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

Complexity and Simplicity in The Third Man.

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.

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