Sunday, March 30, 2003
Okay, this is not a lecture on Will Smith's abs, but a first in a series of "what the movies can teach you about writing movies" lessons. Please enjoy.
Love Serenade: Lesson 1
Some movies are packed to the gills with people, sounds, light, music, experiences….and somehow leave you empty. “Love Serenade,” a black romantic comedy from Australia, features only four main characters, a handful of sets, and a savvy choice of Barry White to create an otherworldly love triangle.
The setup is simple: a slick middle-aged disk jockey from the big city arrives in a small—no, make that micro-sized—town in the middle of nowheresville, Australia. He moves next door to two very lonely sisters, one, a shy, gawky waitress, and the other, clearly the big sister, a bustling hairdresser who runs her own salon. The hairdresser begins wooing the dj immediately, presenting him with a just-caught fish (still on the line!), which he rejects. The dj sets his sights on the gawky young waitress, who, beguiled, offers to “ease his loneliness.” All hell breaks loose. Jealousy. Giant mounted fish. A Chinese restaurant owner sings “Wichita Lineman.” The big sister retaliates, and in the end, there’s a body. Or maybe not. In the hands of a bad filmmaker, this would be overbaked David Lynch, but in the hands of Shirley Barrett, the writer/director, it is very funny, sexy and a little scary.
What Shirley Barrett’s screenplay employs is the art of keeping secrets to create compelling and mysterious characters you want to get to know better. The characters are all quite chatty, most especially about love, but it’s what the characters choose not to say that actually creates the plot. Why has the dj fled the big city? We never know. How exactly did the big sister lose her fiancé? We never find out. Is the gawky sister really quite as innocent as she claims? The script’s dialogue deftly uses these secrets to practice the art of misdirection—making you think the story is going one way, when it is actually going the other.
This kind of movie magic can only happen when the writer knows her characters so well she can feel confident holding back information.
Lesson one:
Try this. Take two characters from your screenplay. Put them in a scene together, and give one of them a secret. It can be a tiny secret—she has to go to the bathroom. It can be a huge one—she’s just killed a man. But whatever you do, do NOT let your character mention the secret to the other character. Now: have them shop together at Wal-mart. Write for five minutes. See how the energy of the secret informs the scene?
For extra credit, go to an existing script you’ve written, pick three scenes at random, and rewrite them, after picking a secret for one of the characters to keep. See what develops.
Love Serenade: Lesson 1
Some movies are packed to the gills with people, sounds, light, music, experiences….and somehow leave you empty. “Love Serenade,” a black romantic comedy from Australia, features only four main characters, a handful of sets, and a savvy choice of Barry White to create an otherworldly love triangle.
The setup is simple: a slick middle-aged disk jockey from the big city arrives in a small—no, make that micro-sized—town in the middle of nowheresville, Australia. He moves next door to two very lonely sisters, one, a shy, gawky waitress, and the other, clearly the big sister, a bustling hairdresser who runs her own salon. The hairdresser begins wooing the dj immediately, presenting him with a just-caught fish (still on the line!), which he rejects. The dj sets his sights on the gawky young waitress, who, beguiled, offers to “ease his loneliness.” All hell breaks loose. Jealousy. Giant mounted fish. A Chinese restaurant owner sings “Wichita Lineman.” The big sister retaliates, and in the end, there’s a body. Or maybe not. In the hands of a bad filmmaker, this would be overbaked David Lynch, but in the hands of Shirley Barrett, the writer/director, it is very funny, sexy and a little scary.
What Shirley Barrett’s screenplay employs is the art of keeping secrets to create compelling and mysterious characters you want to get to know better. The characters are all quite chatty, most especially about love, but it’s what the characters choose not to say that actually creates the plot. Why has the dj fled the big city? We never know. How exactly did the big sister lose her fiancé? We never find out. Is the gawky sister really quite as innocent as she claims? The script’s dialogue deftly uses these secrets to practice the art of misdirection—making you think the story is going one way, when it is actually going the other.
This kind of movie magic can only happen when the writer knows her characters so well she can feel confident holding back information.
Lesson one:
Try this. Take two characters from your screenplay. Put them in a scene together, and give one of them a secret. It can be a tiny secret—she has to go to the bathroom. It can be a huge one—she’s just killed a man. But whatever you do, do NOT let your character mention the secret to the other character. Now: have them shop together at Wal-mart. Write for five minutes. See how the energy of the secret informs the scene?
For extra credit, go to an existing script you’ve written, pick three scenes at random, and rewrite them, after picking a secret for one of the characters to keep. See what develops.
Thursday, March 13, 2003
WELCOME TO MY BLOG
Jeff and I could NOT take our eyes off "All American Girl" last night. Jeff because he has a crush on Ginger Spice, and me because I felt like I had been locked in the biggest, meanest high school in the world. ("Oh, I hope I'm not pregnant again!" blurted a young woman. Us, too, chica.)
It's not the end of Western civilization, it's not the end of a good storytelling on television (one of this things this blog will be about). It's about t.v. series getting expensiver and expensiver and markets getting smaller and smaller. If reality shows were MORE expensive than Friends, do you think we'd be seeing so many Brittany imitations, fake marriages, or Scary Ex-Models Who Really Need Their Meds? No. It's about the money. And it's about the illusion of surprise that video + real people seems to offer us.
Anyway, rant off. This blog is offered as a celebration of good storytelling on t.v. and film, along with the occasional rant. And who the hell am I? I am a recovering film/tv development executive/content provider who has helped more than one script get on its legs. I love movies. I love glamour. I love telling you who I went to school with, and I love watching a really good filmmaker pull off something great. This blog is an attempt to marshal my wildly enthusiastic and undisciplined mind so that I might, um, consolidate my thoughts and "learnings" as they say in the business world in one place.
Tomorrow: a brief lecture on Will Smith's abs and how they relate to three-act structure. Sort of.
Jeff and I could NOT take our eyes off "All American Girl" last night. Jeff because he has a crush on Ginger Spice, and me because I felt like I had been locked in the biggest, meanest high school in the world. ("Oh, I hope I'm not pregnant again!" blurted a young woman. Us, too, chica.)
It's not the end of Western civilization, it's not the end of a good storytelling on television (one of this things this blog will be about). It's about t.v. series getting expensiver and expensiver and markets getting smaller and smaller. If reality shows were MORE expensive than Friends, do you think we'd be seeing so many Brittany imitations, fake marriages, or Scary Ex-Models Who Really Need Their Meds? No. It's about the money. And it's about the illusion of surprise that video + real people seems to offer us.
Anyway, rant off. This blog is offered as a celebration of good storytelling on t.v. and film, along with the occasional rant. And who the hell am I? I am a recovering film/tv development executive/content provider who has helped more than one script get on its legs. I love movies. I love glamour. I love telling you who I went to school with, and I love watching a really good filmmaker pull off something great. This blog is an attempt to marshal my wildly enthusiastic and undisciplined mind so that I might, um, consolidate my thoughts and "learnings" as they say in the business world in one place.
Tomorrow: a brief lecture on Will Smith's abs and how they relate to three-act structure. Sort of.
