Clever Idea.

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.

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...

"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?

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?

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.

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.

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