Creative Maieutics

Two Kinds of Questions

2012-01-28T20:30:00.000-08:00

Watching a movie, the viewer undoubtedly considers many questions.

How much longer will this thing last?
Should I get my free popcorn refill?
Did that actress have work done?
How much money was wasted on this mess?

Not all of these are deeply related to the screenplay of the film. Some of them we can't worry about. Indeed, only the first two have something to do with the screenwriter.

If the audience is waiting for the movie to end, you haven't done a good job of keeping them interested.
If they are waiting for an uneventful spot, you at least managed to convince them to sit tight through one bucket of popcorn.

Other questions the writer should care about deeply. Take Sunset Boulevard. Two things the viewer might wonder are:

Will Joe and Norma sell their screenplay?
Is Joe a good person?

These are two quite different kinds of questions. The first is about plot and has a definite answer. The answer will likely be revealed--with time. If not, the audience will be pretty confused.

The second question is about character--and there is more than one answer. How good or bad a person Joe is will likely be revealed as well, but what the audience thinks about it is quite separate.

We could label these questions:

plot vs. character

facts vs. values

closed vs. open.

And there are two kinds of movies. One kind of movie never seriously poses the second kind of question. The other makes this kind of question central.

The first kind of movie assume there is a clear moral code that can be relied on to manipulate audience responses. This moral code is made up of beliefs like:

People who kick dogs are bad.
People who cheat on their wives are bad.
Murder is never right.
Shooting an unarmed man is a terrible thing to do.
People are either good or bad.

Wilder is the kind of screenwriter who didn't rely on beliefs like this. He doesn't so much manipulate the audience to have a definite moral response: Wilder pushes the audience to think for themselves.

Joe is taking advantage of a crazy older lady.
Joe is basically sleeping a woman for money.
Joe knows Norma will never get what she wants.
Joe is two-timing Norma.
Joe is romancing someone else's best gal.

In many ways, Joe is not a nice person. But Joe is the protagonist. We have some interest in whether or not Joe will succeed on his many half-thought-out projects.

But Joe is charming. Joe is witty. Joe sees humor even in sad situations. Joe is handsome. Joe is played by William Holden--and so Joe carries with him all of Holden's rather considerable charm.

Wilder presents Joe as having an urgent career problem, gives Joe a clever if not-very-moral solution, and then continues to add unsavory behavior after unsavory behavior. Wilder tests the audience. It's as if he's continually asking: "Now do you like him? What about now? Okay, how about now?"

It thus seems like a smart thing as a writer to remember that not all your moral questions about the characters need be answered simply and clearly. Some can be thrown in the laps of the audience, where, if you are both skillful and lucky, they will keep the audience from getting that extra bucket of popcorn.

--Edward R. O'Neill

Thoughts on Writing Dialogue

2012-01-24T11:54:00.000-08:00

What do we talk about when we talk? I mean in life, not just in movies.

To be schematic, we talk about three things.

1. Actions. What we're doing. We make plans. We argue. We decide. We describe what will happen. We talk about how things worked out in the past.

2. Feelings. I liked this. I didn't like that. I love him. I hate her. When this happened, I was disappointed. When that happened I was surprised.

3. Chit-Chat. Nothing. Ephemera. How about those Knicks? Do you suppose it will rain again tomorrow? I had the worst breakfast. Did you see Steffie's new hat?

So if you're writing dialogue, you have at least three kinds of dialogue you can write.

Plot-driven movies focus on actions. The characters talk endlessly about what did happen, what will happen, what they plan. How they will get the bomb on the truck, what kind of poison they will use, how to get the money wire transferred to a offshore account, etc.

This can be interesting. It's notably interesting when there's conflict: no, that plan will never work! Or when the action is uncommon, and therefore the details are interesting to a non-specialist.

What exactly is an offshore account--and how does it work?
How do poisons really work--and how do you get them in someone's sushi or saki?

I have no idea--and so it would be interesting for me to find out.

Psychological movies focus on feelings. I never liked my mother. You hate me but won't admit it, etc. Think Bergman. All that endless talk about feelings. It can be rather trying.

From this point-of-view, you either have 'superficial' people talking about doing things, or you have 'deep' people talking about thoughts and feelings.

It's the chit-chat that gets the short shrift.

Most writers think there should be no chit-chat. It wastes the audience's time. It has no meaning. If it doesn't add to the plot or the characters, it has to go.

But at a certain level, the greatest writers use the most chit-chat.

Waiting for Godot is a nice example. The characters talk about what's happening--which is mostly what does not and will never happen.

What should we do?
What are we doing?
When is Godot coming?
What did we do yesterday?
What will we do tomorrow?

Plot. Actions. It's negative plot and negative actions--things not happening and not done. And that is the clever bit.

And then the rest is chit-chat--very little about feelings, except the occasional "come to me that I may embrace you." And yet Godot is a great drama. Because so much about life emerges around the actions and through the chit-chat.

Take Chekhov for instance. So much chit-chat!

His characters talk about birthdays and tea.
They talk about who is rude and who polite.
They talk about philosophy.
They quote poems and Latin sayings.
Characters clip articles from the newspaper.
They talk about who wore what.
They talk about neighborhoods they used to live in.
They talk about trees and deforestation.

Yet Chekhov is a great writer! How can he fill his plays with chit-chat?

Because Chekhov is very clever. And he knew and loved actors. And a terrific actor, even a good actor, can inject meaning and feeling and intention and nuance in anything. I'd bet every Chekhov play has a character ask for a glass of water. (It happens in The Seagull and The Three Sisters.) Or "what time is it?" Why? Because a great actor can fill that line with the character's whole life.

In The Three Sisters Masha is having an affair with Vershinin. This is only mentioned aloud once. But all the characters know it's happening. And when Masha and Vershinin talk about poetry and philosophy and Masha's late father, they are making love. It's part of their relationship.

So this is Chekhov's method and assumptions--which I think are the best.

He assumes actors can read. He assumes they read the whole play first and figure out what's going on--what the actions are.
He includes lines where the characters express their feelings--but intermittently and usually not when they are feeling what they talk about.
He assumes that actors will act the actions.
He assumes that the actors will read about the characters' feelings and put them underneath the actions.
He assumes that actors can fill all the chit-chat with the actions and the feelings.

Chekhov knew what good actors do.

Writers, even beginners, need to become aware of how good writers and actors work, so they can aim for the same achievement. The writer gives the actors information about the whole life and what is happening so that the actors can put some things under the surface. The information does not tumble out for the audience so that everything is "clear," but rather so the audience remains interested by the unfolding itself.

A little bit of mystery goes a long way. But the writer needs to know how to use dialogue to communicate not only to the audience but also to the actors.

--Edward R. O'Neill

Screenwriting Across the Four Dimensions.

2011-12-22T11:07:00.000-08:00

Screenwriting basically has several dimensions. It's convenient to isolate four. So yes: 4D Screenwriting.

Just as football has offense and defense, running and passing, screenwriting has: material, three-act structure, actions, and dialogue.

If you're competent at all of them and can keep your eye on all of them at once, you're basically doing pretty well.

If you're great at one of them, you will probably ignore your deficiencies in the other areas. Everyone's seen these scripts that have wonderful dialogue but no structure and no actions: nothing happens and you don't know where the thing is headed. This is because the writer was so fond of his own dialogue that he ignored the rest.

Most people who try to screenwrite aren't even competent at one of them. And if you don't use all of them, you can't be competent.

Material. This is the stuff of life that you know about and bring to the story world.

Woody Allen's material is being a neurotic New York Jewish intellectual. He brings that material to the future (Sleeper), the Russian Revolution (Love and Death), and even to Spain (Vicki Christina Barcelona).

Kevin Smith has his material: suburban white guys who love comic books.

Martial arts films may be about Chinese cops or about medieval monks who eat tofu, wear robes, battle evil spirits, etc.

In novels, Phillip Roth has his characteristic material--as Eugene O'Neill did with sailoring and drinking and whoring.

You can provide your own examples.

The great downfall of most sci-fi is that there is no real material. We don't know what the future is like, and most writers' inventive powers are not strong enough to produce the grit and feel of a whole other world. Even the Star Wars franchise simply lifts and transposes Western bars and farm life and medieval swordsmanship into "a galaxy far, far away."

The material is not your story: it's the stuff your story is made from. Look how many stories Woody Allen gets from his same material.

You must be able to take your material and stretch it across some structure in order to write a movie. It's from inside your material that your actions germinate. They took root in the worlds you know and grow organically, using all the material you have at hand.

To use a different metaphor, the material is like soil and water which will nourish your script-plant.

Three-Act Structure.

These are the basic tent-poles across which your material is stretched.

There are many books and web pages on three-act structure. It's impossible to say Who Is Right. And it doesn't much matter how you understand it: it's just gotta work.

For my money, three-act structure is:

a normal universe with latent unsolvable problems,
an adventure that promises to solve the problems but actually brings more new problems,
and then a New Normal--which has its own problems but is somehow acceptable.

(If the ending is: the protagonist gets everything and loses nothing, that's a fantasy. I find realism's more interesting: in realism's choices are hard, there are no perfect solutions, everyone loses something, and you don't always get what you want.)

The close of the adventure and the return to a new normalcy must be richly emotionally satisfying.

The journalists returning to their daily chores while Kane's secrets burn and lie forgotten within the vault/crypt of his earthy possessions is to me richly striking (Citizen Kane).
Joe Gillis getting his comeuppance for trying to cheat a crazy old woman, and the old woman herself getting a fantasy of love and acceptance: to me that is both satisfying and perverse (Sunset Boulevard).
Guido makes peace with all his wives and lovers and all the specters of his past that haunt him--even though he's not in the least a better person (8 1/2).

Also for me, this is where the first Star Wars falls down: just getting a medal and a fancy new white Judo outfit and everyone thinking you're cool is strikingly un-rich for me. But then I'm not an adventure fanboy.

So you need some kind of beginning-middle-end that is the frame for your story.

Actions. This is the bulk of your work. Your story must unfold primarily in actions. Dialogue is secondary. Go watch a silent movie and see how little is down through words. Likewise for your own work: you should be able to write your story as a silent movie which the audience can 75% understand simply by watching it.

Try it. Pop in your favorite DVD and turn off the sound. Look at the tremendous number of things you can figure out just be watching. (In addition, watch any George Cukor movie and you'll notice the tremendous number of thoughts and feelings you can read through the body language! That, kids, is directing.)

The basic skill here is using actions in a plastic way. You must be able to stretch or shrink actions, to combine any two or more actions, and to use one action to suggest something else.

Take: a wedding or a divorce, a party or a funeral, going to work, getting drunk, eating too much, exercising. A good screenwriter can write any of these at any length--and combined with anything else: falling in love, losing one's mind, discovering happiness, anything.

Inflection is a key skill here. One action is inflected when it is bent or shaped to reveal something other than itself.

A woman gets ready for work. She is nervous.

A bad screenwriter writes that as a stage direction or dialogue direction: nervously.

A good screenwriter inflects the actions. She asks herself "How does a nervous person get ready for work"?

Do we need to know what she's nervous about? Not really. It's interesting simply seeing someone mess up a relatively simple task. It provokes curiosity.

Dialogue. This is actually very distinct from the other three. Beginners think screenplays are "just dialogue." This is completely wrong. If you have no three-act structure or actions, your dialogue isn't doing anything: it isn't doing any work or serving any purpose.

The best dialogue does not directly point to the actions or the three-act structure--or does so only minimally.

One of the key tricks of dialogue is attitude. Attitude is a kind of space between a person and an experience. Attitude is how the person feels, thinks about or perceives the experience. And it comes out nicely in dialogue.

A competent screenwriter gives the actors dialogue which lets the actors express their attitudes towards what's happening. The character loves or hates what's happening. And it's not even that the dialogue states as much. It's more that the dialogue lets the actor take an attitude that will make the scene interesting.

A competent screenwriter can write a date at a restaurant in which one person hates the food and the restaurant but loves the other person, and the other person is the opposite--hates the person but loves the food and the restaurant. Ideally, none of this would be stated directly--as with "This restaurant is awful" or "Gee but you're beautiful."

If you can't do that, just go home: you can't bet, you can't play--you're not even at the table.

If you can operate on these four levels competently and seamlessly, you are bound to keep an audience interested. And that is job one for the writer.

--Edward R. O'Neill

The Big Picture: Why Size Matters in Screenwriting

2011-11-30T15:37:00.000-08:00

A writer has to start somewhere.

Where you start is usually called a draft. And everyone knows what the finished thing should look like--a story or poem or novel or script or whatever.

But how you get from one end to the other is not so easy.

In the interest of demystifying the writing process, let's say you're writing lots of ideas to find the interesting ones.

Look at what you've written: look specifically at their duration. Some things last milliseconds and some can last for years.

Mary's heart skips a beat.
Mary wants to be a nurse.

Or I'll do a personal one.

For a moment, Ed wonders if he left the gas on.
Ed really really intends to clean his apartmet.

Okay. Neither pair is really visible.
But each of these invisible states has a duration. The first lasts a half a second. And the second could go on for YEARS.

The screenwriter must try to get somewhere between the two.

Why? Two reasons.
First, visibility.
Ultimately, everything the screenwriter invents must be acted out by actors and visible on a screen. No one, not Meryl Streep, can act "thinking of the number five." And if an actor tells you she can act "sad," she is a very bad actor indeed.

When the writer is discovering his story, he can imagine lots of things that can't be seen or acted: states of mind, states of being, places, hats, sprites, wishes, daydreams, etc.

This is called a draft--or better still, a prose draft. It can be in no particular order. It's a jumble, a dumping-ground. It's written in the order it comes out in.

But at some point, the screenwriter must write things that are visible. If you are not writing visible actions, you are still writing a prose draft.

Thus one of the activities of the screenwriter is converting thoughts, feelings and ideas into visible, sequential actions.

The second reason to write actions between a millisecond and forever is: convenience. It's very inconvenient to stitch together ten thousand moments that last a millisecond each.

So let's take two actions.

Mary gets so stressed her left eye twitches.
Mary tries to become a model.

The first is too short, and the second is too long.
If you have to write a script one millisecond at a time, it could take forever.
You can begin with lengthier actions. But your goal is then to break them down into smaller actions.
Take this:

"Joe looks for a screenwriting job or some money."

How long could this take? Probably years. But in Sunset Boulevard, the writers boiled it down to half a day--a bit longer. (We don't know what time it is when Joe is interrupted in his 'writing' by the repo men, but we know that when he reads Norma's lengthy, lengthy rough draft, the sun is going down, and Max the butler needs to turn on the lights.)

So Wilder and his writing partner broke down "trying to get a job or money" into smaller actions:

Joe makes phone calls.
Joe visits his agent on a golf course.
Joe visits a producer in his office.

Notice that these are between a millisecond and forever. You can't do these things forever. They can only last so long. They are actions with a flexible intermediate duration.
Your story can start with indefinitely long actions, but then your goal is to kickstart some action that has a shorter time frame.

And by this rather odd thought experiment, we have come to a simple understanding of screenwriting as a process.

Many act as if screenwriting is just discovering or assembling an ideal whole--a "good screenplay."

So you build a car by taking a frame and adding wheels and an engine.
And you build a screenplay by taking a premise and adding conflict and setting.

This of course is nonsense. No one can do this. Or rather: you can only do this if you already know how--which of course is precisely what not-yet-writers do not kow.

In this sense, screenwriting is a kind of transformation and sorting.

The writer transforms non-visible thoughts and states into visible actions.
The writer sorts actions to nest smaller durations into larger ones.

Maybe Joe Gillis in Sunset Boulevard is in a state of misery and poverty. But it's only when he's prompted to act, seizes opportunities, plans and struggles, that the quicksilver of our inner lives and the fog of life's meanderings take shape that be filmed one shot after another.

--Edward O'Neill

Realism Mediates Formal Patterns: On Letter to Three Wives.

2011-09-09T10:20:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking a lot lately about Joseph Mankiewicz Letter to Three Wives (1949)--and about what screenwriters call "form" or "structure."

It's often said that screenwriters pay too little attention to form or structure. Meaning: they blurt out a bunch of scenes with no outer shape. But words like "form" and "structure" have too many meanings. If we separate off a few, we get a clearer view of the kind of work that artists do.

On the one hand, beginning screenwriters pay too little attention to things like cross-cutting, which can do a lot of work for you as a writer. Cross-cutting builds up comparisons.

It makes contrasts stand out.
It brings similarities to light.
It builds up expectations: what will happen when these people being cross-cut meet--as we assume they do in movies, based on the supposition of relevance.

On the other hand, that kind of form is something like technique: how the pieces fit together which shapes their meanings.

And there are other kinds of form. The one most screenwriters know best is: three-act structure. That is:

inciting incident,
mounting complications,
final resolution,
likable protagonist
who is wrongly harmed and
has a problem to solve, etc.

This is a form, not form; a pattern, not structure. It's an ideal, a model.

This form may embody principles--injury creates sympathy, unsolved problems elicit interest and attention, etc. But it's just one way to shape a film--as one can shape dough into a stick or a loaf or a braid.

This is cookie-cutter form. This is pleasing-the-audience form--which can also be boring-the-audience form.

What makes movies similar is often less interesting than what makes them different. What makes movies different is something else. Specifically, there are two kinds of form that are very important for the artist's work--and this is true across media--and the realistic dimension of the content of the story is very much a bridge or mediation between these two kinds of form.

A realistic work of art like a movie has two key formal dimensions. One is outside and one is inside. In a very powerful sense, what the writer is doing is filling in a gap between these two dimensions.

The outer form is the box and boxes that make up the work: the frames, the sections. These could be filled with different content.

For instance, Letter to Three Wives has a voiceover narration that discloses inside it a story of the main characters--people who live in an East Coast suburb, go here and there, do this and that. Within the story of the main characters, each of the titular three wives has a flashback disclosing a part of her story.

So Letter to Three Wives has a box inside a box, and inside that three more boxes which are sequential rather than embedded. Indeed "embedded" and "sequential" are the main kinds of 'boxes' I'm talking about. Maybe there are other types of boxes: flashbacks, musical numbers, times of year, kinds of books, crimes--whatever. I doubt there are many limits to the kinds of boxes a good writer could create.

What happens inside these boxes in Letter to Three Wives could be different: the characters could do this or that, live here or there, say this or that. But the 'boxes' would be the same.

But inside the work, there's another formal element: a nucleus of meanings or signifiers. In Letter to Three Wives, the central meanings have to do with marriage, being a wife, and social status in the suburbs.

For instance, the voiceover contains an essayistic reflection on social class in an east coast suburb. The town has a main street and a department store: the department store owner becomes a character. There's also a well-to-do street, a poor street (near the railroad tracks) and a middle-class street--where people are either moving up or down or staying put.

This narration then structures the story elements: the department store owner and workers, a woman rising from the poor to the rich without going in between; another wife has risen to the middle-class street; one couple is climbing through the wife's efforts to rise to the better end of the middle.

In short, social class in the town is a set of boxes that get filled in with characters and actions. The train tracks even become a sort of 'character.'

Another cluster of the 'realistic' elements have to do with marriage and the wifely role.

Who's a good wife?
Who's not a good wife?
Is a wife a partner or a leader?
Is a marriage a business arrangement or a meeting of minds?
Etc.

All the realistic elements fill out the meanings of "marriage" and "wife" with different possible images, different possible meanings. There is similarity--they're a cluster--but there's also contrast. And since it's a drama, there will be choice and decision.

The film is also about a letter. The letter correlates with the voiceover narration, the outermost 'box.' And the voiceover and the letter spark the flashbacks within it, each of which is constructed clearly by the film as one woman's memory. So if we take "letter" and "voice" and "memory" as a constellation around speaking and narration, the film is strongly unified. It's no accident that the title of the film really contains the key meanings of the film. You could do it differently, but this is a very clear way to do it.

Thus the realistic content of the film--the stories of the wives, what each of them does, where they live, etc., expand a core set of meanings about social class, marriage, wives and storytelling. This is a very self-aware film, so the meanings cluster around what the film itself does--tell the story of a number of marriages in a way that's very aware of the role of storytelling and memory (which Mankiewicz of course loved).

In short, Letter to Three Wives has some outer boxes and some inner meanings, and all the realistic details of the story 'expand' the inner meanings and 'fill out' and embody the outer boxes, the outer and the inner being correlated.

In somewhat Hegelian terms, the realistic content of a work of art mediates between its external formal properties and its internal semantic core--which is itself just a set of signifiers or meanings which are organized like a concentric cluster, a constellation that fits together like the words in a crossword puzzle. The movie is a puzzle, and the realistic elements are somewhat like the clues: 'handles' which allow us to read the elements of the puzzle as having meaning.

The same could be said for a painting--even a nonrealistic one. The painter conceives the outer form--the surface's size and shape, the limits of the color scheme, the general segments of the surface, the foreground and background, etc.

Any number of formal elements can be organized or not, depending on the artist's purpose.

Within the painting, then the realistic elements must fill in the scheme the artist has devised, while also expanding on some set of meanings--which may be life in a bar, drunkenness, the Virgin's relationship to the infant Christ, life in the countryside, flowers in a garden as an embodiment of light and nature, etc.

Even a nonrealistic painting mediates between outer form and inner meaning, though the inner meaning is usually something about the technique and medium itself, hence about the artist's power. Drips or splotches may fill out the design of a surface and a color scheme while expressing freedom through action and the balance of chaos and order, as in the work of Pollock, to name only an obvious example.

The artist gives herself a problem to solve.

Art is rigorous. Today, despite decades of modernist formalism, we still tend to be romantic or capitalist: we either see artworks as external expressions of internal feelings, embodiments of semi-divine inspiration, the magical appearance of thought, or we see artworks as efficient tools for giving specific pleasures--fun action, touching tears, dreamy romantic machinations.

A better picture would be: the artist sets a problem of mediating between outer form and inner meaning using interesting techniques. Some commercial work is merely: lovely technique. Some 'experimental' work is merely: 'look at this formal pattern.' In works that involve people deeply, the conception is sometimes more important than the execution. And without the conception, the execution is either inert or merely killing time.

Writing teachers often tell us: have something to say, and choose an appropriate design. I'm merely saying: what appears to the audience is the relationship between the two.

--Edward R. O'Neill

The Question.

2011-06-19T13:02:00.000-07:00

Every coherent screenplay answers one question. Not every coherent screenplay answers the same question. (That's the mistake of the Hero's Journey and such--that every film is the same film.) But each coherent screenplay answers its own question, the question which it forms, poses, insists upon and manipulates.

The Question exists in the minds of the audience. It gets there by insinuation, outright statement, and the audience's past experiences.
Each scene poses a partial or temporary answer to The Question.
The Question might get modified by each scene. Each scene can ramify, modify, inflect The Question.
The Question gets satisfyingly (richly, complexly but clearly) answered by the end of the film.

I wrote some time ago about misleading the audience--in a productive way--by getting them to concentrate on the wrong question. But I should have started with a clearer discussion of The Question. So that's what this is.

It's easy to find clear examples of The Question. Jaws (1975) is one.

In the first scene of Jaws, we find there is a dangerous man-eating shark. From there, there is a single question in the minds of the audience.

Can the town stop the shark?

Sometimes it becomes:

Can the town avoid the problem?

Can they minimize the problem?

These are clearly terrible ideas. We know it because we've watched the shark at work. But the powers that be in the town favor wishful thinking. We have the pleasure (and dread) of knowing how wrong they likely are.

Sometimes The Question becomes:

Who can help the town stop the shark?

Is it the Crusty Old Salt? The snotty urban scientist guy? The City Cop?

Least likely seems to be the City Cop.

For a good stretch of the film, we wonder:

Can these three get along well enough for long enough to stop the shark?

Many enjoyable scenes were built to help us find the answer to this is a partial "yes." These men can eventually get along. But that's not the same thing as being able to stop the shark.

When we realize how big and awful the shark is--when the special effects worked for a change and we finally see the thing clearly--the answer starts looking more like "no."

The shark's bigger than the boat.
The shark can think.
The shark is strong.

Again, some very nice scenes are built to show these things--not to have the characters debate about them--and thus to address The Question. More and more events point to "no."

The scientist gets trapped in his clever underwater cage.
The Old Salt turns out to be no better than Captain Ahab--caught in his eternal quest for vengeance.

Then lo and behold, it's the City Cop, the one who's so uncomfortable in a small town and in the water who manages the job through wits and nerve. City Boy Makes Good.

Jaws is an action movie. This in part means that the question must be very clear and answered by visible risky actions. There's a spare poetry to this genre; whereas in a play by Shaw, the question might be:

Can a well-trained poor flower girl fool a bunch of snobs?

This doesn't depend upon visibly risky actions. It depends upon training, comportment, decorum, judgment. And probably the bigger question of Pygmalian is:

Can you change someone's social class--meaning

her appearance, performance and values?

You can take the girl out of the flower market, but can you take the flower market out of the girl? Can you remove her insistence upon the values of romantic love, monogamy and private property (which Shaw found so laughable)?

Here you can see how language, argument, behavior and emotion all come together to make Shaw so thrilling and subtle to watch--and so hard to perform well.

Back to movies proper, Sunset Boulevard is not Shaw, but it's still a bit trickier than an action film.

First there are two protagonists, a washed-up writer and a reclusive aging star.
Second, if we pay attention, we know at the beginning that the writer will be killed.

The Question starts as:

Can this screenwriter make a living in Hollywood?

(Many people are still trying to answer this question.)

Then it becomes:

Can the aging star make her "return" (aka comeback) to the silver screen?

This is actually the dominant question. The writer gets hired to help the star do this. And truly we know from the get-go that the writer cannot make a go of it, because he ends up floating dead in a swimming pool. If we inflect the writer's Question

Can this writer--charming, possessed of faded good looks,

a good talker--make an honorable living in Hollywood?

Clearly, the movie answers this question in the negative.

For most of the movie, it seems that the answer to the question "Can the aging star make a comeback?" is "no." But the film is ironic (among other reasons) because she does make a comeback--in a way.

One could also say that since we know the writer won't make a go of his Hollywood life, that The Question is:

What stops this writer from making good?

And the answer is: the very thing that was supposed to save him--this aging star and her job offer. Which suggests The Question is about Norma, and not about Joe.

But if you go through every scene in Sunset Boulevard, every scene answers or inflects the Norma Question. The Joe Question is subordinate and therefore always feeds into the Norma Question. The two questions are yoked together.

And this makes it a coherent movie: not its setting or characters or theme, but the thing the audience wants to find out.

The Question is not the actions. It's not what the characters do. But it's what the doing's and saying's decide.

All of which suggests the following.

Your feature screenplay must have a Question.
Every scene must relate to The Question.
Every scene must inflect The Question, make the answer seem to be "no" or "yes," this or that.
Anything that does not somehow address The Question and its answers does not belong.

This is tough advice. It does not feel "creative." Certainly "creativity," many people think, means doing whatever you like. But creativity is stricter than that. Creativity is its own master, the particular master that is yours and that is specific to each created thing. This master demands:

Be exactly what you are, and nothing else.

And obeying this dictum is anything but a whim.

--Edward R. O'Neill

Unbelievably Common Dramatic Elements & Devices.

2011-01-08T18:54:00.000-08:00

A good screenplay sometimes seem very sui generis: unique unto itself.

There's a lot of work to make that seem so. But only a little examination shows that movies use very similar devices to keep the audience interested. The uniqueness of a good movie, you might say, is a nicely-achieved surface effect: what's unique is the facade, seldom the architecture beneath it.

The Closet is a clever comedy. A boring accountant is about to lose his job--and thus stop being able to pay his alimony to his ex- wife and child support for their rather distant son. So the accountant's neighbor cooks up a scheme to make everyone think the boring accountant is gay--hence un-fire-able.

That simple initial situation and offbeat stratagem then instigates a bizarre series of events: trying to get people to disrobe at work, repeatedly making spaghetti with tomato and basil sauce, wearing a condom hat, buying chocolates for a coworker.

Re-watching The Closet again recently, I found it to very nicely use elements quite common to very different kinds of movies. The facade is charmingly unique, but the architecture must obey the laws of gravity.

The basic problems of screenplay-writing--the laws of gravity, so to speak--are not hard to discern.

The audience has to be interested.
The audience must have some sense of what's unfolding--without it being entirely easy to foresee.

In a bit more detail, the simplest thing a screenwriter has to do--her list of Instructions, so to speak--would be something like this.

Show people doing things.
Make their actions cohere together.
Help us understand the characters more and more.
Provide for some suspense and surprise.

A typical structure used to do this is called "three-act structure." In a sense, this is like a pool table where all the balls are in specific positions. Now imagine some bump which moves everything around. The whole configuration is different--which means that every possible shot is now different too.

But it takes some time to unfold or unwind all these new possibilities.

Which is what the movie then does.

Act I is the 'normal' state of affairs.
Act II introduces some 'shock' or change or opportunity. This cascades down through all the characters. It also reveals things we didn't know before--because Act I was very short, no more than needed than to set things in motion, and because you can't know things about a situation until push comes to shove--which is what Act II does.

(Act III is another story.)

Likewise, the basic elements of screenwriting are fairly simple--and have been known since the late teens and early '20's. But the number of unique ways they can be applied are so great as to be somewhat puzzling.

So if you write down what's happening in a movie, and then you phrase it in a somewhat generic way, you see pretty clearly (in a well-made movie), the devices writers use to:

reveal the fictional world bit by bit in a way that keeps the audience involved;
make a series of events hang together so the audience keeps watching and can make sense of things;
motivate the characters, organize their actions in meaningful patterns, so what we're watching makes sense;
but also bring about suspense, both about what's about to happen, and because different characters know or think different things.

Here are the devices I found in The Closet.

Actions reveal a situation. E.g., what someone buys reveals his mood or how he lives.
Someone acquires a new piece of information. E.g., overhearing conversations, etc.
The threat of a new, negative state of affairs. E.g., people are being fired.
An imperative: a positive goal that must be achived, or a negative goal that must be avoided at all costs.
The costs of a choice steadily become more clear--and higher.
A strategem or ploy--to deceive others, for instance, to gain what one needs or not to lose what one has.
Pretending, putting on an act, dissembling.
Familiar motives: gaining or retaining others' respect, revenge, pleasure in others' misery.
Repeated actions: everyone in the fictional universe habitually acts a certain way.
New information causes a change in perception, so the same action provokes new responses.
Some people plan to do something later.
One action causes something else to happen--either as a physical or a psychological consequence.
The same action unfolds in several steps: e.g., investigating someone, playing a prank on someone, getting ready for a date.
Someone misperceives what they see or hear.
Someone takes action to change a situation, and he succeeds or fails.
A new opportunity arises or presents itself.
Exposure of a stratagem, fiction or lie.

All of these familiar. But when they're layered on top of each other and strung end to end, they make a whole set of actions and events hang together in a way that's interesting to watch unfold.

And that is perhaps the least complicated thing that can be said about dramatic writing.

--Edward R. O'Neill

Action Is the Medium of Dramatic Writing.

2010-12-17T19:17:00.001-08:00

Every art form has its medium, its material of expression, its vehicle.

Painting uses paint.
Music uses notes--whether they’re plucked or struck or sung.
Dramatic writing uses actions.

This is easy to overlook.

Films use images.
Plays have lots of words.
Maybe you think films and plays are about emotions or people or stories.
Those may be elements, but they are not the medium, the basic fundamental material.

I’m talking here about dramatic writing--which includes writing plays, films and other things.

Dramatic writing selects and arranges actions to ‘spell out’ story and character.

Actions themselves aren’t a story: think of what you did today. Lots of action, not much story.

Action is at once the substance, the semantics and they syntax (or perhaps the grammar) of dramatic writing.

I’ve said something about substance.

Semantics is the way or ways of communicating meaning.

And syntax is the binding force which holds the elements together.

How is action these three things?

It's the substance, because action a basic material without which actors have nothing to do.

A script or play is a score referring to a sequence of actions the way a musical score refers to a sequence of notes.

Choreography is even a species of dramatic writing insofar as the choreographer chooses and arranges actions in time.

Action is the semantics of dramatic writing, because something else is conveyed through actions.
- Emotion, place, thoughts--all these can, and at a certain level must, be portrayed through actions.

Actions also convey other actions.
- The action "John marries Cynthia" can be conveyed by smaller actions like:

"John and Cynthia choose flower arrangements,"
"Cynthia shops for a wedding dress,"
"John rents a tux,"
"John puts a ring on Cynthia's finger,"
"John and Cynthia drive away in a limousine," etc.

In this sense, actions are a plastic material--like paint in a painting or words in a poem.

They are flexible.

They convey both themselves--in their sensuous and material realities--and something beyond themselves.

(And the material reality is both everything the audience knows about ‘getting married,’ ‘getting arrested,’ ‘falling in love,’ or whatever the action is--and it’s the material reality of the performance, that actual person doing that thing and what that looks and feels like, for the performer and for us.)

But actions are also the syntax of dramatic writing.

Because a single action so typically participates in and points to a larger whole, a larger action, every single action gives rise to expectations of what’s to come.

These expectations may be flouted or subverted rather than satisfied.

But the key point is that action magnetizes together a sequence.

The unity of part-actions within a whole-action is also a syntactic force uniting sequences of actions.

The syntax of actions then create another layer of semantics:
the arrangements of actions generate more meaning.

Parallelism and difference suggest the significance of these actions.

One person does this, another does this.

So cinema discovered early on through cross-cutting.

Certainly, cross-cutting signified the passage of time.

And cross-cut actions imply some relationship--these things have something to do with each other.

But very early on, cross-cutting was also used purely for parallelism, to imply moral significance. “One Is Business, the Other Crime” is the title of one of Griffiths’ early (1912) shorts.

At this level, dramatic writing is a kind of poetry and shades into poetry.

It gives rise to realism because someone must always be able to perform the actions the writer writes.

But the method of composition in dramatic writing is essentially poetic.

Using actions to express meanings, including other actions,

composing these compositions in ever larger patterns.

--Edward R. O'Neill

Dramatic Devices, Big and Small.

2010-11-19T21:35:00.000-08:00

Recently I watched a really lovely film called Last Holiday (1950, directed by Henry Cass). The story concerns a boring young salesman with no real friends or romances to speak of. He finds out he's going to die soon, so he gets all the money he can and goes for a holiday to a posh resort. A junk dealer sees him shopping for suitcases, realizes he's the size to fit some expensive clothes he acquired, and so now the salesman has a posh new look.

At the resort, he's a new man, since he's determined to enjoy life. Everyone loves him and finds him mysterious. Because of his clothes and where he is, they assume he's wealthy. He gets betting tips and offers for jobs and political appointments. People ask his advice, and he's not shy, and they find this refreshing.

It's all very ironic, since he could never do this during his normal life. Eventually he finds out he's not really dying--and I won't spoil the ending for you.

It's all very charming, but it also made me realize something.

It won't come as news to many, but movies have certain repeated tricks I'm currently calling "devices." A device allows something to happen in a film or structures the film in a dramatically interesting way. The device lasts somewhere between a moment and most of a movie.

They could be called 'tricks,' but that seems mean.

Devices vary in size. Some just last for a moment and get something done.

For instance: "finding a letter or diary." A newer version is: "listening to someone's answering machine." (Actually, that's dated already. Now I think someone sits down at another's desk and opens up the email program....)

This is a device. It gets some work done--conveys some information to a character, changes the situation, etc.

Some devices are very broad: "a long journey home." This ranges from The Odyssey to Lassie, Come Home--to name only a few. This structures a long part of a movie. It's basically a serial structure: there will be many adventures, various traps. It's an episodic plot.

In between is something like "a death sentence, an incurable disease." This usually takes up much of a movie. It makes sure that the character has a secret. It makes everything extra meaningful for the audience and the characters who know. It's built-in irony. (You see now how Last Holiday got me thinking. The device basically propels most of the plot, aside from the specifics of who is at the seaside resort.)

It's unclear to me if "falling in love" is a device or an action. You can't do it intentionally like most actions--it's more like a bolt from the blue, or a gradual process. In dramatic writing, falling in love has to be married to other events: while taking tennis lessons, Mary falls in love with Steve.

A very broad one is: "having a secret."

Now take Dark Victory (1939, directed by Edmond Goulding). It's built from a number of devices. This is the plot:

Judith keeps a secret: she gets headaches, and her vision isn't so good. She sees a doctor. While he treats her, she falls in love. He operates successfully, but he keeps the secret that she will get sick again and die. They are madly happy--until she reads some papers in his office. This causes her to go on a tear, get drunk and nearly sleep with some unsavory folks. The whole time she keeps secret the fact that she knows about her death sentence. When she breaks down and reveals the secret, she marries the doctor, and they are very happy. One day her death starts kicking in, but she keeps it secret and dies alone, so as not to bother her husband.

Really, you could re-arrange the devices or change various actions. The headaches could interrupt her reading novels, rather than riding horses. The results might be better or worse. But they would be a more or less involving dramatic story--which is my point.

The point of such devices is: the small ones get something done; the big ones structure big chunks of a movie. "Fish out of water" isn't a device, because it gives no idea of structure or pattern. "Body switching" is too specific. "Switching roles or identities" comes closer, because if there is a clear set of actions which makes up each role, then the switching follows the same pattern, with some shifts.

Beginning screenwriters can use devices, because they are a middle ground between actions and three-act structure. You can try to write movies by just writing people doing things. It's helpful to use purely formal strategies--like alternating and combining actions. You can do fancy things, like omit bits of action or hide information from the spectator.

But three-act structure is big and complicated. Sure, there's an adventure in the middle, and things more or less get more and more complicated. Often multiple stories collide--but that's purely formal.

Devices are a middle space between "Jack goes to the store" and "Jack takes this amazing opportunity."

A writer could do worse than: taking some characters, lives, actions and problems--and seeing how far a few devices could get in structuring a workable storyline.

Judging by the two films mentioned, a love of people and a nose for dramatic interest take you a long way from device to feature.

--Edward R. O'Neill

What's a Good Ending?

2009-03-07T21:51:00.000-08:00

It's kind of mysterious.

I've blogged before about various ways an ending might be 'right' or 'just' or 'apt.' All these are probably part of a very individual sense of--'yes, that's a good ending, a good movie, a good story.'

Well today I saw the Met HD simulcast of Puccini's Madama Butterfly--that's just plain ol' Madame Butterfly to you.

Puccini was inspired by a stage version of the story which theatrical wunderkind David Belasco had put together.

The story has been tugging heartstrings for a very long time, across the page, the stage, the opera house and the screen--so there must be something to it.

And it has a very interesting relationship between beginning and ending.

In the opera, American Lieutenant Pinkerton buys a house--and a geisha for a wife. When the wife Butterfly shows up, she's very charming, and Pinkerton--who seems never to have seen her before--is thrilled (even sexually).

It's clear to us that Pinkerton does not consider this marriage 'real.' It's a bit of a lark to him, and he has an aria espousing the philosophy that Americans can trot around the globe and do whatever they like, enjoy whatever they like.

For Butterfly, however, the stakes are different. She has converted to Christianity for this man. When her family finds out, they disown her.

Pinkerton and Butterfly are en route to consummating their marriage when the act ends--though not before Butterfly asks whether Americans really collect butterflys by piercing them with pins.

So this is the beginning. Man wants house and woman, play wife. Woman buys in, sacrifices and suffers: she puts something on the line, first her soul, then her body.

Now what are we expecting? The husband could well abandon her. Then she might have other options.

That's what happens.

When Act II opens, Butterfly has been waiting three years for Pinkerton to return. She is running out of money, but she becomes upset when her servant suggests Pinkerton won't return. She has unshakeable faith, she says.

Butterfly has options. A wealthy man wants to marry her. People urge her to marry, because she has been abandoned, and in Japanese law, they say, that is the same as divorce: she is free to marry.

Butterfly brings out her blue-eyed child to prove that Pinkerton must love her: here is the proof.

An intermediary has a letter from Pinkerton, and it's clearly bad news.

Butterfly rejects other options--she steers herself towards tragedy, towards reliance on someone who is not reliable. She could make her life better. But she stays committed. She's waiting for her husband and raising her child. When she turns down options, she makes her fate her own. She makes her bed and will lie in it. That is the best that can be said for her: she is committed to an ideal of love and marriage, of devotion.

She explains that she could go back to being a geisha, to singing for men for money (ahem). Or she could kill herself (as we learned in the first act her father did), but she cannot abandon her child. But she seems to find these less noble than remaining true to her husband.

The act ends with Pinkerton's ship arriving in the harbor, and Butterfly and her child and servant waiting for him.

So now the husband could return. Will the couple be re-united? Will he come back for a divorce? What will happen to Butterfly, her husband and child?

In the third act, Pinkerton does return--but with a wife. Something utterly new has been added such that the resulting complexities and options are not clearly calculable. This is something that happens in interesting stories. At a certain point, even with straight lines and clear forces, we cannot calculate the results.

Pinkerton arrives, but he cannot face Butterfly and so leaves his 'real' American wife and an intermediary to negotiate with Buttefly.

They want the child. The child will be 'theirs.'

So there are three horrible twists. Man marries woman but doesn't plan on honoring their vows. So he leaves. That's foreseeable. The first awful twist is: the woman has a child.

Now the man returns. That is part of the string: man marries, man leaves, man returns.

But the man has a new wife. This is the second twist--more of a complication. The resolution to the two complications is the third twist: wife and man take child away.

In a weird way, the marriage will be 'undone.' It will be as if Butterfly never got married or had the child. The child just gets moved from the marriage the man does not consider legitimate to the one he does. Switcheroo.

Butterfly agrees--because she says she must obey her husband. She asks that Pinkerton himself return for the child in half an hour.

Butterfly sends them away and bids farewell to her child.

She has said it would be ignoble to return to being a geisha. She defines herself as a wife--now obeying her husband--and a mother--taking care of the child.

Now these roles are gone. Obeying her husband means ceasing to be a mother. Butterfly kills herself with ritual suicide.

Now this is not a 'good' ending in the sense of being happy.

It's a painful 'resolution,' but it does resolve problems the story sets out.

A man marries a woman and deserts her. She has a child.
When the man returns, he has a new wife--and that couple want to take the child.
The first wife assents, then kills herself.

In this sense, it's very schematic.

But the power on the audience--in part due to expert storytelling--is pretty intense.

--E. R. O'Neill

The Compositional View of the Arts.

2009-02-28T14:31:00.000-08:00

My sense of art forms is compositional: artists select and arrange some substance.

For poets it's words.
For painters, it's paint.
For composers, it's musical notes.
For choreographers, it's movement.
For dramatic writers: it's actions.

As a screenwriter, you are selecting and arranging actions.

Sometimes people think: I'm writing pages. I'm describing what's seen on a screen. I'm telling the camera where to move.

No.

Or: yes, but only later.

Saying a screenwriter writes documents in screenplay format is like saying a writer writes in ink lines on a page: it's true, but it misses the point.

First, and more essentially, as a screenwriter you are listing and describing actions.

Actions in a sequence.
Actions that unfold in a specific universe.
Actions that impact and ramify each other and their world.

And actions are not abstract. Actions are holistic: they are always parts of larger wholes. Such a feeling has been pithily expressed.

For the want of a nail, a shoe was lost.
For the want of a shoe, a horse was lost.
For the want of a horse, a battle was lost.
For the want of a battle, a war was lost.

Dating is part of courtship. Courtship may be part of marriage. Marriage may be part of family. Family may be part of growing up, living and dying--part of life.

The actions that a screenwriter selects and arranges are torn from life. And life still clings to them the way dirt clings to a vegetable that is torn from the earth.

A rich man walks into a very expensive shop. He is drunk.

What happens? What are we curious about or fearful about in watching such a scene unfold?

And where does the materials for writing this scene come from?

What do we know about how people behave when drunk?
About the difference between rich and poor?
About the way people who work in shops act?
About how they deal with customers, rich and not-so-rich, drunk and sober?
What do we know about tact? About diplomacy?

All of that comes into a simple scene of: a drunk rich man walks into an expensive shop.

Because a dramatic writer composes with actions, and actions are wholes, and actions are not pure and abstract, they come from an understanding of life.

And that is the deepest yet simplest thing I can think of to say about screenwriting.

--E. R. O'Neill

The New Non-Ending Ending

2009-02-25T15:02:00.001-08:00

How times change.

Time was, Hollywood movie endings wrapped up pretty much everything pretty neatly. We had an Ending.

The guy got the girl.
The bad guys were punished.
The good were rewarded and the guilty paid a price.
Noble characters erred, sacrificed, suffered and were rewarded.

But I think ambiguous or open-ended endings, even partially open-ended, started appearing in the 1950's--a kind of Weak Ending or Non-Ending.

Certainly Italian neorealism played a role, as those films were much admired for their simpler narrative style with weaker closer.

The Bicycle Thief is never found, but a father and son have grown closer and learned how hard life is.
Cabiria's problems are not solved, but we feel she will cope, come what may.
A little something has happened.
Something has been disclosed--exposed through action, reflection, suffering.
And life goes on.

Closure in literary and cinematic terms refers to the feeling of resolution, the effect that is created in the reader or audience that the work has ended, that something has changed, some problem has been resolved, something has, in a word, happened.

In the '60's and '70's as even mainstream American cinema grew more and more experimental (largely influenced by European cinema), films might seem to just stop. It was hard to tell if the movie was over or if the projectionist lost the last reel.

Nowadays, a weakening of the closure of the movie's ending is more and more visible--but not for avant-garde reasons.

Blame sequels.

It probably all started with John Carpenter's Halloween when Michael Myers got up and started killing again despite having a knitting needle--or was it a coat hanger?--in the eye.

Then Myers was thrown out a window and lay dead. Until his body vanished--readying us for a sequel.

Maybe John Carpenter didn't have a sequel in mind--just the sense that stories begin and end, but evil is eternal and never dies.

In any case, the Age of the Non-Ending Ending was upon us.

Movies are now likely to come in trilogies, or trio's of trilogies, for strictly commercial rather than artistic reasons.

So audiences are accustomed to Non-Ending Endings--since the first two films need to end but not to End.

But what's happened is: movies with full-stop closure--everything wrapped up, all problems solved--now seem false.

So writers with artistic tendencies have reasons to diminish the effect of closure to a minimum: enough so the audience knows the movie is over, but not so much as to be too movie-ish and old-fashioned.

You can see this in High Fidelity. The protagonist breaks up with his girlfriend, suffers a lot, has some adventures, finally gets together with her again, when suddenly--boom--he wonders if he should really have a happy ending!

It's the character wondering this--but it's really the writer, too.

So the protagonist spends another 10 or 15 minutes noodling around, dilating, until, yes, he can accept that, in a sense, the movie is over. He doesn't say "can this really be how the movie ends?" but that's what it amounts to.

Even earlier, in Four Weddings and a Funeral, the big question was: will the protagonist finally marry his beloved, when all around are either getting married or dying. He doesn't--if memory serves--but from the photographs that roll under the credits, we see a long, long relationship, so we feel: "no, they aren't 'married,' but for all intents and purposes, they're married."

It's little wonder these endings concern relationships, since what academics call "the formation of the heterosexual couple" has been a key mechanism (along with punishment and the resolution of narrative problems) for enforcing or creating closure since the silent era. (Think: boy gets girl.)

But The Reader--a four-hanky weepie posing as an art film--struck me as going to a new extreme. Credit super-smart playwright-craftsman David Hare, who adapted the sensationalistic much-discussed novel.

A young man experiences a lengthy sexual dalliance/initiation at the hands of a cranky, odd older woman. She disappears from his life, leaving him Irreparably Scarred. She turns up again later--accused of a Terrible Crime. (The capital letters belong to the movie, not to me.)

He anguishes over helping her, fails to do so. Then years later, he takes an opportunity to try to help her. This would seem to be the resolution. He's overcome being hurt and become capable of actively putting himself on the line to help another.

But it's not. He helps the woman--but he stops short. So there's a Partial Ending.

Now another crisis appears, and again the protagonist can help the woman or not. He delays--a classic movie tactic, because without delays movies would last about ten minutes. So there's a Delayed Ending. Ultimately (or not quite ultimately) he decides to help her.

So this is the ending. Now he's gotten over the hurt and her ignoble status. He can reach out to another human being.

But for various reasons, his actions are not enough, and he suffers some more! What we had was another Partial Ending.

The movie cannot stop raising false hopes of a resolution, dashing those hopes, then inflicting yet more suffering. It's just that kind of a movie.

The protagonist tries to achieve forgiveness from one person, but that doesn't work. So an Abortive Ending.

Then finally, the protagonist takes a trip to a Special Place with a Loved One, and he recounts the whole story--and it's recounting the whole story which, very self-consciously for the film, becomes the resolution: the Ultimate Ending. The film's telling of the story is itself the resolution to the problem recounted in the film.

This ending's tricky and nice, but if I'm right, self-consciousness like this means: the filmmakers are very self-aware about trying to solve a problem and to offer that solution to others. "Here," they are in effect saying, "this is how you should end a movie."

The Reader ending with someone telling the story of The Reader is exactly like Four Weddings and a Funeral or High Fidelity dilating over the question of whether a couple should Finally Come Together: it's these movies' way of saying 'this is how endings need to work.'

In a sense, this is still too pat: the problem has been solved, just with lots of delays.

But False Endings, Would-Be Endings, Near-Endings, and More Problems are all parts of the New Non-Ending Ending.

Which seems to be with us to stay--for a while.

--Edward R. O'Neill

The Choice Among Fathers

2009-02-22T14:39:00.000-08:00

Drama often involves decision, choice.

It's the terminal point of conflict--and the origin of consequences.

Two people are fighting over something--until one decides to give up.

Or someone decides to do something--and then all the consequences ensue.

One of the choices we sometimes see in feature films is: a choice among fathers.

This is not biological fathers, as there's seldom a choice involved there.

It's more symbolic fathers or father-figures.

But you could almost see the relation between the two as causal, not coincidental.

That is: no one has a choice over his biological father. It is who it is.

But we have a choice over whom we decide to pay attention to, to heed, to take moral guidance from, to model ourselves upon.

The latter is a choice, a moral choice: we can be held responsible for it.

And terms like "choice" and "moral" and "responsible" are key in drama, because drama is spoken in actions, and ethics and morality deal with the values that attach to actions--what is good or bad in the way of action.

So we experience drama through ethics, because actions that we watch are experienced as having values attached to them--goodness, badness, well-timed, ill-timed, happy, unhappy, etc.

We don't have a choice who our biological father is: and to make up for this lack of choice, the choice amongst symbolic fathers becomes all the more important.

I'll mention Star Wars because it's a movie everyone knows, and it's constantly used as a benchmark for discussing screenwriting.

You don't have to be terribly sharp to see the series, especially the first three that were produced, as being about the choice of fathers.

Even the first film involves Luke deciding--though it's a forced decision--that the farmer who bosses him around is not to be preferred over the wise old Jedi knight in the long robe.

In the second of the two films made, there's a more important decision between father-figures--or between a father-figure and a father--but I won't belabor that, as it's probably obvious.

But recently I saw The Prince of Foxes, which is a finely made historical film about the Borgias.

It's directed by Henry King, who was saluted in the silent film era as the successor to Griffith, but he ended up making fine, often historical or literary films for 20th Century Fox, and no one really called him terrific or important after a certain point. But his films are quietly remarkable, and The Prince of Foxes, based on fine source material, is like that.

In The Prince of Foxes, a crafty young man is sent by greedy, murderous Cesare Borgia on a mission to seduce a beautiful young woman who's married to an old man. It seems like easy pickin's, as the crafty young man is played by Tyrone Power, and even a middle-aged Tyrone Power could probably seduce just about anybody.

But it turns out the old man is not crafty but wise. And his wife loves him with a daughter's devotion. The crafty young man becomes entirely converted to admiring the old man--at the very same time he falls in love with the wife.

On paper, the old man is the husband and the young woman the wife. But they're more like father and daughter.

And so the story cleverly switches.

Instead of a comedy about a doddering old husband being cuckolded by his young wife, it becomes more like a man falling in love with a young woman and wanting permission from the father--really falling in love with the woman and simultaneously coming to admire the daughter.

When the old man dies, in a sense, it's a wish come true: the young man gets the wife! But he's come to admire the old man greatly, and the old man, on his death bed, being no dummy, gives the wife's hand to the young man! It sounds creepy, but it's less not so terrible while watching the movie.

The point is: the young man is given a choice between two fathers.

He can continue working for the murderous, scheming, evil, power-hungry Cesare Borgia. Or he can take arms against that powerful opponent, in essence betray him, and work for the wise and kind old man whom he had at first set out to betray.

It's a fine, richly emotional plot--all hinging on the choice between two fathers.

Once the choice is made, there are of course consequences, because "choice" and "consequence" go hand in hand.

Although morally superior, the battle against Cesare Borgia is not easy, and it is lost.

The crafty young man is punished for his betrayal. But the young woman still loves him, and various friends and rivals still admire him and so help him to escape and to rise up and strike against the Borgia clan.

The assumption is that admirable behavior is admirable, and even scamps can admire goodness, so when push comes to shove, people may turn out to be on your side, even if you started out by being not-so-nice yourself.

We can find this unrealistic, but it's enough to move the film along.

The young man has to take his lumps, because (a) it's a Hollywood movie, and he started as a bad guy, so he has to suffer a bit to be redeemed and (b) now he's part of a young couple, and there's a ritual aspect (seen in Mozart's The Magic Flute) in which a young couple must go through a trial and be tested to be shown worthy.

The test-and-trial-to-be-shown-worthy goes back to the folk tale, and it shows how our moral intuitions--the "worthy" part--is tied up with story structure--trials and being tested.

Drama involves conflict and choice--and the choice amongst father-figures is a pretty potent one. However it's dressed up.

--E. R. O'Neill

Public Dramaturgy.

2009-02-17T07:08:00.000-08:00

Public life has its own dramaturgy: its actions call for sentiments, investments, moral responses.

Roland Burris took his Illinois Senate Seat as a wronged man.

A governor no one trusted appointed Burris. Burris seemed hopelessly tainted. A wiser man would have refused the job. (One already had.) But Burris, perhaps partly driven by vanity, took the job.

Then he would not be turned away. Senators wanted nothing to do with him: that was their mistake.

The spectacle of a black man turned away from a job to which he was legally appointed: that was too much.

The mighty, oh-so-moral Senate of the United States--the Democrats therein, really--yielded. Roland Burris became the 'junior' U. S. Senator from Illinois.

Now it appears Burris was not entirely forthcoming in some statements he made. He has recently recalled some more conversations he had about fundraising for the disgraced governor--conversations which, by an interesting coincidence, happen to have been recorded. Wonderful how recording refreshes the memory--even when not replayed.

Now Roland Burris is not a wronged man: he is a forgetful man, and our feelings towards him shift based on the actions he performed.

This is the dramaturgy of public life--or a tiny instance of it.

Roland Burris may have acted lawfully. He may be a completely innocent man.

But actions have appearances, and people respond to them--rightly or wrongly--based on moral notions.

Being turned away from your rightful place makes you an object of sympathy.

Withholding information which might discredit you makes you an object of suspicion.

And so it goes--and not just in Illinois.

--E. R. O'Neill

Happy Endings--and Moral Intuitions.

2009-02-12T10:45:00.001-08:00

What's a "satisfying" movie ending?

Of course, it depends on whom you talk to.

The happy ending is the most famous kind--but I think it's intriguing that almost every movie ending has some element of loss. Even Luke, who kind of saves the universe, loses his beloved mentor!

Sometimes Hollywood folk talk about "up" endings, "down" endings and "mixed" endings. (I think "up" and "down" are abbreviations for "upbeat" and "downbeat.")

One person's "perfect" ending is another's "wrong" ending.

But everyone can point to certain movies and say "for me, that is the perfect ending."

This ending can be described in various ways: "satisfying" is one.

The word "satisfying" is interesting. "Satisfying" what?

If we borrowed some Freudian terms, we could say that an ending satisfied the id, the superego, or the ego.

The id is the source of wishes, so the wishful happy ending satisfies the id: dreams come true, the protagonist gets what she wants.

The superego is our internal guardian of morality and rules, our sense of what's right and ideal. So when the guilty are punished and the bad rewarded, then the superego is satisfied.

If, by some neat trick, that also fulfills the protagonist's wishes, well that's some clever handiwork.

The ego is the compromiser: the ego negotiates the conflicting demands of the id and the superego. So the "mixed" ending which acknowledges reality and yet satisfies some of our wishes, that would be an ending satisfying to the ego.

This is a little different than up, down and mixed endings--because the moral dimension comes in.

The interaction between our moral intuitions and our cinematic pleasures is fascinating and under-discussed.

I blogged earlier about Norman Friedman's narrative theories. Friedman has the most complex moral vocabulary for thinking about how stories progress and end.

Friedman acknowledges that the audience has sheerly narrative expectations and also moral wishes.

On a sheerly narrative level, if a character buys a gun and practices shooting, we can expect he might fire at something besides a target.

If someone buys chocolates and flowers, we can expect he's going on a date.

But this is irrespective of whether these actions are good or bad, and whether we'd like them or not.

Expectations about events we'd like to see, Friedman calls "hopes," and expectations about events we don't want to see, he calls "fears."

And all these can be separate and complexly combined--like colors.

Thus we might watch a charming person prepare to do horrible things to someone stupid and doltish, and even if these things are wrong, we might not mind too much, and we might even enjoy it.

Thus the audience's pleasure in the progress of a story, including the ending, has layers of complexity in the moral judgments the audience makes and the kinds of pleasure they might like.

And my take on what Friedman is talking about would be: it's not about doing it the right way or getting the audience to feel x or y, it's often about asking the audience to explore their feelings.

The sophisticated writer says, in effect:

"So you like this person. Well how do you feel about him when he does this? Well how about now? Now do you like him? Okay, then he's punished--does that make you happy?"

Friedman's take on tragedy fits here.

A complex and admirable person makes a mistake that an ordinary person would not; he is then punished out of all proportion for that mistake, at great length, but rightly, so that we feel a mix of admiration, sympathy and despair.

Hamlet is smart and funny, but he's hung about his father's death in a way that goes out of all proportion. Then he all kinds of other terrible things happen on top of that--his father's death was murder, he has to set that right, his friends plot against him, his girlfriend goes nuts and kills herself--until he finally rights the wrongs but also dies trying.

Talk about complex moral intuitions!

Billy Wilder's films are among my favorites, and Wilder has a particular complex of moral intuitions and pleasures he favors.

Often a charming and admirable heel does stuff he shouldn't, and we both hope he'll get away with it and also enjoy seeing him punished. He then might well in the end get far more punishment than he deserves (Sunset Blvd.), or he might, through luck and pluck, finally get something good from life (The Apartment).

Thus, in Sunset Blvd., Joe Gillis is not a nice guy, but he's funny and charming. He suffers from lack of work, then he takes advantage of a batty old lady (not so nice), takes the old lady's money, becomes her boytoy, then steals his friend's girl. When he finally does something good and decides to leave the whole mess, the old broad kills him! He's punished just when he does something upright. (Ain't it always the way!)

To wrap up, stories can progress by playing upon the audience's wishes, hopes and fears for the audience, but also our moral intuitions about what's good and bad, upright and detestable, solid and lousy.

Good writers play these feelings like a violin--and they make "happy," "unhappy," "upbeat" and "downbeat" pretty much beside the point.

--E. R. O'Neill

The Do-Over--or Illogical Happy "Hollywood" Endings.

2009-02-10T14:54:00.000-08:00

"Do I get a do-over?"

Apparently, the term kinda comes from golf, where it's a synonym for a "mulligan."

Most of us understand life as not having any do-over's. (It's significant that in golf such do-over's are not part of the official rules.)

You can't go back. Some opportunities only come around once. Time only flows in one direction. There are all kinds of ways of expressing this thought.

Yet it's surprising how many movies have do-over's.

Vertigo is a kind of a negative do-over, or a do-over with a bad outcome.
In Million Dollar Baby, the trainer gets to accept his loss of his daughter by accepting the loss of his surrogate daughter.
After not doing anything about Darth Vader and seeing Darth kill his mentor, Luke gets a chance to destroy Vader and all his henchmen.
Groundhog Day is all about do-over's: the guy's whole life becomes nothing but a do-over.

I'm sure examples could be multiplied.

I have observed elswhere that the third act of a Hollywood movie is usually, strictly speaking and in the logic of whatever film it is, impossible.

Wall-E gets his memory erased--yet magically he still remembers Eve.
The Blade Runner could easily be killed by the powerful robot, but the robot relents, because he has become human in the end.
Rick gets a chance to get Ilsa back and yet accepts willingly that life is a place in which he and Ilsa cannot be together.
A Saint Louis family that must move to New York City in the era of the Saint Louis World's Fair discovers that this decision was not so irrevocable as all that.
In Hidden Fortress, one general suddenly has a change of heart and releases his prisoners.

Most people would interpret these as lapses, failures in logic, a weakness in writing.

I don't believe this is the case.

Instead, I believe this sudden shift is a useful, almost necessary, and altogether pleasing part of the feature film structure.

First, you don't want the audience to know everything about the ending. You want some element of surprise--and audiences want this too.

Hence a problem for screenwriters is: be logical and make sense, but surprise them at the same time. The movie's ending must be inevitable and yet surprising. Talk about an impossible task.

But this is in a sense the audience's demand. The audience makes conflicting demands on the filmmakers. But--hey!--almost all of life involves conflicting demands. Life isn't "logical" in the sense of being devoid of contradiction and conflict. Life is full of conflict, and the more dramatic and messier it is, the more interesting.

So the screenwriter must fulfill contradictory demands.

I've written elsewhere about how the audience usually must be lead to the wrong expectation, so that the ending can be a surprise.

So a changeof heart or character or reality near a film's end is very useful.

Second, we all feel conflicted about reality. We have a sense 'this is what reality is.' But we're not entirely happy about it. We know that dreams don't often come true--if ever. But at some place inside ourselves, we still want it to be so. We don't want reality to win. We want wishes to win.

This is the origin of the audience's contradictory demands upon the filmmaker: be logical and realistic, yet make me happy at the same time.

Movies can either let reality win and disappoint us.

Or movies can let wishes win--and we will know they are false and fail to be affected powerfully by them.

If, however, a movie first lets reality win and then lets wishes win, the movie has things both ways. The taste is bittersweet.

The inverse would be: let fantasy win, then destroy fantasy--too heartbreaking to contemplate, too real. That's not a movie: it's a bill coming due.

With the double ending, we are very pleased, because our sense of reality is satisfied, and our wishes are gratified, too. Contradictory demands have been met.

That's why this kind of aspect of the third act of a feature film is almost necessary--just not entirely so.

--E. R. O'Neill

Life Life vs. Movie Life.

2009-02-07T16:19:00.000-08:00

Recently I was half-watching The Devil Wears Prada on TV. It is an enjoyable, well-enough-made film, certainly well-acted. And I found it shed interesting light on some aspects of drama.

My acting teacher at Yale used to say: Blanche Dubois can't settle for less. People say to her: Blanche, why don't you stop sleeping with young men, dreaming of your past, living in illusions? But she can't. Blanche is not "well-adjusted."

If Blanche were well-adjusted there would be no play, no drama! And he wanted to say to us: don't be entirely rational as an actor. Have your whims. Accept your strong likes and dislikes, your quirky desires. Want things you can't have. Life is more dramatic that way.

Indeed, drama requires characters who are stubbornly wrong-headed. It's a fine line between us enjoying watching them and detesting them. And a lot of art probably comes in to disguise how wrong-headed they are.

We get a glimpse of this in The Devil Wears Prada.

A young woman wants a career as a serious journalist. The only thing she can get is being assistant to a haridan fashion editor. Her father needles her: she gave up Stanford Law School for this?

So this is the beginning of the first act--it happens quickly. The young woman is desperate, seeks a change, so she accepts a solution she really should not accept. If she did not do this, there would really be no movie!

Since I was only half-watching, I was not committed to her choice. Perhaps her need was not made dramatically effective enough. Perhaps it was me.

At this point, I thought to myself: Doesn't this girl know she could move to Providence or Sheboygen and work on a newspaper for a year or two in order to get enough experience?

But no--she wants to move to the Big City, start at the top, not work her way there. She's greedy. She wants a shortcut. And she takes something that's glamorous rather than utilitarian.

Everything that follows is very much her own fault. She wants the easy way. And she just plain takes the wrong path.

But that choice sets up the second act, with all its promising adventures that turn into problems more grave than not having a job as a serious journalist.

There's something about life here--an intuition, a sense of what life is like and how life is different from drama. If this young woman did not want to have it both ways, she would have no adventure, and we wouldn't want to pay attention. This is a pint-sized version of the tragic hero being punished for hubris: the outcome isn't tragic, but there is a kind of moral punishment. And we do have a sense that life demands choices, and that those who want to much ultimately pay, that Icarus flies too close to the sun and so must fall.

The young woman accepts the series of adventures. At first she fails. Then, in an interesting turn, someone essentially tells her that she's failed because she looks down on them. This has the virtue of being true, and it turns the young woman around.

In any case, the young woman transforms herself into a chic and somewhat cruel, competitive creature--exactly the embodiment of everything about the fashion world she doesn't like! But we may well ignore this--if indeed we do--because the clothes are enjoyable to watch.

The young woman loses her moral compass and her friends.

When she then sees just how cruel the fashion world is--which was there all along--she finds it is too late: she has become contaminated. She is now just like the people she loathes--whom she loathed from the beginning, quite correctly, and whom she foolishly imitated in her wrong-headed quest to for the specter of success.

But it turns out not to be too late! I notice that Hollywood movies often have this feature. All doors close, and there is no way out. Life, the films seem to insist, is crue and implacable. There Is No Going Back. Some Decisions Can't Be Unmade.

And then the movie proves itself to be a movie and not life: it gives us the magical world in which Life Is Life--cruel, implacable, at once obscure and transparently obvious--and then this gives way to Movie Life, in which we get just one more wish.

The young woman gives up her job. That is: she re-ranks her values. She decides that what seemed important was not. She basically realizes what we might well have seen from the outset: honey, you cannot get there from here. If you want to be a serious writer, don't become the personal assistant to a dragon-lady fashion editor. Seriously.

One can complain the movie is about a fool. But foolish people exist, and we are all a little bit foolish at one point or another.

Probably the film could have made the fashion world more desirable from the get-go. Or put in some other motive for taking the job which immediately vanishes--like working with a literary critic who then up and dies.

In the end, in looking for another finds her time in the fashion world was not wasted. Which is again Movie Life. Or maybe it's Life Life. I'm not sure.

--E. R. O'Neill

Generic Movie Plot.

2009-02-07T13:23:00.000-08:00

What Is a Bad Movie?

It sounds awful. Why would anyone want to write a generic movie?

But people have a sense of what a movie is.

Just like we know what a poem is or what a car is.

We know what a generic movie is--a movie-in-general.

I hesitate to use the word "essence": too much philosophical baggage.

And it's largely unconscious. We're not aware of all of its features--the movie-ishness of the movie.

We're most aware of it when we see a bad movie--because one of the things bad movies are is insufficiently movie-ish.

Bad movies aren't movies that are bad: they're things that are not enough like a movie--they're not-quite-movies. (There is a philosophical point here, but let that pass for the time being.)

So when I see a bad movie, I might say: there was no hope, there was no surprise. Or: I had no idea what was coming next.

We become aware of norms when they are violated.

So by reflection we can come to learn things about the movie form--or our expectations about it, anyway.

Your Generic Movie--and Mine.

So in my Generic Movie, there is some hope. Things might go better for the characters--which implies things could go worse.

There is surprise--meaning we are lead to expect one thing and another happens 'out of the blue' (yet in retrospect logically).

We have expectations about what comes next, which can then be fulfilled or frustrated (as Kenneth Burke observed way back in the 1930's about all kinds of aesthetic forms).

Now one of my key points about learning to write movies is: you need to develop this sense of what a movie is (a feature-length movie story).

How Do I Learn What a Movie Is?

One way could be: see bad movies. But that wouldn't be too much fun.

Another is to examine closely a movie you admire to find how it's put together.

One technique here is the hypothetical universe movie: what if the movie were different? What if the ending were different? What if this happened and not that?

By asking and answering such questions, sure, you can say 'it's better the way they made it.' But you can also get a sense of why this choice was better (usually) than the one's rejected.

For a long time, I've been taking apart Sunset Boulevard. It's not your typical movie. But it's quite good (I think). It's quite odd--dark, bitter, as Wilder often is. Yet humane in its own strange way.

And I've learned so much from reading the script, reducing it to an outline, to many outlines. I've learned too much for one blog post.

Generic Movie--Structure and Story.

But recently, I had two sudden perceptions about the Generic Movie Plot.

Really it's two perceptions: one about Generic Movie Structure, and the other about the Generic Movie Story.

One is:

A few interesting things unfold over time: meaning they are not yet decided; the audience awaits the outcomes.

Maybe someone tries to do something.

But that one person's actions, adventures and choices depend upon and impact other chains of events.

Because of this, each separate set of actions becomes more interesting.

The audience waits to see how one thing will affect another.

Enough things are going on that the implications are unpredictable--unpredictable enough to be interesting rather than confusing.

That's it.

If any of these things are lacking--actions with undecided outcomes unfolding over time and affecting and being affected by other actions--then we're not interested. Whatever else is the case, we will not feel this is "a movie."

Notice that this is purely about the structure--how events unfold and are related to each other. It's the syntax or the grammar, not the content or semantics.

Six Verbs in Three Acts.

The other Generic Movie Story is semantic: it concerns what happens, not how it unfolds.

This is:

Someone hopes, risks, loses, changes, revalues, accepts life's consequences.

Namely:

Act I is: someone wants something she doesn't have.

Act II begins when she risks something--in the hopes of gaining.

Very quickly, she usually loses.

At this point she's usually caught and needs to keep shoveling her way out.

Act II ends when the protagonist reassesses everything she'd thought before, re-prioritizes her values.

When she is able to do this, she can cut the Gordian knot that holds her in place.
"I thought I wanted that, but I don't."

Then the consequences of this decision unfold, and the protagonist accepts the consequences.

These can be okay, great or tragic, depending.

(Here we're back to syntax: "consequences" are part of the syntax of actions, the way actions connect with other actions, events and experiences, aside from what those actions are.)

Don't Take My Word for It.

Usually, screenwriting books and blogs try to tell you "this is what a movie is."

And they're quite often wrong. How do I know? Because when I look with my own yes, I can see: that's not the way movies are put together.

So these are some ways I verbalize that understanding.

In the end, yes, the theories and generalities don't matter. What matters is getting a sense in your bones of "this is how movies are," and being able to work with that.

And, like so many things, it's probably something no one can tell you. You have to find it out for yourself.

--E. R. O'Neill

Clever Idea.

2009-01-19T21:23:00.000-08:00

One fellow (who gives advice about screenwriting--and also write K-9) says: take two weeks and read one script every day for two weeks.

A nice idea.

And he has a list of scripts with links (and two different versions, no less).

--E. R. O'Neill

Rhetoric and the Screenplay: The Wrong Question.

2009-01-17T16:01:00.000-08:00

Rhetoric Means Controlling the Question You're Answering.

There's a well-known thing in rhetoric.

You answer the question you want the other guy to answer--

because it's to your advantage to do so.

That is: you don't let the other team pick the question. You pick the question.

You talk about "how I'm going to lower taxes." Then the other guy has to say how he's going to lower taxes--even if he thinks that's a terrible idea.

(Sometimes people even remark in debates when one person just answers a different question. 'What you're really asking is....?' This is why. It's not a question they want to answer.)

So the team that controls the question controls the playing field, because it's the question you want to answer.

Make the Audience Dwell on the Wrong Question.

There's something similar in feature film screenplays.

The writer wants to control the questions in the audience's mind, the questions about how the story will unfold.

More exactly: you're never exactly posing the question that the plot will answer. You must always force the audience to answer the wrong question. If they know the right question, they would essentially know how the plot resolves, and so suspense is greatly diminished.

Star Wars doesn't start with "Will some team of misfits blow up the Death Star?"

No. It starts with "Who will rescue the Princess?" and "Will Luke escape his family and grow up?"

Then, with Luke's family conveniently killed, the question becomes "Can Luke and Obi Wan rescue the Princess?"

And then it becomes: "--with the help of Han and the wookie?"

And they all do rescue the Princess.

Which means the rest of the movie concerns another question: "Can the Star Fleet fighters blow up the Death Star or not?

And this question takes precedence over other questions, like "Is there a romance? Will someone end up with the Princess?" (I rememeber being totally puzzled about that when I first saw the movie.)

Every screenwriting manual is wrong about this, because every screenwriting manual is written as if the protagonist is given a problem which he solves at the movie's end.

Not so.

The protagonist starts with one problem, then gets another, then another.

The initial problem is almost never the one solved at the end--just as the question on the audience's mind almost never directly bears on the actual resolution of the story.

Sunset Boulevard and its Questions.

Or consider Sunset Boulevard (which I've been looking at quite a lot lately). It poses a series of questions.

First the audience wonders: Can Joe Gillis manage to keep his car? Can he make it as a writer? Can he even borrow $200? Or will he instead be forced to crawl back to Dayton, OH where he bragged how he'd go to Hollywood and become a big shot?

Then--turning into Act II--Joe meets Norma Desmond, and she's rich, and she'll hire him to rewrite her thousand-page screenplay.

So now he's set, right? The initial question is answered. Except it's not. It sort of is.

But really it's replaced by another question, something like: "What will become of the bargain between Joe and Norma? Will they finish the screenplay? Will it succeed in getting Norma's career back?"

We think probably no.

At the midpoint, then another question emerges. Norma confesses her undying love for Joe, and she manipulates him into being her lover.

Now it's still "what will happen with Joe and Norma's screenplay?" but it's also "what will happen to this odd couple?"--really a variation on our earlier question.

The screenplay isn't sold, but Norma thinks it is. And Joe starts writing and falling in love with someone (appropriately) named Betty.

Now we're down to a romantic triangle. It's our same question of "what will happen to the Joe-and-Norma couple?" but it's more focused: "Will Joe choose Norma or Betty?"

And also: "Will Norma ever realize that she's deluded?"

What of course happens--spoiler alert for everyone who's never seen Sunset Boulevard--is that Joe chooses neither. He packs his bags and gets ready to go back to Dayton, Ohio--which he was so frightened of doing at the outset.

This shows us Joe's changed. He's less of a weasel. Not so little of a weasel that he should get a nice girl like Betty. But less of a weasel.

Therefore, the question the audience is wondering about--and often it's posed explicitly by the characters to each other--is almost never the one the subsequent movie answers.

We don't at all start wondering, "Will Joe be killed by a jealous lover? Will an old lady become deluded out of her mind?"

Because if the audience knows the question, and it's a reasonably focused question, it only has so many answers, and there is little or no room for surprise--or really much pleasure.

This is a delicate balance, beause if the question is completey off-base, it seems like two or more separate movies. But it's a risk that must be taken.

Suspense and Resolution in The Office

There was a nice recent episode of a clever sitcom called The Office that worked like this, too.

Andy was engaged to Angela, but Angela was sleeping with Dwight.

For weeks and weeks the suspense and humor revolved around: "Will Andy ever find out?"

Then Andy was told, and--like those cartoon characters who run off the cliff but don't know and so don't fall--Andy didn't realize he'd been told. (It's a comedy: real-life cluelessness can be exaggerated for 'comic effect.')

Finally, someone tells Andy, and Andy and Dwight must face off. The show constructed the question as "Who will win? Who will end up with Angela?"

The resolution was a nice exposure and development of the characters. (Spoiler alert--don't read on if you haven't seen the episode.) We've been seeing Angela sleep with Dwight but not Andy. It turns out she was sleeping with both.

Both men thus lose respect for Angela--'okay she was lying to him but not to me!--and neither stays with her.

(There was a blues song by Little Milton some time back whose key line was "Hey Mister, your wife is cheating on us!")

Thus the resolution of the plot is never simply "what will happen?" The resolution of a plot always involves a rhetorical relationship to the audience in which the audience is forced to consider the wrong question and thereby given pleasure in a surprising resolution--which is really a reframing of the problem.

And there's something of life in this framing of the wrong question.

Because when we have a problem, and we can't see the solution, it's so often because the way we frame it prevents us from seeing another solution--which means seeing it as a different problem.

Why All This Sleight-of-Hand?

In a sense, there's no other satisfying way to do it.

You must give the audience the wrong questions to ponder. You must give them first one question, then another, and change the issue every ten or twenty minutes.

Why, you ask? Why does one question give way to another like this in the feature film?

Very simply, because any more than twenty minutes is just too long for us to be curious about anything much.

I'm serious. It doesn't matter how fascinating the people are. We will get bored if the same issue is unresolved for too long.

Consider sporting events.

Yes a baseball or football game has one question: "Will team A win? Or will it be team B?"

But it's always smaller than that: "Who will pull ahead? Can that team come from behind? Can this team expand its lead?"

Etc.

And if we wonder about these for too long--it's either a nail-biter or a yawn.

It's probably a nail-biter if one team has a very narrow lead and must hold it for a long, long time--because they could lose at any moment. The question is very intense. It's always very sharply in our minds.

And I would argue that this is one reason why Revolutionary Road is so awful.

The question after the first five minutes is "Can these people ever be happy?" or "Will this couple ever stop being so miserable?"

And then the movie really kicks off when they get the idea--'Yes, we could be happy, if only we lived in Paris!' (No one's unhappy in Paris. Are the characters idiots? Or is it the movie that's idiotic? Hard to say.)

Then it soon becomes clear: these folks aren't going anywhere.

So then it's more like "How will they get out of going to Paris? And what other kind of awful misery will then ensue?"

So it's really back to the original question--very quickly.

Which is why it seems like such a very long and very unhappy movie. The couple is married--what?--six or eight years. The movie feels twice that long--because we are not given different questions to wonder about.

But reasonable people will disagree about which movie gives pleasure or fails to. But the point of dramatic writers framing plot questions so as to mislead the audience--well I think this speaks for itself.

--E. R. O'Neill

My Problem Is Your Solution...

2009-01-13T19:31:00.000-08:00

"Wouldn't it be nice if your problems were my solutions--and vice-versa?"

Is this really a line from a movie? Or am I imagining it? Strangers on a Train perhaps?

I feel like there's some movie where someone says almost exactly this.

For my online course, the other day I was outlining some structures in Sunset Boulevard.

I realized that a very common structure is:

one character has problems,
and another character has problems,
and together they find a single 'solution' for both problems.

Joe needs a job and money. Norma needs a screenplay. Voila! Hijinks ensue.

In Sunset Boulevard, Joe muses: "here was a cozy set-up." It's a nice line to describe the appeal of the purported 'solution.'

In fact, it's usually a terrible idea.

But if it were a good idea, we wouldn't be interested in watching what happens next--since we often watch a movie not much differently than a rubbernecker at an accident.

How many movies have this structure?!

Leia needs to be rescued by a Jedi knight. Luke needs to get off the farm and become a Jedi knight. Voila! Adventure ensues.
Tennis player has loathsome wife. Psychotic loafer has loathsome father. Psycho suggests they each kill the other's problem--but the tennis player doesn't really agree. (Only unconsciously.)
You beat your son, hate your wife and drink, and we have an isolated hotel that needs a caretaker who won't murder his family and himself.

The charm and richness comes in each problem in itself being banal, but the 'solution' of the two problems together is likely to be more unique and memorable.

--E. R. O'Neill

What's it all about, Alfie?

2009-01-06T10:36:00.001-08:00

What is life ALL ABOUT?

A big question.

And everyone has their own answer.

Often we can't say exactly what it is--but we know it when we see it.

Movies that affect us deeply often jibe with our sense of--gee, life is really like that.

Sometimes it's a sense of how life is that we'd rather weren't so.

I remember reading about the writers of the sitcom Roseanne trying to come up with one particular punchline.

Roseanne had to be skeptical that something good could really happen.

The line the writers eventually came up with was--"Yeah, and there's chocolate air."

Maybe not the funniest line on earth, but it captured the sense of--yeah, chocolate is the best thing in life, and wouldn't it be great if it were plentiful and calorie-free?

But that's a punchline. And most punchlines don't go that deep.

Sometimes, when I think about how life turns out, I think about that old hymn "Simple Gifts." Some of the lyrics are:

'Tis the gift to be simple, 'tis the gift to be free,

'Tis the gift to come down where you ought to be....

And when we find ourselves in the place just right...
To turn, turn will be our delight,

Till by turning, turning we come round right.

That is:

things happen,

and things happen,

and then things turn out a certain way,

and maybe it's not what you wanted,

and not what you expected,

and not what you tried to achieve--

but there it is.

And in a certain way, it's right.

Often we glimpse this sense of life by looking at the movie's ending.

What is Million Dollar Baby about?

"It's hard to let go"?

"Fight--and don't stop"?

"If you gotta go, go out slugging"?

Or maybe it's:

The hardest fight is the one you don't want to fight.
But even then, you want someone who cares about you in your corner.

--Edward R. O'Neill

What Is a Feature Film?

2009-01-03T00:35:00.001-08:00

It's not an easy question to answer.

Ninety minutes--sure. But why does it last that long?

We look at the finished story, and imagine it was, so to speak, born that way.

We imagine it didn't start out as a vague notion, that it was born fully formed--like that goddess born from the forehead of Jove.

It sounds like film criticism, but I believe that writers know what their stories are about. And they're very clear about that--they need to be to write them. (I read recently that the author of Lord of the Flies said much the same.)

In a sense you need to start from--here's a movie you find interesting, why is it interesting?

There must be reasons.

The head fake, that's one explanation for the middle of a feature film, the largest chunk, the "second act" (of three). Life is one way, then something outrageous happens that takes life in a different direction. But ultimately it merely sets the stage for a confrontation with the original reality.

Crisis exposing character--that's another way of thinking of it. Someone finds exactly the kind of thing that's terrible for them.

Instead, most writers are writing short films--beginning, middle, end.

But feature films are longer than that, so they have more complications.

A feature film is more like this.

Someone has a problem. They find a solution--which turns out to be a worse problem. Their problems get worse and worse, multiply. For everything that goes well, another problem sprouts up. Finally, they find a way of making it all go away--though at a a cost. And they return to the starting point to face the initial problem again.

That's feature format.

A writer needs a job. He finds one. But the lady is crazy and angry. She moves him in. He becomes her butt boy. The film he writes for her will never be made. He falls in love with someone else, and this makes the angry crazy lady real jealous. The girl he loves is engaged to his best friend. Finally, the only thing to do is be honest with the girl he loves, and pack up and leave town. Which he begins to do. But the crazy old lady shoots and kills him. And SHE gets what she wants--cameras turning towards her.

THAT is three-act structure! It could not be plainer.

Yet it seldom comes easily.

--E. R. O'Neill

The Action-Series--and Beyond.

2008-09-21T18:26:00.000-07:00

Single Actions in a Screenplay Are Meaningless.

I am increasingly convinced that the basic grammar of screenwriting hangs on what I call the action-series.

Namely: actions are the basis of screenwriting, and they always take place in and through a series.

There are almost no punctual actions in movies--no actions that take place once and only once.

Consider: a many picks up grains of sand.

What's happening? What is the action?

He could be obsessive-compulsive. Or they could be diamond dust that he has spilled and needs to gather up.

A man fills his car's tank with gas.

What's happening? It depends on whether he's on he's way to a date, a wedding, a funeral, or a bank hold-up.

The punctual actions--the picking-up-the-grains, the filling-up-the-tank. These are not actions in the sense that they are not meaningful actions. They are only meaningful when they become parts of a series.

Actions are spelled out in screenplays through series: an action-series.

The Basic Grammar of Screenwriting.

This implies that the basic skill of screenwriting is the ability to spell out meanings through series of actions. It's something like the equivalent of spelling out words in verbal language.

A screenwriter should be able to spell out any meanings she wishes through a series of actions:

preparing for a surprise party;
going on a date;
falling in love;
robbing a bank;
moving to a new town;
falling out of love;
discovering your spouse is unfaithful;
stalking someone;
buying a gift for a loved one;
buying a gift for a coworker;
trying to raise some money;
etc.

This would be the most basic kind of thing a developing scriptwriter should practice. It's like a short film: you take one such idea (a description of an action, really), and you develop the series that spells it out.

You try it a few different ways, and you work other changes upon it--the way a jazz musician practices playing melodies and scales in different keys.

Developing, Layering, Building a Story.

The writer then works upon these action-series. There are three main kinds of operations that can be performed upon the action-series.

Particularize. You make them particular to: the characters, the settings, the symbolic meanings you wish to spell out.

One of my stock examples is from Million Dollar Baby, because I've been teaching it in my online screenwriting class.

A common action in movies about athletes is: training. At some point in a movie about an athlete, he has to train.

Training is something that's clearly a series of actions--like the tests the hero in a fairy tale goes through. You lift the same heavy weight a number of times, and over time, it's not so heavy.

We can see the change in the character through the change in the action.

We all remember the training sequences in Rocky, which are about being poor--hitting sides of beef instead of a punching bag.

It's a different series of actions for a runner, a jumper, a boxer, etc.

In Million Dollar Baby, the athlete is a woman boxer. She's poor and lives in LA.

She runs on the beach at dawn.
She takes home a leftover steak from work.
She practices her footwork while putting plates on tables.
She uses change from tips to buy boxing equipment.

This 'spells out': poor woman waitress training to be a boxer. The actions and details are particular to the setting and the character.

A badly-written series would be the same one that any athlete would undertake in any city. This one's well-written--which means specific to character and place.

A nice exercise would be taking the same action-series and setting it in a different place, or giving the actions to a different character.

Set it in the rural south of the 1920's or 1960's. A black man training on a plantation after the Civil War, for instance.

Alternate. First one action, then another, in alternation. A very old pattern, one identified with the 'discovery' of cinema, of cinematic editing.

When two actions alternate, we expect them to collide.

A man gets ready for a date, a woman gets ready for a boxing match.

We fully expect them to meet! It's part of the logic of cinema.

Or a man gets ready to propose to a woman, and she gets ready to have a cup of coffee after exercising. These two people have different expectations!

He gets his good clothes from the dry cleaner, buys flowers, polishes the ring. She goes to the gym, doesn't shower, brings her smelly gym clothes along, crams an onion-laden hot dog in her mouth.

You see? Now you're going from one action to two, and this is creating the specificity and surprise, the expectations and problems, we expect from stories.

Layer. More than one thing happens at once.

So let's say a man falls in love--and also loses his job.

Or a man gets ready to rob a bank and he falls in love. That is: at the same time he's preparing to rob the bank, he's also falling in love--perhaps with a fellow criminal, perhaps with a woman who works in a bakery on his block.

Again, this is two actions, but the intertwining of them can make something unique.

It also gives actors the opportunity to act. Doing two things at once is one hallmark of acting going on: Hamlet is acting crazy and planning revenge. He's acting crazy and in love with Ophelia. A character says one thing but is thinking another. You can write this, you better write this, because it's something actors in particular can do: they're expert at it.

And the Story? Life Is Like That.

To wrap up.

You may want to tell a feature-length story, with a beginning, middle and end. But it always has to be told through series of actions that are particularized, alternated and layered.

The big question then becomes: How do you get from the beginning, middle and end of the story to the series? What's in the middle 'layer' between the two?

But that's another topic.

And I actually think that before one even gets to that level, there's an intervening level: something we feel about life that series of actions concretize.

These are things like "isn't it always the way?," "what goes around comes around," "anything that can go wrong, will," "you get what you pay for," and "no good deed goes unpunished."

These are generally spelled out through a series of actions that leads to a reversal or twist.

A guy gets ready for a date: picks up dry cleaning, changes, buys flowers, chocolates. He drives everywhere. He's about to buy gas and he realizes--not so much money left. So he saves it. Doesn't buy gas. He picks up the date. The car runs out of gas. That's an action-series that leads to a particular sense of 'life is like that.'

This makes the question of the beginning, middle and end of a feature script at a still-higher level than these feelings about life. Probably in some sense the larger story is a fight or conflict--is life like this or like that? Is it 'a sucker never gets an even break' or 'every dog has his day'?

But more about all that another time.

--E. R. O'Neill

Intuitions.

2008-09-10T21:14:00.000-07:00

Norman Friedman gets mentioned in at least one book on screenwriting. (How Not To Write a Screenplay by Denny Flinn.)

Friedman is useful in so many ways.

He sketches out some plot types--adventure fiction, classical tragedy, modern drama, the like, and he has a layered theory of story and of our reactions to stories.

For example, he distinguishes formal or aesthetic 'emotions'--e.g., "What will happen next?"--from moral emotions, which involve how we feel about whether a character succeeds or fails, takes action or suffers, is rewarded or punished.

His descriptions often go something like:

a person of moderate social status, through no fault of his own, is subject to terrible misfortune at first, with intermittent hopes of something better, but in the end comes to a sad end. (Think Willy Loman.)

Or:

a person of high standing and great talents suffers terrible misfortune through a relatively small or insignificant mistake, and ultimately but nobly perishes.

That is, there's always:

a person,

their social status,

their admirable or regretable moral and other qualities,

(this including whether we admire or detest these),

whether the person acts or is acted upon,

whether he succeeds or fails,

inflicts suffering or suffers,

whether such sufferings or honors are his own fault or pure chance or choice or accident, etc. (that is: is he responsible or blameless),

what happens in these terms in the short run and over the long run (e.g., at first he succeeds but in the end is routed),

whether his status changes by the end--he becomes Prince or loses his inheritance or dies or whatnot.

E.g.:

Three sisters are of relatively high social status.

They have admirable qualities--being generous, knowing French, being cultured. (But they can also be snobs.)

They experience glimmers of hope--of romantic attachments, for instance.

But ultimately, through no fault of their own, or through their own inability to take positive action, their situations all worsen, they lose things and persons valuable and important to them.

In the end their states are worse then when the play started.

Yet the persist in dreaming of a better world--even a world without them, a future world, though none have children. (Only a social upstart has children, and they are not their legal father's children).

It's a nice approach. You can see how it's kind of proto-structuralist. One feels that Friedman's plot types could eventually be reduced to all the possible variables in a sort of equation--although he's not exhaustive. (Could there be a weak and detestable person who hurts others, and we admire him for it? Then when he's rewarded, we nevertheless feel bad?)

Even making a game stab at the 'grammar' Friedman detects, we can see how action-based dramatic writing is.

Someone acts or is acted upon, injures other or himself suffers.

And in a really good dramatic analysis, everything can be stated in terms of actions.

The script or play becomes transparent, because everything takes a clear role in relation to actions, to causality, to responsibility, choice and these moral-narrative categories.

Dramatic writing is writing in actions. It can be in words or some other medium. But actions become an expressive, plastic means:

they're selected and arranged (sequenced and compounded) to say something besides themselves, to be a vehicle for meanings.

Friedman's interesting, because he helps flush out the way stories embody what might be called, in a hifallutin' way, moral-ontological intuitions.

That is: stories embody certain feelings we have about the way the universe is, the way it rewards or punishes those who are good or bad.

The "universe" part is ontological.

The moral part is about virtue and vice (good or bad, strength or weakness) and reward or punishment (justice).

(A lot turns on guilt and innocence, responsibility and the lack of it.)

It's surprising how many stories seem to embody some very global intuitions of this kind. (I've mentioned some before on this blog.) E.g.:

Virtue is rewarded.

No good deed every truly goes unpunished. (E.g., virtue punished.)

Bad things happen to good people.

What goes around comes around.

The universe is amoral.

Everything that can go wrong will.

Bad things happen to good people.

Rewards are proportional to risks.

In for a penny, in for a pound.

Life's a bitch and then you die.

And the like.

These intuitions can be simple or complex.

But we like and admire dramatic works when they confirm to these intuitions. We think they're 'true to life.'

To be altogether too brief: if you can't conceptualize your story with this kind of clarity, and if it has no such moral intuitions or logic, the chances of anyone being able to follow it or cotton to it are pretty low.

Or such is my own moral and ontological intuition!

--E. R. O'Neill

Complexity and Simplicity in The Third Man.

2008-08-24T00:01:00.000-07:00

Graham Greene was kind of a clever guy.

The Third Man was on cable the other night, and I shouldn't start, because I'm always sucked in. Looking at the movie a bit, there's little wonder. It's a tidy piece of work strung together from familiar ideas in a nice combination that ratchets up the complexity of the whole and still manages to surprise us at the end--all while preparing those surprises very nicely.

A naive American man (a writer of simplistic popular fiction) goes to morally ambiguous and complex war-torn Vienna to work on a project with an old friend.

The American finds the friend is dead. That pretty much begins Act II.

Notice how little we know. There's very little 'exposition'--because the American must discover everything, and we'll discover it too, but in dribs and drabs.

We know little about the dead friend. We'll hear a lot: this also provides tremendous build-up.

Through odd behavior and inconcistencies, the friend begins to believe something fishy is going on--that the friend did not die in an accident but was rather murdered.

At the same time, American falls in love with his dead friend's girlfriend.

So now we have two things going on: a kind of amateur murder investigation, and a would-be love story, a romantic triangle with a dead man.

About halfway through, the American discovers his dead friend was not so nice. He'd been told this a lot before, but a lot of characters make post-war Vienna seem like a place where nice honest people don't get too far. But the dead friend wasn't just a rascal: he was a really bad person.

All this information was neatly withheld--because if the American were searching for a really terrible, we wouldn't care very much. If the American is "searching for a friend" or "trying to discover who murdered his friend," we kind of understand that.

At this point, the American decides his friend is 'better off' dead: the deserved what he got.

He plans to go back to the U.S. He's wiser now. He confesses his crush to the girl, but nothing can come of it, since she's still pretty much in love with the dead guy, worthy or not.

At this point, the murder investigation is moot--it doesn't matter what happened to the dead friend, he deserved what he got, it wasn't unjust--and the romance is moot, too.

The movie's over. Right? Not quite.

Now--spoiler alert for those who haven't seen the movie--it turns out the dead friend isn't dead. Talk about a twist.

As with most clever movies with a mystery and/or a twist, there is always a false hypothesis. The American doesn't think "I bet my friend is really alive and only pretending to be dead." He thinks "something's fishy--maybe it was murder." He's right about the fishy part, wrong about the murder part.

The logic of the actions is clever, too. This one change changes the actions, flips them all around.

It's now incumbent upon the American to kill his best friend. If not to kill him, at least to cause him to be arrested and punished.

The goal went from find the friend to find what happened to the friend and romance the dead friend's girl to right the friend's wrongs by making him pay.

It's a bit turning on a dime, but it's very powerful.

Notice how little bits of familiar stories are piled on top of each other. Are the individual elements so strange? Innocent American in corrupt old Europe. Friend investigating his friend's murder. Romantic triangle. Woman mourning for her lover, relying on the mercy of strangers. The 'cop' (here a soldier) sick of meddling amateurs. (That one's in just about every detective story.) They're all trite!

But the combination enriches them, and let's face it: you hadn't seen them in post-War occupied Vienna before. (No one had.)

There's more to this reversal. In a strange and somewhat happy coincidence, the American is still nursing a crush on the friend's girlfriend, so we get a more conventional angle: the American would be better off if his friend really were out of the way. If he can kill or lock up his former best friend, the American still might get the girl after all!

The American cooperates--collaborates, one might say--with the police. (They were antagonists all along, not believing his silly theories, finding him hopelessly unwise. So that's another big reversal.) The American tries to rescue the girl he loves, to send her away, but to no avail. (If she left the plot, there would be less emotional complication for the American.)

And he tries to trap the old friend. But the girl shows up--talk about being in the wrong place at the wrong time. That kind of bad luck is necessary in movies.

A chase ensues. The 'friend' would be happy to kill the American (who's now betrayed him). He really isn't so nice!

The friend shoots a nice soldier who liked the American's books. This causes the American to take his gun and go after his former best friend.

The friend is wounded. But an exchange of looks between the American and his wounded friend suggests that the friend asks to be killed.

So even when we might expect the vengeance plot, we get first betrayal and then helping.

The American stops one more time before leaving to try to romance the girl--to no avail.

It's a superb script. It's crammed with delightful, unique details. Most of the characters speak in anti-romantic ironies. (When the American observes that the mourning girl has smiled and asks her to smile again, she replies about that happiness that "there isn't enough for two smiles.")

And of course, the whole thing is beautifully photographed and acted in Vienna.

But the layering of actions, the complications, the reversals, the looping back on itself, and the surprises, the combination of unity and surprise--that is all about fine screenwriting, the kind we can study and learn from.

--E. R. O'Neill

Emotional Ambivalence.

2008-08-14T14:34:00.001-07:00

I've written before about the mysteries of the three-act structure.

I just noticed yet another screenwriting book proposing a 19th-century view of screenplay dramaturgy: incidents in a progressive, 'rising' action leading to a climax.

It's a nice idea, but it doesn't really work for Hollywood movies.

What I've argued instead is that the big, bulky middle of a Hollywood movie constitutes 'another world,' a world that's different from the ordinary problem-filled world of the first act.

The second act has its own problems, but they're problems that are set apart from those recognizable problems of everyday life.

That is: instead of set-up, action, resolution, it's: real problems; more interesting, movie-ish problems, resolution (or pseudo-resolution) to all the problems.

Life is such that we're emotionally ambivalent about it. There are things we'd like to change, but we can't or feel we can't, or we don't want to mess up the parts that we like.

The movie as an art form provides a zone within which we can explore bigger, more intense feelings, issues above and beyond everyday life, where we can act out, be challenged, experiment, do things we can't and probably shouldn't ordinarily do. We thereby stand to gain or lose more.

The characters make a choice that attempts to resolve life's problems. Those choices may succeed or fail. And then the question is how that success or failure carries over back into the realm of the everyday.

The Christopher Vogler hero's journey aficionado's have a sense of this by talking about how the hero goes on a journey, then returns home.

The art form of the feature film lets us go into a special place where we can resolve our emotional ambivalence by making a single strong emotional commitment, an act that threatens to decide the problems of life once and for all in a focused way.

This is an aesthetic quality of the feature film as a whole, and it's mirrored and embodied in the feature film's second act.

We're ambivalent about life, and movies recognize this and give us a space for imaginatively resolving that ambivalence. The issue is especially important to creative writers, who must resolve their ambivalence towards writing, towards what they're creating, in order to finish creating it.

And so it's perhaps no accident that the space in which creativity takes place is so often mirrored within movies. You have to go through that space to get a movie out at the far end, so the movie becomes an allegory of what it took to create it.

Read movies carefully and they contain a record of how they were created--and instructions for creating itself.

As I mentioned before, The Wizard of Oz is a good example of this view of three-act structure, and it's a good illustration of this theory of creativity and the fantasy space for resolving ambivalence that creativity requires.

Dorothy is unhappy at her Kansas home. A mean woman wants to take away her dog. Her aunt and uncle pay her no mind. And she gets insufficient attention from the three male hired hands.

She expresses a desire to go "over the rainbow." She's emotionally ambivalent, frozen in place. She can't do anything to change her world, but she can't leave it.

She does indeed decide to run away. But an astute carnival charlatan convinces her that her family loves and needs her, and so she returns home. She's going back to the same place with little change. Yes, she realizes she should honor her family obligations. But all the same problems still remain--the dog, the inattention, etc.

End of movie.

Not exactly.

Instead, a hurricane strikes and magically transports her to a magical wonderland "over the rainbow" where she meets helpers, has adventures, and tries to get back home to Kansas.

This is the special, more-interesting-than-everyday-life, other world, within which she can resolve her emotional ambivalence towards life in Kansas.

On the one hand, being far from home in a strange place makes her value Kansas more.

On the other hand, she can do things in Oz that are really more interesting and dramatic than anything that was going to happen to her in Kansas.

And these adventures have little to do with the original problems. No sorting out the Toto problem, no increased attention from her aunt and uncle. Yes, the people in Oz mirror some of those in Kansas, so she's symbolically working out her problem. Oz is, after all, a kind of dream space.

But the interesting narrative-structural (as opposed to psychological) feature is: none of the adventures actually cause her to be able to return home. She gets to Oz but isn't helped there. She's sent to get the witch's broom. Which she does, but that doesn't help either.

Not even the balloon someone fashions for her takes her home and resolves the getting-home-problem.

Instead, Dorothy must recognize what she's learned, must recognize something about how her feelings have been clarified by her adventures.

Only this recognition brings about the resolution--the return to Kansas, where, it turns out, no one really believes her. (Things have changed a lot.)

The trick of the movie is: none of the real problems in Kansas have exactly been changed. Sure, people are crowded around her bed ooh-ing and ahhh-ing and fretting over her.

We never find out if Toto has ceased to be canine non grata. Presumably the witch-y neighbor still hates Dorothy's dog. And soon everything will go back to the way it was.

But Dorothy herself has changed in how she views and feels about these things. In losing them and struggling to get them back and seeing them from a different perspective (as fantasy figures), she has a different relationship to her ordinary reality. And she can accept it now, more or less as it is.

This is where movies about making a million dollars or saving the world are foolish: no one can really do that, so that really is a dream in the shallow sense.

We few of us can change the world. But we can resolve our feelings through it by imaginative and dramatic means. And that's what many movies do for us--quite blatantly at that, if you take the time to look.

--E. R. O'Neill

Folk Whatever.

2008-07-27T14:22:00.000-07:00

In psychology they're playing with this idea of "folk psychology."

That is: people, in their heads, have certain ideas, about what other people are like, what's in their heads.

Folk psychology.

Folk psychology is what people think about how people think--unscientifically, so to speak.

And folk psychology is a functional part of psychology: people think and act certain ways based on assumptions about how other people think.

So folk psychology, unscientific as it is, is an object of psychology 'proper.' (Psychologists distinguish themselves from these lay theories, which are their objects--but forget about the hangup's of psychologists, their insistence that they're scientists, and we're not.)

Screenplays, I believe, are informed by folk psychology--and folk sociology and folk metaphysics.

I teach an online course on screenwriting, so I have to develop ideas that help students fill in what's missing in their stuff. And often it's 'perspective' and 'logic': what is this universe like? what do you think of these people?

Writers are often great believers in "this is just how people are." So every screenplay has some implicit sense--often clear very quickly--about: this is what people are like, this is the way they think and reason, these are the kinds of motives they have, this is what happens when they interact, and this is what the universe is like.

These folk theories are embedded in the script. They underwrite it. They don't have to be true for all time. They just have to be convincing.

All people care about is sex.
Everyone's out for himself.
It's a dog eat dog world.
People are their own worst enemies.
Everyone gets what he deserves.
What goes around comes around.
If something can go wrong, it will.

These are not very sophisticated ideas. But everyone can vouch they've thought them at one time or another. And we could all probably provide stories that 'bear them out.'

And screenplays don't just set forth any old theories of life, but probably the more dramatic ones. The folk theories I listed are ones that will tend to lead to harsh consequences--because we sense that such more 'dramatic' cases are more worth watching, more consequential, so to speak.

The difference between these ideas and stories are those of the screenwriter, is that the screenwriter's are more 'worked over,' more elaborate. They're subject to more of those Freudian processes like condensation, displacement and secondary revision--the unconscious processes Freud saw in dreams.

Screenplays are like elaborate daydreams, carefully worked out in the conscious mind and subjected to all kinds of logical criteria--commercial viability, formatting on the page, ability to be acted and shot, and the like.

It's vulgar reductionism to say at the end of Nights of Cabiria, 'Gee, I guess she's a survivor' or 'Well, life goes on,' or (more elaborately) 'She thought shes couldn't get any lower, but she was wrong, but she's still okay, so there's hope for all of us.'

But Fellini had some idea like that in the back of his mind. Or at any rate, such verbal inferences can be drawn from the series of images and events on the screen. The writer creates that dramatic series of events and actions, and a good writer leaves it for the audience to work out the inferences. But some of them are fairly clear.

Somehow we need to get some sense from stories of what it's all about, why we bothered watching. (A philosopher named Grice wrote about something called implicature that's related.) It's not exactly a lesson or a moral, and it need not be true. But it must ring true. It must jibe with one of those bits of folk psychology or even metaphysics: the world, or a world, is like that, I can believe that to be the case, for some patch of reality, small or large.

And the writer has to decide: What are people like? What is the world like? And these questions require some conscious articulation and elaboration in order to be consistent.

In Bergman, people even say them out loud: 'men are fools and women put up with them because of their weakness and need to take care of someone, and men should be grateful.' The characters practically say it!

But if the writer doesn't have a folk psychology, sociology, metaphysics somehow worked out, the chances are the results will be incoherent.

I risk the hypothesis that good movies have folk theories you could clearly state, just as good photographs have clear meanings that can be verbally expressed. That is also (backwards) a criterion of value, a definition of 'goodness' and not just an observation about the class of all good movies or photographs.

And so, clumsy as it may seem, working out one's own inmost sense of how people and the world are--well, it's a good idea as part of the screenwriting process.

--E. R. O'Neill

Mama Mia.

2008-07-23T13:24:00.000-07:00

Sloppy as it is, the movie Mama Mia does demonstrate some interesting aspects of the mainstream feature film.

A constantly intriguing question about this form is: what is the relationship amongst the parts? How is the ending for a movie the ending for that beginning?

Bad movies, I'd argue, often go wrong by having the wrong ending--or you could say the right ending for a different movie.

Rather surprisingly, I'll argue that the ending is seldom the resolution of the purported problem with which the film commences. Rather, it's the resolution for another, more fundamental problem.

Indeed, each part of a fiction film often replaces an earlier problem with another, more complicated one. Things seldom get better and better in a feature film: more often, they get worse and worse.

More specifically, one problem isn't "solved": it just morphs into another, worse problem. Or one solution in turn gives rise to other problems.

But I get ahead of myself.

It is common parlance to divide a feature film into three "acts."

The first ten to thirty minutes sets up the characters and situation,
the next hour or so launches one or more protagonists on a 'journey' that takes them away from their ordinary universe,
and the last ten or twenty minutes (the traditional denouement), resolves most everything and returns the characters and their world back to form of stability.

This is all fine. Or it's all rather sloppy, but it's good enough. But is the universe of the second act the same universe?

Generally not.

I've said before that one characterization for a film story is: things are not what they seemed. That is: a film story often begins when a character realizes that the world doesn't work the way she thought it did.

There's a lovely example in Waking Life: the protagonist is told that if you flip a light switch in a dream, it never works. Then of course, the character flips a light switch when he believes he's wide awake--nothing. Is he dreaming?

It's one of the charms and peculiarities of that movie that it oscillates unstably between waking and dreaming--we and the characters are often not entirely sure. Thus, one could say, it's not a very "good" movie--in traditional terms, at least.

To get back to Mama Mia, the film starts almost instantly with a problem and a protagonist. A young woman on the eve of her marriage confesses to her friends that she has found her mother's diary (hoary old plot device), examined the month of her conception own conception, and discovered that her mother had three lovers during that month. She's also invited all three--this is the image that starts the film--to her wedding the next day. When she meets her real dad, she'll know (she thinks), but meanwhile, mom mustn't know.

So we have a protagonist: the daughter. And she has a task she's well on the way to beginning: discovering her real father.

Naturally, we may full well expect that seeing the gentlemen in question will not be enough to decide her own paternity, if anything indeed will.

And we have a new universe--from one with only a mother and a daughter, to a universe with a plethora of fathers, really just broad types gussied up as characters, but fine, good enough, we'll have time to learn about them.

So that's it. The first act is just about over. The gentlemen set out for the wedding (in a clumsy montage) and intersect pretty quickly. It needn't take much more than ten minutes, singing included.

Once the men encounter each other, we could say the second act has begun. But I think a subtler analysis would be that once the daughter sees all three and does not know which her father is--that's when the real problems begin.

In any case, the problem of the ending is: what will be a satisfying ending for a given beginning?

Here's the truly interesting part.

The film starts out with a daughter's problem. Who's her father?

But the fact that the daughter considers her fatherless existence a 'problem' is rather a reproach against the mother.

This has to come out.

The daughter has to say 'you raised me without a father, but I've never felt whole or complete, and I can't get married without knowing this fact.'

But it turns out--spoiler alert for those who haven't seen the film--that what the daughter who's more conventional than her mother (who never married) needs to learn is to be more like her mother, not less, to be less conventional, not to get married, but rather to travel the world in search of herself.

The film isn't about a daughter who needs to find a father, who needs to be different from her mother. It's about a daughter who needs to find herself--her initial purpose in finding her dad--a daughter who needs to be more like her mother.

The wedding--spoilers again--will take place, but it's the mother's wedding the movie turns out to be all about, not the daughter's.

The daughter's actions will end up not cementing her marriage but rather reaching back into the past to provide the marriage and husband her mother never had.

This is extremely socially conservative: damn weirdo mom, raised me as a bastard and now needs to do the 'right' (socially acceptable) thing, to become a conventional little bourgeois wife.

But it's nevertheless a very good ending for this movie and this beginning--because it's not the ending you expect. It's not the ending for the beginning of the film, for the problem set out at the beginning. It's the resolution of a more fundamental problem.

Not that every ending and third act needs to be that.

But feature films are so long. They require variety and surprise. But this mitigate against unity and rationality. So you often need to have characters who don't shape their own destinies, who don't know what they want, who set out on some cockamamie journey, and then find something else, quite despite themselves.

Isn't this what Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz does? She wants to leave home, then doubles back, only to be taken away from home 'against her own will'. The resolution means going back to the home you were so eager to leave--go figure.

--E. R. O'Neill

The Middle May Be a Distraction.

2008-06-25T09:57:00.001-07:00

I saw a student recently work on a mystery plot. It was a clever idea, but the student had a lot of problem with--surprise, surprise--the middle.

That's not unusual. Screenwriters often have a great first 30 pages, maybe a killer last ten pages, but the middle is The Beast.

I have an inkling that mysteries in particular require about four or five plots in the middle that hide the answer to the mystery. They're pure distraction or misdirection. (Misdirection is when the magician waves his hands to draw your attention while the assistant is stuffing the rabbit into the hat.)

For example--and don't read this if you've never seen Murder on the Orient Express--let's say lots of people get on a train, they all conspire to kill a Bad Guy. They succeed; the bad guy turns up dead. We don't know or see this, but it's what's going on beneath the surface.

Poirot happens to be on the train. He investigates and finds...many tantalizing backstories and clues that point hither and yon.

(People who haven't seen Murder on the Orient Express can start reading again!)

So the middle is 90% smoke and mirrors to distract from the actual story.

But I'm beginning to suspect that the middle of a feature film (not just a mystery) is largely misdirection from the beginning and end--except insofar as it effects a change in consciousness for the protagonist. The middle is thus not entirely consequential for the ending, only indirectly through the protagonist's motives.

Take True Lies--one of James Cameron's finest films, IMHO.

There's one problem--in True Lies it's the marriage--which is then replaced by another, more interesting, glamorous, dramatic problem--something about spies, I forget what. (I think the spies almost literally fall from the sky to interrupt the marriage-fidelity-trust plot.) When the spy story is resolved, the characters are dumped back at the main problem again, which now looks different to them.

Or take The Wizard of Oz.

Dorothy's dog gets in trouble with Miss Gulch. Also Dorothy is bored in Kansas. No one truly listens to her. So she plans to run away. Now she'll run away or not, return home or not. But that story's immediately cut short.

The device of the hurricane and the dream then fulfills Dorothy's wish--as Freud tells us dreams and phantasies do, and as pop culture stories so often do. Dorothy wanted to run away but backed down. Now she's forced to run away.

That strangely reverses the problem: not how to get away but how to get home.

Thus in The Wizard of Oz, the problem in the middle is precisely the opposite of the problem at the beginning.

This points to a deeper aspect of aesthetic form: everything that leads away from something also leads to it. The part of the story that's distraction and misdirection, that leads away from the actual ending, is also in a sense a preparation.

That is: you can't just stick any plot in the middle. It has to relate in some substantive (and even formal) way to the beginning and ending story.

In The Wizard of Oz, many strange adventures ensue--talking trees, flying monkeys, etc. They have little to do with Kansas. They're mostly contrast. They make Kansas's problems seem desirable by comparison.

Dorothy gets closer and closer to her new goal (getting home) with the help of helpers who themselves will be helped--they'll all get their wishes in the end. But the putative solution (the wizard) in fact demands even more and harder work--attacking the witch in her lair.

With pluck and determination, the team succeeds. The final route home (the balloon) falls through. But it turns out all the adventures were unnecessary--more or less--save the change they effected in Dorothy's consciousness.

Indeed, the adventures mainly serve to give the characters what they wished for--which it famously turns out they had all along. The adventures serve as a kind of pretext for the characters finding out strengths they had in themselves which they might never have found were it not for the challenges presented by the middle of the plot.

Dorothy has been made happy to be in Kansas, unlikely to run away again--in part because all her fantastic adventures were abetted by the farmhands from whom she had been running away.

What I'm underlining is the way the middle is often kind of a dead end. It doesn't directly solve the initial problem, may have little to do with it, or it may be a fantastic reversal or just cover-up, a thicket in which the threads of the main problem are buried, reflected indirectly.

This are questions of story design--how do the parts relate--but also of narrative logic--what forces or causes one thing to lead to another.

But these are the kinds of things one has to think about to understand how the parts of the feature film hang together--which is in part by not hanging together.

--E. R. O'Neill

Go Figure.

2008-06-24T22:18:00.000-07:00

I've been mulling over a couple-few of questions lately.

One has to do with the mystery of the three- (or four-) act structure of the feature film.

Namely, what happens in the middle? How does the middle relate to the beginning and ending?

Second, how do the chunks of the middle cohere? What's their logic? A series of unrelated problems? One problem's solution begets a new one? What?

Finally, these all connect back to the controlling idea, the vision of the universe that's explored, revealed, assumed, yet somehow also confirmed by the story.

Okay.

Many observers claim that the middle of a feature film consists of a series of 'progressive complications,' efforts of the protagonist to achieve a goal, perhaps getting successively closer or trying a series of different tacks.

Each of these ideas has its problems.

If it's just the protagonist trying to accomplish something, and then doing it, as many claim, then it's more or less just a wish-fulfillment--and thus not very interesting.

More often it's the complication that gets successively deeper, not the protagonist's actions. That is: things tend to get a lot worse before they get any better.

And the logic of those actions in the middle tends not to be just 'more and more,' but one thing happens and that causes a new problem to open up.

The other issue that's been on my mind is the view of the universe one finds in feature films.

I've written before about 'everything that can go wrong does.'

Or another one would be 'God doesn't close a door but he opens a window.' A man tries to overcome a terrible disease. And he does. But he loses a child in a freak accident.

Maybe that's just the type of 'mixed' ending I prefer.

And seeing a number of student films recently, I realized that many films can be typified by the sentence 'the world isn't what you thought.' That is: within ordinary reality, someone discovers that the world follows different laws than she thought.

All these things come together in--of all things--The Incredible Shrinking Man. (I know: go figure.)

Not that it's the greatest movie ever. But as a B-movie, it embodies movie-ness with a certain clarity.

Namely, the protagonist is more or less minding his own business. He's not even doing anything 'wrong.' And some passing radioactive something-or-other causes his strange condition of shrinking.

The world changes. In an unusual and thus watchable sort of way.

This opens up a series of adventures and challenges.

Some flow from the basic problem: he shrinks, so his clothes don't fit. He shrinks, so he's an object of curiosity.

Others follow from each other. He gets trapped in one situation, and the action that rescues him also tumbles him into another, worse situation. He escapes the cat, but only to be pinned down by the spider. That sort of thing.

The resolution is partly overcoming these obstacles. But the basic problem isn't solved at all! He's still tiny, tinier than ever--and getting ever more miniscule.

The 'resolution'--if it can even be called that--is that the new universe is the discovery. The problem is the solution. The positive spin on his terrible situation, the 'silver lining,' as it were, is that he's going to explore a brave new world: he'll become as small as atoms.

So even an old sci-fi B-film, even because of its simplicity and novelty, can show us a few things about how feature films work.

--E. R. O'Neill

How Memorable.

2008-06-18T11:23:00.001-07:00

In the morning on my way to the office, I read the newspaper.

Yes, it's on actual pieces of paper.

Not a Kindle Reader. (Kindle as in flames? Yipes!) Not an iPhone. Not a laptop.

Actual pieces of paper a human being in a gas-guzzling vehicle flings at my door sometime in the early a.m.

I like it.

I usually finish reading the paper on the train. But then there are articles I'd like to 'clip'--but that I do virtually.

I get to the office, and when I have a moment, I grab the articles from the web site and save them (strictly for my personal use). I figure since I buy the paper, I deserve to keep a copy of an article or two.

But how do I remember which articles?

I use an age-old technique: mnemonics.

Legend has it a visitor to a party walked from room to room, and just after he left, the building collapsed. No one knew who all had died.

So the asked the man to remember. He couldn't. Until he imagined walking from room to room and place to place, and then he could recall all the people he had seen.

This gave the idea of topoi or topics--places (like the rooms of the collapsed house) you associate with different items, so a list, even a random list, becomes memorable.

My technique is similar. I just create a crazy image for each article, and then I link them together in a story.

A woman's cleaning her flooded house, and the fridge pops open, and there's a dead elk in there. The elk comes to life and smokes some Greek tobacco.

That points to three stories in the paper I want to 'clip' today.

All of which made me think of memorability.

In teaching screenwriting online, I've lately noticed that the actions in screenplays have a general and a particular side.

Athletes train. Rocky drank raw eggs and ran up some museum steps. Maggie in Million Dollar Baby is a waitress. So she takes home a leftover steak from work, practices her footwork while waiting tables, and uses the change from her tips to buy a speed bag.

The clever screenwriter made the training specific to the profession.

This also created memorable images.

It's really worth thinking about memorability in writing. Don't we remember certain images from movies very clearly? Certain moments from the story?

There's something about how a movie gets under your skin, into your brain. It's not just efficient--getting from point A to point B--it's memorable.

So taking one's story and then saying 'how would I remember this?' could be a nice way of going down that path.

--E. R. O'Neill

Creative Maieutics.

2008-06-18T11:07:00.000-07:00

Maieutics is the Greek term for midwifery.

Socrates used it to describe his dialogical method--by which he could bring forth truth by interrogating an individual to disclose a truth hidden behind the individual's often faulty beliefs.

Not that we have to use Socrates as a model or accept his rather combative procedure. (Everyone else was always wrong, and Socrates could always convert their ideas into his. He asked a lot of loaded questions to trap his interlocutors. In short, Socrates is kind of a terrible examplar for finding truth through discussion--but let that be.)

Creative maieutics would be concerned with the creative process as a process of invention, discovery and shaping.

How does creativity 'give birth' to new things and ideas?

A particular focus here will be on writing in general, screenwriting in particular, and filmmaking as a kind of exemplar.

But almost anything can be an exemplar or emblem of the creative process. Indeed, creative thought can be particularly concerned with exemplars and emblems: what's in image for something, an emblem of it?

As a long-time student of acting I often feel that acting is the best exemplar of the creative process--because it leaves no physical trace or reside (except when filmed or taped).

The actor must always create the performance anew from inside herself. So the creative challenge and task is always foremost on the actor's mind.

--E. R. O'Neill