Bad Shark, Good Movie

Back in the days before CGI, my roommate was a special effects makeup artist. At that time I had a few friends in this field. There was an ongoing argument that I would have with my creature-making friends about Yoda and E.T., back when both of these characters were make of rubber. They were really just suffocated puppets.

My roommate’s view was that both E.T. and Yoda were poorly sculpted. It bothered him that Yoda looked like puppet. Now, he may have been correct. But it doesn’t matter.

Jaws was released in 1975 and the shark looked like a big rubber piece of crap. This did not prevent the film from becoming the first summer blockbuster, one of the highest-grossing films of all time, and a bona fide classic.

How did this happen? Spielberg and editor Dede Allen kept the shark off-camera as much as possible (partly because the thing didn’t work). This allowed the audience to use their imaginations. Not a bad strategy.

They also told a good story and created characters that we cared about. This is a novel idea in today’s Hollywood, but it used to be standard practice. Creating compelling characters and putting them in a story for an audience to be invested in produces the illusion of life better than any computer imagery ever could.

Yes, the audience could see that Yoda was a puppet, but they were so interested in this unusual character that they allowed themselves to be “fooled” into believing he was a living, breathing being.

E.T. was another example of a puppet (albeit a sophisticated puppet) that people believed was a creature with feelings, dreams and motivations. When I saw the film in 1982 I don’t remember a single person in the audience saying that the puppet was poorly sculpted. People cried when E.T. “died” and cheered when he was revived.

With all due respect to Carlo Rambaldi who built E.T., the first step in making E.T. live was writing the script. Melissa Mathison made the alien come alive on the page. She constructed a story that made us sympathize with a fictional alien when he was left behind on a planet not his own. Her words made us both happy and sad when E.T. went back home.

Today we could arguably make a “better looking” E.T., but would he would not be any more believable. In recent years we have spent a lot of effort trying to make creatures look more real. Maybe they do. But they don’t feel more real. No one cries when they die.

Our job as storytellers is to make characters as real as possible, so that people can suspend disbelief. Our job is to make it so bits of rubber or bits of digital information can live in the minds of the audience. When I was a kid there were few television stars as big as Ms. Piggy and Kermit the Frog. By no standards do these characters look realistic. They do, however, live as far as the audience is concerned.

For thousands of years people have imbued puppets with emotion and feeling. The puppets can be crude or sophisticated, it makes little difference. If the story is relevant and well-told, people will believe even a sock puppet can talk.

My hope is that Hollywood will once again concentrate on story and storytelling, instead of empty spectacle, because this is not what pulls us into the film experience. No, it is character and story that does that. If they get that right we will fear a rubber shark, cry for a dead alien, even worry about a digital fish lost in the big ocean.



No matter how much better technology gets, it will not improve on good story-craft. Make your characters live on the page and they will live on the screen.

The Best Writing Advice I Ever Got

One thousand years ago, when I was a teenager, I went a sci-fi convention in Seattle. This was probably 1978 or ’79. In those days these kinds of conventions were only attended by hardcore geeks (called nerds in those days) who were on the fringe on society. Big movie stars did not go to these events. The biggest star at this convention was the actor who played Boomer on the original Battlestar Galactica.

In attendance were a smattering of comic book creators. And it was while sitting in on a panel with these creators that I heard the best piece of writing advice I have ever heard to this day.

I can’t remember who the writer was, though it may have been Steve Englehart, who I met at that convention and still talk to from time to time.

Whoever it was listened to a story pitch from the crowd and gave back this golden nugget, “If you have a Batman story and you can turn it into a Superman story, it isn’t a very good Batman story”.

That was it, that was the advice. I use this advice whenever I write.

Some of you will think this is nothing special. Too simplistic. But the mistake of not making a story character specific is one of the most common mistakes that I see writers make. It may be simple advice, but few people know it or use it.

First you must understand that all plot and character are linked. They are one and the same – one does not exist without the other. “Character driven” is how people describe a story that has no plot, but is just an observation of people behaving. There is a reason that this type of story reaches a small audience and is boring to most people. Nothing happens.

On the other end of the spectrum is the story that uses characters that are simply buffeted around by the story. Things happen to them – character and plot are not really intertwined. These stories may excite people, but have little or no emotional impact on us.

It is the combination of plot and character that makes a story sing. You cannot remove Hamlet from Hamlet and replace him with King Lear. Those characters and plots are unified into a single entity.

In Finding Nemo, Marlin is an over protective father who is afraid of the big bad ocean. What happens? His overprotective nature pushes his son to take risks he might not otherwise take, resulting in him being taken away. This means Marlin must face his fear and search the ocean looking for his lost boy.

See how the character is interlocked with the story? They are not separate things.

Characters create plot through their actions or lack thereof. And these actions are driven by the hopes, fears, strengths, weaknesses, desires, loves, hates or insecurities of these characters. It is how these characters confront or avoid these things that creates drama in your stories.

In the film The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy is not simply a girl who is taken to a faraway land by a twister. No, she is a girl who dreams of life away from her farm. She wants to be somewhere far away. It is this Dorothy who is swept away by the tornado, only to find that she wants nothing more than to go home.

Here again, story and character are linked.

Ask yourself when you write, “Why this character for this story?” Make sure one cannot exist with the other. Can you plug in any generic character to your story? Character and plot are respectively the body and soul of stories – the yin and yang. Make sure you don’t have a Batman story that can just as easily be a Superman story.

If you follow this piece of advice, the quality of your work will be consistent and appeal to more people.

Water Shortage

Several years ago I wrote a script that had as one of its elements an army of ghosts. Everyone who read the screenplay swore it would sell for big money, and that it was the best screenplay I had written up to that point. I was really proud of this script myself; I felt that I had nailed this story and its treatment.

But when I showed the screenplay to my agent at the time, he looked as if he had smelled some sour milk. His comment was, "Dead people walking around – that's like Scooby-Doo. Don't they have dead people walking around?" He looked at me like I was a moron.

I was stunned. This was a fairly serious script; the ghosts were treated as a real threat. There was nothing there remotely like Scooby-Doo. (The cartoon, I mean. This was before the live action movie.)

But let me put this in context for you: this was years before Sixth Sense, and Hollywood hadn't yet rediscovered the power of the supernatural.

For a while, I was baffled as to why my screenplay made my agent think of a cartoon show. Then it hit me – he had no better reference for dead people walking around.

That's when I realized that imagination is like a reservoir: you can take out only what you have put in.


Everything is a Remix Part 2 from Kirby Ferguson on Vimeo.


I grew up reading comics, watching the Twilight Zone, Star Trek and The Outer Limits. I had also had books full of art by fantasy artists like Frank Frazetta. My mind was full of fantastic images and stories. This was the reservoir from which I drew. It was all of these things I took in that allowed me to create my own stories with their own realities.

My agent had a much more limited palette, so for him dead people equaled Scooby-Doo. He had no other reference point.

I tell you this story because I have a hard time getting some of my students to watch older films or films outside a particular genre. But these things are ways of filling one's reservoir. It will give you more colors to paint with, so to speak, and demonstrate that there can be many different treatments for the same idea.

Look at Batman. There is the 1960s camp version. There is Tim Burton's version from the '80s, which was inspired by Frank Miller's treatment of the character in The Dark Knight comic book. And there is the current film treatment by Christopher Nolan, which, I'm sure owes much to the Frank Miller/David Mazzucchelli take on the character in their comic book mini-series Batman Year One. That book treated the character in a more realistic fashion than others had.




My point is that there are an infinite number of possibilities when it comes to how a story, or character can be imagined. But your ideas are limited to your life experiences and the books, movies, television show, music and other art that you take in. So do what you can to experience more because, again, your imagination is a reservoir. The more you put in, the more you can take out later on.

The End

"Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end; then stop." -- Lewis Carroll

Before I launch into this post I want to apologize for my long absence. My father died and I didn’t much feel like writing the blog. Also I got an idea for a book and wrote that instead.

Now on with the show…

Endings come up a lot when I’m teaching. Some people say that a happy ending is cheap and that life doesn’t work out that way. Others feel like a happy ending is the way to go. And there is, of course, the twist ending. Which one should you choose? You should not choose any of them. Endings should be where your story has been headed the whole time.

I can tell by the way people talk about endings that they think of stories in pieces rather than a unified whole. Think of story as a finely tuned machine. Each piece of this machine may be well made in its own right, but its job is to serve the whole.

I can hear that people are thinking of story components as separate from the whole, when they say things like, “The dialogue was good”. Or, “I liked the characters”. Or, “There were some good parts”.

We teachers talk about story components to make it easier to comprehend, but it truth all of these components should work in concert to produce a satisfying story.

One type of ending is not inherently better than another; it is all about which ending the story needs to make its point. Endings may be discovered, but they are not decided on.

People tend to fixate on the type of ending that corresponds with their world-view and they force their stories to have this type of ending.

Greek dramatist Euripides said, “A bad beginning makes a bad ending.” And legendary filmmaker Billy Wilder said, “If you have a problem with the third act, the real problem is in the first act.”

What both of these storytellers are saying is that is that a story is a unified whole – one thing informs the other. Everything in a story should be connected.

A story has a proposal, an argument and a conclusion. Once you make your story’s proposal you are bound by that promise to the audience to prove, or argue that proposal. If your proposal is “There is no honor among thieves” then your ending is the one that best proves this point.

Billy Wilder also said, “Know where you are going.” That is because everything in your story should be leading there. Your beginning and your ending are linked. They are tied together by your second act. These are one thing, much like the human body. Your body has many parts, but it adds up to one body, each part working in concert with the rest.


So the next time you are trying to work on your ending ask yourself which ending makes your point. And if your ending doesn’t work perhaps that’s because you didn’t start off in this direction.

Turn up the contrast (or why we like crazy astronauts)

I often hear people say how much they love a film because it is “dark.” They wax poetic about dark films because they feel that they are more true-to-life than one that is lighter (or “sappy,” as they might say).

I feel as if I have asked them what they see in an inkblot. Over many years I have noticed that these people tend to be gloomier people all around. They believe anything good or happy is false -- a lie. This is the filter through which they view both life and art.

On the other hand, or inkblot, there are those people who don’t want to see any of the dark side of life in their films. They ignore these things in life as well. This group might see two people kissing in their inkblot, while the first set sees one person strangling another.

As is often the case the truth in somewhere in between -- light and dark, good and bad are polarities that don’t exist without the other. One is no more real or truthful than the other.

Frank Capra, one of my favorite filmmakers, was often accused of being too sweet and sappy. When he was making films some critics dubbed them “Capra corn.” That put-down has stuck. What people seem to forget is that his films get as dark as they are cheery. In It’s a Wonderful Life, we learn George Bailey is about to kill himself. This is a “feel-good” film, and yet the good-guy main character has a suicidal breakdown.

Watch the film again, and see how dark it gets. Sure, it ends on a high note, but if you remember, George Bailey has always wanted to travel the world. When the film ends he still hasn’t gotten to. He probably won’t. He never gets what he wants; he simply learns to appreciate what he has.

In an argument about Schindler’s List, a friend of mine voiced the opinion of many people (and maybe even a few of you) when he said, “Leave it to Spielberg to make a feel-good movie about the Holocaust.” Yes, there were moments in the film that were lighter in tone, but there were also moments in that movie that are as about as dark as things can get: children hiding out in a latrine to save their lives, the entire Kristallnacht sequence where the Nazis cleared the Jewish Ghetto.

If these things make you “feel good,” seek therapy. You would be hard-pressed to find anything as dark in a popular American film.

It seems, as with It’s a Wonderful Life, that if the story ends on a high point it is perceived as all light, no matter what has happened prior. And the same is true in reverse, a down ending leaves people feeling as though the entire story was dark, when it may in fact have had several lighter moments.

But light and dark define one another -- one cannot see one without the other. Having all dark is like typing black letters on black paper: it obscures your point. In her insightful book Picture This -- How Pictures Work, author Molly Bang puts it like this, “Contrast allows us to see.” This is a design principle that works for designing stories as well as anything else. Contrast is the best way to make your point clear.

In another Christmas classic, A Christmas Carol, Ebenezer Scrooge is seen in his office. It is a cold place, both literally and emotionally. Scrooge would rather let his employee, Bob Cratchit, freeze than put another lump of coal on the fire. The story later shows Scrooge earlier in life when he worked for someone else, a man named Mr. Fezziwig. Fezziwig’s place is full of life, warmth and joy -- the exact opposite of Scrooge’s. Seeing these two environments in contrast allows the other to be seen more clearly.

This idea of contrast is why drama works well in the world of extremes. In a well-told story, a very rich man becomes very poor or vice versa. But if a rich man looses just a little money, it is of little interest to an audience. It illuminates nothing. If a poor man finds a nickel, it is not as interesting as if he wins the lottery. We have a term for this kind of contrast: Rags to Riches.

Aristotle referred to this as a reversal of the dramatic situation (peripeteia). He said that simple plots tended to have no such reversals, where as complex plots do. A change of fortune for the hero engages and entertains an audience, he pointed out. What he did not say is that seeing something one way than the other gives us a kind of measuring stick.

If we see a homeless man eating garbage, we might have a passing interest -- but if we were aware that three weeks earlier he was as rich as Donald Trump, our interest would increase because of the stark contrast. David and Goliath is a story of this kind of contrast. So is The Tortoise and the Hare, and The Prince and the Pauper.

In each of these stories, one element defines another: large and small, slow and fast, rich and poor. Each condition increases the other’s visible. A giant cannot be a giant in a vacuum; he needs something to be bigger than, or he is no giant at all. In the same way, a story needs both light and dark if one is to tell it clearly and honestly.

Theme Beats Logic

“Don’t give me logic, give me emotion.”
— Billy Wilder’s instructions to his writing partner, I.A.L. Diamond

Let’s start to explore this idea of theme versus logic by looking at the film Raising Arizona. Nicholas Cage and Holly Hunter play a couple desperate to have a child. They eventually resort to stealing an infant from a couple with quintuplets.

When the hapless couple brings the baby home, they all pose for a family photo. This snapshot of the new family is followed immediately by a shot of a man’s head popping out of a small mud hole. The man screams at the top of his lungs as rain pours down upon him. In the background, we can see a prison wall and searchlight. This man is escaping from prison. Is there any logic at all that says that a man escaping from prison should or would scream as he makes his escape? In fact, logic tells us just the opposite—a man escaping prison would be as quiet as can be. So why is it in the film? It’s because theme beats logic, and the mud-soaked screaming man makes a thematic point.

Look where the scene falls in the film—right after the snapshot of the happy family. So what? Think about it: Everything in the scene about the screaming man is made to resemble a birth. The man pops up headfirst. They could have started with his fingers pushing up out of the mud. That would make more sense, logically, if the man is digging, but this scene is not about logic. The head, covered with dripping mud, emerges from a small hole. The man screams and screams and screams as he is “born” into the world. This is an ugly birth; there is something wrong with this birth. That’s the thematic point that beats logic. Nothing good happens for the Nick Cage and Holly Hunter characters after they steal the child. In fact, the escaped convict, along with another, seek refuge at the couple’s home. Hunter and Cage have no choice but to house them, because the criminals know about the kidnapping and threaten to expose their secret. The couple has no end of trouble until, at the film’s conclusion, they return the child to his rightful parents.

This is a situation in which the armature is not spoken, but is evident in every decision made by the storytellers. The armature could be stated: It is wrong to deprive others of their happiness to gain your own. Or it could be stated: Nothing good can come from a bad deed.

You may have your own way of putting the film’s armature into words; make sure you can back it up with solid, consistent evidence in the story’s structure.

Groundhog Day and Tootsie have similar armatures: When the protagonists use their inside information to get the object of their desire into bed, it doesn’t work. In both cases the plan should work, but doesn’t, because it isn’t right thematically.

In Tootsie the armature is set up very well. What you see in the first act is that Dustin Hoffman’s character is a good actor, and what makes him a good actor is that he can’t lie when he’s acting. He has to be true to his character. In life, he is a liar, particularly to women. Through living the life of a fictional woman, who can be nothing but honest, Dustin’s male alter ego learns to be honest with women.

One of my favorite examples of this is the story of Groundhog Day. I read somewhere that the studio wanted some kind of explanation as to why Bill Murray’s character was reliving the same day over and over again. They wanted a gypsy curse or something along those lines. From what I understand, it was written and then cut because it didn’t work. The reason, I think, is that it doesn’t need a logical explanation. The audience understands why it is happening. It is what is supposed to happen thematically to teach Bill Murray a lesson. When he learns his lesson, the phenomenon stops and we all know why. We understand that “ever since that day” Bill Murray is a better man.

Remember that dramatizing the armature is a way of getting an intellectual idea across emotionally. If you learn to do this you’ll move more people more often and more deeply.

Another favorite example of mine is in the 1968 version of Planet of the Apes. Here the armature is that “Man” is a violent and self-destructive creature. This point is hammered home again and again, topped off by the surprise ending, which reveals that humans destroyed their own world.

Near the middle of the film, before the audience knows that the planet is indeed Earth, there is a courtroom scene. Humans on this world are mute, but the sentient apes of this world have discovered that Taylor (Charlton Heston) can speak. The courtroom scene takes place following this discovery.

Until then, Taylor has been kept in a cage. There is no logical reason to have this scene in a courtroom. Why not have the scene at Taylor’s cage? It all goes back to the armature that Man is a violent and self-destructive creature. This scene, thematically, is about needing to put humanity on trial. The storytellers even make a point of stripping Taylor of his clothes to make him appear more Adam-like. And it is no mistake that this scene immediately follows the discovery that Taylor possesses speech. Just being human, it seems, is crime enough. It is a beautifully crafted scene that abandons logic for theme to support its armature.

My favorite “logic flaw” of all time is also in Planet of the Apes. It is my favorite because it is so obvious and yet almost no one notices or cares about it. Again, Planet of the Apes, co-written by Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling, has a mother-of-all-twists ending. Taylor believes that he is on a distant planet populated by intelligent apes only to discover that he has been on Earth all along. Here’s the big flaw – the apes read and write English. This is a huge flaw. But no one cares because THEME BEATS LOGIC.

The ultimate sophistication

"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication." -- Leonardo da Vinci

Da Vinci’s quote on the sophistication of simplicity has been all but forgotten by creative people today. Screenwriting students, more than anything else, don’t want their work to appear too simplistic, too “obvious.” The idea of communicating clearly with one’s audience is now equated with talking down to them.

Good art, we think, must challenge the viewer to get its meaning. Some art is mostly challenging, as if we have made the collective agreement that “Art” is defined by its inaccessibility. If we can understand something at first glance, we feel it must be without enduring merit. It is not profound. Note that the responsibility for communication has moved from the creator to the audience. The artist is now free to do whatever comes to mind without the hindrance of clarity. The viewers can be blamed for any breakdown in communication. They were not up to the complexity of the art.

Being clear is an artistic crime nowadays. Steven Spielberg is public enemy number one according to some critics. Spielberg “hits you over the head,” they say. If everyone understands his work, how good could it possibly be? I am at a loss as to where the craftsmanship is in deliberately making something convoluted and difficult to comprehend. A five-year-old’s story or painting can be personally expressive (and hard to make sense of). But few children, however creative, can reproduce an intended effect with any precision. It takes years of practice to acquire the marksmanship required to hit one’s target squarely on the nose.

It is ironic that, when a complicated subject is expressed so well that it is understood easily, it is assumed the ease came with the idea. They confuse the ease at which the idea is received with the idea itself being pedestrian. Students of screenwriting or filmmaking rarely marvel at the clarity with which something has been communicated, and film schools seem to help foster the idea that clear communication is unsophisticated. They mainly study “art films” that are slow and hard to follow, with a convoluted story that bravely tackles an important topic.

Lately, I find audiences don’t expect to understand what they see. I overheard someone say that they liked the film Transformers, with the caveat that it was a typical action movie where you couldn’t follow the story. When did incomprehensible plots become typical in action movies? Did the first Die Hard (1988) confuse anyone? Take an “important” films like Syriana or Babel. Over and over again, people who saw them told me that the movie was confusing and hard to follow, but good. I can’t help but think that “good” here is synonymous with the “Good effort!” kids get on their papers as grades.

It is vital that the primary job of a storyteller be to tell the story clearly. Clarity is where truth comes from. Without that, a story is “just” a story, quickly forgotten. If today the filmmaker is absolved of any responsibility to be clear, and the viewer must bear the burden of creating meaningful connections, the story is no longer about an audience sharing a truth. It is about the individuals in that audience, who reall “gets it” and who doesn’t.

The most complex story can be broken down into simple elements. That is the work, that is what we all sweat over. The reward is an understanding that seems to come easily. All I ask is that next time a story you can’t follow makes you wonder if you have brain has turned to mush, turn it around and give yourself some credit for being intelligent. Maybe it isn’t your fault. Maybe the storyteller just wasn’t sophisticated enough to rely on the strength of simplicity.

The Secret of Magic

Years ago a good friend of mine was an apprentice film editor at the same time as he was learning carpentry from his father. One day the film editor says to my friend, “When you read about carpentry think about editing.”

My friend and I talked about this for some time trying to figure out what he meant. We were both in our late teens at the time and couldn’t make sense of it. Now that I’m older I see what he meant was that the principles of one craft can be applied to another.

Even people who have mastered their craft can gain valuable insights by looking closely at someone else’s.

On BBC America I watch master chef Gordon Ramsey on his show Kitchen Nightmares. He takes failing restaurants and helps the owners revamp their businesses. More often than not he finds two related problems: 1) The chefs at these places let their ego get in the way of their work. 2) They make the dishes too complex. They spend too much energy on the presentation of their dishes.

His struggle is to get these chefs to simplify these dishes. This is exactly the same thing I find with less experienced screenwriters, filmmakers and comic book illustrators. They tend to be much more into style then the foundations of their respective crafts. Youth often goes for style over substance. As a teacher, it helps me to see chef Ramsey deal with the same problems I deal with, but in an entirely different universe.

I have mentioned it before but learning magic has been unbelievably helpful in helping me gain a deeper understanding of my craft.

In my teaching I have found that students often dismiss something I teach them because it is too simple. They often think what you teach them will never work because an audience will surely see through something so elementary.

In learning magic I have seen myself have the same reaction as my students. Most magic tricks are quite simple -- at least in principle. They might be hard to master, but the methods behind them are so simple that when you read the description you think that there is no way a person could be fooled -- but they are. In fact, the simpler the trick, the more fantastic the illusion.

I am an amateur magician. A few months ago I did a trick for some friends, and screwed it up. They were not impressed. This was a trick I had done before that had blown people away. But because I
screwed it up, my friends could not believe that it would have ever worked. They were polite. They said that it might be a good trick...for kids.

When I teach students to set things up in the first act that will pay off later, they complain that it is too predictable to do things that way. Like the simple magic trick they think that it will never work. They have all seen too many bad films where they could see how everything returns and works out. But this is like my poorly executed trick: it is only poor craftsmanship that is at fault, not the method itself.

Among other things, learning the craft of magic has taught me to trust the methods -- that it is up to me to perform them well. My advice to you is to master a simple magic trick or two just to see how something so simple can amaze an audience. And remember when you read about magic -- think about screenwriting. You’ll be surprised at what you discover.

A Genius - Part 2 (or Chaplin's Blog)

I have said it before: The people who made films "in the old days" were better at their craft than those who make them now.

I have urged people to seek out old interviews with these storytellers to see just how much they had to say about their craft. If you do this, you will see farther because you will be standing in the shoulders of giants.

Now here is one of those giants: Charlie Chaplin. If you want a taste of just how smart this man was here is something he wrote up for American Magazine in 1918 called "What People Laugh At":

"Comedy moving pictures were an instant success because most of them showed policemen falling down coalholes, slipping into buckets of whitewash, falling off petrol wagons, and getting into all sorts of trouble. Here were men representing the dignity of the law, often very pompous themselves, being made ridiculous and undignified. The sight of their misfortunes at once struck the public funny bone twice as hard as if private citizens were going through a like experience.

Even funnier than the man who has been made ridiculous, however, is the man who, having had something funny happen to him, refuses to admit that anything out of the way has happened, and attempts to maintain his dignity. Perhaps the best example is the intoxicated man who, though his tongue and walk give him away, attempts in a dignified manner to convince you that he is quite sober.

He is much funnier than the man who, wildly hilarious, is frankly drunk and doesn't care a whoop who knows it....

For this reason, all my pictures are built around the idea of getting me into trouble and so giving me the chance to be desperately serious in my attempt to appear as a normal little gentleman. That is why, no matter how desperate the predicament is, I am always very much in earnest about clutching my cane, straightening my derby hat, and fixing my tie, even though I have just landed on my head.

I am so sure of this point that I not only try to get myself into embarrassing situations, but I also incriminate the other characters in the picture. When I do this, I always aim for economy of means. By that I mean that when one incident can get two big, separate laughs, it is much better than two individual incidents. In The Adventurer, I accomplished this by first placing myself on a balcony, eating ice cream with a girl. On the floor directly underneath the balcony I put a stout, dignified, well-dressed woman at a table. Then, while eating the ice cream, I let a piece drop off my spoon, slip through my baggy trousers, and drop from the balcony onto this woman's neck.

The first laugh came at my embarrassment over my own predicament. The second, and the much greater one, came when the ice cream landed on the woman's neck and she shrieked and started to dance around. Only one incident had been used, but it had got two people into trouble, and had also got two big laughs.

Simple as this trick seems there were two real points of human nature involved in it. One was the delight the average person takes in seeing wealth and luxury in trouble. The other was the tendency of the human being to experience within himself the emotions he sees on the stage or screen.

One of the things most quickly learned in theatrical work is that people as a whole get satisfaction from seeing the rich get the worst of things. The reason for this, of course, lies in the fact that nine-tenths of the people in the world are poor, and secretly resent the wealth of the other tenth.

If I had dropped the ice cream, for example, on a scrubwoman's neck, instead of getting laughs, sympathy would have been aroused for the woman. Also, because a scrubwoman has no dignity to lose, that point would not have been funny. Dropping ice cream down a rich woman's neck, however, is in the minds of the audience, just giving the rich what they deserve.

By saying that human beings experience the same emotions as the people in the incidents they witness, I mean that—taking the ice cream as an example—when the rich woman shivered the audience shivered with her. A thing that puts a person in an embarrassing predicament must always be perfectly familiar to an audience, or else they will miss the point entirely.

. . . There is no mystery connected with "making people laugh." All I have ever done is to keep my eyes open and my brain alert for any facts or incidents that I could use in my business. I have studied human nature, because without a knowledge of it I could not do my work. And as I said at the very beginning of this article, a knowledge of human nature is at the foundation of almost all success."

If you think that Chaplin is not funny and therefore has nothing to teach you just look at one of the things he said, that we like to see rich people or people in power as comic foils. Is that true? Well, the Daily Show makes use of this everyday. And look at the glee generated when we hear that Paris Hilton has to go to jail.

Now, pick a modern filmmaker at random and read something they say about the craft and it will become clear to you that Charlie Chaplin was indeed a genius who has much to teach us, and that we have much to live up to.

A Genius -- Part 1

"I like Keaton's [films]. But Chaplin is the best of 'em all." -- Howard Hawks

Charlie Chaplin was a genius. I know, I'm not the first one to say this, but people tend to take him for granted. We think of his little tramp character as too cutsie -- we are too sophisticated nowadays to laugh at something so corny. He doesn't look funny to us with his Hitler mustache, bowler hat and baggy pants. But once upon a time Chaplin made the whole world laugh; and sometimes made them cry -- very often both at the same time.

Like Alfred Hitchcock he could play his audience's emotions like a violin. If you call yourself a student of film and don't make yourself familiar with his work you are doing yourself a disservice. His films are the best film school you could ever attend. Some of the best filmmakers in the history of the medium have been influenced by his work: Woody Allen, Chuck Jones, David Lean, Walt Disney and Martin Scorsese are just a few.

What made him so great? His uncanny ability to put a dash of pathos in his comedy. His ability to communicate visually. He was great at everything.

He was a master at the art of pantomime. It is my firm belief (as it was Chaplin's) that pantomime is older than spoken language and communicates more clearly. Even dogs who want to be petted pantomime the action to communicate their needs. It is an ancient form of communication that, when done well, speaks to us more deeply than spoken words.

If you want to tell stories on film then visual storytelling is your stock and trade and you would
do yourself a big favor by sitting down in front of the television and going to Chaplin University.

My favorite Chaplin films are The Kid, Gold Rush, The Circus and City Lights. If you watch these films it helps if you remember that the gags you are seeing were brand-new. He was the first to think them up and execute them. You may be familiar with some of the gags because you've seen them used in a Chuck Jones cartoon. Or you may be familiar with some of them out of context and are likely to shrug them off because you have seen a clip used in a cheesy commercial to sell you a mattress on Labor Day.

Try to work through that secondhand familiarity and put yourself in the audience's place, seeing these things for the first time. If you can allow yourself to do that, you will not only learn something about your craft, there's a good chance you will laugh your ass off.

FLIP-FLOPS

When I say flip-flops I don’t mean shoes. Flip-flops is the name that I give characters who are opposites, but exchange character traits.

Oscar and Felix of Neil Simon’s play The Odd Couple, are probably the most famous flip-flops. One is clean and prissy while the other is sloppy and gruff. Their marriages have broken up and they are thrown together as roommates. They are extreme opposites, which offers the best opportunity for conflict and, therefore, comedy. Their ritual pain is having to live with one another.

By the end of the story we have seen why both of their marriages failed. This pairing is a replay, or a clone, of each of their marriages. But it has also changed both characters. Both are a little more aware of their respective faults. They could each stand to be a little bit like the other.

In fact, the last messy thing Oscar does is tell his poker guests to watch their cigarette ashes. He says, “ This is my house, not a pig sty.” This is a huge change from the Oscar at the opening of the play.

Another classic example is The African Queen. In that film, Humphrey Bogart plays a crusty, hard-drinking boat captain, while Katharine Hepburn plays his flip-flop. She is a stuffy religious matron who detests vulgar vices such as demon rum. These two share little in common except the small boat they are trapped on together.

Through the ritual pain of having to make their way down a treacherous river together, they both become fuller people. Each has something the other is lacking, and by exchanging traits they become whole.

Sometimes only one of the characters needs to change and the other is the catalyst for that change, such as in Beauty and the Beast. When the Beast changes enough on the inside to earn the love of a woman, he changes on the outside from a beast to a handsome man. The change is only an external manifestation of what is going on internally.

Shrek turns this idea on its green funnel-shaped ear, but it is still the same story. Shrek is completely comfortable with who he is; it is the Princess who must change.

Get Rich Quick! Become a Hollywood Screenwriter!

“Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.” -- Thomas Edison

I was once asked to show a short film of mine and speak about filmmaking at a community college. At the time my film (a short film called “White Face”) had been running on HBO. After a few standard questions like, “What was the budget?” and “How long did it take to make?” came a question that floored me. A young man raised his hand and asked, “How do I get my film on HBO?” For me, the assumption behind that question verged on an insult.

Why? Because it devalues my craft. Filmmaking has become the get-rich-quick scheme of our times. The problem with get-rich-quick schemes is that they promise great success with minimum effort. One of the things I dig about my friends who draw is that they are aware that it takes time and effort to get good.

Once, at a Comicon in San Diego, a bunch of artists I knew were looking at someone’s portfolio, their mouths agape. They “oohed” and “ahhed” for a while, then someone asked how old the artist was. The answer came back that he was 45 or so and with that they all relaxed and nodded. They were relieved because they understood he had put his time in.

Imagine a person who has never picked up a paintbrush deciding that they want to be an artist. Upon completing their first painting, they call the Louvre and other museums and ask the curators if they would be interested purchasing and displaying their masterpiece. Sounds silly, right? Yet people have no problem believing that they should sell their first screenplay or have their first film distributed.

I have the utmost respect for the people I know who draw because they understand that talent is nothing if not backed up by skill -- and skill takes time and effort to acquire. What bothers me about some younger people wanting to break into films is their sense of entitlement.

They don’t seem to care about the craft of filmmaking -- only the fame and/or money. They know nothing about the history of the craft the wish to enter and have never seen the films of John Ford, John Houston, Frank Capra, David Lean, Howard Hawks or Billy Wilder. These legends have things to teach, but few bother to listen. They just want to know who they can call, what the next step is to becoming famous.

I once had an aspiring filmmaker tell me that she was on a quest to find out how to involve an audience. She said that there must be some key to keeping an audience interested in your film. I told her to read Hitchcock interviews because he was probably the most articulate filmmaker in history when it came to engaging audiences. She scoffed at that, saying she didn’t like Hitchcock and so didn’t think he would have anything to teach her.

I know quite a few people who have done well in the movie business, but they all had a minimum of ten years of hard work under their belts before anyone bothered to pay attention to them. These people were not no-talent hacks -- they are now show-biz VIPs. But I knew them when no one of consequence would return their calls, or come see them perform or read their screenplays. But they just kept doing what they did and acquired skills.

Jerry Seinfeld (not that he’s a friend of mine, but we have met a few times) tells a story about how he was looking out a window one morning and saw construction workers on their way to work and thought to himself if those guys can get up in the morning and go to work he should be able do the same with his work. So, he began getting up early in the morning and sitting down for a couple of hours to write jokes. Bill Cosby does the same thing. As far as I know they both do it to this day. Johnny Carson was so used to getting up, reading the paper and writing jokes that he even did it after he retired.

If you are unwilling to see filmmaking/screenwriting as a craft you must hone, you will fall behind your competitors who are willing to work a little harder. If you are unwilling to study the work of those who came before you, you will fall behind your competitors who are willing to learn. Most of all, if you think that this business is a way to get rich quick, you are in for a world of heartbreak.

I once heard Steve Martin give a young comic this advice: “Be so good they can’t ignore you.” Good advice, but it takes work to be that good. If you are unwilling to do that work, find a craft that you are willing to work at and do that.

All I have ever wanted in my life is to be good at what I do and be paid to do it. While I was making my film “White Face,” HBO could not have been farther from my mind. I was only trying to make a good film. Having the film run on HBO did not bring me fame or fortune; it was just one brick on the road to wherever I end up in this business. Meanwhile, I am working on getting better.

So my advice to the young man who wants a film on HBO? Make a film good enough to be on HBO and they will call you. Even if they don’t, you will have something you can be proud of. And for that, you can also be proud of yourself.

Please Don’t Kill The Animals

In the last couple of years, several animated films have used animals as major characters. Now I am told by my friends in that business that the studios are looking to buck this trend. They feel that the audience is growing tired of watching animals. I find this baffling. Animal stories did not emerge in the world with the advent of computer-generated animation, and will be with us long after we have moved on to some new technique.

We cannot help but see ourselves in the behavior and habits of animals. How many times have you heard someone say about his or her dog, “He thinks he’s a person”? (A more accurate statement might be, “I think my dog is a person.”)

People constantly equate human and animal behaviors; they always have. It would not be out of the ordinary to hear a person say of someone, “That guy really squirrels away his money.” In fact, here is a short list of such sayings:

• Those guys live like pigs
• She watched me like a hawk
• Men are dogs
• Those guys are really butting heads
• She eats like a bird
• He’s stubborn as a mule
• She needs to come out of her shell
• Those two go at it like a couple of rabbits
• He’s a leech

Creative people have used animals in storytelling for all of human history. The ancient Greeks believed that by observing the way a beehive was organized and following that model you could have a perfect society.

Many tribal peoples believe that one has an animal spirit guide and by following that animal’s lead one might have an easier time at life. Tribal people also believe that we have an animal side to our natures, what Carl Jung calls a “bush soul.” So, not only do we see ourselves in animals, but also we see the animal within ourselves.

But why do we use animals in stories, particularly? Because it is a way to look at ourselves with a little distance.

One of my favorite storytellers, Aesop, used animal stories to illuminate the nature of human beings. If the story of the Tortoise and the Hare were merely what the title suggests few would remember the story. No, this is a story about people -- people “dressed” for the story like a Tortoise and a Hare -- but people nonetheless.

In the American South, during the time of slavery, the slaves told stories of the clever Brer (Brother) Rabbit. These were not stories of rabbits, foxes and bears, but stories about people designed to help them survive their cruel circumstances, stories about slaves outwitting their masters to get what they needed.

George Orwell’s book Animal Farm uses that distance to reveal how people in power can abuse that power. And Art Spiegelman’s brilliant graphic novel Maus uses cats as Nazis and mice as Jews to give the reader just enough emotional distance to see a Holocaust story through fresh eyes.

Less seriously, Daffy Duck provides the distance necessary to notice our greedy natures and laugh at ourselves.

If using animals to tell stories is just a trend, then it is a trend that stretches back to the beginning of time. Maybe Hollywood needs to realize that the animals in their films did not write the stories they are telling. If people are tired of those, then it is not the animals that are to blame.

The New Holy Grail

People tell me about how good the stories are in games nowadays, but I have never seen this to be true. The games are exciting and the graphics are great, but they do not tell stories. (I can hear some of your knees jerking from here, but hear me out.)

Because video games have many of the elements of a story -- characters, settings and exciting events for instance -- it is easy to be fooled into thinking that you are “in” a story when playing a game. You are not. What you are doing is playing out a scenario.

If the object of the game is to kill the dragon and save the princes, that is a scenario, not story. Take chess: it has characters and goals very much like a video game. The object is to capture the opposing king without losing your own. There are bishops, knights, and foot soldiers called pawns, to help in this task – yet it is never called a story. Why?

I believe we have been tricked by our technology. If chess had been invented as a video game, people would undoubtedly say it had a great, interactive story, different every time. Same thing with board games: in Monopoly you can go to jail, buy a house, run a hotel, or own a railroad. But would you say a board game tells a story?

In the old days -- the very old days -- a hunter might go out and have an adventure while tracking a killing his prey. Upon his return home he would tell the story of his quest for food. Exactly how the trip went (“First I turned left at the rock...”) was not a story, but the retelling of his adventure was.

The term “interactive story” is a misnomer. Interactivity turns a story into a game.

People have been playing games and telling stories as long as there have been people. (I believe the oldest chess reference comes from Persian literature in 600 A.D.) People go to games for one reason and stories for another. The two forms serve very different functions.

Stories are primarily a way of passing along information from one person to another. Good stories remain essentially the same after many retellings.

Games are a way of practicing, physically or intellectually. A good game varies its scenario, and makes us change how we play it.

Each plays its part very well. There is no reason to try to merge them. And pretending that you can fails to acknowledge the specific purpose and power of each.

The Artist’s Vision

“Why do you want to build an amusement park, they’re so dirty.” -- Walt Disney’s wife, on his idea for Disneyland

For those of us born after 1955 it is difficult to imagine a world without Disneyland. But for the people who were born the other side of that year, it was just as difficult to imagine a world with Disneyland in it. Mrs. Disney was correct: amusement parks were dirty places. She could not conceive of them being otherwise, and neither could anyone else. Except Walt.

In the late 1920s, Walt Disney had made his name making funny little cartoons about a mouse. It is almost impossible for us to understand the enormous popularity of Mickey Mouse in those days. Mickey Mouse was a bona fide movie star. Before the first Mickey Mouse cartoon hit the movie screens, Walt was told that it was a bad idea to try to “popularize a mouse.”

A few years later Walt had an idea to make a feature-length cartoon. Everyone thought it was a terrible idea. No one could imagine an audience sitting through a cartoon that long. In Hollywood his project was called Disney’s Folly. He was expected to lose his shirt. The film was Snow White and it was a smash. And just as with Disneyland, it became impossible to imagine a world without Disney’s version of Snow White. Going further, can one imagine a world without feature-length animated films?

One of the things that makes a person an artist is their ability to look at the world and see what is missing. They can visualize in their mind’s eye a brand new thing, or see an old thing in a completely different way than others around them. They have vision. And more often than not, people do not trust a visionary artist.

When Francis Ford Coppola was hired to adapt the novel The Godfather the studio began to worry if they had made a mistake. Coppola had a vision for the film in his head that did not match anyone else’s. Every decision he made was questioned. The studio did not want Marlon Brando in the cast. Nor did they want Al Pacino in the part of Michael -- they suggested Robert Redford. The director of photography, Gordon Willis, is now known as one of the best in the world, but the studio thought his photography was too dark. The studio even went as far as to hire another director to follow Coppola around so that when they fired him this new director could step right in.

Coppola’s The Godfather is now regarded as one of the best films of all time.

George Lucas’s film American Graffiti became a cultural phenomenon despite the fact that the studio expected to lose money. They could not see what Lucas saw. Following the success of American Graffiti, Lucas went to all of the studios with a new project called Star Wars. No one expected much of the film and everyone but 20th Century Fox turned it down. Even they didn’t think enough of the film to retain merchandising and sequel rights. Lucas kept those. After an early private screening of the film, all of George’s friends told him he had failed. Lucas’ wife Marcia purportedly cried because George had wasted so much time on this piece of garbage. In May 1977, Star Wars became the most popular film in the galaxy.

In the late 1950s, Alfred Hitchcock started work on a film about a transvestite murderer called Psycho. Long-time associates distanced themselves from the film and decided not to work with Hitchcock on this one. “You’ve gone too far, Hitch,” they said. Universal Studios also felt he had gone too far and gave the legendary director a minuscule budget. Hitchcock put up his own house as collateral to get the money to make the film, now a classic.

I wrote these stories down so that you artists out there will stick to your creative guns. I want you to realize that if you have a clear vision of something truly new it may not be recognized by the people in power or those around you. The world is full of naysayers who cannot see what you see until after it’s done. Sometimes the entire world is against you, but their power nor their numbers do not make them right.

“When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him.” -- Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)

Target Practice

"The greater danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it." -- Michelangelo

While teaching a class, I once mentioned that it wasn’t just luck to repeatedly produce good work as a storyteller. I said that if it were being in the right place at the right time, you could not have people whose successes span decades, such as Alfred Hitchcock or Billy Wilder.

One student scoffed and said, “Yeah, but that’s Billy Wilder!” I could tell he had already decided what the limits of his talent were, and to live within them.

That is not a helpful kind of self-appraisal. It allows one to make an excuse for substandard work, an excuse I have seen used a lot over the years. In the early ‘90s, I remember being in the studio of a popular comic book artist whose work could have been a little better. The artists who worked there, producing comics, didn’t take their work very seriously. They wrote poor stories and made mediocre drawings.

When I asked why they didn’t seem to care about the books’ quality, one of them said, “It’s just for kids.” Does anyone think generation after generation would still be watching Snow White if Walt Disney had ever said this to his artists? I don’t think so. That attitude is just one of the many ways people excuse themselves from doing the hard work it takes to produce something good.

Contrary to popular belief, quality work seldom comes easily for those who produce it. In fact, it is often most difficult for people at the top of their craft. (Thomas Mann said, "A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.") Professional level writers are aiming high. They are looking at their heroes as competitors. Or they are aiming at a very specific idea or emotion and they want to hit the bull’s-eye. They are working at the limit of their abilities.

You have to always aim higher than you think you can reach.

The great Disney animator Glen Kean once told a friend of mine that he only took on assignments if he was afraid of them. He had to be unsure that he could pull it off. This is the kind of thinking that pushes one to do great work.

August Wilson and I were talking about this one day -- he told me a story that illustrates the idea perfectly. He said that he was once working on a play as a submission to get into a playwriting workshop. A friend asked him what he was doing, and he said that he needed to write a play good enough for him to get into this workshop. The friend asked, “What are you doing that for? Why aren’t you trying to write the best play ever written?”

August took his friend’s point to heart. He now aimed to write the best play ever written. The result was Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom -- the first play of his ever produced on Broadway. August went on the win two Pulitzers for drama, a host of other awards, and now has a theater on Broadway named for him. This is where pushing himself to the limit of his abilities got him.

So, did he write the best play ever written? Let the critics argue that. The point is he tried, and in trying wrote a far better play than he would have done otherwise -- and became one of the world’s most admired playwrights.

Aim high. Very high. Higher than you think you might possibly reach, and you will produce work whose quality will surprise you.

Hero Worship

"One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being."
-- May Sarton

What happened to heroes in stories? In older films and stories, heroes were characters who made sacrifices. They were people who thought of others before themselves. At some point we decided that this was unrealistic, and characters like a square-jawed Superman were too corny for us. We were more sophisticated than that -- life is gray, not black and white. Bad guys and good guys went the way of the dodo. Nowadays heroes are out for themselves. Maybe that is more realistic -- but what lesson are we learning?

What people are forgetting about stories is why we tell them, and that “why” is very important. The “why” tells you how to tell a story. Almost all stories have a lesson at their core. Sometimes a small lesson, sometimes profound, but almost always a lesson.

If you buy this idea, then what are heroes for? Why in the past were they so goody-goody? Heroes represent ideals to live up to. We learn from their example how we should try to behave. We see who we hope we will be when and if we are ever called on to be brave in the face of danger, be it physical or emotional. These examples are what we hope to imitate.

Stories are only a reflection of life, and flesh-and-blood heroes who are not fictional beings serve the same purpose -- they have lived out ideals we hope to live up to. Look at Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Albert Schweitzer, Martin Luther King, Jr. -- very few of us can claim to be as self-sacrificing as these. And because we know what they did is right, but not easy to do, we exalt these people.

A hero is measured by the size of his/her struggle. In many stories, a formidable villain shows us the hero’s strength. But in others, a hero’s internal struggle, with what has been called a fatal flaw, is the real obstacle to overcome. Giving a hero a weakness to overcome is what makes him/her like us. They are reluctant to do the right thing, but do it anyway because it is the right thing.

How deep does this imitation go? In the 1930s, Clark Gable starred in a classic Frank Capra film called It Happened One Night. In a scene in that film, he undressed and you could see that he wore no t-shirt. That year the sales of t-shirts went down. Years later, in Rebel Without a Cause, James Dean wore a t-shirt as outer wear and that became a fad.

These are just small examples of how we imitate our heroes. We also adopt their behaviors. We learn from their mindsets. As storytellers, we have a responsibility to show people who they could be if they face their demons and do the right thing. Sometimes people need a story to show them how they can be heroes.



This blog entry is dedicated to August Wilson who became a friend and hero to me. He died on October 2, 2005, of liver cancer.

WHAT’S WRONG WITH EMOTIONS, ANYWAY?

When was that last time you felt anything in the movie theater? I mean really felt something for the characters. Did you care who lived and who died? (I don’t mean intellectually, but deep down in your gut.)

When a film is really working people come out fired up. They are still giggling at the funny part, or still worked up by exciting part. Or they are still sad because of the melancholy part. But more often than not when I leave the theater I don’t hear people talking about the film at all. They just file out quietly, unless they have something clever to say about what they have just seen. Just as often, they talk about getting lunch or dinner.

Part of what has happened is that academics have hijacked cinema. For them, emotional drama is cheap or manipulative. If it makes them cry, that’s the worst kind of story.

But also, filmmakers have fallen in love with spectacle. These are the amazing special effects, or stunts, or scenery, or sexy stars that create visceral, albeit superficial, emotions in the viewer. These cost a lot of money, but are what I like to call “creatively inexpensive”—not hard to think up. And they have no lasting effect on the audience.

Aristotle put it like this: “The Spectacle has, indeed, an emotional attraction of its own, but, of all the parts, it is the least artistic, and connected least with the art of poetry [he means playwriting]. Fear and pity may be aroused by spectacular means; but they may also result from the inner structure of the piece, which is the better way, and indicates a superior poet. For the plot ought to be so constructed that, even without the aid of the eye, he who hears the tale told will thrill with horror and melt to pity at what takes place.”

That’s right. Thousands of years before computers, Aristotle in fact said, “Hey, don’t go nuts with the special effects.”

We screenwriters have all but forgotten that our job is, fundamentally, to evoke emotional responses in the audience in order to make our point. Is this simply manipulation? No. This is the nature of drama, making people feel things deeply, and that requires more than cheap manipulation. This is, after all, what all art strives to do—to stir people.

SUPERIOR POSITION

 From an interview with Alfred Hitchcock: "There is a distinct difference between ‘suspense’ and ‘surprise,’ and yet many pictures continually confuse the two. I’ll explain what I mean.

We are now having a very innocent little chat. Let’s suppose that there is a bomb underneath this table between us. Nothing happens, and then all of a sudden, ‘Boom!’ There is an explosion. The public is surprised, but prior to this surprise, it has seen an absolutely ordinary scene, of no special consequence. Now, let us take a suspense situation. The bomb is underneath the table and the public knows it, probably because they have seen the anarchist place it there. The public is aware the bomb is going to explode at one o’clock and there is a clock in the decor. The public can see that it is a quarter to one. In these conditions, the same innocuous conversation becomes fascinating because the public is participating in the scene. The audience is longing to warn the characters on the screen: ‘You shouldn’t be talking about such trivial matters. There is a bomb beneath you and it is about to explode!’

In the first case we have given the public fifteen seconds of surprise at the moment of the explosion. In the second we have provided them with fifteen minutes of suspense. The conclusion is that whenever possible the public must be informed. Except when the surprise is a twist, that is, when the unexpected ending is, in itself, the highlight of the story."
—Alfred Hitchcock

Alfred Hitchcock’s definition of superior position is about the best there is. It is when the audience knows something that the characters do not know. Most of the time it’s used for suspense, but not always.

In Chuck Jones’s hilarious animated cartoon Feed the Kitty, a huge bulldog adopts a sweet little kitten. The problem, or conflict, is that the woman of the house has forbidden the dog from bringing anything into the house, so he must keep his new pet a secret.

At one point in the film, the woman starts to make cookies, and unbeknownst to her, the kitten climbs into a bowl of batter set under an electric mixer. When the woman flicks the switch to mix the cookies she finds that her dog has pulled the plug. She doesn’t know he’s trying to save his pet and just thinks he’s causing trouble. She puts the dog outside so that she can work uninterrupted. While the woman is putting the dog out, the kitten climbs out of the bowl and wanders off.

This all happens when no one is watching—except the audience. We now have superior position.

The woman returns to her cookies unaware there was ever a cat in her mix. Worried about his pet, the dog is outside looking through the window as the woman flips the mixer on. He is mortified as the beaters go to work on the batter and, he thinks, his little kitten.

I have seen this film in a movie theater and I have rarely heard such uproarious laughter than during this scene. The poor bulldog looks on in abject horror as the cookie dough is rolled out with a rolling pin, then cut by cookie-cutters, then put into an oven to bake.

Outside, the dog is a wreck. He blubbers like a baby and lies in a pool of his own tears.

Why is this so damned funny to an audience? And believe me it is funny.

It’s funny because we know the cat is okay. Imagine how people would react if they thought the cute little kitten had been beaten, cut up, and baked. It wouldn’t be very funny. But just letting the audience in on the joke allowed the storytellers to put that poor dog through hell.

Even frightening experiences in our own lives can be funny in the retelling because we have a superior position over our past selves. We know everything turned out okay.

Remember that you have this tool, and it can frighten or amuse an audience depending on how you apply it.

This kind of invisible ink is often overlooked by storytellers, but if you want to keep readers turning pages, or viewers watching, you would do well to master this technique. Alfred Hitchcock used it to engage filmgoers throughout his fifty-year career.

"The Humble Improve"

“The Humble Improve” – Wynton Marsalis

The sketches in this blog were done by my friend Derek Thompson who works for Pixar and has sat in on two different seminars of mine. This was his way of taking notes.





A few months ago I had the privilege of teaching my seminar at Pixar. Anyone who knows me knows that there are few modern storytellers I respect as much as I do those at Pixar. They are the best.

I was as nervous as I have ever been in my life. I worship these people. You think I’m kidding, but I cannot express here just how highly I regard their work. At one point while speaking I thought that I might pass out my head was spinning so fast.
All of this tension I was feeling was self-generated, by the way. The people at Pixar could not have been nicer. They were sweet, generous and humble people. Not one person swaggered with pride or puffed their chest out. These were the people who made Toy Story and Toy Story 2, A Bugs Life, Monsters Inc., The Incredibles and (my personal favorite) Finding Nemo and they walked with their feet planted firmly on the ground. And strangest thing of all -- they wanted to hear what I had to say about story construction.

My late friend Scott Tolson used to say after dispensing advice, “but what do I know, I’m just some guy.” That’s the way I felt – I’m just some guy. But they listened to me to see just what I had to teach them. As I said before these are humble people. This is a key element to their success.



I will repeat something from another blog here, but I think it’s appropriate. I was lucky enough to become friends with acclaimed playwright August Wilson a few years before he died. One day, shortly after we had met, I mentioned the story structure class that I teach, and he said that he should take it. I was blown away. I said, “You have two Pulitzers to my zero. Why would you want to take my class?” He told me a story about a guy he knew who had once met the great jazz saxophonist John Coltrane. The man sheepishly mentioned to Coltrane that that he too played the saxophone. Coltrane’s response was, “What can you teach me?”



August wanted to know what I could teach him. In fact, once I was on my cell phone and August approached and hovered around until I got off the phone. He then asked me for advice on his new play. I told him what I thought he should do and he took notes and listened. The man knew that he didn’t have all the answers and wasn’t afraid to seek them out. This was a man at the top of his field, but he showed the same dedication to continued learning that I would later witness at Pixar.
















I have seen over and over again that the best people are humble before their craft and don’t lean on their past successes. They are hungry for knowledge and know that they will never reach that elusive goal of knowing everything. One must always move toward the horizon even though the horizon keeps its distance.