"Invisible Ink is a powerful tool for anyone who wants to become a better screenwriter. With elegance and precision, Brian McDonald uses his deep understanding of story and character to pass on essential truths about dramatic writing. Ignore him at your peril."
—Jim Taylor (Academy Award?- winning screenwriter of Sideways and Election)
A few months ago, I heard a
story on NPR about a study that found reading literary fiction, rather than
popular fiction, could help people be more empathetic. I have no doubt that this could be true. But I
did take issue with ending the story there.
The story seemed to conclude
that because literary fiction had the effect of making folks more empathetic it
was better than popular fiction. Now, I just don’t believe in the idea of one
genre being better than another. I do not believe in story hierarchy. There are
well-told stories and there are poorly told stories, that’s it. And empathy is
just one thing we can learn from them.
Stories work because of
something called theory of mind, which is our ability to put ourselves in the
minds of others—real or fictional. A lot of that has to do with this: When we
read about, or watch, someone doing something, neurons in our brains fire so
that our brain can imagine this activity or event is happening to us. When a
person runs, for instance, motor neurons are activated in their brain. The same
parts of the brain activate when we simply watch someone run.
If I write, the cool breeze
blew gently over my skin causing goose bumps, you can feel that. You are
predisposed to feel it; it is the only way to understand what I was feeling.
Literary fiction is all
about the subjective experience, getting in the minds and experiencing the
feelings of the characters, so it only makes sense that having these areas of
one’s brain stimulated would have an effect. But again, as far as I know, the
researchers only tested for empathy.
I suspect that if they had
had subjects read mystery novels and then tested their memory and puzzle-solving
skills they might have seen an improved ability to perform those types of
tasks. There are all types of things one can learn from stories; empathy is
just one.
This only makes sense. This
is ancient wisdom that modern science is now catching us with. In Ayurvedic
medicine, a more-than-3,000-year-old form of medicine from India, using stories
is part of the practice. A patient is told a story and instructed to
contemplate the hero’s plight. Sounds a lot like the romantic movie study,
doesn’t it?
Humans seem to be hardwired
not just for enjoying stories, but for imitating and learning from them. People
have known this for just about as long as people have been telling stories. And
there are many things to be learned from them—empathy being a very important
one. But if ever find yourself lost in the woods, cold and hungry, you might
find the story you read about someone surviving in the woods more valuable than
any piece of highfalutin’ literary fiction.
I am unsure just how many posts of mine mention legendary
writer/director Billy Wilder, but here is another to add to the stack. The man
made a ton of good films and there is no reason not to mention each one. Very
few filmmakers can touch him when it comes to the number of classics he
produced. He crafted stories with the care, precision, and elegant simplicity
of a Shaker woodworker. His filmAce in the Hole is a great example of this.
Released in 1951, Ace in the Hole, starring Kirk Douglas, is the story ofdown-on-his-luck, former New York newspaper
reporter, Chuck Tatum, who takes a job on a small paper in Albuquerque, New
Mexico, while he waits for that big story that will put him back in the big
leagues—back on a big New York paper. And when the right story does come his
way, this unscrupulous reporter isn’t above manipulating the situation to make
sure it gets lots of attention from the New York papers—even if this means
putting a man’s life in jeopardy.
Wilder was a master storyteller and did many things well,
but one of the things he did exceptionally well was construct a first act. This
is now almost a lost art, but a great first act can make or break a story—it is
a story’s foundation. It is the bedrock upon which one builds a solid
structure. Ace in the Hole has an
amazing first act.
When we meet Chuck Tatum he is reading a newspaper while
sitting in the driver’s seat of his car, which is being towed: a very nice
opening image that tells us something about the character and his situation. It
already doesn’t look like this guy is living the good life.
Tatum has the truck pull over when he notices that they are
passing the office of the town newspaper. When Tatum enters the office he
addresses a very young man at a typewriter. His very first words to the young
man:
TATUM: I’d like to see the boss—what
did you say his name is?
YOUNG MAN:I didn’t say.
TATUM:Cagey, huh?
[For those of you that don’t know
the old slang, cagey means reluctant to give information.]
YOUNG MAN: Mister Boot is the owner
and publisher.
TATUM: Okay, tell Mister Boot that
Mister Tatum would like to see him. Charles Tatum from New York.
YOUNG MAN:What about?
[There is a line missing from Tatum
here, for the sake of brevity.]
YOUNG MAN: What did you say you
were selling? Insurance?
TATUM: I didn’t say.
YOUNG MAN: Cagey, huh?
This exchange matters. Why? Because this young man (Herbie)
becomes Tatum’s protégée. During the course of the story, that young man grows
to idolize Tatum. And, here, in this very first exchange you can see that
dynamic at work—the young man takes on aspects of Tatum’s personality right
away. This is a brilliant little exchange that sets up what is to come.
While waiting for Mister Boot, Tatum spies a piece of
embroidery framed on the wall. It reads, “Tell the Truth.”
We find out that is something Mister Booth says. He runs an
ethical, honest newspaper.
Shortly, in Booth’s office, where Mister Booth also has the
framed embroidery saying “Tell the Truth,” Tatum tries to talk himself into a
much-needed job on the paper. During his pitch to Booth, Tatum says:
TATUM: I can handle big news and
little news. And if there’s no news—I’ll go out and bite a dog.
This line matters. He is saying that if there is no news he
will make the news, which is just what he later does. His character is being
established here. None of this clever dialogue was written to be snappy patter
without a purpose. It all matters.
Tatum offers to cut his rate in order to work for Booth, and
Booth wants to know why.
Tatum decides not to lie because he has noticed what Mister
Booth is wearing:
TATUM: I’ve done a lot of lying in
my time. I’ve lied to men who wear belts. I’ve lied to men who wear suspenders.
But I’d never be so stupid as to lie to a man who wears both belt and
suspenders. You strike me as a conscientious man, a man who checks and double-checks.
Tatum then goes on to list all of his drinking and
philandering, as well as a libel suit, that got him fired from the big papers.
Tatum lands the job. But Booth tells him there is to be no
drinking on the premises.
The film then jumps in time to a year later and when we
first see Tatum we see he is wearing both a belt and suspenders. He has
conformed, so far, to Booth’s way of doing things. It is clear, however, that
Tatum is unhappy here. He paces the floor of the newsroom, ranting about the
boredom of this little town. This is not New York. Even the news is boring
here. His big story has not come and he is restless.
Then Tatum is sent out on an assailment to cover a
rattlesnake hunt in a neighboring county. Herbie is to go with him to take
pictures. Tatum is not excited about the assignment.
"Bad news sells best. Because good news is no news." -- Chuck Tatum
On the drive, Tatum fantasizes about what a great story it
would be to have fifty snakes loose in
Albuquerque, with the whole town in a panic, and how the story could go on day
after day as each snake is hunted down until there is only one left…somewhere. He
asks:
TATUM: Where’s the last rattler? In
a kindergarten? In a church? In a crowded elevator? Where?
HERBIE: I give up, where?
TATUM: In my desk drawer, fan.
Stashed away only nobody knows it, see. The story’s good for another three days,
and when I’m good and ready we come out with a big extra—Sun-Bulletin snags number fifty.
Herbie finds this distasteful.
TATUM: Me, I didn’t go to any
college, but I know what makes a good story. Because before I ever worked on a
paper I sold them on a street corner. You know the first thing I found out? Bad
news sells best. Because good news is no news.
Again, nothing is wasted Wilder tells us just who Tatum is.
He is a guy who will do whatever it takes to get a good story even if that
means not being completely honest.
When Tatum and Herbie pull into a gas station they discover
that there is a man trapped in a cave-in. The man was in the cave dwellings
looking for old Native American pottery when the cave collapsed, trapping him.
Because of the danger, no one will enter the cave to check
on the trapped man. And the Native Americans won’t enter because this is sacred
land to them—The Mountain of the Seven Vultures. They believe that the cave-in
was caused by their ancestors.
Tatum figures that this could be the break he’s been looking
for, and enters the cave with Herbie to
check on the man. It is made clear through what Tatum says to Herbie that Tatum
does not care about the man at all, this is just a means to an end—this is Tatum’s
change to get back on top.
Tatum wishes out loud that it will take a least a week to
get the man out of the cave, that way he could milk the story. Herbie, is again taken aback by Tatum’s callous
attitude.
TATUM: I’m not wishing for
anything. I don’t make things happen, I just write about them.
When Tatum emerges from the cave he knows he’s got his
story. And then comes Act Two, when we see how he finds ways to keep the man in
the cave longer while appearing to lead a rescue effort.
It is a flawless first act that sets up everything that is
to come. Tatum is also able to get others to help with his scheme: the man’s
wife, the crooked sheriff, and the drilling engineer. Herbie knows nothing
about the manipulation, but does like being part of a major news story. There
is also an insurance salesman and his wife, who start off as the spectators in
what becomes a media circus.
These people are all getting something from exploiting the
fact that a man is trapped in a cave. Tatum, the sheriff, the engineer, the
wife, Herbie, and the couple—that’s seven people. Seven vultures. Wilder does everything for a reason. Doing so helped him become one of the
most celebrated directors in the history of the movies.
There is a point in the film when Tatum has given over
completely to the dark side, so to speak, where he removes his belt and suspenders
and starts drinking again. He’s no longer Booth’s kind of reporter.
I won’t tell you what else happens in the film, but if you
like to see a master at work you should take a look at Billy Wilder’s Ace in
the Hole.
Before I start this post I want
to apologize for the long gap between this post and the last.I was deep in a project that took up a
lot of my time and mental energy. That project is more or less done—more or
less. So, now I can take the time to write a post. I hope that I can make them
more frequent. Thanks for sticking with me.
Recently, I have found myself in a
couple of email exchanges about the idea of deus ex machina (pronounced like “day-us eks mawk-inna”).
For those unfamiliar, translated
from Latin, deus ex machina means “god
from the machine”, referring to the special effect of a god arriving on stage
machinery, and it has come to mean that a storyteller has pulled the solution
of the story out of his…out of nowhere.
In ancient Greece some playwrights
(I’m looking at you, Euripides) would use this device to get their heroes out
of trouble and end their plays. A god, at the climax, would descend from
Olympus and solve everything. The hero of the play did not solve the problem
himself, and after a while, audiences found this device tiresome. Why?
Aristotle said, “The resolution of
a plot must arise internally, following from the previous action of the play.” Again,
why?
To answer that question we have to
look at why humans tell stories in the first place. As I talk about at length
in my book The Golden Theme, I believe
stories are told to pass on survival information. This is why stories are about
conflict. Often, when I say this, the first thing some people do is go through
a list of stories that they think are not about passing on survival information—but
there are all kinds of survival. There’s physical survival, social survival,
cultural survival, spiritual and emotional survival. All kinds. If you think
you have found a story that is not about some kind of survival, chances are you
haven’t looked deeply enough.
Stories provide us with a kind of
dress rehearsal for conflicts in real life. It doesn’t matter if the story
takes place in the “real” world or a fantasy world of some kind, like sci-fi,
sword-and-sorcery, or another era in time. And it doesn’t matter if the story
uses animals instead of people as characters, it will contain survival
information. At the very least the character usually learns something about
herself or the world, and learning is a great assistor when it comes to
survival.
Slaves in the American South told stories of a trickster named Br'er(brother) Rabbit. The character was used to pass on information about how the seemingly powerless might use their wits to survive.
The more stories we have in our
heads, the more prepared we are for different types of conflict, and just what
types of options we might have to overcome the conflicts we encounter in life.
Let’s look at the first Indiana
Jones film, Raiders of the Lost Ark. In
this story, archeologist Indiana Jones is trying to obtain, and keep out of the
hands of the Nazis, the Biblical Ark of the Covenant. The Ark is said to have
great power: an army that marches with the ark before it is invincible.
At the story’s climax Indiana
Jones and his partner, Marion Ravenwood, are tied up against a pole and the
Nazis have the Ark. When the Nazis open the Ark, it is a god from the machine
as the power of the Ark is unleashed on the Nazis, killing them all, but
leaving Indiana Jones and Marion unharmed. Their ropes have been burnt, setting
them free.
Why does this work?It shouldn’t, but there it is—working. How?
When the story starts Indiana
Jones doesn’t not believe in the Ark and its power. Here is an exchange between
Indiana Jones and his friend Marcus Brody:
Brody: Well, I mean that for nearly three thousand years man has
been searching for the lost Ark. It’s not something to be taken lightly. No one
knows its secrets. It’s like nothing you’ve ever gone after before.
Indiana:
[laughing] Oh, Marcus. What are you
trying to do, scare me? You sound like my mother. We’ve known each other for a
long time. I don’t believe in magic, a lot of superstitious hocus-pocus. I’m
going after a find of incredible historical significance, you’re talking about
the boogieman.
There it is: Indiana Jones doesn’t
believe in the supernatural. One way to think about this is that Indiana Jones
believes he understands how the world works. But by the story’s end, Jones has
changed and does believe in those things he formerly disbelieved. Or maybe he
simply realizes he doesn’t know everything. He has grown. He has learned.
The story was not about whether or
not Indiana Jones could break free of his ropes. By this point in the story, we
have seen him do some amazing things and make incredible escapes. At this point
in the story it is about his change, and it is this change that saves him. When
the Ark is opened, he believes in its power enough not to gaze on the Ark as
its power is unleashed. This is what saves him, not the god from the machine. Being
open to changing one’s mind may save your life.
This is not an absolute truth, but
it is often true in life that we get stuck in a way of thinking that is
detrimental.
It is important in a story that a
character can solve her own problems, because the audience is there to learn
how to overcome theirs. So, in just about every case if some mysterious force
or unlikely coincidence saves the day, the audience feels cheated. And they
have been cheated.
You may have a story where a
character needs to learn that there is always hope or that miracles can happen.
There are people in life who survive car crashes or other accidents that should
have killed them. Or maybe they survive an illness that the odds say they
should not have.
But in such cases, the story’s
lesson had better be proven by a god
from the machine event. The lesson ought to be about a character’s state of
mind. Maybe a character needs to believe that there is always hope and that
helps them to survive.This is the
kind of story that is more about emotional or spiritual survival rather than
physical.
The reason deus ex machina doesn’t work in other instances is because it doesn’t
teach us how to solve problems. It doesn’t teach us how to survive.
One of the questions I get most is about story structure and
is, “Is it different for documentaries?” No. In fact one of the best
structuralists working in film of any kind is documentarian Ken Burns. I watch
his work in awe. If you want to know how stories work, you should become
familiar with what he does.
There is something I often urge people to do, but few ever
bother: to understand how stories work you must learn to observe them in their
natural habitat. You must pay attention to the way people talk in real life to
discover when people tell stories, why people tell stories, how people tell
stories, and how often.
As I have written before, story structure is natural; we all
use it every day and most of us are relatively good at it. Yes, some people are
better and others less so, but for the most part we are pretty good at telling
stories. It is when we are consciously constructing them that we get confused.
No matter the genre or medium, story construction is
basically the same. When you are able to see this clearly, you will have
reached another level of storytelling. So many people become confused by the
surface of a story—what I call the clothing that a story wears.
So, I might be lecturing someplace and someone may say when
I am making a particular point, “But what about sci-fi, my story is sci-fi.
Does this work for sci-fi?”
You can replace the word sci-fi with comedy, drama, western,
dramedy, musical, romance, historical fiction, supernatural romance, historical
romance, supernatural comedy, docudrama, horror, fantasy, or countless other
combinations. For some reason people think that their particular genre will
have special structural concerns. (This may be true of your story, but it will
not have anything to do with genre.)
I guess that when people ask these questions it means that I
have done a poor job of explaining exactly what structure is. Story structure
is a way of arranging story events that makes the meaning of those events clear
and engaging for one’s audience, to elicit the maximum effect.
In some ways each story has its particular demands, but
there are some basic structural forms that work more often than not. Ken Burns
uses basic story structure so well that he makes what he does look effortless
and his stories could not be more effective.
At the opening of each series and of each episode of that
series he “tells you what he’s gonna tell you.” If the show is about Mark
Twain, he lets you know just who Mark Twain was and why he matters—and he does
this right up front.
Rather than making you feel like you have already seen the
story, it makes you more interested in
hearing the story. This is one of the most difficult things to get students to
understand, because they often want everything to be a surprise. But what good
is a surprise if the audience isn’t interested enough to start listening?
Then Ken Burns will tell you the story in detail, and with
emotional truths that give the story resonance. He makes the history relevant
by using emotion to connect you to historical events. He makes the story matter
because he makes the audience care.
This is no different than what one would do in a fictional
or dramatic narrative piece.The
structure is the same because a story is a story. Period.
Then Ken Burns “tells you what he told you.” He sums up what
you have just seen. He tells you again why it matters. And now, because you
have an emotional context for the information, it has even more power than it
did upon the first hearing.
This is classic structure and Ken Burns, and his team, are
masters of it. His latest film THE DUST BOWL does this amazing well. And his
film THE WAR, about World War II, moves me in a way that few current filmmakers
have.
One of my very favorite films of all time is the landmark
documentary by the Maysles brothers, David and Albert, and the brilliant editor
Charlotte Zwerin, called SALESMAN.
This is a film about Bible salesmen in 1969 and their
attempt to sell expensive bibles to poor people. There is a humanity to this
film that is so powerful that my guess is that David Mamet saw this film before
he wrote his Pulitzer Prize-winning play GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS. There are some
pretty striking similarities. (This is nothing against David Mamet, I just
mention it to say that this film has a real impact on viewers.)
It was one of the early documentaries not to have a narrator
talking over the film, telling the audience what was happening and how to feel
about it. This film is all structure. As with most documentaries, the structure
was found in the editing.
The film might be seen by some as merely a character study. I
often don’t like things called character studies because what it almost always
means is that the characters are “interesting,” but that there is no story to
speak of. SALESMAN is great because it is a story that looks and feels like a
character study, proving that one need not sacrifice character for story or vice
versa. When these elements work in concert, as in SALESMAN, the result is
engaging and moving.
Paul Brennan with the Maysles
The film starts with a shot of the Bible and a man’s
arthritic hands. This is the salesman who becomes the main character of the
story. In this opening he is in someone’s home and is trying—and failing—to
make a sale. This opening scene is a real “tell them what you are going to tell
them” moment. This is the story of a salesman desperate to make sales, who in
the end wonders if he’s made the right choice with his life. It is amazing.
The first act introduces the main character Paul “The Badger”
Brennan and all of his fellow salesmen. These other salesmen are characters
that allow us to, by comparison, measure the success or failure of Paul. This
is a basic structural technique and works exactly the same no matter if the
story is a piece of narrative fiction or a documentary.
My favorite examples that use to explain this technique are
the pigs in the story THE THREE LITTLE PIGS. It’s really the story of one pig—the
pig who used bricks to build his house. But it is through the failure of the
first two pigs, who build their respective houses from straw and sticks, that
we can measure the success of the last pig. This is the very same technique
used in SALESMAN.
There is a great scene in the first act where the supervisor
of these traveling salesmen states that money is being made in the “Bible
business.” And, he says, that anyone who is not making money is to blame. This
sets up the attitude of Paul’s boss—that if Paul isn’t making sales, it’s his
fault. So we know the stakes—Paul could lose his job.
Again, this is basic story structure used brilliantly. Set
up a character’s goal—what does the character want?It also helps to let people know the stakes—what happens if
the character doesn’t get what s/he wants? Then let the audience know about the
obstacle to the goal—why can’t the character just go get what s/he wants?
This obstacle can be physical, emotional, or a combination.
The combination, if you can do it, can hit an audience deeply. In JAWS, the
chief of police must kill the shark that is terrorizing his community. The
shark is both a goal and an obstacle, as it wants to avoid being killed. This
is a physical obstacle.
But there is another obstacle and it is emotional—the chief
is scared out of his mind of the water. He must overcome both the outer and
inner obstacle in order to achieve his goal.
In SALESMAN, Paul faces the physical obstacle that his
potential buyers are cash-strapped. But we also see that the number of
rejections he gets is taking its toll on him, and he is losing confidence,
which, in turn, makes selling even harder.To make his sales, he must overcome this emotional goal as
well.
This film uses the elements of structure to great emotional
effect and because of this tells a compelling human drama. This is why it is
both a classic and a masterpiece.
Remember that a story is a story, and structure works in the
telling of any story regardless of form. The films of Ken Burns, and SALESMAN,
are stellar examples of this.
“The two most
important words in motion pictures are Billy and Wilder”
– Alfred Hitchcock
“It was a hot afternoon, and I can still remember the smell
of honeysuckle all along that street. How could I have known that murder can
sometimes smell like honeysuckle?” – Walter Neff in Double Indemnity
I could have done an entire post by now on how cool Billy
Wilder is, instead of just doing one film at a time, but since I have already
done posts for The Apartment, Sunset Boulevard, and Stalag 17, I’ll just
continue to do his films one at a time. That way I will have something to write
about for some time to come.
One of Wilder’s greats is his third feature, Double
Indemnity. It was nominated for seven Academy Awards, including Best Actress
and Best Picture.
People have been trying to recreate the look, witty patter,
and insightful narration of this classic film noir since its release in 1944. Just
about all film students at some point try their hand at a black-and-white,
moody piece with the feel of John Seitz’s brilliant photography. It is almost a
rite of passage – even for those who have not seen the original film they are
trying to imitate.
A shot from Double Indemnity showing Seitz's lighting
The original screenplay, co-written by Billy Wilder and
Raymond Chandler, is based on a book by James M. Cain, about an insurance
salesman, Walter Neff. Played by Fred Mac Murray in the movie, Neff plans,
along with a woman with whom he is having an affair (played to perfection by
Barbara Stanwyck), to kill her husband for the insurance money. It doesn’t go well.
Wilder knows how to start a film. He does what he can to
pull the audience in as quickly as possible. In Sunset Boulevard he starts with
a dead man in a pool narrating the film, so the audience isn’t watching to see
what happens, but just how it happened. How did this guy end up dead in a pool?
Double Indemnity starts with a car careening, nearly out of
control, down the night street, running red lights and narrowly missing
accidents. This car is in one big hurry. Already we are asking questions – who’s
in that car and why are they in such a hurry?
The car stops at a building, and a man, seen only from the
back at first, is let in by someone who works there. The building is closed, it’s
after hours. The night worker tries to make small-talk with the man, who he
recognizes as Mister Neff, but gets little more than grunts in response.
Sweaty and not feeling well, Walter Neff makes it into his
insurance office, sits down, and pops a cigarette into his mouth. We see that
he only has the use of one arm, the other is injured, and there is a bullet
hole in his suit just above his injured left arm.
Fred MacMurray, as Neff, records his confession
He speaks into his dictaphone (an old-fashioned voice
recorder). As he speaks, he addresses someone named Keys. He confesses to Keys
that he murdered someone named Dietrichson. It
seems Keys suspected murder in this case, but he did not suspect Neff. Shortly
it becomes clear that Keys is an investigator for the same insurance company that
Neff works for.
So…the film kicks off with a confession of murder. In typical
Wilder fashion, he sucks us in quickly and efficiently. Now he has us asking
questions, and, as in his later film Sunset Boulevard, we are not watching to see what happens, but how it
happens.
Neff’s confession to Keys bleeds into the narration for the
rest of the film, as Neff explains what happened. He remembers the first day he
went to Phyllis Dietrichson’s door: “It was a
hot afternoon, and I can still remember the smell of honeysuckle all along that
street. How could I have known that murder can sometimes smell like
honeysuckle?”
MacMurray, Stanwyck and Robinson
Again, Wilder reminds us that a murder is coming, so we
watch with interest. Neff goes on to explain how he began his affair with Phyllis Dietrichson and how
eventually they plotted to kill Mr. Dietrichson in such a way that it would pay
off double – thus, Double Indemnity.
Neff and Keys
This brings me to the character of Keys, played by the
legendary Edward G. Robinson.Robinson does an amazing job in this well-written part. Keys is a crack
investigator. For Neff, it’s like trying to get away with murder while working
in the same office as Sherlock Holmes—if Sherlock Holmes was a bulldog. Keys is
scary-smart and is the source of much of the film’s suspense as he threatens
Neff’s chances at getting away with his crime.
In fact, one of the amazing things in this film, and all
Wilder films, is that no one is stupid. None of the major characters becomes conveniently stupid so that they can get into trouble to make the
story happen. Wilder is never lazy that way; he makes everyone smart – as smart
or smarter than the audience. It creates great tension when smart people in a
story are trying to outsmart one another.
I don’t want to say too much about the film after this
because I don’t want to spoil the fun for those of you who haven’t seen it. I
will just say that there is a reason that Wilder is considered one of the best
storytellers in the history of film. And when you watch, it will be clear to
you why Double Indemnity is a classic.
This post was originally written for, and posted at, the Women in Film Seattle site. Cool organization, check them out. Anyway, in case you missed it at their site, here it is.
A friend of
mine recently read a spec script of mine and was very complimentary. Which was,
of course, nice. But his compliments are also the specific kinds of comments I
like to hear because they tell me that I have hit the target at which I was
aiming.
When people
like my screenplays, the things they say most often is, “I really feel like I
just watched a movie.” Or they say, “I could really picture it!” And one of my
very favorites, “I couldn’t put it down”. These kinds of comments have been fairly
consistent over the years. Why? How can I get these comments consistently? It’s
because I spent many years reading, starting as a teenager, reading scripts and
learning from them. I stole the techniques of the writers whose work sucked me
into the story and made me see a movie in my head vividly.
It is
astonishing to me how many aspiring screenwriters almost never read
screenplays. Part of the reason for this is that with the advent of
screenwriting software that formats scripts for you, folks no longer feel that
they need to look at screenplays to learn that aspect, which was one of the
main reasons that people ever looked at screenplays to begin with. Most people
I speak to haven’t bothered to read scripts to learn much else, but there is so
much to learn.
WhenE.T.The Extraterrestrialcame out I was 17. That movie blew me away and I, already a huge Spielberg fan,
became obsessed with the film and screenplay. At this time Spielberg’s most
famous films were Jaws,
Close Encounters of the Third Kind,
and Raiders of the Lost Ark.
The man was a juggernaut. I even had a picture on my wall of Steven Spielberg
with E.T. that I pulled out of an issue of Rolling Stone magazine. I wanted to know what this
guy knew, so I tracked down the scripts to his films and studied them.
Movie geek that I was this picture of E.T. and Steven Spielberg was on my wall as a teenager.
I really got
into reading screenwriter Melissa Mathison’s script for E.T. I’m not sure how many times I read
that screenplay. Multiple times. It was while reading this brilliant script
that I learned one of my biggest screenwriting lessons – make every single thing matter. It was a revelation.
It struck me as
I was reading a section of the script where the boy, Elliot, is hiding in a
closet with his alien buddy E.T. as they eavesdrop on Elliot’s mother reading a
bedtime story to his kid sister.
E.T. heals Elliot's cut finger
This scene is
interrupted when Elliot cuts his finger, “Ouch!”This is where E.T. learns the meaning of the word ouch and
that is associated with pain. E.T.’s finger lights up and he touches it to the
boy’s finger and heals the cut, after which the pair goes back to eavesdropping
on the bedtime story.
Elliot and E.T. watch as Elliot's sister is read a story.
It is a
tender scene of friendship between boy and alien, but it is so much more than
that. I learned something reading the script, seeing the words on the page that
I had not noticed consciously while watching the film.
The story
being read to Gertie, the little girl, as played by Drew Barrymore, is Peter
Pan’s. So what? Think about this: writer Melissa Mathison could have chosen any
story to be read to the little girl. It could have been about Snow White or the
Three Little Pigs or Rumpelstiltskin or Stone Soup,
but it was Peter Pan, the part where the fairy Tinkerbelle is dying. And this
is what the mother is reading when Elliot and E.T. go back to listening in.
“She
thinks she can get well again if children believe in fairies, “ reads the mother.
“Do you believe in fairies,” she continues, “Say quick that you believe.” Gertie says
emphatically that she does believe. “If you believe,” the mother reads, “clap
your hands.” The girl claps earnestly. “And Tink is
saved,” says the mother.
Mom reads Peter Pan to Gertie
Here’s
what’s amazing: later in the film E.T. dies and is brought back to life. Mathison
works this fairy-tale imagery of miraculous resurrection into our minds; she
primes us to believe what’s coming later. She did it seamlessly and skillfully.
She did not stop the story to have this tender scene – she continued to tell,
and add, to her story by choosing a story for the mother to read that mattered,
not an arbitrary or generic one.
Not
to be forgotten is the fact that the fairy Tinkerbelle is often depicted as nothing
more than a glowing light, with the light dimmed to indicate when she is dying,
and made to glow brightly again when she is coming back to life.E.T’s light, too, goes out when he is
dying and comes back up when he comes back to life.
The amazing screenwriter of E.T. Melissa Mathison
I
often compliment a film I like by saying that it had no fat. What I mean is
that the storytellers used every line, shot, scene, and character to stay on
track with the story in some way. Nothing is wasted.
If
I ever have to pleasure of meeting Melissa Mathison, I will remove my hat out
of sheer respect for the craft of her screenplay.
Today,
I use this lesson I learned from reading the screenplay for E.T. in every story I construct.
This lesson changed the direction of my writing profoundly. I have no doubt
that if you read great scripts, you will learn great lessons. And when you do,
steal them and use them liberally. P.S. And in case you missed this, I was on the 20/20 Awards podcast discussing one of my very favorite films Norma Rae: And also another film I love Groundhog Day:
Not long ago I read the late legendary comedy writer and
teacher Danny Simon used to show episodes of The Mary Tyler Moore Show in his classes and talk about the writing
techniques. I loved hearing this because I, without knowing about Danny Simon
doing so, have been known to do this very thing. So I have at least one thing
in common with Danny Simon.
The show has been on my mind lately because Mary Tyler
Moore co-star Valerie Harper announced that
she has terminal cancer and has very little time to live, news that has
saddened me deeply. I have been a fan of The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Ms. Harper from the beginning of the show and
nearly the very beginning of my life. The show first aired on September 19, 1970, when I was five years old. Somehow
I knew it was great, even at that tender age. In fact, during its run, the show
won a total of 29 Emmy Awards. Over the years my admiration for the show, its
cast, and its writers, has only increased.
A good friend of mine owns this slate from the last episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show. He let me hold it and then had to pry it from my hands.
It is fair to say that I’m not sure I would know anything
about constructing stories if it weren’t for this show. When I was about ten or
so I started to audiotape the shows to listen to them over and over again.
(This was before people had any way of recording television. Once show had
aired that was it. You were at the whim of the network as to when you might
ever see that show again.)
After repeated listening, I started to see the patterns to
the stories. I had never read a book on story structure or ever heard anyone
talk about such a thing; I was happening upon it without knowing. I remember
clearly the epiphany when I first discovered the purpose of each act even
before I knew the formal concept of an act.
One of my very favorite episodes – one I have used in my
classes – aired in Season One of the series, is called Support Your Local Mother. This episode is so well constructed
it blows my mind.
In the episode, Valerie Harper (who plays Rhoda, Mary’s
upstairs neighbor and best friend) gets a visit from her mother, but Rhoda
refuses to see her, and so Mary, not understanding this, puts up Rhoda’s mother
while she is in town. This is how it plays out.
In Act One, Mary’s friend and neighbor Phyllis instructs
Mary on how to whack a table with a length of chain to give furniture an
antique look. Mary, who is a prim and proper woman and a little uptight, finds
it silly to whack her furniture and comes down with a case of the giggles with
each whack.
No sooner has Phyllis left Mary alone to do her work when Ida
Morgenstern, Rhoda’s mother (played brilliantly by actress Nancy Walker), shows
up at Mary’s door. Rhoda lives upstairs, but Ida says that she is not home and
Mary lets her wait in her apartment until Rhoda arrives.
Ida and Mary as Ida waits to hear from Rhoda
Mary goes back to her work beating her table and is now
embarrassed to have company.Ida is
a no-nonsense New Yorker from the Bronx and finds Mary’s giggling a little odd.
This is not a small thing. Mary is very middle-America, very Midwestern. Already
it is established that there is a clash of cultures at work – brash New Yorker
meets Pollyanna.
Turns out Rhoda has been home all along and is avoiding her
mother, so Mary marches upstairs to talk some sense into her friend. Rhoda
tells Mary her mother drives her crazy and that it’s better that she not see
her at all. This makes no sense to Mary, so Rhoda explains that Bronx love is
not like Midwestern love and comes with a healthy dose of guilt. Mary still
doesn’t understand, but Rhoda still refuses to see her mother.
As Mary is leaving, Rhoda asks Mary in all earnestness to
ask Ida if she’s taking her pills.
Okay, some things to point out here. If the three acts are
thought of as proposal, argument, and conclusion, then Rhoda saying that Bronx
love is not like Midwestern love in that it comes with guilt is the story’s
proposal. The rest of the story will deal with this idea – the story will
argue, or prove this proposal.
Nancy Walker as Ida and Mary Tyler Moore as Mary Richards
Also, it is great that the scene with Mary and Rhoda ends
with Rhoda showing that she truly cares for her mother and her health. Without
this, Rhoda would look just plain mean, but now we know she cares. That is
beautiful construction.
We are still in the first act at this point. Mary lets Ida
stay with her in hopes that Rhoda will change her mind, but right away Mary
starts to get an idea of what Rhoda was talking about: Ida wants to pay Mary
for letting her stay there and Mary refuses.The two go back and forth over this with Mary saying that it
would make her feel uncomfortable to take the money, but Ida finds a way of
wearing Mary down and guilting her into taking the money.
By the end of the first act, just as the two are about to go
to sleep Ida takes one more little stab at making Mary feel guilty and we know
that Mary is in for a hard time with Ida. This is a brilliant first act. It
sets up everything perfectly.
Ida and Mary settle in just before the end of act one.
The second act is the argument for, or proof of, the
proposal that Bronx love comes with guilt. Second acts prove (or sometimes
disprove) their proposal through dramatization.By dramatizing an idea I mean demonstrating through the
storyline and actions and reactions of the story’s characters. To dramatize is
to demonstrate and this second act demonstrates the proposal by seeing Mary
driven to near insanity by Ida just as Rhoda said would happen.
Cloris Leachman, who plays Phyllis, along with co-stars Mary and Ms. Harper
At one point Mary tries to explain to Phyllis how she is
being driven crazy by Ida, but Phyllis doesn’t understand. Now Mary is in the
same boat Rhoda was in Act One, trying to explain to an outsider how this
seemingly sweet woman is making her insane.
By the third act, Mary understands through experience what
Rhoda was talking about in the first act. Now Mary can talk to Rhoda from a
place of knowledge – and is able to
convince her that should see her mother. It is an amazing piece of writing.
There is a reason the show won a bunch of awards and has become a classic.
This is me meeting Ms. Valerie Harper in October 2012. She was very sweet.
As a side note I want to say that I was lucky enough to meet
Valerie Harper not too long ago and I was able to tell her how great she is as
an actress and how much the show means to me. It was one of the coolest things
that has ever happened to me.
I would very much like to thank Ms. Harper and the cast and
writers of this show that has had such an impact on my life from the first day
it aired until this very day. This show was one of the very first things that
helped me to understand my craft, not to mention how much joy, laughter, and
happy memories it’s given me.
For those of you wanting to better understand the craft of
storytelling, you have a great teacher in The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
