two films I missed at the theater, one due to procrastination and the other by choice.

The first was Zombieland. I was drawn to this by two things: the previews and Woody Harrelson. I’m no big fan of zombie films. Seen too many. What’s new in that?

Well, there was something fresh and plenty to like about Zombieland. For starters, they didn’t waste much time on what made them zombies in the first place. Some throwaway line that I don’t even recall. It was more about killing the zombies and surviving. Liked that. Also loved the “rules” (for instance, The Double Tap). Abigail Breslin (Little Miss Sunshine) was great, too. And Woody was everything I expected.

On the negative side, what made it not-so-great was Jesse Eisnenberg. Hated him in Adventureland and he played essentially the same character in this. He is running the risk of becoming the new Michael Cera (I know, he’ll take that) in that he doesn’t “act” so much as “be himself” in every role. I’ll be interested to see what he does with an Aaron Sorkin script in the new Facebook movie. Will he be DeCaprio or Cera?

The other big downer to this film was the last half. Once they got to Bill Murray’s house, it became a different movie. Things got even worse at Playland. Overall, I enjoyed it, but it simply went off the rails at the end.

The second film is almost too painful to admit, but I also saw 2012. Yikes. I’m a sucker for a good disaster movie which is why I gave it a shot - at home of course. This was a disaster of a disaster movie. For the most part, they are all ludicrous. You have to swallow lots of (ahem) improbabilities to keep watching. However, this may have set the bar at a new low. Like Antarctica. Which at the end of this movie was probably in the Caribbean somewhere, although I stopped caring about continental shifts and other such things.

I always used to poke fun at how in every Seinfeld episode all of the characters would run into each other on the streets of Manhattan like it was Main Street in Nantucket. Hell, that was nothing compared to this film. The earth’s crust was shifting and they still managed to land a plane within walking distance of the “arks” over in China where John Cusack’s character was reunited with the scientist he met at Yellowstone National Park just days before! But that was only after Cusack’s character and his family managed to land a smaller plane in Denver (I think) where they ran into the Russian billionaire who previously employed Cusack as his limo driver!

I won’t go on except to say that the whole premise was that Earth was supposed to implode or disappear in 2012 according to the Mayans (and others apparently), and yet once the “ark” carrying Cusack and all his closest friends managed to swerve and avoid the north face of Mount Everest, the sun came out! Forget that whole thing about the center of the Earth boiling! Not happening! Somebody turned off the heat!

2012 is an example of the type of movies Hollywood thinks it has to bring to the theaters these days. Except that The Hangover did $100 million more in domestic box office. The lesson? Damned if I know. All I do know is that more people probably watched both at home than in the theaters. And that practice is unlikely to change anytime soon.

Coverage vs. Consulting

2010-04-04T05:32:00.000-07:00

On numerous occasions, I've been asked if there is any difference between "coverage" and a "script consult" and, if so, what that might be. As someone who does a fair amount of consulting (and no coverage), I can tell you that there is most definitely a distinction. Several, in fact. Many writers confuse the two, and I thought it might be high time to write an article about how they differ.

Before I became a screenwriter, professor and consultant, I was a practicing attorney and taught business law for ten years in the school of management at Boston College. To help explain one of the biggest differences between "coverage" and a "consult", it's helpful to look at some basic legal principles.

For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, "coverage" is sort of like a book report for a script. A reader reads the script and then writes a report - coverage - that includes a synopsis of the plot, analysis of the story/script, commercial potential of the project, grades for characters and dialogue and, finally, a verdict that results in either a "pass", "consider" or "recommend". The vast majority of scripts receive a pass. A small percentage (less than 10%) receive some form of "consider" and only a select few get a "recommend".

In the traditional circumstance, "coverage" comes about because the reader is hired by a studio, a producer or an agency to provide that coverage. And that's where the law comes in. The reader works for whoever hires him or her. In legal terms, they owe a contractual duty to that person. More to the point - and here's where part of the confusion arises - they owe no duty to the writer!

A reader providing coverage may offer suggested fixes for the script, but they do so only for the person who hires them, not for the writer. The fixes or comments are there for the producer or studio or agent so that they can decide if it might be worth pursuing the script and/or the writer. They are not meant to help the writer, unless the person paying for the coverage chooses to share it with them. In practice, writers almost never get to see the coverage on their script. However, if they do, it is important for them to remember that the reader providing the coverage is not working for them! Most times, readers don't even bother offering "fixes". Their "coverage" is (and should be) pure evaluation for a prospective buyer or representative.

On the other hand, a script consultant is almost always hired by the writer. Under those same contract law principles, the consultant owes the duty to the person paying them, in this case the writer. Any notes, comments, suggested fixes are solely for the writer to utilize to improve their script and/or their writing. The notes are not meant to be shown to any prospective buyer. In fact, it would be most unwise for a writer to do so. The consultant works for the writer and their duty is to help that writer write the best possible script with the hopes of selling it and/or getting future work for that writer. Along with that, the consultant can provide some of the same evaluation provided by a reader doing coverage. However, no prospective buyer or representative will see that, nor should they.

One of the reasons for the confusion about all of this is that there has been some cross-over lately involving both coverage and consulting.

In the case of the former, writers these days can "purchase" coverage from companies who, in some cases, use some of the same free-lance readers used by producers and agents. However, if done correctly, this coverage should be undertaken as if there is some fictional producer/studio/agent out there paying the reader. The coverage would then tell the writer what the reader would be telling that prospective buyer/representative who might have paid them to cover the script. Of course, the writer can use whatever suggested fixes are offered by the reader, but it is important to remember that the reader is not accustomed to providing fixes to writers. They are in the evaluation business, not the amelioration business. This is the case, despite the fact that it is the writer paying for the coverage. Best to think of it as a test run for your script, without consequences (i.e. a pass), and not much more.

Similarly, consultants are sometimes hired by studios, producers and even actors to provide notes on scripts. In those instances, the consultant's duty is owed to those who hire them, but in almost every case, those notes are going to be shared with the writers, in some form or fashion. That's why the consultant was hired, even though they are sometimes paid by the same entity that is paying the writer(s). As with the reader doing "paid coverage", it's important for the consultant in these circumstances to be consistent with what their customary role is when offering their services. In other words, they are in the amelioration business.

I think the matter has been further muddied by the fact that the companies offering "coverage services" often use terms like "analysis" and "consult", even though the people they hire to provide the services have more experience in providing coverage to buyers, as opposed to writers. Please note, I am not suggesting that those folks are unqualified or incapable of providing either analysis or amelioration. It's simply a blurring of the line between the two.

There is something else writers should consider when hiring a "coverage service". In nearly all circumstances, the writer does not choose the reader and, in fact, never even knows the identity of the person providing the coverage. Because of that, they have no idea of what their qualifications might be. Instead, they have to rely on the representations of the "coverage service" that the reader is an experienced analyst. As mentioned, these services often use the same readers who work on a free-lance basis for production companies and agencies and market that fact. However, in almost all instances, they choose not to reveal their names or qualifications to the reader.

Compare that to a script consultant who is likely to have been selected by the writer because of their reputation. Writers usually are referred to that consultant or have found them on their own via the internet or in ads in the screenwriting magazines. In both of those instances, the writer knows the consultant's qualifications and presumably hires them based upon them. Moreover, they know that the notes they ultimately receive will come from the person they hired.

This leads to the question that I am most often asked after I explain the differences between the two: when should a writer hire a coverage service versus a script consultant? My advice always is to hire a consultant first, if you can afford it. Use their expertise to get the script in the best shape possible. Then, before sending it out to decision makers, give it a test run with a coverage service. Of course, a writer is free to do either one alone or neither. However, if you do hire one or both, hopefully you will do so now with a clearer understanding of what you are paying for.

Upping the Anger

2010-01-02T07:59:00.001-08:00

I have never seen my wife angrier coming out of a theater.

We had just seen Jason Reitman’s Up In the Air and I had asked her what she thought. Big mistake. She went on about a fifteen minute tirade about how the ending ruined the film for her. Naturally, having written a book about such things, I asked her why that was.

She went on to explain her take on the film, which was that George Clooney’s Ryan Bingham had obviously changed over the course of the story, having gone from man-on-an-island to a reformed cad desirous of a loving and lasting relationship. The problem? As those of you who have seen the film are no doubt aware, Bingham does not “get the girl” and ends up back in first class on an American Airlines flight to some unknown destination. Here’s where the debate begins, I believe.

My wife says (and it’s hard to argue) that at the end of the film, she believes that Bingham has returned to his job of firing people on the road and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. The reason this angered her is that she feels that this behavior is inconsistent with his “change”. She felt that the “new” Bingham would never return to his old ways. He may have lost the girl he wanted, but there are plenty of fish in the sea. He could easily find another woman, knowing now what that feeling is like. I have to admit that I interpreted that ending in a different way.

To me, Bingham staring at the departure board just prior to the final shot/voiceover was an indication that he was going to follow the recommendation of his young colleague Natalie (the delightful Anna Kendrick) who said that she would use his astronomical number of frequent flier miles to see the world. She would do exactly what he appeared to be doing and peruse the board and select a random destination. I thought one could just as easily conclude that while Bingham was returning to his “home” on board a plane, he was doing so for an entirely different reason, maybe even using his travels to find a new girl.

My wife disagreed, arguing that Bingham’s boss Craig (Jason Bateman) told him he was returning him to the road and that Bingham didn’t decline the assignment or quit. Furthermore, she pointed out that he was wearing a suit, not a Tommy Bahama shirt, when he was staring at the departure board, letting us know that he was traveling on business. Both are excellent points and difficult to refute. However, I noted that Reitman also chose to include a very specific shot of Bingham letting go of the handle of his trusty carry-on bag as he stared at the board, which told me that he was “letting go” of his old life.

I can’t claim to be the authority on this. Other than Jason Reitman, who can? Perhaps that’s the point. At the very least, the ending is ambiguous. It is most certainly not a happy one, atypical of most romantic comedies, a category to which I don’t assign Up In the Air anyway.

My wife had another complaint, apart from the ending, and it’s one I tend to agree with. She saw the twist with Alex (Vera Farmiga) coming and did not buy it for a second. To her, it was a pure plot device and not in keeping with her character up to that point. She claimed that a woman with a husband and three kids at home might allow herself to have a fling on the road (say what?), but she would never spend the weekend at Bingham’s sister’s wedding and act as if she was falling in love with him, as she most definitely appeared to do. This is hard to argue with when you consider how Alex reacted to Bingham’s surprise visit to Chicago, telling him quite coldly that she thought he “understood” what kind of relationship they were having. When I add up the “facts” facing Bingham just before that happened, I have to admit that I would have drawn the same conclusion as him and would have taken the same action in flying to Chicago to profess my love for her.

In retrospect, that twist seems more of a “trick” to me than a naturally occurring consequence of all that preceded it. That doesn’t mean I didn’t admire it nor that I wouldn’t have written it that way myself. But my wife (as always) makes an excellent point.

Personally, I enjoyed Up In the Air, though not as much as Reitman’s two previous films (Thank You For Smoking and Juno). Not that anyone is asking, but I don’t think it’s deserving of a Best Picture Oscar, though I wouldn’t grab a pitchfork and a torch if it were to win.

If you have a different take (or the same) on the ending and/or the big twist, I’d love to hear from you, just as I would love a couple of hours with Reitman to talk about how he came to decide on both.

NOTE:

Jason Reitman was recently asked about the ending and gave this comment:

"For me, at the end of the movie, he's making a choice about where he wants to go for the rest of his life, and certainly he does have a rest of his life."

Reitman was actually responding to the rumor that Bingham might have cancer at the end, as in the book, though I think it helps clear up the debate as above.

To see the article, click here.

Becoming Adaptable

2009-12-06T07:08:00.001-08:00

If you’ve been following the marketplace in Hollywood, you know that this is just about the worst time for spec scripts in the last twenty years. To state it succinctly, specs just aren’t selling. We’re talking only a handful out of hundreds in the last several months.

What Hollywood is buying, if they’re buying anything these days, are projects with “underlying rights”, meaning books, plays, magazine articles and the like. Principal among those is the novel. Hollywood has always had a love affair with the novel. It has been their preferred story source for feature films since they were first made and for two very obvious reasons: they have a ready-made narrative and often, but not always, a built-in audience.

The downside to making movies out of novels is that the movie audience is often disappointed with the adaptation. The most common response we hear is “I liked the book better”. The best that film makers can hope for is that the film’s audience will like the film “as much as” the book. Only on the rarest of occasions will an audience prefer the film to the novel.

I bring this up because in my adaptation class at Boston College, we examine Cool Hand Luke. I’d venture to guess that the vast majority of people who have seen Cool Hand Luke don’t even know that it was based on a novel. Fewer still have ever read the book, and if they have, I can almost guarantee that they prefer the film. And by no small margin.

This is meant as no disrespect to Donn Pearce the author of the novel of the same name. But facts are facts. The hard cover for Cool Hand Luke sold 1,100 copies, and it was only published after it came out as a paperback that also sold poorly. According to Hollywood legend, the novel was discovered by director Stuart Rosenberg in a closeout bin in the Pickwick Bookstore in the mid 1960s. There was no built-in audience for Cool Hand Luke the film because there were almost no readers of Cool Hand Luke the novel, either before or after the film.

At the same time, almost everything brilliant that is in that AFI top 20 film is in Pearce’s novel. It is an iconic film, as popular today as ever. So how can that be? Simple. It has to do with the story-telling. Pearce, by his own admission, doesn’t think in linear fashion. He jumps around, and writes the same way in Cool Hand Luke. He also uses a narrator who isn’t the main character and tells it as a story within a story. To say that the novel is inaccessible is an understatement.

Rosenberg and screenwriter Frank Pierson, who co-wrote the script with Pearce, made several significant changes that helped to make the film superior to the novel. First, they did away with the narrator, thereby eliminating the cumbersome story-within-a-story device. Second, they open the film with the main character Luke, whereas the novel does not really introduce him until page 41 and he doesn’t even meet the rest of the bull gang until page 62. Finally, they reordered some of the other big events so that the story had less of an episodic feel. These improvements made all the difference. That and Paul Newman, of course.

You may wonder why I’m writing about this and what it might have to do with you the aspiring screenwriter. As it turns out, the adaptation of Cool Hand Luke may be something you can use as a template for your own screenwriting success.

In the past, I have strongly advised writers not to even dream of adapting a novel. I do so usually because they don’t have the rights to the material and wouldn’t be able to sell their script to anyone if they were foolish enough to try to adapt it. And that remains true today. Except that in those instances, they and I are usually talking about a popular novel, one that has sold many copies and, most likely, has already had the rights assigned to someone else.

However, not all the novels on the shelves of the bookstore and library have had their rights sold. Not by a longshot. And in this economy, especially with little or no competition for those rights, you may actually be able to option an over-looked novel for very little up-front money. You may even be able to negotiate a manageable “purchase” price upon selling the script, one that won’t make a producer or studio shy away from buying it, as they must if they want your script. As I mentioned, Hollywood is looking for “under-lying rights” stories, but they don’t necessarily have to be best-sellers to attract their attention.

Now I’m not saying this “over-looked” novel will be easy to find and adapt, nor that a sale will be assured, but like Cool Hand Luke it can be done. You may even have a novel in mind, one that you’ve read that not a lot of others have, and something about that hidden gem has appealed to you. Which means it may appeal to a potential film audience.

However you come upon it, the key is finding a novel that was not close to being a best-seller, but at the same time has a great story somewhere in it. It would be even better (and cheaper probably) if all the elements of a great story are in there but difficult for others to see. That’s when you can do what director Stuart Rosenberg, producer Jack Lemmon (yes that Jack Lemmon) and writer Frank Pierson did with Cool Hand Luke.

In this current climate where breaking in as a writer is getting harder and harder, you may have to look for new ways to get noticed and make a sale. This could be one way to do it. Who knows, you just might end up writing a film that audiences will like more than the book. Which they probably will never read.

Expectations

2009-11-04T04:21:00.000-08:00

I finally saw Paranormal Activity last week and, much to my surprise, I was not as frightened as I thought I’d be.

Don’t get me wrong. There were scary moments, but it wasn’t The Exorcist or The Shining. Of course, at $15,000 we shouldn’t expect it to be.

In trying to figure out why, I decided it all comes down to “expectations”. It is amazing to me how much “expectations” have to do with our movie-watching experience.

To me, the “expectations” factor works in two ways. First, there are the “expectations” that we bring into the theater based upon genre. If we know a movie is a comedy, we expect to laugh. If it’s a thriller, we expect surprises and twists. Horror? We expect that we will be scared. From the screenwriter’s perspective, the trick is to give the audience what it “expects”, while at the same time delivering something different. No small task. And to a large extent, Paranormal Activity delivers in that regard.

The second way “expectations” come into play has more to do with word-of-mouth and how long after you hear about a film and when you see it. Have you ever heard about how great a film is and, for whatever reason, you don’t get to see it in its initial run? Later, on DVD or pay cable, you see it and feel let down. For reasons you can’t quite articulate, the film doesn’t live up to your - you guessed it - “expectations”. For me, my Paranormal Activity experience was a victim of this phenomenon. I had seen the trailers and heard all the buzz for weeks and expected that after seeing it I would need to sleep in the lobby of a busy hotel for several nights. Instead, I have nestled comfortably in my bed and not once have I seen a woman standing next to it, staring at me for three hours.

On the other side of that coin, there are those films that you hear aren’t so good, and so you skip them at the theater only to stumble onto them later and, much to your surprise, find them not to be so bad after all. How can that be? Again, “expectations”. If everyone says the movie sucks, you expect very little. Anything even remotely entertaining is greeted with positive vibes.

So what to make of all this? Nothing other than the fact that public opinion can shape what we think of a film, be it negative or positive. As a screenwriter, there is little you can do about that. The only way “expectations” can play a part in your writing is with respect to genre. In which case, give the audience what it expects, but in a way that hasn’t been done before. Much like Paranormal Activity. Then hope they make your film and that your audience goes to see it right away. Before those dreaded “expectations” can set in.

Respect the Subplot

2009-10-02T10:18:00.000-07:00

How often do you think about subplots? I’d be willing to bet that if you’re an aspiring screenwriter, you don’t give much thought to your subplots. Dialogue? I’m sure that’s at or near the top of your list (it shouldn’t be). Structure? This should be at the top, but likely is behind dialogue for you. Subplots? I hear crickets.

I tell every class the same tired line about subplots: “they add depth and texture to your story”. That’s like your mother saying you should drink eight glasses of water a day. You know it’s good advice, but you forget about it thirty seconds later as you order another Starbucks.

I bring this up because I’m once again analyzing the Hitchcock masterpiece Rear Window for my adaptation class. For those of you who don’t know, Rear Window is based on the Cornell Woolrich short story “It Had to Be Murder”.

The story contains most of the basic elements you see in Hitchcock’s film. The bones are there. However, the brilliant screenwriter of Rear Window, the late John Michael Hayes, supplied two of the best elements of the film version. One was completely absent in Woolrich’s story, while the other was only hinted at. Both involve subplots.

The first thing Hayes did was create a love interest in the character of Lisa played by the radiant Grace Kelly. There was no love interest in Woolrich’s story. A treatment written by Joshua Logan prior to the Hayes script did contain a love interest, but that woman did not remotely resemble the Lisa character created by Hayes.

The reason the Lisa character adds so much to the story is that she is a fashion model who desperately wants to marry Jimmy Stewart’s L.B. Jeffries, a photographer for some sort of Life Magazine. Jeffries thinks the marriage cannot work because she loves New York and the world of fashion while Jeffries loves being a photographer covering dangerous stories around the globe.

Which brings me to the second element created by Hayes. He spends time showing us all the other neighbors that Jeffries observes from his window, in addition to the murderous Lars Thorwald.

One is Miss Lonelyhearts, a middle-aged woman who lives alone and appears desperate for a husband. The next is Miss Torso, a beautiful and lithe dancer who appears to be single and hotly pursued by a number of men. Then there’s the songwriter struggling to write a sad ballad that causes Jeffries to surmise that he must have had “an unhappy marriage”. Next are the newlyweds who can’t keep their hands off each other, while across the courtyard is a middle-aged couple comfortable enough in their relationship to sleep outside on the fire escape to beat the heat. Finally, we have the main plot involving Lars Thorwald whose apartment is across from Jeffries’ and whose marriage is so bad that Thorwald chooses murder over divorce in order to be with his paramour.

Notice how each of these characters is at a different place in the “marriage” gradient, from “no prospects” to “lots of prospects” to “newlyweds” to “lasting marriage” to “marital discord”. All on display for Jeffries, who just happens to be pondering the prospect of marriage himself, as he wonders about the suspicious actions of his neighbor Thorwald. That my friends is “depth and texture”.

Later on in the story, when Lisa performs a “dangerous” task for Jeffries (entering the murderer’s apartment), Jeffries comes to realize how much he loves her and how capable she is of facing danger with and for him.

Of course, in the end the murder is exposed, Lisa is safely back in Jeffries’ apartment, and they are well on the way to marriage. As it should be, the denouement revisits all those neighbors, with some unexpected results.

The lesson for you, the aspiring screenwriter, is to respect your subplots. They often make the movie. If you think Rear Window is unique in this regard, then go back and take a closer look at Thelma & Louise, Good Will Hunting, Rocky, Moonstruck and Casablanca, all of which were vastly enhanced by their many and rich subplots.

For a hint on how you might do this with your script, examine your theme and then try to find a way to make your secondary characters’ stories reinforce or underscore that the theme. The audience may not even get it on a conscious level, but trust me, they will love it. I’m not suggesting that this will be easy or that you won’t have do so some considerable rewriting to accomplish it.

However, if you get stumped, just do as John Michael Hayes did: take a look out the window.

Random Summer Thoughts

2009-09-03T06:37:00.001-07:00

Some random film and writing thoughts rolling around my brain as summer comes to a close:

The guy (Sharlto Copley) who plays the main character in District 9 looks like a cross between Peter Sellers and Daniel Day Lewis. He also had a weird affect, particularly in the beginning, that had me thinking I might be watching a Monty Python skit. Despite all that, I thought it was a thoroughly entertaining film.

Quentin Tarantino has a talent for taking scenes that should be less than two minutes long and turning them into ten minutes or more and making them engrossing as hell. The scene in Inglourious Basterds where the Nazi Landa questions the French farmer Perrier LaPadite (love that name) goes on for way longer than a scene like that should, but Tarantino never lets it go off the rails and milks every bit of drama and tension out of the exchange. If you are an aspiring screenwriter, don’t try this. Few writers on the planet can pull that off or should even try.

The opening of Martin Scorcese’s Shutter Island has been moved to February 2010. I don’t know what that means, but it doesn’t sound good. Are they afraid of the competition? Are they looking to clean up at the box office in the dead of winter when the cineplexes usually feature crapola left over from the previous year? Will they open limited in New York and LA to qualify for the awards season? Curious.

Producer Marvin Acuna has a video/on-line newsletter out proclaiming the “death of the screenwriter”. He’s not really administering last rites, but warning that writers need to adapt to the current marketplace (or perish presumably). Basically, he tells writers to write horror or big action or comedy, which is good advice. The only problem is that lots of aspiring writers just can’t do that. I always tell my students to write the movie that they would go to see on its opening day, first showing, the rationale being that if they long for that kind of film, there is probably an audience out there for it. Except, of course, if they themselves are way out there on the fringe. Still, it’s hard to argue with Marvin. I cringe every time an aspiring writer comes to me for a consult and they have written a huge, expensive fantasy story or an historical epic. They might turn out to be good writing samples, but they will never get made having been written by an unknown.

I love the trailer for Zombieland. Every semester I get two or three students who want to write a zombie script. It’s almost an obsession for Generation Y. The problem is that it’s difficult to come up with something new in that genre, but Zombieland looks like it has done so. Besides, I love Woody Harrelson. Who else could be in No Country For Old Men and Seven Pounds more than a decade after a brilliant turn in Kingpin. I love the guy and he might be reason alone to see Zombieland.

Story Receptors

2009-08-20T06:34:00.001-07:00

I saw A Perfect Getaway this past weekend. Writer/director David Twohy did a nice job as a writer on The Fugitive, and I enjoyed his work in Getaway. It features an interesting twist late in the second act, something the story almost begs you to look out for. As with A Sixth Sense, you may have to go back and watch Getaway again to see if it all holds together and makes sense afterward. All that said, it wasn’t even in the top ten last weekend and it has done less than $12M domestic box office. So why is that?

Simple. We’ve seen it all before. And even if we haven’t, we think we have.

Every semester, I tell my new screenwriting students that they are the most accomplished and experienced “story receptors” in the history of mankind. It’s a statement I make with complete confidence and without reservation. Think about it.

In pre-Industrial Revolution times, how many stories do you think the average person heard in their lifetime? Twenty? Thirty? When the only stories they could receive were oral, how many could there have been?

When plays/live performances became popular in our culture, what did that add to a person’s "story inventory"? Another twenty or thirty over a lifetime? Fifty tops?

One could argue that the invention of the printing press made stories available on an individual basis and added to one’s "story collection". No question. Except that reading levels didn’t reach over 50% until sometime in the 1900s, so one has to wonder how many stories an average American read back then.

Arguably, it was the invention of the motion picture camera that dramatically increased the number of stories the average Joe could “receive”. Still, even during the heyday of film in the ‘30s and ‘40s, how many films did people go to? One or two a week? If so, that’s one to two hundred more a year. Throw in radio during its brief run and certainly the stories people received increased from the previous 50-100 years.

Television surely added to the number of stories that people have been able to experience. Baby boomers most definitely filled up on “stories” from TV in the ‘50s and ‘60s. But with the proliferation of cable TV in the last twenty five years, those boomers can’t compare story-wise to what the average college student has been able to experience in their brief 20 or so years.

Consider that this new generation has had the multiplex, television, and perhaps most importantly, the VCR (and later DVD). Add to that graphic novels and the internet (hello Hulu) and the 20 year old of today has “taken in” thousands of stories by the time they have come to my class at BC.

So what does that have to do with screenwriting? Well, only everything. And that’s the operative word: everything. As in, they have seen it all. Which means the screenwriter of today has a much harder job than the screenwriter of even twenty years ago. The producers and studios today crave new, just as their predecessors did, but it is harder and harder to come by these days.

A Perfect Getaway was a nice piece of work, but even with that nice little twist, it was a basic thriller not all that different than those that most 20 year olds have already seen. Which is why it's no surprise that it finished twelfth in the weekend box office while District 9 cleaned up.

If you’ve chosen to pursue this craft, good luck. You have some work ahead of you trying to find something that hasn’t been done before. Keep that in mind when you try to come up with an idea to write. Then think long and hard before you commit to write it. If it feels familiar to you, chances are it will to everyone else.

A Hell of a Run

2009-08-07T12:46:00.000-07:00

Most aspiring screenwriters hope someday to just sell a script. A screen credit is a career-changer. Sole screenwriting credit on a bona fide hit is the Holy Grail. How then do you evaluate the legacy of John Hughes?

Try this on for size: Mr. Mom; National Lampoon’s Vacation; Sixteen Candles; The Breakfast Club; Weird Science; Pretty in Pink; Ferris Bueller’s Day Off; Planes, Trains & Automobiles; and Home Alone.

And I left out the not-so-good ones that still made tons of money and entertained a lot of people, just maybe not all of us.

Most of the tributes on the day after Hughes’ death start out with something like: “If you grew up in the ‘80s”. Well, forget that. If you were ALIVE in the ‘80s or anytime thereafter, you had to have been influenced by and probably greatly amused and entertained by something that John Hughes wrote and probably directed.

Three of Hughes’ films have a place on my shelf and my ticker. Every year on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, my family and I watch Planes, Trains. It is a simple but deceptively meaty story about the illusion of success and happiness in modern life. If you don’t get a lump in your throat at the end when Steve Martin’s Neal Page takes John Candy’s Del Griffith home for Thanksgiving upon realizing that he is essentially homeless, well then, you’re a robot.

Home Alone is not It’s a Wonderful Life, but it is in the rotation of Christmas movies that we watch every Yule season at our house. And not a semester goes by when I don’t have some student in a writing seminar drop a line from that film (“Keep the change you filthy animal”). And like Planes, Trains, when Kevin’s mother returns on Christmas morning and apologizes to Kevin for leaving him behind, I always have to pretend I got something in my contact lens.

Lastly, I have written about and continue to teach The Breakfast Club as one of the definitive multi-protagonist films of modern commercial times. I slipped the word commercial in there because there was a time when Hollywood didn’t think multi-protagonist films could make any money. Go back and read about the difficulty Lawrence Kasdan had trying to get The Big Chill made if you weren’t aware of that. The Breakfast Club ranks right up there with Chill and Diner as a multi-protagonist gem. And if you don't think they're hard as hell to write, just give it a try sometime. Once again, the ending is pitch perfect.

Now I’m not suggesting that Hughes is Billy Wilder. But he’s not that far behind either. They’re probably up there sharing story ideas as we speak. Personally, I think of Hughes as the Roger Maris of screenwriters. He’s not Babe Ruth. But he had one hell of a run there for a time.

The Virtual Walkout

2009-07-27T07:23:00.000-07:00

I was watching Watchmen the other night and halfway through I couldn’t take anymore so I hit the 'stop' button. Not 'pause', as in 'I’ll be back'. 'Stop' as in 'I’m done'. That got me thinking. If I had paid to see Watchmen in the theater, would I have walked out?

Walking out of the movie theater is the ultimate 'thumbs down', is it not? Word-of-mouth is usually associated with a positive feeling about a film. However, word-of-mouth is just as viral for negative opinions as positive. Just ask Bruno. The drop off for Bruno from its Friday opening to the following day was jaw-dropping. From there it all but disappeared from the box office top ten. Point in fact: my daughter saw Bruno that weekend and came home to report that she had, indeed, 'walked out'.

Now I’m sure that Hollywood has no statistic to measure 'walk-outs'. Even with all the audience testing that’s done, there’s probably no way (short of a hall monitor at every theater) to measure 'walk-outs'. But it would be nice if there were. Think of the service that would provide for movie-goers.

I can remember vividly the last time I 'walked-out'. It was 1992 and a movie called Brain Donors, a Three Stooges wannabe (beware Farrellys). Bet you never heard of it. If you did, you probably walked out, too. I walked out less than an hour into it. Come to find out, it was only 79 minutes long. However, even had I known there was only another 19 minutes to go, I still would have left. It was so bad that I can still remember the theater where it was playing and the day of the week I went to see it, some seventeen years later. Indeed, the memory is so vivid that it blocks out any other memory I have of ever walking out on another film.

On the other hand, I have turned off many a DVD. Usually they were films I avoided at the theater and thought 'what the hell, I’ll give it a shot'. And that’s what I do. I give them a shot. If they don’t engage me, I employ the 'virtual walk out' and simply hit the 'stop' button, never to return. Obviously, it’s much easier to walk out virtually. And with the cost of a theater ticker compared to a DVD rental, the virtual walk out is less cost-driven.

So back to Watchmen. Would I have walked out of the theater had I paid to see it there? I don’t believe so. Like I said, that is the ultimate 'f-you'. I would have stayed until the end and took my medicine. Then I would have engaged in a little negative word-of-mouth. Like I’m doing here. Virtually.

The Why of the Want

2009-07-05T11:49:00.000-07:00

I want to love Michael Mann. No, not that way. As a director and writer. A film maker. I really do. And is often the case with people you want to love, I have come close to doing so. There are whole sections of The Last of the Mohicans that I think are absolutely brilliant. Same for Heat. But overall, I didn’t love the entirety of either one. My favorite Michael Mann film is Collateral. Great story and great acting by Tom Cruise, Jamie Foxx and Jada Pinkett Smith. But Mann did not write Collateral, in whole or in part. Perhaps that’s the key. Which brings me to his latest effort: Public Enemies.

Like Heat, Public Enemies is a 'cops and robbers' film, with a flawed cop obsessed with catching the sympathetic robber. Public Enemies features wonderful performances by Johnny Depp and Christian Bale. But as with most Mann films, it falls short in terms of story.

In most great commercial films, our main character is somebody who wants something badly and goes after it against great odds. Impossible odds often. John Dillinger is the main character of Enemies and Mann does a passable job of telling us what Dillinger wants. Actually, Dillinger tells us himself what he likes: money, nice clothes and Billy. Great. We know what he wants. However, here’s where we get the flaw in Public Enemies: we don’t know 'why'!

In my paradigm, somebody wants something 'badly'. You might even say desperately. It is this urgency that is the essence of 'story'. It is this urgency that makes us want to watch the film. The 'badly/desperately' part is 'why' the main character is doing what they are doing. It is also what creates the emotional connection between the main character and the audience, and do not underestimate this.

We in the audience don’t have to have the same 'want' as the main character. In fact, we almost never share a want. After all, who wants to go see a film about somebody who wants a promotion or a new Range Rover? No, films are far better when we don’t share the same want as the main character. For instance, none of us (OK maybe some) share the 'want' of Tony Montana in Scarface. But we understand why he wants what he wants (money/success). It is that particular immigrant’s version of the American Dream. We empathize and we get it. And, therefore, we watch to see if he can fulfill this want.

In Public Enemies we have absolutely no idea why John Dillinger wants so badly to robs banks and obtain the money that comes from that. Obviously, there is something about the danger attached to acquiring it. We might even play kitchen-sink psychiatrist and try to draw some connection between that and the fact that his father beat him often 'because he didn’t know any other way' to raise him. But if that’s the reason, it falls far short.

I think this movie could have been made far better with a short scene or even an additional line or two of dialogue in the first act to allow us to get a glimpse of why Dillinger wants what he wants. It could have even come later in the film, as in Good Will Hunting in that famous scene with Will and Chuck at the construction site. But wherever it might have come in Public Enemies, it would have improved the film mightily.

The lesson for the budding screenwriter is this: don’t forget the 'why'! Everyone tells screenwriters to make sure the audience knows what the main character wants, but that’s just half the battle. Less even. If you don’t also let the audience in on the urgency of that desire - the 'why' of the 'want' - there will be no audience connection. And your script will suffer for it.

You are not yet Michael Mann. He gets to keep making movies because he is brilliant at giving us spectacle and big scenes. I just wish he’d give us more story to go with them.

Then I’d truly love Michael Mann.

1 2 3 and out

2009-06-24T15:58:00.000-07:00

I saw The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 on Sunday. This is the third film to come out of John Godey’s excellent novel. I’m a big fan of the 1974 film starring Walter Matthau, but did not see the TV movie made in 1998 which is generally considered a disaster. I also love actors Denzel Washington and John Travolta, not to mention the writing of Brian Helgeland. When I first heard they were remaking this, with Denzel in Matthau role, I was excited about the prospect. All that said, this third try at this was a disappointment.

I should amend that a bit. For about three quarters of the film, it was actually quite involving, and Helgeland did a great job updating the story without following the earlier film beat by beat. Washington’s character had a compelling (though not novel) back story. Travolta played an interesting villain with a good deal of anger and well-chosen and colorful language. Gandolfini’s New York mayor was superior to the one in the earlier film, and Helgeland added a nice homage to that character by having Gandolfini’s mayor fearing catching a cold while visiting an elementary school. (Go back and watch the original.) But despite all that, it fell apart in the end.

Spoiler alert: The movie moves into the third act when Washington’s character is asked by Travolta’s character to personally deliver the ransom money to him in the subway tunnel. Washington does so, and they all travel on foot through the subway tunnels, presumably to make their planned escape. It is unclear what they have in mind for Washington’s character. At one point, Washington sees an opportunity to get away from the bad guys and does so by staying on the other side of a speeding subway train. And there’s where the film goes off the tracks - to keep the train metaphor going.

Washington up to this point has been portrayed as a subway supervisor who has been demoted for suspicion of taking a bribe. He is not a cop. When a gun is planted in one of the bags containing the ransom money, a cop asks Washington if he knows how to use it. Washington tells him he does not, and the cop has to proceed to show him how the safety works and to basically instruct him to shoot the nearest bad guy. So you would imagine that when Washington’s character manages to escape Travolta and his henchman, he would make for the nearest safe port. Instead, Washington chooses to go after Travolta. Why? Excellent question. There is no personal issue between the two of them. Travolta hasn’t killed Washington’s dog or raided his IRA. He’s bad, but he’s done nothing to Washington personally. One could argue that Travolta forcing Washington’s character to admit to taking the bribe is personal. Perhaps. Except we’re not even sure Washington did take the bribe (though it appears he did). But if he did, will capturing or killing Travolta change that? Will his actions be excused? If so, no one has told Washington this ahead of time or at least no promise has been, particularly since no one has any idea that Washington will ever be in a position to capture or kill Travolta. And, oh yeah, he will certainly be putting his life at risk going after Travolta by himself as a novice gun-user.

It doesn’t end with that. Washington eventually runs down Travolta on a bridge and holds the gun on him until the cops can arrive. Yet despite having no way to threaten Washington, Travolta manages to convince Washington to shoot him, in a sort of suicide-by-cop. Ugh.

If you recall the original film, one of the bad guys gets away and, in the process of running down leads on all former subway drivers, Matthau visits him at his apartment where the bad guy gives himself away by sneezing - a connection Matthau makes since he heard one of the bad guys do so several times earlier over the subway radio. Much more clever.

This is the problem with sequels. How does one make it new again and at the same time, top the earlier movie and/or book? Hollywood remakes these films because they know they are proven, audience-tested stories. They know that folks like me who have experienced the earlier material will also want to go to see how they have been reinvented. The risk? Just this. Disappointment. It’s hard to tell the same story again with changes that are superior to that proven winner.

Unfortunately, I don’t see this changing anytime soon. Hollywood wants a predictably large audience before they commit to making a film with this kind of budget. Choosing proven material gets them that. But how many times can they do so before they run out of track? In the case of The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, the answer is in the title.

Class Participation

2009-06-05T16:35:00.001-07:00

I saw UP last weekend, like about six million other folks.

I enjoyed it thoroughly. In recent years, it seems animation is where we get the freshest stories. Certainly, it is about the only genre where we get original stories, as opposed to the recent Hollywood obsession with 'prequels, sequels, remakes and comic books'. The Incredibles and Ratatouille were both excellent films, as close to four quadrant films as animation can get. UP qualifies on that score as well.

So how much can the aspiring screenwriter take from UP? Well, for starters, I would not advise anyone to write an animation on spec. It just doesn’t work that way. These films are story-boarded and developed over a long period of time, with the animators and writers working in conjunction. There are always exceptions, but I’d advise against even trying.

That said, I can tell you where a screenwriter can learn from UP. My favorite part of the film came in the first act. Having written a book about the third act, you’d think that wouldn’t be the case. I truly enjoyed the third act in UP. But for my money, the most impressive part of the film came in the set up, not the resolution. I’m referring specifically to the montage where we are shown (there’s the key word) about the marriage and life of Carl and Ellie Fredrickson.

This series of scenes unfolds quickly and - here’s the important part - without any dialogue. Not only does it provide important backstory, it creates an undeniable emotional connection between the audience and the main character Carl. I’m not ashamed to admit (ok, maybe a little bit) that I got a little teary-eyed at the conclusion of the montage. Think about that: this is early in the first act! We don’t even know the characters yet. Or I should say, we do, but it’s at such an unusually early time in the film for us to do so, we are pleasantly surprised.

Again, this is all accomplished without dialogue. Instead, it’s about moving pictures, the phrase from which the term “movies” is derived. More than most film makers, animators understand telling a story through images. You don’t need to “tell” the audience the story, when “showing” will do the job even better.

The lesson here for aspiring screenwriters is that this doesn’t just apply to animation. You will always create a stronger connection with the audience if you can inform them visually. Just like your Mom told you - actions speak louder than words. The reason most new screenwriters choose dialogue is that it is easier to tell the audience something than to allow them to watch a character perform an act or acts and have the audience interpret the meaning of that for themselves. It is always preferable to have the audience participate in the story, and that’s what they do when they have to figure out the story without the use of dialogue.

The next time you want to get an idea across to your audience, stop before you write that line of dialogue and wrack your brain to come up with an idea that might convey the same message visually. Let the audience participate. They’ll love you for it.

Indie Writing

2009-05-25T09:07:00.001-07:00

Recently, I appeared as a panelist at a workshop for independent filmmaking where, among other things, I was asked: “Is there any difference between writing an independent film and a commercial film?” My short answer to that was: “In theory, no”. After all, when we go to the movies, we want to watch a good story, regardless of the funding source. And a good story is a good story, once again, regardless of who pays to make it. But as we all know, theory and practice are two entirely different beasts.

For those who don’t know, there are really only two methods of film funding. There is the traditional Hollywood studio-financed film (including their specialty divisions, like Fox Searchlight). And then there is everything else, meaning anybody with money who’s willing to risk it to finance a film. The studios generally make movies for $50 million and above. Independents films usually cost $3 million or under to produce. (Those specialty divisions of the studios make films with budgets above $3 million, but significantly lower than $50 million.)

I’ve found that most aspiring writers don’t set out to write an “independent film”. Instead, they seek to sell their script to Hollywood and don’t give much thought to budget. Only when that avenue is closed off do they sometimes pursue the so-called independent route, and often without any regard to whether their script is suitable for that type of film.

Whether you choose to write specifically for a low budget, independent film or you’re seeking to go that route after meeting resistance selling to Hollywood, here are a few things to keep in mind:

– Your script should be free of special effects. If your script features explosions, car chases, fires or battles scenes, you can pretty much forget the independent film route. It will simply cost too much to film those things. And if you try to go the cheap route, well, you’ll get what you pay for.

– For the same reason, if your script takes the story to numerous outdoor and/or exotic locations, you have pretty much priced yourself out of the independent market. Travel, housing, crew, permits and the like will eat up a huge chunk of the budget. Few locations and plenty of interiors are what the independent budget is best suited for. Take a look at Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs for an example of this.

– Setting your story in any time but present day can cause the budget to explode. Costumes, cars, technology (old or new), and elaborate sets all present costs that can be prohibitive to a small budget. If the locations are almost all interior, costumes alone might not break the bank. Otherwise, it’s almost always best to stick to present day.

– One of the ways you can make your script attractive to an independent financing source is to feature characters that “name” actors will want to play. Actors are drawn to challenging and ground-breaking roles. They won’t care if the budget is small if the part is big. Your financier/producer will find it much easier to sell the film to distributors if they can market a “name” actor or two. After all, the exhibitor is only going to allow a film to take up a spot in their theater if people come to see it, and they’re more likely to do so if it features well-known actors playing juicy parts. Admittedly, this is easier said than done, but you should focus your efforts on writing great characters. (One caveat: as with locations, too many characters can chew up a budget as well.)

– Another way to attract a potential audience and, thereby, make the distributor and exhibitor more willing to go for your film is to tackle a provocative subject. I’m not suggesting you deliberately seek out controversy, but Hollywood is unwilling to take on certain subject matter that a somewhat sizeable segment of the movie-going population might have an interest in seeing. If your script fits that category, then it might be suitable for the independent market.

– Finally, the audience for an independent film is less likely to expect the traditional, three-act story with all the usual beats. This gives you some creative freedom in terms of structure and story-telling. Nevertheless, audiences still appreciate and look for resolution in stories. Heck, it may be the reason story-telling was invented. Therefore, you shouldn’t neglect the ending to your script. Just because the film isn’t going to be produced by a Hollywood studio doesn’t mean that all the elements of a good story need not be present. And a great ending is essential to audience satisfaction. In this regard at least, “theory” should be the same as “practice”, regardless of the funding source for the film.

What's Hate Got to Do With It

2009-05-16T12:04:00.001-07:00

Taken was just released on DVD last week. You may recall that it opened in the theaters in January, which is when I saw it. I remember watching the previews and thinking that it had a pretty good setup. I must have not been alone in that regard since the movie took in just north of $140 million domestic. That’s a nice number for a film released in January, which is usually a sign of a dog. I doubt the producers are disappointed with the box office performance, and for the most part I liked it. However, I don’t think it was all it could have been.

If you haven’t seen it, Liam Neeson plays a former CIA badass whose 18 year old daughter gets kidnapped with her friend on their first night (no parents) in Paris. The kidnappers don’t know who her father is, and it’s the classic case of they-picked-the-wrong-guy-to-mess-with scenario. To make matters worse, the kidnappers are sex slave traders, raising the stakes considerably for Neeson’s character. So far so good.

The problem? Characters. Namely, other than Neeson’s character, the other characters are vastly underutilized. I’ll leave aside the main character’s buddies who appear a lot in the first act, only to never return. More to the point, this film sorely lacks a villain. Actually, it has a lot of villains, seven or eight maybe. But that’s the problem. Neeson's character goes to Europe to find his daughter and encounters a succession of bad guys who he quickly and expertly dispatches, one after another, none of them ever to reappear. Finally, in the third act, Neeson’s character's daughter is on a yacht belonging to a rich, unnamed Middle Eastern guy, surrounded by tough-looking Middle Eastern bodyguards. The thing is, we have never seen these guys before. The rich guy has just purchased the girl and appears for the first time in act three.

OK, he’s still villainous. After all, he’s a purchaser in the sex slave trade. We don’t like him, nor should we. But we don’t hate him. Why? Because we don’t know him!

Listen, movies are all about emotions or should be anyway. Sympathy for the main character, enmity for the villain, and so on. But in order to work up a decent level of emotion, you need to know the character. This is true in life as well as movies. Hate is not a particularly healthy emotion to harbor in real life, but I’m assuming most of you have felt it at some point. And if there’s anyone you do hate, I guessing you have a considerable history with that person. It’s hard to hate someone you don’t know, just as it's hard to love someone with whom you have no connection.

Taken would have been a far better film had the story progressed to the third act with a single main villain who has managed to cause considerable pain to the main character, while at the same time managing to elude capture that was tantalizingly close on more than one occasion. Think the original Die Hard for example. In Taken, Neeson’s character picks off a number of lesser characters who could have filled that villain role, one by one, much like in a video game (probably accounting for the film’s success at the box office).

I don’t know why the writers made the choices they did, but I’m guessing that they wanted to accurately depict the layers of the sex slave market and they probably felt that a single baddie would not stay in the picture as that sex slave was passed from one level of the sales chain to the next. Great. But this isn’t a documentary. The idea in a feature film is to entertain and create drama. And to maximize the dramatic impact, you must invent! Whenever possible, find a way to keep the ultimate villain in the story. Doing so will ensure that the audience is truly invested in the outcome of the final battle.

I don’t mean to suggest that there was no pleasure to be felt from Neeson’s character’s rescue of his daughter on that yacht. There was. We were relieved and happy to see them reunited. But we would have been even happier and more relieved had we been teased by the ultimate baddie for nearly three acts before watching him receive the ultimate punishment.

Now you may think that hero facing the villain is too traditional and that there's room for variation on that theme. Perhaps. But if you haven’t already seen this film, watch it and tell me how satisfying you feel at the end and then consider how much more you might have felt if that first villain, the young thug who had kidnapped the daughter in the first place, wasn’t killed early in act two, but instead met his fate on that boat in act three, after being more villainous and narrowly escaping Neeson's character for the better part of an hour.

As a writer, you want your audience to connect with the story, and emotion is what creates that connection. Hate is a valuable cinematic emotion. Don’t waste it.

Foreplay

2009-05-13T08:05:00.001-07:00

OK. I got your attention. Actually, this post has nothing to do with any form of sexual activity. It has to do with something I’m going to call 'fore-story', which I don’t believe is yet a term of art in screenwriting, but just might have to become one, given recent the trend in Hollywood.

I raise this in connection with the new Star Trek movie which I saw recently. Most movies unfold in linear fashion - you know, beginning, middle, end. At some point in most of these films, we have to learn something about a character’s past, usually more than one character’s past. As you know, this is referred to as 'backstory', the technical definition of which is 'anything that happened to any character prior to the start of the film'. Backstory revealed is exposition, and in most films, we need at least some backstory exposed.

Not Star Trek. Or at least not the way you might think.

The current Star Trek is a remake of sorts. It is also a prequel. In case you haven’t been paying attention, Hollywood these days is pretty much only making 'prequels, sequels, remakes and comic books', Juno aside. The current Star Trek has the benefit of not only being a sort of remake, but also of having a huge well-source of audience knowledge. In other words, the typical audience member for this film walks in already knowing a ton about the characters. This is because there was an original TV series with 80 episodes and 10 previous movies, not to mention four additional TV series and the odd novelization etc.

What makes this Star Trek truly different is that there is no backstory. There is simply no need for any. This one starts before we go where no one has boldly gone before. This one reveals who these characters were before we saw them in all those previous TV shows and films. And it does so by showing. The action informs, and that’s the key word. Action. No need to tell when it can show. We learn by watching what the characters do, and we supplement what we are seeing with what we already know from the previous material we have seen. No need for some other character reading a resume to us. No need for a character interviewing another character about their past. No need for any of the other devices often used to reveal a character’s past.

So, does this make the film anything less than it should be? Hardly. It’s better. Better because we know who these characters are already. And that’s because we have 'fore-story'. We know what happens to these characters after this movie ends. That’s not only cool, but quite rare as well, though it’s becoming less so.

We had a very similar situation occur in Batman Begins and, to a lesser extent, in Dark Knight. However, probably because of the sheer volume of source material, it feels like there is more fore-story with Star Trek.

In a different vein, The Bourne Ultimatum gave us almost no backstory as well (except for who Bourne actually was and how he came to be). It is only similar to Star Trek in that the audience didn’t need any backstory. Unlike Star Trek, we didn’t have fore-story, but we did have the two previous Bournes to give us what we would have ordinarily needed in terms of backstory had this been a self-contained story.

So what does this mean for you, the aspiring screenwriter? Sadly, not much. Unless or until you become a successful, multi-credited writer, you are not going to get to write a hallowed franchise like Star Trek. You are going to write specs. Original stories that will require some backstory to be revealed about your characters. You will be left to use those devices I mentioned before or, hopefully, to invent new ones to reveal your characters’ backstories.

So my advice is simply this: don’t try to do what the writers did in Star Trek. They are working in a different environment than you. You may come up with some spec set-in-outer-space, a sci-fi fantasy with lots of interesting and novel characters about whom you know everything. You may have even figured out their futures and what they will do in the next four or five scripts you intend to write about these same characters. The problem is that the audience (which is the reader who is doing coverage on it first) won’t know that.

So don’t do this. Instead, go see Star Trek and buy your popcorn and enjoy what is a rather unique screenwriting and movie experience. Just don’t try to copy it.