Living the Romantic Comedy

The Genius of Bad Writing

 

Generally after teaching a screenwriting class, I feel a sense of positive accomplishment, however meager.  Something's been learned, even if it's as trivial as the proper formatting of sound effects.  But after my last class, I felt like I was leaving a trail of fire and brimstone in my cloven-footed wake, the air thick with the stench of sulfur.  I had become the screenwriting instructor Devil incarnate. 

Call me a heretic, call me a hack, here's the horrible reality I'd preached, the one that sent my students screaming into the night: The surest path to getting your screenplay sold is to write it badly.

One of the cardinal rules of the screenwriting craft is "Show, don't tell."  Good writing, we all are taught, doesn't over-explain, doesn't pander and pre-direct the action.  Parentheticals, the script writer's equivalent of "indicating," are frowned on: If you need to add (sadly) after a character's name before a line of dialogue, then you haven't written the dialogue right -- the line isn't inherently mournful.

Same goes for characterization work.  "What you see is what you get," another bit of screenwriting gospel, says that you don't talk about a character's emotions and thoughts when you're writing their actions.  The character moment should be self-evident.  Actions speak louder than indulgent inner-voice aping: If you need to explain how a character is feeling, or fill in his reaction to someone else's action, you haven't written the character right -- their personality hadn't been properly articulated.

Good screenwriting is supposed to appeal to a reader's intelligence.  Be clear, be precise, and they'll get what you intend in a given scene.  Your prose should be as spare and smart as a Raymond Carver story.

But as a writer who's been a story analyst and script consultant in the studio system, and thus has read something like 6,893 screenplays over the past 17 years, most of them agented, many of them since sold and developed, I say:

Bullshit.

I can only report to you what's actually going on, speaking to you from the belly of the industry beast (where the gaseous air, come to think of it, is often sulfurous).  Here's what most screenwriters don't want to hear: In the working industry, these rules of "good writing" don't apply.  Most of the scripts that sell are loaded with what's thought of as bad, with telling-not-showing, and I'm talking about the big boys. Eric Roth does it.  Stephen Zaillan does it.  Robin Swicord, Richard LaGravenese, James L. Brooks... Highly paid Oscar-winner Ron Bass (or his massive "research" staff) does it.

Now let me define this it.  The Big Boys and most of the less heralded writers who get their movies made  observe a less well-known rule of the screenwriting trade: The fundamental job of a selling screenplay is to get the reader to empathize with its protagonist.

Paraphrased for emphasis:  The most important task a screenplay must accomplish is to get whoever is reading it to identify with the lead character.  It's really that simple, although often tricky to pull off.  If you can't get an executive, an actor, a whoever the hell is reading the thing to see the story through the eyes of its protagonist, to experience your story's emotions as they're experienced by the person in the starring role... then you are dead in the water.

This is, after all, what we all do whenever we see a movie.  As we watch the leading man or woman, we're subliminally doing a lot of emotional math in our heads: Why's she doing that?  Oh, she's outsmarted him (she's smart).  Wait -- is she nuts?  Oh, no, that was funny (we like funny).  Hmmm, I don't get why she reacted that way (now I'm curious).  Wow, I didn't see that coming!  (This is intense).  Etc.  And the sum total of these largely unconscious lightning responses to a character in action is meant to be: We get them.  We're with them.  We are them.

Like it or not, the savvy screenwriter, ripping up rulebook pages to fuel her audience-identification fire, gets right to the heart of this process.  Here, for example, is Oscar-winning original screenplay writer Dustin Lance Black, early in his script for Milk.  Young Harvey is trying to pick up a guy named Scott who's just caught his eye on a subway platform:

HARVEY MILK: I'm part of the big, evil, corporate establishment that, let me guess, you think is the cause of every evil thing in the world from Vietnam to diaper rash.
SCOTT SMITH: You left out bad breath.

Falling for it, Harvey covers his mouth. Scott laughs. They both smile, realizing they share a wry sense of humor.  A TRAIN IS COMING, Harvey has to work fast.

HARVEY MILK:  So...  You're not going to let me celebrate my birthday all by myself, are you?
SCOTT SMITH (gently teasing):  Listen, Harvey, you're kind of cute for a suit...  But I don't do guys over forty.

OhmyGod!  The telling, the explaining and even (gasp) the parenthetical!!!  A doctrinaire screenwriting teacher would cut that "realizing..." clause, question that "has to work fast," probably damn the "gently teasing."  They'd probably have problems with this bit from a little further in:

HARVEY MILK (an idea, half-jokingly, half-seriously): Why don't we run away together?
SCOTT SMITH: Where to?
INT. FLASH FORWARD - HARVEY'S KITCHEN -  NIGHT
Harvey speaks to the tape recorder. (Throughout the film, these scenes should feel intimate, as if Harvey is telling us things no one else knows.)
HARVEY MILK: In those days, San Francisco was the place where everyone wanted to go... 

That last parenthetical in the narrative is the epitome of a tell-don't-show.  But it sure makes a difference in our understanding -- our "feeling the story," does it not?

Sometimes the "you are the character" POV work is more subtle.  As Simon Beaufoy brings us into the world of Jamal in the first flashback of Slumdog Millionaire, note how succinctly and eloquently the action in this first flashback is pitched from Jamal (and no one else's) point of view:

SALIM: Jamal! Catch it! Catch it!
The seven-year old Jamal stares up at the ball, jinks around trying to get into position.  He pays no heed to the rest of the children who are scattering fast to the edges of the tarmac. The ball seems suspended in the blue sky. Shouts from the other children seem very far away. He doesn’t notice that they are screaming for him to get out of the way. Jamal adjusts his feet for the perfect catch. Then out of nowhere, a light aircraft almost takes his head off as it comes in to land on the tarmac runway.

This is actually good writing (it avoids the interior editorializing while vividly transcribing a "you're a camera in Jamal's head" trajectory in the reader's mind), but the principle (make us be him) still applies.  Here, conversely, is an extreme example from another screenplay, describing a daughter talking to her elderly mother, who's on her hospital deathbed:

CAROLINE: I wanted to tell you how much you’ve meant to me. I’m going to miss you so much...

They hold each other for some time...  They separate... And there’s an awkwardness.  They have nothing left to talk about... nothing left to say to each other... a hole in their relationship... Caroline fills it with the eternal question...

CAROLINE (CONT’D): Are you afraid?

As a screenwriting instructor, I'd be tempted to throw this maddenly ellipse-riddled schmaltz right out of class... except... it's painful to acknowledge... this is an Oscar-nominated screenplay (Benjamin Button) from Oscar winning scribe Eric Roth (Forrest Gump).

Bad or good (and such terms begin to lose their bearings on this turf), getting across exactly how a character is feeling, in its varying degrees of subtlety or on-the-nose excess, is the coin of the realm in professional screenwriting.  When it's done deftly (e.g. Beaufoy) you barely notice it, and it's hugely effective.  Personally, I find Roth's end of the spectrum hard to stomach, but I can't knock his agenda.

"Telling the story from inside the character" is what sells the story to prospective stars, directors, producers... and while it's absolutely Wrong as a supposedly proper approach to screenwriting craft, it's employed by ostensibly A-list writers on a daily basis.  That's because with this kind of neon indicating on the page, nobody reading such material can misunderstand or fail to comprehend the emotional beats in a character's arc.  And these screenwriters know that getting the reader on that same page with their protagonists is their fundamental task.

I ain't sayin' I like it.  I'm just saying... it works.

Now maybe you can understand why in preaching such heresy, I felt like I was telling my students to sell their minimalist-sophisticate souls to the studio devil the other night.  But this is my story and I'm sticking to it: bad writing, shmad-writing -- don't shy away from doing some "telling" in your show, if it'll put your reader more vividly and palpably into your protagonist's shoes.  It's a dirty job, abusing (i.e. over-using) the technique may get you in trouble, but writing your movie from inside the character will get you further with that spec script than most of the rulebook do's and don'ts ever written in stone.

Let the hissing begin.

The Perfect Metaphor

Some people are born mad, in a way that makes them lightning rods of inspiration for humanity: certain explorers, artists, inventors present the more timid of us with proof that the impossible can be made to come true.

In the summer of 1974, French tightrope walker Philippe Petit walked back and forth between the tops of the World Trade Center towers performing a 48-minute routine on the high wire he'd illegally rigged between them with the help of friends, before he was arrested for disturbing the peace.

James Marsh's sublime documentary, its title taken from a police report document's description of the event: Man on Wire, is deservedly an Oscar front-runner.  Already available on DVD, the film should be required viewing for all creative types.  Certainly any writer should see it, perhaps on a yearly basis, as a kind of talisman for You Can Do It faith.

What Marsh both documents and recreates with actors is the story of a man who felt, the moment he laid eyes on a news article about the not-even-built-yet towers, that he was meant to walk between them on a wire.  After successfully walking between the towers of Notre Dame and across the top of Sydney Harbor Bridge, he schemed, plotted and against all rational odds, ended up where he'd long dreamed of being.

Philippe Petit, on his first reconaissance mission to check out his projected site:  We are at the top of the world.  I see two slabs of concrete, barely inhabited with some construction, no fence, no net, nothing, and I am frozen to death.  I see the other tower, and I imagine the void, and if I were to run and slide I would just fall to another life.  And slowly I thought, okay, now it's impossible, that's sure.  So let's start working.

There's something so profoundly mythic about Petit's quest (he himself describes the arc of his life as a fairytale) that anyone watching the film can't help but see his or her own life-quest writ large.  Ultimately the metaphor is absolutely clear: Everybody needs to string a cable between two towers and walk across it.

Petit: I didn't have any "why."  To me it's really so simple: that life should be lived on the edge of life.  You have to exercise rebellion.  To refuse to taper yourself to rules, to refuse your own success, to refuse to repeat yourself, to see every day, every year, every idea as a true challenge, and then you are going to live your life on the tightrope. 

Movie Book Heaven

While half the blogs in the known universe are posting reactions to the 2008 Oscars telecast (Javier Bardem actually won for No Country?!  OhmyGod!!!  But seriously, best speech: Tilda Swinton), Living RomCom would like to talk about the Oscars show from 1968 -- as relived in one absolutely scrumptious book. 

By this time in 2009, you'll prob'ly have a hard time even remembering who won what this year (this oft-experienced Oscar amnesia is a clear indicator of how fundamentally trivial our modern era's Academy Awards can be), but I'll wager that the movie book-reading public won't forget Mark Harris's Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood.  It's the best book written about the movies and what they mean to us to come down the pike in a long while, and its subject matter is particularly intriguing in terms of its contrast to the times we live in.

Harris's basic story concept is brilliant.  Pictures uses the Best Picture nominations of 1967 to explore that seminal moment in film history when the old guard of Hollywood was pushed, wheezing and whelping, into confrontation with the New.  On the left was Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate; on the right was Guess Who's Coming to Dinner and Dr. Doolittle (yes, really); occupying the conflicted middle-ground was In the Heat of the Night.

Night won the night, but the ultimate champion was a new breed of filmmakers that was to nearly destroy the old studio system, dragging it under protest across a just-solidified generational dividing line, and therein lies the fascinating core of Harris's tale.  The book is at its shrewdest and most revealing when it explicates the particulars of a rather Oedipal story, showing how a motley crew of European-inspired sons (among them, Warren Beatty and Mike Nichols) slew the already staggering Hollywood dragon-dads (e.g. Jack Warner), creating a passel of more modern myths even as they enacted an ancient one.

Harris's cinematic narrative strategy is to cross-cut the creation stories of all five future Best Pic noms; we follow each movie from conception, through production, to release, spanning a four year period.  It's an involving and suspenseful gambit, due to the cliff-hanging nature of its subplots (a crash course in how miraculous a feat it is to actually get a movie made), and the colorfully diverse cast of characters involved.  Being a fly on the wall in a legend-filled room is one of the great pleasures in movie-book reading, and Pictures puts you in many such stellar suites.

I loved, for example, discovering that screenwriting team David Newman and Robert Benton, while trying to sell Francois Truffaut on helming Bonnie and Clyde, sat through a screening of Gun Crazy he'd set up for them along with Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina.  Godard briefly considered directing Bonnie himself -- and as Picture reports, after it later lost Best Picture, sent a telegram to Newman saying "Now, let's make it all over again!"

The book cuts from Gene Hackman agonizing over having been fired from Bonnie, to Stanley Kramer wondering if Spencer Tracy will live long enough to finish Dinner.  You get first-timer Dustin Hoffman's totally traumatic experience of working on The Graduate while everyone else in show biz considers him miscast, juxtaposed with Sidney Poitier's refusal to film in the deep South for Night because there was no guarantee he'd get out of there alive.

The era's portrait snapshots are priceless.  Here's Sidney Lumet remembering vulgarian producer Joseph E. Levine "sitting in the Polo Lounge, so happy, a hooker on each arm, each hand on a different tit."  There's young Peter Fonda (with then-unknown chums Jack Nicholson and Dennis Hopper) cheering on the Byrds while they play his mom and Roger Vadim's Malibu beach party -- with "Daryl Zanuck and George Cukor both staring dumbstruck as a barefoot young hippie began to nurse her baby in front of them." 

Next to the passionately innovative serious-ities of Arthur Penn and Nichols, the disastrous saga of Dr. Doolittle serves as black comedic counterpoint.  That it was clearly a movie that didn't want to have been made is borne out by a telegram sent, after typhoons and animal seizures jeopardized its bloated, ill-advised production, from a crew member on location in St. Lucia to Anthony Newley and wife Joan Collins: "Insect terrible from very wet summer STOP everyone covered in welts and sores two people bad infections from bites STOP six people ill last week from dysentery."

Meanwhile, it's the life-and-death issues of that era -- when the Civil Rights movement was peaking and the Vietnam War was beginning to divide the country -- that give this movie race its gravitas.  The book explores how The Graduate came to embody youth culture before the term existed, how Bonnie seemed to react to the war and the violence in the heart of America, how Night's success (and Dinner's datedness) were informed by events that culminated in the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. -- a tragedy that caused the Academy to postpone its show for the first time in nearly 40 years.

Harris's well-written and prodigiously researched work (even the footnotes are intriguing) has an aptly-timed resonance.  As I devoured the book, I couldn't help occasionally humming Dylan's Things Have Changed.  This year's picture race?  There Will Be Blood does speak to the tyranny of oil-lust that underlies our current administration's downfall, No Country can be seen as an indictment of the nihilistic violence we live with now, and Juno certainly has its finger on the pulse of kids-these-days.  But no one could sanely make a claim that this crop of pictures signifies a revolution of any kind -- or that they've even connected with America with anything like the force that 1967's wildly popular bunch did (many critics have pointed out that prior to the Awards, Juno has been the only major moneymaking hit among this year's nominees).

In its tacitly elegiac way, Pictures takes a picture of a now long-gone moment when movies were still at the uncontested epicenter of popular culture, and a clear embodiment of what "we" were all thinking and feeling.  Micro-trended into a vast collection of disparate cultural tribes, we (or, all the many "we"s) simply don't live in that world anymore.  But Harris's book delivers its bygone era to us in an indelibly vivid way.   All I can say is: hie thee with this tome to a comfy chair, 'cause boy, is it ever a damn good read.

The Movie On the Page

"The primary thing in a screenplay is to make the reading experience as identical to seeing the movie as possible...  I want the prose to match the tone of the movie.  I want it to smell as much like the movie as it possibly can."

-- Tony Gilroy

What's one thing the 2007 Oscar-nominated screenplays have in common?  I'll follow Tony Gilroy's lead and say it's this: they smell like the movies they are, or to put it in less colorfully metaphorical terms, they read like movies.  Their writers have put the movie in their minds on the screenplay page -- so specifically that any director worth his lens-knowledge could tell what the movie was supposed to look, sound and feel like.

Interviewed in the Newmarket Shooting Script edition of the Michael Clayton screenplay, Gilroy goes into depth on the painstaking, often obsessive amount of work he puts into all of his projects and did on Clayton in particular.  What he divulges here should put to rest any lingering misunderstandings as to what kind of fierce intelligence must be brought to bear on a successful (i.e. one that's substantive as well as commercially viable) script.  And his work is an embodiment of Robert Towne's famous dictum, "When I write a screenplay I'm describing a movie that's already been shot."

Cinematic storytelling -- the term that's come to define this particular approach to screenwriting -- involves a kind of three-step process (though these steps are often enacted simultaneously): 1) you conceive your story in filmic terms, 2) you see the movie in your head, and 3) you write the story in a language that vividly communicates that movie's sounds and images.

The common criticism made of this methodology is that film is a director's medium (i.e. leave all that complicated filmmaking stuff to the big boys) and that using technical terms (e.g. camera angles, etc.) in a script destroys the read.  I say hogwash to the first (tell that to the hordes, from directors to caterers, put out of work by the WGA strike) and oh, ye of little brains! to the second. 

The ten Oscar-nominated screenplays are all "pre-directed."  They're crammed full of specific visual/aural choices that timid Little Brains would deem "directors only!" -- and most of them achieve their aims without ever resorting to camera language (the Coen's No Country lays out the writer/directors' shot list, as is their wont, but this and P.T. Anderson's There Will Be Blood prove the exceptions amidst the current crop of Oscar-nom'ed screenplays).

No, as Gilroy makes clear, you can make the reading experience as identical to seeing the movie as possible, sans any distracting technical talk, if you're an imaginative writer who has an understanding of how movies are made.  (And if you're not, why don't you try blueprinting a house without learning anything about construction and architecture, while you're at it?)

Cinematic storytelling is an approach that affects every craft component.  Here's a "movie on the page" way to set the scene, from Brad Bird's script for Ratatouille:

FRENCH COUNTRYSIDE - LATE AFTERNOON

A light rain falls on a small farmhouse.  The last remaining dead leaves tremble in the gusts.  The quiet is shattered by a LOUD GUNSHOT that lights up the inside of the cottage.

Simple but effective: you smell the autumn in the air, and get the full effect of that gunshot because of the deft lighting detail.  Here's a moment from No Country For Old Men (Joel and Ethan Coen).  It's the first glimpse we have of Chigurh, the psycho killer played by Javier Bardem, after a nighttime shot featuring "the flashing light bars of a police car stopped on the shoulder":

The deputy, with a hand on top of the prisoner's head to help him clear the door frame, eases the prisoner into the backseat.  All we see of the prisoner is his dark hair disappearing into the car.

Clear, precise... and ever-so-faintly ominous.  You can't imagine seeing anything but just this much of the villain on screen.  And the rest of the sequence that follows (Chigurh escapes and murders the deputy) is similarly laid out, giving us little glimpses of the man, never coming in close on his face until he's in the (perversely ecstatic) moment of cutting the deputy's throat.

Specificity.  Here's how Diablo Cody gives us Juno's world:

Juno's bedroom is decorated with punk posters: The Damned, the Germs, the Stooges, Television, Richard Hell, etc.  She picks up a hamburger-shaped phone to call her best friend, LEAH.

Apparently director Jason Reitman didn't mind the screenwriter specificizing his props for him (we all remember that phone).  By contrast, Cody nails Leah's bedroom with one bold stroke:

Leah's room is cluttered with the sentimental junk that certain girls love to hoard.

...In Christopher Hampton's adaptation of Atonement, the screenwriter even has the nerve (I'd call it verve) to give directions to the film' s composer in the opening lines:

The SOUND of a typewriter, irregularly struck, now fluent, now creating an urgent rhythm that forms the percussive element of the opening score.

The writer creates identification with a protagonist by giving you her point of view in Tamara Jenkins' Savages:

Wendy glances over the top of her cubicle and sees the disembodied head of MATT, her manager, fast approaching.  With a quick click of her mouse, she brings a spreadsheet up on the computer, then covers her folder with an accounting file.

Jenkins delivers the painfully poignant experience of "what it's like to be Wendy" via one artfully conceived visual moment (expletive-averse readers, please skip this).  We're in an overhead closeup of:

Wendy with Larry on top, moving rhythmically.  She tries to get lost in the sex but can't.  She opens her eyes and looks at the ceiling.  After a few moments, she turns her head and finds herself staring into the sad eyes of [her Larry's dog] Marley.  She reaches for a paw.  Wendy and Marley stay like that gazing into each other's eyes while Larry fucks her.

Ronald Harwood's adaptation of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly literally puts us inside the head of its hero from the first shot onward:

Like a flickering eyelid a picture begins to take shape: a small, bare hospital room, the faces of NURSERS either side ot the bed looking down expectantly, directly into CAMERA.

THE CAMERA IS JEAN-DOMINIQUE BAUBY, KNOWN AS JEAN-DO.

I think you'll agree that in this particular case, mention of the camera is absolutely necessary.  You feel camera, rather than read of it, throughout the whole of Michael Clayton, which prob'ly won't win the Oscar (the Academy's more likely to go with Juno's flashy dialogue), but for my money was the most exciting screenplay of 2007, for structural risk, for its honed-diamond dialogue and story logic, for the tension you feel right from its opening:

It's 2:00 a.m. in a major New York law firm.  Ten floors of office space in the heart of the Sixth Avenue Canyon.  Seven hours from now this place will be vibrating with the beehive energy of six hundred attorneys and their attendant staff, but for the moment it is a vast, empty, half-lit shell.  A SERIES OF SHOTS emphasizing the size and power of this organization; shots that build quietly to the idea that somewhere here  -- somewhere in this building -- there's something very important going on.

Would you read more?  I think so.  William Goldman gives this opening an amused, appreciative nod in his intro (come to think of it, the shrewd tone of Gilroy here is very vintage Goldman), and the whole  of it is like a textbook for making a movie snap, crackle and pop.  And speaking of which:

I'll be using pages (and matching clips) from Clayton in the Cinematic Storytelling class I'm about to teach as a four-day intensive workshop at the UCLA Extension Writers' Studio, February 7th through 10th.  Details are in the sidebar, but give Leigh-Michil a call at 310-206-2612 if you're interested in attending.  Even if you come into my classroom feeling cinematically clueless, you'll leave it with the tools you need to realize your mind's movie on the page.