Embracing Cliché (by not being cliché)

"There is nothing new in art except talent." – Anton Chekhov


When teaching story structure, one of the biggest objections I have run into over the years is that “life’s not like that.” You can read my answer to that on my old Sherman Alexie post.

Another objection is that utilizing structure creates stilted work. Yes, it can, if one has only a superficial understanding of structure and has yet to master it. But that’s true of learning any new skill.

Still another objection is the beginner’s idea that the practice of story structure leads automatically to cliché. Legendary playwright Anton Chekhov said that a writer can’t introduce a gun in the first without using it by the third act. This is the most basic rule of story structure. Hollywood legend Billy Wilder said, “If there is a problem with your third act, it is really a problem with your first act.”

This is a variation of what Chekhov said. I am not smarter than Chekhov and Wilder, so I listen to them and do what they say and more times than not it works out.



But people who know this rule see a gun introduced early in a story and roll their eyes because they know it will be used later: “Of course the gun was used at the end. That’s so cliché, so predictable,” they say.

So these writers who want to avoid cliché often opt for randomness, because randomness is not predictable. But after teaching hundreds of students over the years I have noticed something about my students who desperately want to be different – they are all “different” in exactly the same way. They create, ironically, the same clichés. In their stories, the guy will not get the girl. In their stories, characters are quirky. In their stories, the main character dies at the end. Their stories are dark – no happy endings for them. Their stories present random scenes that go nowhere and are awkward because, “That’s the way life is.” These are the clichés of the avant-garde, the clichés of those who wish to be simply “different.”

These writers never seem to ask themselves why the more mainstream clichés exist – they chalk it all up to lazy writing or rose-colored glasses. Sometimes it is. They are not completely wrong about that. But it is no less lazy than a series of random events and dark, quirky characters that do not serve a story function. (Making the writer feel “original” is not a real story function.)

Hitchcock talks about want to avoid a cliché in his classic film North by Northwest. In the story, the main character, played by Cary Grant, is being pursued by the bad guys who are trying to kill him. In one scene, the bad guys try to kill Cary Grant in an open field using a crop-dusting airplane.

Peter Bogdanovich asked Hitchcock about this in a 1963 interview:

How did you get the idea for the plane sequence?

This comes under the heading of avoiding the clichés. The cliché of that kind of scene is in The Third Man. Under a street lamp, in a medieval setting, black cat slithers by, somebody opens a blind and looks out, eerie music. Now, what is the antithesis of this? Nothing! No music, bright sunshine, and nothing. Now put a man in a business suit in this setting.

What’s funny to me is that Hitchcock both used the cliché and avoided it. He knew he needed a scene where the character was isolated and alone, where the bad guys try to bump him off. He did not choose not to have the scene, but rather to avoid the cliché trappings of the scene. This is what made the scene an original and a classic.  


An old song lyric goes, “It ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it.” Craft is about how well you execute a concept. 


If you want to avoid a cliché first ask honestly why the cliché exists – there may be a good story reason to have it. But then what you do is find a way to get away from the trappings of the cliché.

One way to do that is to choose opposites. This is an old acting trick. They say that when playing a miser stress his generosity. Good actors will often play opposites because it takes their performances away from the cliché. The actor might smile and speak sweetly when the character is seething with anger, for instance. Playing opposites gives characters depth and avoids the cliché. One can always play against a cliché while still understanding its usefulness in telling a particular story. This way one gets the best of both worlds. 


At the very end of his classic film The Apartment, Billy Wilder had guy get the girl and proclaim his love for her. This is a cliché if ever there was one. How did Wilder both use the cliché and avoid it, too?


In the scene the man and women are playing cards together when the man proclaims his love. Does the woman say that she loves him too, throw her arms around him, kiss him and say that she loves him too? No, she does not.


What she does is continue to play cards. The man bears his soul and says again how he feels. Still interested in her cards the woman smiles and says to the guy, “Shut up and deal.” And we know she has feelings for him, too.

Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine

in The Apartment.

This is a film classic by one of the best filmmakers in history. He did not run away from the cliché, but he knew just how to soften it, take the gloss of sentiment off it.


Another way to use the cliché while avoiding its trappings is to tell the truth. If the story demands that you have a type of scene you have seen a million times before then ask yourself what might really happen in that situation. Don’t copy what you have seen in the movies, but be as honest to real life as possible. How would a person really act if they were being shot at? How would someone behave if they were trapped somewhere with a bloodthirsty monster? 

Jodie Foster in the basement with the killer as he views her through  night-vision goggles in The Silence of the Lambs.

I remember reading an interview with Ted Tally, screenwriter of The Silence of the Lambs, where he talked about needing get the heroine in the basement with the killer. At first he wanted to avoid the cliché, but he realized that he could not escape the story’s demands. So his job was to find a convincing story reason that compelled the woman to go into the dark basement alone with the killer.

When you are constructing a story, and you introduce a gun in Act One that must be used by Act Three, your job is not to use the gun, but to surprise the audience by how the gun comes back. Maybe it is used by a character that we least suspect would use it. Or you could construct the story so well that the audience forgets all about the gun until it returns.


My point is you don’t avoid the clichés by not using them, but knowing why you might need them to help tell your story and how you might dress them up in new clothing.

My Book FREEMAN Is Out!

  Hey guys, my new book FREEMAN is actually out now.  We had a pre-release last month at TR!CSTER, but now it is available to anyone on Amazon.com or BarnesandNoble.com. 

FREEMAN, an original screenplay, is a western about Thomas Freeman a former slave, living out West with his wife and child, building a new life. Accused of stealing, he is forced to become a fugitive. To evade the posse on his trail, he finds himself using the same tricks he used as a runaway slave. Problem is, Freeman's also being hunted by an expert tracker by the name of Cage. Cage's former profession? Slave-catcher. And he knows all the tricks.          
 

The book also includes my notes on how the story was constructed.  As often as possible I like to show you all how the elements of story I write about can be put to practical use.

In my first book INVISIBLE INK I use the script for my short film WHITE FACE to show how the principles of Invisible Ink were applied. And on this blog I often use the work of others as examples. But with FREEMAN you can see how these principles can help in the construction of an entire feature film.

In this book I show how theme/armature can be applied to every aspect of one’s decision-making when writing a story – how one can use armature as a compass that points true north. I hope that I show how these ideas of structure can be used to create an interesting, exciting, emotional and meaningful story. That was the idea. So far people tell me that the book does just that.

Hope some of you find it helpful as well.

-- Brian  

Movies I Like (Redux): Planet of the Apes

"Overall theme leads to characters then on to plot"
-- Rod Serling


This post is a kind of “re-run” of a previous post, but I thought that with the new Planet of the Apes film about to open, it was worth posting again. The original post was about the erroneous, in my opinion, comparison of M. Night Shyamalan to Rod Serling, I have altered this version just a bit to speak only of the original Planet of the Apes.

It would take only a casual glance at my writings to deduce that I’m a huge Rod Serling fan. Frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised if people are tired of reading about it.  


When I was a very young boy (this would have been 1969 or ‘70), I remember my father speaking with wonder and excitement about a film he’d seen called Planet of the Apes. He spoke with such joy it is possible that my love of film started at that moment.

My Dog Trixie and I in 1970

When I saw the film I was just as impressed as my father had been. It wasn’t until years later that I would know that the film was co-written by Rod Serling—or even who Rod Serling was.


Serling was the creator of an early television classic called The Twilight Zone, a show known for strange happenings and twist endings. But for me what shines through his work is his love of humanity coupled with his profound disappointment that we can be a cruel, self-destructive and greedy species. 

This can be seen even in his work which precedes The Twilight Zone, when he was writing for the live television dramas of the early 1950s. His work spills over with humanity. But for better or worse, because of The Twilight Zone, he has become known as the twist-ending guy.

People who are not practitioners of something are often impressed with the obvious. People who don’t act, for instance, think that crying on demand is good acting. Or that being able to do accents or memorize lines is good acting. Trained actors know different. A lot of work that people don’t notice as easily goes into great acting.

In writing, the twist ending is one of the obvious things that people are very impressed with. But what is often overlooked is that Serling’s endings were linked to the story’s theme—the reason to tell the story.

Serling winning Emmy number four.

Back to his screenplay for the original Planet of the Apes, which is very much like a feature-length Twilight Zone. (By the way, I used to tell people that Planet of the Apes was just a long Twilight Zone, that it had all the same structure, but people said that I was crazy. Then some guy cut a short version of the film and made it into a Twilight Zone and people were surprised how well it worked.)

http://theforbidden-zone.com/media/tzone.shtml

Okay, back to the monkey movie. Planet of the Apes was a film where the twist blew people away.

In the opening of the film an astronaut on a starship tapes a log. In it he talks about how long he’s been away from Earth and how even more time would have passed on Earth because he and his fellow astronaut have been traveling at light speed. Then he says:

“I wonder if Man, that marvel of the universe, that glorious paradox who has sent me to the unknown...still makes war against his brother, and lets his neighbor's children starve.”

This is the theme that the entire film explores—are human beings essentially war-like, self-destructive creatures? The story never loses track of this.

So, Taylor, the astronaut, and his fellow travelers crash land on an unknown planet. At one point, as they walk through a desert looking for food and such, they have this exchange:

LANDON (heatedly): You thought life on Earth was meaningless. You despised people. So what did you do? You ran away.

TAYLOR: No, not quite, Landon. I'm a bit of a seeker myself. But my dreams are a lot emptier than yours. (pause) I can't get rid of the idea that somewhere in the Universe there must be a creature superior to man.

There it is again. Human beings are not so great.

Later, intelligent apes with the power of speech capture Taylor. On this planet, human beings are primitive brutes that cannot speak (Taylor was injured during his capture and cannot talk). One of the apes, Dr. Zaius, talks to another in front of Taylor’s cage:

ZAIUS: Men are a nuisance. They outgrow their own food supply in the forest and migrate to our green belts and ravage our crops. The sooner they're exterminated, the better.

Here it is again. Humans are self-destructive. But this time out of the mouth of someone other than Taylor. Now Taylor finds himself trying to argue on the side of humanity.

This point of view is consistently stated throughout the film.

At the end of the film, Taylor escapes the apes and this strange planet only to discover the Statue of Liberty buried in the sand. He has been on Earth the entire time. Humans have destroyed the Earth. This “twist” is right in line with what the film has been saying the whole time. We brought about our own destruction by way of a nuclear war.




If the three acts can be defined as Proposal, Argument, and Conclusion, then we can look at the tape log at the beginning of the film as a proposal. And the second act as the argument when the opening statement or proposal debated. So the conclusion of the film is proof positive of what the film has been saying all along.

This is not just a trick—it is storycraft.


Serling’s stories are timeless and they matter. In the ‘60s, when he wrote the film, the cold war was raging and people felt like any minute the world might end by our own hand.

Today, although it is still a possibility, we are slightly less worried about the nuclear threat and more an environmental one. But it doesn’t matter what the method of possible destruction is, only that we may be the ones ultimately responsible.

 Great stories are never just timely, they are timeless.


Rod Serling was so much more than a writer of twist endings. He was an artist and a craftsman. His writing was so good that it still inspires filmmakers today. I wonder if this new film Rise of the Planet of the Apes will employ as much storycraft. Will there be a strong underlying theme that can be seen, and felt, throughout...or will it be an excuse to show cool-looking CGI apes?

Thank you, Tr!ckster!

This is unusual post for me because for the most part things I write here are directly related to the craft of storytelling, but I want to thank the people at Tr!ckster publicly.

This past weekend I was lucky enough to be one of the speakers/presenters at Tr!ckster in San Diego. It was the first year for this event, which ended up being the place to be. Tr!ckster is a response to what the Comic-Con has become—in many ways, it’s just a big commercial for whatever blockbuster the entertainment industry wants to sell that year.

This is me giving my storytelling talk at Tr!ckster. I guess that I sometimes strike a Shatner pose when I speak.

photo by Julia Lundman (using my phone)

Tr!ckster is more down-to-earth with a focus on creators and, more importantly, aspiring creators. There were symposiums on the craft of creation, and I gave a talk on storytelling and story construction. It was a short talk for me, but people did seem to like and learn from it.

Please forgive me for getting excited, but this is the very first time I have seen my three books on sale together.

It was also a chance for me to meet some of you. I met some fans of the blog and my books for the first time in real life. They were all cool people. Frequent commenter Jett and I got into a very serious but all-in-good-fun debate. I also met an early supporter of the blog, Emma Coats. That was nice, and she was as cool as thought she would be.

Good guy and Animator Everett Downing.  It was nice to see him.

Me with the very friendly and talented artist Jeff Pidgeon (photo by Joon Kim)

 Some of my favorite past students showed up to hear me say things that they have heard me say a million times. Thanks for coming, guys. (Artist Ronnie del Carman was also nice enough to come hear me speak on things he’s heard me say before. A good guy, that guy.)

Separated at birth -- me and Ronnie Del Carman.

It was also a chance to meet up and toss a few drinks back with some of the dudes I know from Pixar: Ted Mathot and Scott Morse, who co-created Trickster, were gracious hosts, on top of being two of the nicest guys you’d ever want to meet.

Ted Mathot and me after a few drinks.

I know I am forgetting some of the cool people I met and talked to, but there were many. My point is I had a great time and I think most everyone else did, too. If you did not make it this year, next year try to get yourself to Tr!ckster.

By the way, for those who don’t yet know my website is now up:

http://thinkinvisibleink.com/

Again with the simplicity

-->

 

--> "Simple is good." – Jim Henson

Many years ago a buddy of mine worked in a comic book shop. One day a bunch of teenagers who were very excited about the work of a particular artist came in. They were hyped to see that his new book was out, very impressed with all of the detail in his work. Conversely, they made fun of another artist, calling his work “lame” because he did not use enough lines in his work.

The artist that they liked was a young man named Rob Liefield. The artist they hated was named Mike Mignola.

Today, Mignola, known for his spare style, is recognized as one of the top artists in the field, and as the creator of the popular Hellboy character. Liefield, whose style was kinetic and busy, is barely remembered at all.

 

-->Rob Liefield's Youngblood
 

Mike Mignola Hellboy Book Cover

But there was a time when you could not get bigger than Liefeld. He starred in a Levi’s commercial directed by Spike Lee.

The youthful and the inexperienced tend to be more impressed with work that is visible. The flashier something is, the better they think it is. They cannot conceive of another way of viewing things.

When I was a teenager, working for my mentor Bruce Walters doing motion graphics, he said something to me that put me on the path of seeing the beauty in simplicity.

Bruce was a very smart guy and I paid close attention to the things he said to me all those years ago; I still use what he taught me.

We did a lot of animated graphics for local television spots, so we dealt with a lot of logos. One day as we were shooting some animation, he said to me, You know who makes a ton of money? The guys who design those international signs that tell people—without necessarily using words—things like “slippery when wet” or “this way to the hospital” or whatever. You know the signs.

I was surprised. He said it was because it was hard to design something that was so easily understood by so many different kinds of people.

 From that moment on I started to see the beauty in simplicity. I began to notice how effective simplicity was in all kinds of design and composition. I saw how simplicity communicated ideas so clearly. Simplicity can be hard to execute—it is marksmanship. It is about hitting the target. In design, it is about eliminating everything that is not necessary. Novices always want to add and seasoned designers want to take away.

From an essay on writing by Robert Louis Stevenson

When John Williams played his simple JAWS theme for a young Steven Spielberg, the director laughed because it was so simple. He thought Williams was joking. This is now so iconic that the simple notes are synonymous with sharks. Just as Williams’ simple Raiders of the Lost Ark march is synonymous with adventure. Williams is a master of these “sound logos”—simple ideas that communicate mood so perfectly that decades later they can easily be recalled and applied properly.

One of the most difficult things that I teach is the appreciation of simplicity. It may be better to think of it as precision. Legendary illustrator Alex Toth said (and I’m paraphrasing here) to figure out what you need to draw. Draw that and only that. And draw the hell out of it. Precision.

Drawing by Alex Toth

Mignola comic book art

Just as with these other crafts, storytelling can communicate much more clearly when there is no fat on it—nothing extra. Figure out what you need to write, write that and only that. And write the hell out of it.

“It's not the daily increase but daily decrease. Hack away at the unessential.” -- Bruce Lee

 

 

I'm On The Air!

Hey guys, I’ve been busy working on a book so it has been a while since I’ve posted. I promise that I will post something new soon. In the meantime you can listen to an interview I recently did for a radio show.

The Karl Show Starring Jason:


http://www.karlshowstarringjason.com/2011/07/episode-5-brian-mcdonald/-mcdonald/

Hope you dig it.

The High Bar - An Interview with Me

The High Bar w/ Warren Etheredge & Brian McDonald from The High Bar on Vimeo.

Meanwhile, Back at The Ranch…

“It was so quiet in Hollywood you could hear a name drop”  -- Hitchcock quote. Paraphrase

Paul Feig, being the nice guy that he is, holds up my book The Golden Theme.

 Once, after mentioning a famous friend while telling a movie business story, I was asked by a young student how I knew so many cool people. I told her that they were just the guys I started out with and that soon enough her friends would become big-time movie business folks.

This is turning out to be true. She does hang with a talented, hardworking, and smart group and they are starting to come into their own.

You will often hear people say about success that it’s not what you know, it’s who you know. Well, it’s both. But when people think of the “whos” to know they think of people who have already made it and how they might get to know them. That’s not the way it usually goes down. The people you come up with, those are the “whos” you know.

Over the years, I have seen truth in the saying that water seeks its own level. I have noticed that people of comparable talent and capabilities tend to find each other. The better you strive to be at what you do, the better you will be at attracting people reaching for that same level of excellence. And you will all get better by being in such close proximity–iron sharpens iron.

This has been true in the long history of art. Artists hang out, do nothing together, and, somehow, make art.

Back in 1986 I packed up my car and moved to Los Angeles. Hollywood was waiting for my arrival–or so I imagined. My joke at the time was that I was going to get to know Spielberg so well that when asked about him I would say, “That guy gets on my nerves sometimes.” I have yet to meet the man.

When I got to Los Angeles I was lucky enough to stay with a hometown friend by the name of Todd Masters. At the time he was starting his career and was working on make-up effects for an Arnold Schwarzenegger film called Hunter–later called Predator.

Skipping some of the boring details, within a few months I was writing jokes for a professional comic friend. He was a high school friend also from my hometown. It wasn’t long before I was trying stand-up myself. One of the places I worked started learning that craft was in downtown Los Angles downstairs at a place called the Variety Arts Center in a room called the Ed Wynn Comedy Lounge.

The Ed Wynn was a showcase club, where something like 15 comics would each do a very short set. It was there that I met some really cool dudes. They invited me to “The Ranch” as it was called. The Ranch (sometimes called “The Saticoy Ranch” after the street it was on) was a smoke-filled ranch-style house in North Hollywood where a few of these comics lived. There I would meet so many of those “cool people” I am now asked about. We were all just young dudes starting out. I think I was one of the youngest. Well, there was one kid who was younger.

The Ranch was a place where dudes, mostly dudes, would hang out and make each other laugh till all hours of the night while drinking gallons of coffee. After a few years, guys started making it. Some of us were working a little bit in the biz, but mostly we were doing our stand-up (I mostly worked in a lot of creature shops back then).

The first guy in our group to cross over to the big time was a screenwriter I spent a lot of time with talking craft. His name is Jim Uhls. He sold a screenplay called Dead Reckoning that has yet to be made. He went on to write the screenplay for Fight Club.

I won’t get into the details of how everything started to happen; I will just list some of the “Rancheros” (as we were called) that you may know:

Steve Higgins is now the producer of Saturday Night Live as well as the sidekick on the Jimmy Fallon Show. His brother Dave Higgins played “the fat guy” on the show Malcolm in the Middle and was a regular on the show Ellen. Their younger brother Al Higgins became a writer on the show News Radio and a producer on Malcolm in the Middle.

Joel Madison became a writer on Roseanne, the head writer of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, and creator of Malcolm and Eddie.

Pat Hazell wrote on the first season of a show called Seinfeld, along with another Ranch guy Matt Goldman.

Comedian Andy Kindler, who you may know from his David Letterman appearances or from Everybody Loves Raymond as one of Ray Ramano’s buddies, was a frequent Ranch vistor.

An actor/writer who was my manager for a while when I was a stand-up, Steve Bannos, became the math teacher Frank Kowchevski on Freaks and Geeks. Another Ranchero named David (Gruber) Allen played the hippie counselor Mr. Rosso on Freaks and Geeks, too.

The youngest and most famous of the Rancheros was Judd Apatow. Judd didn’t spend as much time at The Ranch as most of us–he was funny, but very serious about his career. I wish I had paid more attention to what he was doing, and how he was thinking. I could have learned even more than I did.

Another great Ranch guy was Paul Feig. He is one of the warmest human beings I have met. He was the one guy who everyone knew was going places. When I was learning stand-up I would watch him in awe. He was, and is, a really talented guy. He is the guy who created Freaks and Geeks and took it to Judd, who worked on it with him. Paul directs a lot of TV now: Mad Men, 30 Rock, Arrested Development, The Office and the new movie Bridesmaids.

There are people I am leaving out, but you get it–a lot of cool people sat around at The Ranch.

I spent this time dropping names to show you how all of these guys were in the same social circle. Back then, I never would have believed that most of these guys would become what they have become–but they did. Now I don’t think this is in the least unusual.

The friends you create with when you are making comic books, or short films, or writing screenplays—these are the “whos” that you know. Keep doing what you’re doing with the people you are doing it with and eventually some younger person will ask you, “How do you know so many cool people?”

Cast Away: Act One Breakdown

I was once watching a film where one cop betrays another—this is the event that spurs the story into action. Afterwards we find out that these cops were best friends. I don’t recall one scene of them together before this big scene. In fact, the betrayed cop had to say out loud, “But we’re best friends.” That is very sloppy construction. The moment had no emotional impact at all.

What was missing was a first act. Act One has many functions, not the least of which is providing context that will later elicit an emotional response from the audience. 

Remember in Raiders of the Lost Ark when Indiana Jones looks into a pit of snakes, and how the audience responded? I saw the film when it came out and there was an audible “Uh-oh” in the theater when Indy saw those snakes. Why? Because we found out in Act One that he hates snakes. So later when the snakes showed up, the crowd had an emotional response.

Aspiring screenwriters have learned, since the release of Syd Field’s book Screenplay in 1979, that the first 25 to 30 pages comprise the first act. Knowing this has had the effect of training writers to do little more than kill time until the big event happens that gets the movie going. Or they will skip that “filler” at the beginning and cut to the chase with an action sequence.

I was even told once by a former agent not to write first acts—that they were a waste of time. But here’s the deal: writing a story that has no first act is like building a house without a foundation—it will fall apart no matter how well the rest of the house is built.

Everyone understands the importance of a first act when they are telling a joke, get to the middle, and realize that the punch line will not work because they have forgotten to give the listener vital information: “Oh, wait, I forgot to mention that the sheep is wearing a party hat!”

Although this is a clumsy way to tell a joke, you might still get a laugh if the listener has all of the information before the punch line has been reached. The joke would never work if the joke-teller got to the end, and after the unfunny punch line then explained about the missing information.

But, as I mentioned in my opening paragraph, this is another thing that I see often—information given after the point when it can’t have any emotional impact.

In the old days they really understood first acts. When I say “the old days,” I mean until the mid ’80s or so. There are really great examples in classic cinema. I’m talking about films by Billy Wilder, Alfred Hitchcock, Frank Capra, etc. Casablanca has a great first act. Recently, I blogged about the film Tootsie and its flawless first act.

Today, the first act is almost extinct, but it does show up from time to time in films made after the early ’80s. One example is the film Cast Away. I know that there are people out there who might not have responded to the film, but I am asking you to look past that to see my bigger point.

One person I know personally who did not like the film is my uncle, Dwayne. I remember the film came up because he had caught it one night on cable a few nights before and he wouldn’t stop talking about how bad it was, and how it was only about Tom Hanks stuck on an island for two hours. But how could a film about a guy stuck on an island have impacted so many other people?

So, I asked him if he had seen it from the beginning. His answer did not surprise me—he said that he’d missed the beginning. He had missed the first act.

First, the film has a great thematic opening image. Many films start with a generic image, but Cast Away starts right away with an image that matters to the story. Trust me, when people see a film or read a screenplay that knows what it is about from the very beginning, they know that they are in the hands of a pro.

The image is a vast open space. Isolation. This is a desolate landscape. This is what the film will deal with—isolation. Loneliness. Nothingness.

This same shot follows a lone FedEx truck, small in the frame, as it comes to an intersection—a crossroads. This matters. At the end of this story, Tom Hanks is at a crossroad in his life and must chose the correct path. In fact, he ends up on this very road to nail the point home.

This kind of on-the-nose precision is something amateurs run from. They would rather be clever rather than clear. Not pros—professional storytellers rejoice when they find a clear way to communicate with an audience.

When the film came out, people complained that it was a long ad for FedEx because Tom Hanks’ character works for the overnight courier service. But why did he work for an overnight courier service? Because it was very important. 

When we meet Tom Hanks’ character, Chuck, he is giving a speech about time:

“Time rules over us without mercy—not caring if we are healthy or ill, hungry or drunk, Russian, American or beings from Mars.  Time is like a fire—it can either destroy us or keep us warm. That’s why every FedEx office has a clock. Because we live or we die by the clock—we never turn our back on it. And we never ever allow ourselves the sin of losing track of time.”

Right away the film states what it is about. Chuck is a man ruled by time, but what the first act shows us is that he doesn’t make time for his life. He is always rushing. He doesn’t take the time to get the number of a doctor to help a friend’s wife with her cancer. Not because he’s a mean guy, but because he thinks he has all the time in the world.

Chuck barely has time for his long-time girlfriend, Kelly. And when he does have time with her, he is so tired from working that he falls asleep. Here he is committing the sin of “losing time.”

 At a family dinner with his girlfriend’s family we find that it is an ongoing joke that Chuck has taken his sweet time proposing to Kelly. He is losing track of time the closer he watches it. In fact, Chuck has even timed how long it took for the family to bring up the subject of marriage—14 minutes, by his watch.

Chuck is teased for wearing a pager all the time, always on call, but he also has a bad tooth he should have looked at—and never seems to get to.

This is followed very quickly with Chuck being called away from Christmas dinner to go to work. It is clear that Kelly is unhappy with this.

When Kelly drops Chuck off at the airport, because he must fly away for his job, Chuck gives Kelly a small box for Christmas—presumably an engagement ring. But Chuck stops short of proposing and tells Kelly to wait, that she can open it on New Year’s Eve. With that Chuck kisses Kelly, boards his plane, and turns his back on time.

It should be noted here that in some amazing precision of storycraft Kelly's gift to Chuck is a pocket watch.  Not just that, but on the inside of the watch is a picture of Kelly.  So Time and Kelly are linked together in a single image.

While in flight the plane hits a violent storm and crashes in the ocean. Chuck, the only survivor, finds himself alone on an island. One of the first things he does is pull out his pager. It is waterlogged and obviously broken. Now Chuck, who did not have enough time, has nothing but time. End Act One.

In the second act we see that what keeps Chuck alive is his love for Kelly—his desire to get back to her. It has become clear to Chuck how he should have spent the time he had.

The first act of Cast Away makes everything that follows matter. It creates emotion in the audience. I believe my uncle could not connect with the character of Chuck because he did not have a context to understand what he was seeing. All he could see was a man alone on an island, not someone learning a lesson.

But for most people who saw the film it did work. The film was a huge hit.

 The screenwriter, William Broyles, Jr., knew what he was writing about. He was saying that time is precious and fleeting and that we should spend it wisely. The story was telling us that we must never turn our backs on time. That we must never commit the sin of losing time.

Cast Away has a brilliant first act and studying its construction further would be time well spent. Get to it! Time’s wasting.