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Lesson 12: Watch the Explainometer

I'm a fan, medium-sized, of the tv show Smallville. It's a what-if show. Meaning, it asks the question: what if Superman were an adolescent right now?

The result is a fairly dark, Buffy-tinged show about being a teenager with powers that both awe our young Clark Kent and...well, piss him off.

And, of course, he is, as many normal teens are, convinced he is alone. Unique.

But in this episode, Clark briefly believes that one of the weirder kids in his school is ALSO from the planet Krypton. The kid has healing powers. He draws Krypton-like space ships. And the nasty boys at school pick on him. At a crucial point in the story, the nasty boys nearly kill Weird Guy as he believes he is about to be beamed up to his real home. We already know, as Clark does, that Weird Guy is just a human kid who has a few special powers.

So here's the problem. Weird Guy, at the urging of Clark, "heals" a nasty boy who has just tried to hurt him. Badly. While the crucial beam up time comes...and goes. The Weird Guy, who believes himself trapped on the earth, falls into a coma.

Powerful stuff. Meanwhile, it takes a full scene and a half AFTER this one to explain motivations, timing, actions---perhaps as much times as the original scenes did.

This is a dramatic flaw in a show that is generally very well written, but it's an object lesson for cleaning up your script. If you find yourself writing a snappy scene, and then finding yourself compelled to explain it in the next scene, stop, look, listen. As a writer, you should always be conspiring to bring the audience into your confidence. Into your understanding. There are, of course, movies that delight in keeping the audience guessing. But if you are not writing this kind of a movie, really honor your audience. Allow them to stay on the same page. Write well enough so that you aren't playing museum docent to your scenes. "What you just saw could be explained by..."

No. Don't do it. It's shoddy writing. And you want better than that.

Lesson 11: Go There: Knowing Your Territory

God is in the details, and so is your screenplay.

Screenplays occur in definite physical places: Los Angeles in the 1950s, Atlanta during the Civil War, Hollywood in the 1960s and 1970s.

Make sure that you know so much about a place and a time, you’ve forgotten half of it. In the best movies, your authority doesn’t register consciously with the audience…but it shows up somewhere in their collective brain pan.

Lesson 10: Breaking the Log Jam

Are you stuck? In a rut? Being crushed by a gigantic writers’ block?

Maybe you know more than you think you do. Consider asking your characters for help. Consider having one of your characters ask another character for help. Set up a little interview between two of your characters. It could look something like this.

ROMEO: Just what do you think could happen to us?

JULIET: Oh, a great love. And a great tragedy. Or something like that.

ROMEO: How do you feel about poison?

Lesson 9: change the pace

How fast do your characters or your scenes move?

Do you have "insert high speed chase here" installed as a macro on your screenwriting software?'

Or, conversely, are you fond of long, slow, leisurely conversations?

If you don't know, notice what kind of films you're drawn to. Are you in love with quick-cut action films? Fond of chick flickus talkusalotus?

You know who you are.

So, just as an athlete profits by changing her pace, so can a writer. Consider taking one of your blow-em-up good scenes and 1) slowing it down and/or 2) inserting a "relationship talk" into the middle of it.

That's what made DIE HARD the first such a wonderful movie. It managed to combine two very disparate stories and make them work. Bruce Willis isn't just a guy rescuing a building from elegant terrorists. He's a guy rescuing his ex-wife for whom he still has feelings. It's a chick film with explosives...

EXERCISE

Take your talkiest scene and put the characters underwater. Force them to communicate by gesture and action. Now: make a shark chase them.

Take your most DIE HARD blow em up scene and give one of the characters a monologue about the first time he had bad sex.

Lesson 8: accept the gift: little writers have big ears.
There’s a line from Gertrude Stein: messages are being sent all the time. She wasn’t wrong or paranoid. All around us, people are speaking. And that means they are speaking story into the air.

If you are in the beginning stages of writing your screenplay…or if you know that you want to write a screenplay, but do not yet know what your story is, don’t despair.

Don’t despair. Go eavesdropping.

Go to a local restaurant. It could be a Wendy’s or an Olive Garden, but it should be eavesdroppable. Meaning that you should be able to hear at least some fragment of a conversation, preferably a lot of fragments.

Listen big, and listen hard. Being able to hear other people may not do much for your meal, but it will do wonders for your creativity. It will teach you the ways people really speak, not the way people talk on t.v. It will teach you to love pauses and slurs and incomplete phrases and mispronunciation. Today I was thinking so hard about these issues, it must have read on my face: a guy at another table at the Wendy’s asked me to spell “depict.”

The writer/director of “Clueless” spent days and days eavesdropping on teenage girls at upscale malls, and the result was not just a good movie, but an entire Clueless lingo. You should be so lucky.

Lesson 7 Everything I ever learned about character I learned from Hannibal Lecter

In the movie Silence of the Lambs, FBI agent in training Clarice Starling is on the edge of discovering just what makes her quarry, Buffalo Bill, tick. But she’s stuck. She knows that if she can just figure out one last piece of the puzzle, she can catch him. So once again, she turns to serial killer—and psychiatrist—Hannibal Lecter. Lecter badgers Starling, asking: “What does he covet?”

Covet.

Crave.

Lust for.

These words should never be far from you when you are constructing the characters in your screenplay. What would they die to have? What would they die from if they were denied? What do they secretly lust for?

Once Clarice knew what Buffalo Bill craved, her own journey became much simpler. We, the audience, knew that we were in the final stretch of the movie, and this is perhaps Lesson 6B: once you announce a central character’s deepest desire, his or her burning question, it is usually either the beginning of a heroic quest, or the slam bang finale.

We knew—because we had traveled this far with that Buffalo Bill craved not so much the death of his victims as a kind of sexual transformation that he believed was only possible through acquiring another’s skin. And that he had craved it first when it was directly in front of him.

Lesson 6: Rules: The rule of three

We’ve all seen the movie trailer with the big action hero who…drum roll, please, “BREAKS ALL THE RULES.”

Which is one of those little paradoxes, because, of course, the big action hero has CREATE one big rule for himself: he breaks all the rules.

Good movies are a lot of things: in William Goldman’s word, they are architecture. They are characters we care about. They are, sometimes, dialogue we won’t forget, music we’ll always remember.

And somewhere in the mechanics of a good script are just enough rules. Not too many, not too few.

Some movies, especially science fiction, horror, or fantasy movies, are quite explicit about their rules. Don’t feed a gremlin after midnight, or it turns into a fiend. Don’t go into the basement alone. Show a vampire a cross, and he’ll shrink from you. They are rooted in the first stories we heard—fairy tales and myths. Think of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. All he had to do to retrieve his wife from hell was to lead her from Hades without looking back. All Icarus had to do to enjoy the gift of flight was not fly too close to the sun.

It’s my humble opinion that a single rule in a movie isn’t enough—and ten is too many. Three feels about right, for a lot of reasons. Wire a movie to a single rule, and it feels thin, too rigid to really be fun. Give a movie two rules, and it becomes a kind of ping pong, and the movie bounces side to side. Three feels good. The audience can remember them easily…and not feel overwhelmed by choices. Yet the number three provides wonderful complications, and it’s a number we know in our dramatic and comic bones. Think of romantic triangles. Think of baseball. Think of the Three Stooges, or the Marx Brothers (the ones you can remember!).

Exercise

If you have not begun your screenplay, write down at least one rule you intend to have one of your characters live by.

If you are in the midst of your screenplay, review the plot and the characters for rules, explicit and implicit. They are usually easy to find. Your statuesque heroine swears, “I’ll never date a man under six feet.” Or whenever a character eats a banana in your action-packed fruit adventure movie, he explodes.

If you have trouble identifying the rules in your own work, rent your favorite movie. Pick one character, and write down three rules he or she CLAIMS to live by, and the ones he or she actually does. Now, write down three rules the movie lives by.

Lesson 5: Just Because It Happened, Doesn't Make It Interesting

This is the first part of what will probably be a multiple part essay on ‘true stories,” and the traps beginning screenwriters fall into telling them.

Here’s the first rule of true story telling:

Just because it happened, doesn’t make it interesting.

Your cat dying is not interesting. Sad, yes. Heartbreaking..to you, maybe. To others…probably not.

Your cat getting run over by the President of the United States, pretty interesting.

Your cat getting run over by the President of the United States, causing an international incident which forces you to abandon your identity, go undercover and join forces with a cryptic yet beautiful martial artist. And you have a mysterious flu that may or may not kill you in 24 hours: yup, probably a movie.

So that’s the first reality test: Would you pay 10 dollars to see this scene from your life in a movie? If not, don’t put it in. Or: if not, tart it up as one of my friends says, until it is.

Tomorrow: the dead cat story done as a viable Indy Movie pitch.

Adaptation: Lesson 4: Embrace Your Inner Weirdo

Charlie Kaufman’s script Adaptation is an adaptation, of a demented sort, of reporter Susan Orlean’s nonfiction book The Orchid Thief. Kaufman reportedly had huge trouble transforming Orlean’s book into a screenplay…so he decided to make the trouble he was having one of the subjects of the screenplay, as well as one of its themes. Susan Orlean, who became a character in Kaufman’s screenplay, seems to share some of Kaufman’s trouble in truly capturing her subject John Laroux. She longs to connect with Laroux's passion. she longs to have some of it.

Adaptation is a good film to review when you’re stuck, because it suggests that perfection isn’t possible, and that Hollywood endings aren’t necessarily what we crave—in life, or in our movies. Charlie Kaufman’s naked neurosis connected with a lot of people, and not just blocked screenwriters. The frustration we feel when we’re unable to capture something, or to do our job right, is a universal one.

Exercise

Try this: the next time you’re having difficulty writing your movie, introduce yourself into a scene. Say you’re having trouble writing a scene between Napoleon and Josephine—Napoleon is anxious to rush off to fight a war, and Josephine is just as anxious to make love to Napoleon one last time. Now, enter you. How might you help or hurt things between them? What would you say?

Who Am I This Time?? Lesson 3: Be A Hero...Interestingly

One of my favorite teachers in the whole world, screenwriter Venable Herndon, used to say that in the first few drafts of any screenplay, everybody in the script would just POP with life...except the hero. You'd know less about her, like her less, feel less invested in her character than, say, Johnny the Shoeshine boy who has two lines.

Venable said there was a very good reason for that.

Your hero is you. You are your hero. Because writing a script is a way of exposing yourself, you, the writer, often do this terribly crafty thing to protect yourself/your hero.

You write the hero really, really dull. You protect the hero from too much awkward attention by making her a snoozer.

Perhaps you are the exception to this rule. Perhaps your hero crackles with personal electricity.

Still, it's something to consider. And it doesn't hurt to review your screenplay, your character sketches, and your background notes for hints that this just might be true. But it's vital, for the life of your screenplay, for the life of you, for your hero to be a whole person, with a rich inner life...and a lot of exposure to scary, dangerous, and horrible things...internal or external. Remember, screenwriter Robert Towne liked to say that what he really needed to know was what his character was afraid of. The rest was gravy.

So try this.

Exercise

Take your lead character and create a scene where she suffers from something so horribly embarrassing...you wouldn't want it to happen to you. Something so bad, it hasn't even shown up on any of the realtiy shows. Write for at least 10 minutes.

Reread your scene. See, you're not dead. And I bet you know a whole lot more about your character, too.

Laurel Canyon: Lesson 2/Found in Translation

Current release Laurel Canyon, written and directed by Lisa Cholodenko, stars Frances McDormand as a 40ish record producer, an unregenerate hippie, dealing with her son, Christian Bale, an uptight psychiatry resident. Though he lives with a lovely woman, Bale finds himself attracted to a fellow resident, played by the delicious Natasha McElhone, an Israeli with a slight accent. At crucial times, McElhone's character seems to "use the wrong word." At first, it appears charming. But McElhone's character sometimes uses her malapropisms to put other people on edge. Because of what she does, people are forced to restate and redefine what they've said or heard. The accent is part toy, part weapon.

It's a clever device. We often see accents used in comedy as big fat indicators--This is A Funny Character. You don't have to notice the character once he or she starts using that accent, you've learned all you need to know. But Laurel Canyon goes for something more. Once we know that McElhone is capable of mangling language, it sets all of her scenes slightly on edge. What will she say? How will she say it? Does she know that she's doing what she's doing? How will the other characters react?

Exercise

Write a brief character study for someone who has had trouble "living out loud." Your character may have a speech impediment, a brain disorder, or may just have moved too often. Examine when and where she might have had trouble speaking. Did she once live in a foreign country? Did her father yell at her for lisping? Did she move from North to South, or South to North, and get picked on in high school? Was she poor, and did she marry into a rich family? Did she watch her word as carefully as her fork choices?

Now, list three ways she might turn that defect into an asset. How might it be a weapon? List three more ways.

For extra credit, write it as a scene.