Podcast

Monday, October 31, 2011

Storyteller's Rulebook #103: Misunderstandings Must Be Ironic

The week before last, I used stills from the movie all week, then last week I broke down the first 15 minutes. After that, I couldn’t resist re-watching the whole thing, and wow, the rules started flowing! So now we have...Misunderstandings can be a crutch when used to prop up shaky writing. Captain America was a lot of fun, but the weakest plot turn in that movie showed the danger of relying on an unironic misunderstanding.At mid-movie, everything is hunky dory with Cap and his love interest. They’re both super-nice, so there’s no room for any real drama in their relationship. But the writers nevertheless felt the need to put a bump in the road, so they fell back on that old standby... Out of nowhere, a vixen-ish secretary jumps Cap’s bones as he’s leaving the war office. Before he can turn her down, his crush walks in and sees them together, then runs away. Ugh.

This false conflict could be resolved with a simple explanation, but, as usual, the misunderstanding snowballs out of control. Why do this? Why not generate an actual difference of opinion between the two, so that a genuine dilemma can help fuel the drama, instead of a meaningless mix-up?

The Apartment, on the other hand, shows the value that an ironic misunderstanding can have. Baxter’s neighbor spends the entire movie convinced that Baxter, and not his bosses, is bringing all those women back to his apartment. This adds a thick layer of irony to all of their discussions.Baxter accepts the criticism because he wants to be gentlemanly and not expose his bosses’ affairs, but as a result he looks like a massive heel. The audience bristles with indignation to hear our hero falsely accused, but we also know that what Baxter’s doing is wrong, and so we know (as he knows) that he does deserve this criticism, even though it’s misdirected.

This irony is compounded when Baxter, Miss Kubelik, and the doctor are all in the apartment together. Baxter must now take the blame for her suicide attempt to cover for his boss, Sheldrake. As the doctor’s criticisms get more severe, Baxter must totally adopt the persona of Sheldrake, quoting his boss’s cruel dismissals of Kubelik as if they were his own.

This attempt to identify with his boss has the opposite effect on Baxter: It forces him to finally realize just how despicable Sheldrake is. Baxter has to become what he fears, which shows him what he really wants to be. It also results in the advice he most needs to hear, even if he hears it for the wrong reason: be a mensch.

Imagine a different version of this scene: Baxter truthfully explains the situation and the doctor sympathetically suggests that Baxter should stand up to his terrible boss. That would be far less powerful.

The misunderstanding in Captain America is unironic, and tests the audience’s patience. The many misunderstandings in The Apartment are wickedly ironic, juicing every scene with additional layers of meaning.

Sunday, October 30, 2011

Underrated Movie #137: Nobody's Fool


Title: Nobody’s Fool
Year:
1994
Director:
Robert Benton
Writers:
Benton, based on the novel by Richard Russo
Stars:
Paul Newman, Bruce Willis (uncredited), Jessica Tandy, Melanie Griffith, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Dylan Walsh, Gene Saks, Pruitt Taylor Vince, Margo Martindale

The Story: An aging ne’er-do-well handyman tries the patience of his friends and foes in a poky little snowbound town in upstate New York. When his college professor son moves in with him, he decides it’s time to finally get his ass in gear.

How it Came to be Underrated: This was a little-seen critic’s darling, but Newman was considered a shoe-in for best actor, until he got steamrolled over by Tom Hanks’s aw-shucks work in Forrest Gump. That’s a shame, because this is the sort of meaty, funny, heartbreaking role that every older actor dreams of, and Newman hits it out of the park. If he had won, this might have gotten the recognition it deserved.

Why It’s Great:

  1. This is a real “They don’t make ‘em like this anymore” kind of movie, starting with gentle classical music playing over poignant shots of the snowbound town, then easing us into an understated low-drama heartfelt character piece. Will Hollywood ever make movies like this again? If not, why can’t we get indie movies like this?
  2. In a great recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, Brad Pitt, who is usually humorously humble and self-effacing, showed a bit of petulance when he complained that he had “the bitch role” in Interview with the Vampire. In other words: the role that’s always on the losing end and doesn’t come out on top. It’s a peek into how the star system works, or doesn’t work. Bruce Willis is wonderful here in a major role, but he’s bizarrely uncredited. Why? Because it’s a bitch role, and undignified for a big star. (But one that he found too good to pass up, as long as they didn’t advertise it)
  3. Is there any better expression of realism than shooting a whole movie in actual messy snow? I’ll always have a special spot in my heart for truly-committed movies like this and McCabe and Mrs. Miller. (It was certainly an appropriate movie for me and Betsy to watch yesterday as NYC got hit with an unseasonable snowstorm.) The abundant charm of the small town here reminded me of this song.
  4. Check out that cast! The talent pool in this ensemble runs deep and wide. Yes, that’s the same Gene Saks who was so great as Chuckles the Chipmunk in A Thousand Clowns, and he’s once again delightful. The best surprise is Pruitt Taylor Vince, who almost steals the movie from all those heavyweights as Newman’s sad-sack assistant.

If You Like This, You Should Also Check Out: Benton, Russo and Newman re-teamed after this for a good laid-back noir called Twilight. (Newman played a teen girl in love with two cursed hunks. That man could do anything.)

How Available Is It?: It’s on a bare-bones DVD with another Newman movie (Fat Man and Little Boy) on the flip side, but it’s a nice print.

Today’s Post Was Brought To You By: Umm…

Thursday, October 27, 2011

The 15 Minutes Project #8: C.C. Baxter in The Apartment


C. C. Baxter in The Apartment
  1. Credits roll over exterior shots of the apartment.
  2. Aerial shots of the city. Baxter’s voiceover gives actuarial statistics about New York City. He explains that he works for an insurance company, Consolidated Life.
  3. We see a vast sea of employees. We meet Baxter at one of the desks, using a massive adding machine. His head jerks with each movement. The bell goes off and everybody else leaves but Baxter stays at his desk, working. He explains in voiceover that he can’t go home yet because he has a little problem with his apartment.
  4. Baxter comes home, sees the lights on in his apartment and hears music playing. He frowns and hides, waiting outside…
  5. Inside, we see one of the execs at his company trying to hustle a floozie out of the apartment.
  6. Baxter hides when the exec finally leaves. The floozie insists on a cab instead of subway fare. “How come all you dames have to live in the Bronx?” “You mean you take other girls up here?” “Certainly not, I’m a happily married man!” Baxter rolls his eyes.
  7. Baxter enters, his neighbor asks about all the noise, disapprovingly.
  8. Baxter cleans up, but the exec comes back and says she forgot her galoshes. Baxter tries to complain. The exec says he put in a good word for him with Sheldrake in personnel. The exec complains about the lack of crackers and drinks, but puts off chipping in any money. He leaves.
  9. Baxter cleans up after their party, drinks the last martini, cooks himself a TV dinner.
  10. The doctor from next door comes home, sees Baxter setting out a lot of liquor bottles. He’s shocked a nebbish like Baxter could have so many parties and sleep with so many women—or so he hears through the walls. “Slow down, kid!” Baxter just shrugs.
  11. Baxter is asleep in bed when a another exec, on the phone, wakes him up and demands the apartment, Baxter has already taken a sleeping pill and it’s 11PM, but the exec says that he’s filling out the efficiency report the next day...
  12. Baxter hides under his stoop while the exec enters with Marilyn Monroe sound-alike.
  13. The exec enters the apartment. The neighbor shouts, “Mildred! He’s at it again!”
  14. Baxter falls asleep on a park bench.
  15. Baxter arrives at work with a cold. Says hello to one of the execs in the lobby. Elevator opens. Kubelick, a pretty elevator girls, says hello to everybody.
  16. In elevator, Baxter asks her, “What did you do to your hair?” “It was making me nervous so I chopped it off. Big mistake, huh?” “No, I kinda like it!” He sniffles loudly. She says, “You’ve got a lulu.” “Yeah, better not get too close.” “Oh, I never get colds.” He gives statistics on the average number of colds. She says that that makes her feel terrible, since somebody else has to get more colds to make up for her good health.
  17. An exec slaps her ass. She makes a joke about chopping off his hand. They both laugh. The exec takes Lemmon aside: “That Kubelick! Best operator in the building. I’m not a bad operator myself, but she just won’t give me a tumble.” He wonders why not. Baxter responds, “It could be she’s just a nice respectable girl, there’s millions of them!” The exec sneers: “Listen to him: Little Lord Fauntleroy!”
  18. Baxter calls another exec and tells him that his floozie did a Picasso mural on his wall and he put the wrong key under the mat, meaning that Baxter had to sleep in the park. The exec agrees to send the right key down and send in that efficiency report praising Baxter.
  19. Baxter is called upstairs to speak to the boss. He assumes that he is about to get a promotion.
  20. He tells Kubelick the good news in the elevator. She’s happy for him.
  21. Instead, his boss tells he knows all about the key and doesn’t approve. Baxter promises to stop. The boss says good, because he wants the exclusive use of the apartment for his own mistress…


Analysis: If the story had started earlier, we could say that the problem was a lack of a promotion, the opportunity was the execs who wanted his key, and the conflict was they disrespect they showed towards their privileges. But Wilder skips over the series of soul-deadening compromises that brought Baxter to this point, and that all becomes the backstory. Instead, he starts at the moment that Baxter begins to want to pull himself out of this mess. Deciding where to begin your story is just as hard as figuring out how to end it.

Wednesday, October 26, 2011

The 15 Minutes Project #7: Dave in Breaking Away

Back by popular demand!

Dave in Breaking Away
  1. Shot of quarry, hear four teen boys proudly singing: “When I die, won’t you bury me / In the parking lot of the A&P!” Dave responds, “Bravo! Bellisima!”. Four friends walking to their swimming hole (which used to be a quarry that employed their dads.) Dave carries a trophy from a bicycle race he’s just won. Dave’s friends ask him if he’s really going to shave his legs to become a better racer. He responds positively in Italian.
  2. At the swimming hole, one friend points out that this is the first time that nobody’s going ask them to write a “theme” about what they did that summer. They got a lot of rights at age 18, but, “What the hell do you get to do when you’re 19?” “You leave home.” “My dad said that Jesus never moved more than 50 miles from his home.” “Yeah, and look what happened to him.” Dave won’t swim with them because an Italian coach said not to swim after a race.
  3. Dave rides through his neighborhood with his trophy, singing an Italian opera.
  4. Dave’s mom gives his dad a small serving of food. “This is it?” She says, “you’ve got a bad heart.” He says that it’s because of their son. “We gave him a year off to hang out with those bums, now he thinks he’s an I-Tie. I wanted him to go to college, but then, why should he, I worked in quarry.” “Most of the quarries are closed.” “There are no jobs but let him come home tired from looking. He’s never tired! He’s never miserable!” Mom says, “He says Italian families stay together. He thinks we should have another child.”
  5. Dave comes home, says Italians racers are coming soon. Mom shows off trophy to dad. “So what, I lived fifty years, I never got a trophy.” So Dave gives the trophy to his dad and heads to his room.
  6. Dave puts on an Italian opera. Dad goes to yell at him. Comes back disturbed: their son is shaving his legs.
  7. [Because this is an ensemble movie, we then cut to scenes about another one of the friends, then back to…]
  8. Dave’s dad’s used car lot. He lies immediately: “Gets 30 miles to a gallon. Of course the milage you get may vary.” Dave bicycles by and calls out “Bongiorno, Papa!” His dad asks an employee, “Friend of yours?” (Foreshadowing his later denial of his son).
  9. The four boys sun on a rock in the quarry. One asks, “Aren’t you glad we got fired from the A&P?” The others point out that he got fired and they all quit in solidarity. They add, “You know there aren’t many places that will hire all four of us.” “You know what I’d like to be? Smart.” One talks about how his parents moved to Chicago looking for work. Dave responds, “You can come live with me. In Italy everybody lives together.” They point out that that ever since Dave won that Italian bike, he’s been acting strange.
  10. College kids arrive to swim. “What the hell are they doing here?” College kids make daring dives that the poor kids can’t do, then taunt them with, “Hey cutters!” “Let’s get out of here, if they’re gonna come here then we’re gonna go on the campus.”
  11. They drive through campus, shirtless. “Going to college must do something to girl’s tits, I swear.” “Sure look like they got it made.” “That’s because they’re rich.” Dave points out, “In Italy they’re poor but happy.” They drive over a Frisbee thrown by a pretty girl and laugh.
  12. They watch the college football game from a hill nearby. “Every year there’s gonna be a new star football player, and it’s never going to be me. They’ll keep calling us cutter. To them it’s just a dirty work. To me it’s just something else I never got a chance to be.”
  13. Dave bicycles through campus and sees the girl whose Frisbee got run over. She hops on a Vespa but drops her notebook and doesn’t notice. Dave grabs the notebook and bicycles after her, all the way across campus, to catch up.
  14. He catches up to her, returns the notebook, and pretends to be Italian. She asks if he’s an exchange student, he says he is. He considers asking her out, but he’s too shy, for now…


Analysis: This is a good example of an ensemble movie that’s not really an ensemble movie. Of the four teens, three get their own storylines (Dennis Christopher as Dave, Dennis Quaid and Jackie Earl Haley. Daniel Stern’s character doesn’t arc because he’s already made his peace with his lot in life) But the moviemakers don’t start to cut away to Haley and Quaid’s storylines until after they’ve firmly established our identification with Dave.

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Storyteller's Rulebook #102: A Love Triangle Has Six Sides

Love triangles are a lot of fun, but they’re deceptively hard to write. This is because every time you have three characters, you’re dealing with six different sets of emotions. I just re-wrote a script about a love triangle and I realized that I had only done half the job on the first pass. I was thinking about the three legs of the triangle (the relationship between each pair of characters) but it’s more complex than that...

For better or for worse, the rule that “People only want what they want” applies even to friendships and relationships. If you and I are friends, it doesn’t mean that we want the same things from each other. I like you for certain reasons, and you like me for your own reasons. Maybe I like to talk and you like to listen. Or I like to take and you like to give. Maybe I want a hunting buddy but you just want a drinking buddy. Maybe we both expect things from each other that the other won’t give, and the friendship is ultimately doomed.

To prepare for my re-write, I re-watched The Talented Mr. Ripley and wow, has it aged well! It’s a masterpiece, and the special features on the DVD are pretty fantastic as well. Writer/director Anthony Minghella devotes his whole commentary to mapping out the very complex psychological terrain lurking beneath the surface of the movie (It’s a great example of another rule: “Know more than you show”).

He makes it very clear that the love triangle between Tom (Matt Damon), Dickey (Jude Law) and Marge (Gwyneth Paltrow) has six sides to it, none of which ever quite meet up:
  1. Why does Tom like Dickey?
  2. Why does Dickey like Tom?
  3. Why does Dickey like Marge?
  4. Why does Marge like Dickey?
  5. Why does Tom like Marge?
  6. Why does Marge like Tom?
There are six very different answers. This is one reason that a two-hour movie should have a one-hour plot. If you’re going to take the time to interweave six different sets of emotional motivations for just three characters, you have to learn to prioritize character over plot.

Monday, October 24, 2011

Storyteller's Rulebook #101: Funniest Isn't Always Best


One of the reasons that writing comedy is so hard is that you have to serve two sometimes-opposing goals: You want everything to be as funny as possible, but you also want everybody to stay in character. You quickly realize that you can’t always use the funniest possible line or show the funniest possible action. Instead, you have to limit yourself to the funniest line or action that this character would say or do in this situation.

On “How I Met Your Mother”, if the writers comes up with a funny Barney joke, but he’s not in the scene, they have to resist the temptation to just give that line to Ted, who wouldn’t naturally say it. The worst possible solution is when writers give a Barney-type line to a Ted-type character, and then cover their asses by having Ted say something like, “Sorry, Barney’s not here and somebody had to say it!” Ugh. Do not do this.

This is even worse: one thing that happens all the time in kids’ books is that the author will mention early on that the kid has a word-a-day calendar, then every time the kid uses a word that no kid would know, they simply have the kid explain, “I just learned that word from my calendar”. Double-Ugh.
Bridesmaids had a wonderful ensemble of actresses and the script was able to come up with strong character arcs for four of the six ladies in the bridal party. Ellie Kemper and Wendi McLendon-Covey, on the other hand, each had a lot of funny lines , but didn’t really get storylines of their own.

The proof that the moviemakers weren’t sure what to do with them is in the airplane scene. They have a funny conversation about their very different marriages, but the writers didn’t seem to know how to end it, so they have the two women suddenly kiss. It gets a big laugh, but it really doesn’t come from character and it doesn’t get paid off later.
 
In an otherwise rock-solid movie, it’s an example of choosing a quick laugh over character building, which isn’t the best choice. You can’t ask, “What’s the funniest thing they could do?”, you have to ask, “What’s the funniest thing they would do?”

Sunday, October 23, 2011

Underrated Movie #136: Salvador


Title: Salvador
Year: 1986
Director: Oliver Stone
Writers: Oliver Stone, Richard Boyle
Stars: James Woods, James Belushi, Michael Murphy, John Savage

The Story: The (mostly) true story of Richard Boyle, a gonzo journalist who roadtrips with a drinking buddy down to El Salvador to cover the horrific events of 1980, only to get in way over his head.

How it Came to be Underrated: This wound up coming out the same year as Stone’s follow-up movie, Platoon, which became his breakthrough. They competed against each other for Best Screenplay. Platoon won that and Best Picture, but this one was quickly forgotten, though I think it’s aged much better.

Why It’s Great:

  1. How do you tell the story of an atrocity? All too often, the focus is put on the most saintly and blameless of the victims, as if only certain people don’t deserve to be killed. This movie could not be more different: the point of view through which we see these tragic events is one of the sleaziest, funniest, and most believable journalists ever portrayed. (It helps that the villains were literally raping and killing nuns, so it’s not like anybody was going to side with them. Except Reagan.)
  2. Stone got home from Vietnam and wrote Platoon in the mid-‘70s, but couldn’t get it made yet. The popularity of that script made him a top screenwriter, but he really wanted to direct. Before Salvador, his only studio directing job was the hilariously bad horror movie The Hand, in which Michael Caine had an evil hand he couldn’t control. This independent labor of love was his last shot, but it paid off big time and finally got him the chance to finally make his other dream projects.
  3. In the special features, they explain that Stone’s insane plan was to shoot in El Salvador, where the civil war was still going strong, and trick the death squads into providing all the production value by giving them a phony script in which they were the good guys. This plan was only abandoned after their technical advisor was killed by another group of rebels during pre-production. Stone shot in Mexico instead, on a shoestring budget, but somehow made it look like an old school epic, complete with a stirring “Battle of Santa Ana” cavalry charge.
  4. But, watching this, you can’t help but wonder what’s happened to Stone. His direction here is simple, elegant and brutally efficient, reminiscent of Costa-Gravas and Pontecorvo. It’s totally the opposite of the bloated, jittery messes he makes today.
  5. Woods has been one of our great character actors for almost forty years, but he can also do amazing work in lead roles when he gets the chance. His manic energy makes every moment in this movie tense and electrifying, earning him his only best actor nomination. This proves that he can carry a movie and then some. (Believe it or not, Belushi is also very good)

If You Like This, You Should Also Check Out: Woods also did great work in Stone’s second-most-underrated movie, Nixon.

How Available Is It?: It’s got a great DVD with a wild, hilarious, in-depth hourlong documentary about the movie’s insane production history, detailing the escalating war onset between Woods (the only sane one) and everybody else (who were all suicidal maniacs.) There’s also a great commentary by Stone.

Today’s Post Was Brought To You By: Get Ready for the Kind of Career that Pays You to Do What You Enjoy Doing Anyway!

Saturday, October 22, 2011

How to Structure a Movie

This is what we’ve been building to for a while… In The Hero Project, I figured out a lot of this (but not all of it) in real time. In The Great Guru Showdown, I looked at the structures that have been offered by other storytelling gurus. I then looked at the relationship of the Problem, the Opportunity and the Conflict. Now let’s put it all together…

Just to be clear, this absolutely positively does not describe the plot of every good movie, and no one movie will hit every one of these points. These are beats that most movies tend to hit:

  1. The First Quarter often begins with a prologue (maybe a framing sequence, or a killing, or a flashforward, or a moment of absurdity, or a self-contained interaction that represents the theme) that leaves a big question in the viewer’s mind.
  2. We meet an active hero, resourcefully pursuing what they want, but ignoring what they need. Often they (or the person they’re talking to) will issue a false statement of philosophy, which will have to change later in the movie.
  3. The hero’s longstanding personal problem becomes more acute, often in the form of a social humiliation.
  4. The hero finds out about a scary opportunity to fix that problem.
  5. After some hesitation, the opportunity becomes more and more appealing.
  6. A false goal is formed (false because it’s either morally backwards, the wrong tactic, or too limited in perspective)
  7. The hero commits to pursuing the opportunity the easy way.
  8. Second Quarter: Very quickly, the hero’s pursuit of the opportunity causes an unforeseen conflict with another person.
  9. Nevertheless the hero sticks to the easy way. Cleverly skirting the conflict (possibly telling lies, possibly just ignoring the consequences of what they’re doing).
  10. One of the questions the hero is trying to ignore is the thematic question. This is a contrast of two seemingly incompatible good ideas that underlies the conflict in the story.
  11. The hero enjoys some success and has some fun.
  12. As Blake Snyder points out, this is source of the trailer and the poster, where the hero does the stuff that fulfills the “promise of the premise” a.k.a. the “thrill of transgression.”
  13. All of this early success builds to a crescendo where it all suddenly ends in disaster. The hero loses not only the gains they’ve made but also the safe space (or safe relationship) that they’ve always had.
  14. Third Quarter: The hero tries to regroup, but comes to suspect that all their assumptions were wrong, their goal was wrong, and their philosophy was wrong.
  15. Things get worse before they get better, but now the hero is learning from their mistakes in a painful way.
  16. The weight of the thematic dilemma becomes clear to the hero.
  17. Hero finds out who their real friends and real enemies are.
  18. The stakes continue to be raised and the pace increases.
  19. One final hardship finally forces the hero into a spiritual crisis.
  20. As a result, they realize what they’ve been doing wrong. A corrected philosophy is formed and they commit to pursuing the corrected goal. (Sometimes this moment represents the end of the original opportunity, but not the end of the conflict. Sometimes it represents the end of the interpersonal conflict and the opening of a clear, but hard, path to pursue the opportunity.)
  21. Final Quarter: The hero commits to pursuing a corrected goal, which is still far away.
  22. Though their philosophy is corrected, the overall thematic question remains totally up in the air until the climax.
  23. All strands of the story and most of the characters come together for the climactic confrontation.
  24. The exciting climax is reached, and the true goal is achieved or lost forever. (This climax makes a definite statement about the thematic dilemma, but the question is not completely settled.)
  25. In the final scene (call it the epilogue, the aftermath or the denouement) the hero’s original problem is finally resolved one way or the other, as they realize (and hopefully show) how much they’ve changed.
And click here for specific genre structures!

And here’s how this stacks up against the structures put forward by other storytelling gurus, as well as thinkers in other fields who have tried to figure out the structure of a problem. (If you’re an old person with terrible eyesight, you may want to click to enlarge...)

Thursday, October 20, 2011

How to Structure a Movie, Part 5: Specific Genre Structures

So we’ve looked at an overall structure that tends to apply to most movies, but each genre also has its own structure. Let’s look at some of those...

Thrillers (and many dramas and comedies):We all have two twin impulses: We want our lives to be easier but we also want those who have it easy to be punished. When we go see thrillers, we get to enjoy both impulses: we get to feel the vicariously thrill of watching someone transgress society’s rules and get away with it, for a while, then we get to switch gears and enjoy righteous indignation as we see that same character get punished for the transgression. In the end, we get to get to feel genuine admiration as the character embraces hard work (like we have) and achieves honest success.

  1. Dissatisfaction
  2. Temptation
  3. Transgression Enjoyed
  4. Transgression Punished
  5. Consequences Accepted
  6. Honest Success Attempted
Romance:Some movies are all about romance, but almost every movie has a romantic subplot in addition to the larger story. Why? Because romantic feelings are the best and most intense feelings we have, so they make every story better. If the movie is all-romance, then the following will be the primary structure of the movie, but even if it’s just a subplot, the romance will tend to go something like this:

  1. Loneliness or dissatisfaction intensifies
  2. Meet appealing but problematic love interest (connection is established in an “I understand you” moment)
  3. Win love interest by means of a trick or mask.
  4. Masked removed, followed by rejection
  5. Become a better person
  6. Attempt to win love interest honestly
Tragedies:Tragedies at first seem very different from all of the other structures we’ve looked at. The midpoint, for instance, is actually the moment of greatest success, instead of greatest failure. The hero never pursues a worthy goal. The story has an unhappy ending. But it’s really not that different. As with any other structure, the hero struggles to pursue a goal, that struggle gets harder and harder, and lessons are learned in the end. This is the structure of every Shakespeare tragedy and many movies, from Citizen Kane to The Godfather:

  1. Pride causes dissatisfaction
  2. Ambition is ignited
  3. Success achieved with allies
  4. More success achieved by betraying allies
  5. Empty victory or humiliating defeat
  6. Realization of folly too late

I know I said that this would be the last one, and it is, but tomorrow, as a weekend bonus, I’ll cut and paste four structure entries together to form one entry, for easy linking…

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

How to Structure a Movie, Part 4: The Final Quarter

Act 3! The Climax! The Big Finale!

  1. The hero commits to pursuing a corrected goal, which is still far away.
  2. Though their philosophy is corrected, the overall thematic question remains totally up in the air until the climax.
  3. All strands of the story and most of the characters come together for the climactic confrontation.
  4. The exciting climax is reached, and the true goal is achieved or lost forever. (This climax makes a definite statement about the thematic dilemma, but the question is not completely settled.)
  5. In the final scene (call it the epilogue, the aftermath or the denouement) the hero’s original problem is finally resolved one way or the other, as they realize (and hopefully show) how much they’ve changed.

But wait, we’re not done! Tomorrow I’ll look at variations of this structure that are used for specific genres... Then we’re done, I promise, and I’ll never mention structure again!

Tuesday, October 18, 2011

How to Structure a Movie, Part 3: The Third Quarter

Moving on into the third quarter, also known at the second half of “Act 2”…

  1. The hero tries to regroup, but comes to suspect that all their assumptions were wrong, their goal was wrong, and their philosophy was wrong.
  2. Things get worse before they get better, but now the hero is learning from their mistakes in a painful way.
  3. The weight of the thematic dilemma becomes clear to the hero.
  4. Hero finds out who their real friends and real enemies are.
  5. The stakes continue to be raised and the pace increases.
  6. One final hardship finally forces the hero into a spiritual crisis.
  7. As a result, they realize what they’ve been doing wrong. A corrected philosophy is formed and they commit to pursuing the corrected goal. (Sometimes this moment represents the end of the original opportunity, but not the end of the conflict. Sometimes it represents the end of the interpersonal conflict and the opening of a clear, but hard, path to pursue the opportunity.)

Monday, October 17, 2011

How to Structure a Movie, Part 2: The Second Quarter

Okay, let’s jump in the second quarter, also known at the first half of “Act 2”…

  1. Very quickly, the hero’s pursuit of the opportunity causes an unforeseen conflict with another person.
  2. Nevertheless the hero sticks to the easy way. Cleverly skirting the conflict (possibly telling lies, possibly just ignoring the consequences of what they’re doing).
  3. One of the questions the hero is trying to ignore is the thematic question. This is a contrast of two seemingly incompatible good ideas that underlies the conflict in the story.
  4. The hero enjoys some success and has some fun.
  5. As Blake Snyder points out, this is source of the trailer and the poster, where the hero does the stuff that fulfills the “promise of the premise” a.k.a. the “thrill of transgression.”
  6. All of this early success builds to a crescendo where it all suddenly ends in disaster. The hero loses not only the gains they’ve made but also the safe space (or safe relationship) that they’ve always had.
Sorry for the quick entries, this week, I’ve got a screenplay to finish...

Sunday, October 16, 2011

How To Structure A Movie, Part 1: The First Quarter

This is what we’ve been building to for a while… In The Hero Project, I figured out a lot of this (but not all of it) in real time. In The Great Guru Showdown, I looked at the structures that have been offered by other storytelling gurus. I then looked at the relationship of the Problem, the Opportunity and the Conflict. Now let’s put it all together…

Just to be clear, this absolutely positively does not describe the plot of every good movie, and no one movie will hit every one of these points. These are beats that most movies tend to hit. Here’s the first quarter:

  1. A prologue (maybe a framing sequence, or a killing, or a flashforward, or a moment of absurdity...) leaves a big question in the viewer’s mind...
  2. Then we meet an active hero, resourcefully pursuing what they want, but ignoring what they need. Often they (or the person they’re talking to) will issue a false statement of philosophy, which will have to change later in the movie.
  3. The hero’s longstanding personal problem becomes more acute, often in the form of an overly harsh social humiliation.
  4. The hero finds out about a scary opportunity to fix that problem.
  5. After some hesitation, the opportunity becomes more and more appealing.
  6. Consciously or unconsciously, a false goal is formed in the hero’s mind. (False because it’s either morally backwards, the wrong tactic, or too limited in perspective.)
  7. The hero commits to pursuing the opportunity, as long as they can do it the easy way...

Come back tomorrow for the second quarter. (Don’t worry, when the whole thing’s done, I’ll create a one page version for easy linking)

Thursday, October 13, 2011

Storyteller’s Rulebook #100: Theme = Good Vs. Good

As I was writing next week’s pieces on how to structure a movie, something finally clicked for me. I’ve said before that the theme of a movie shouldn’t be a clear moral statement, but rather it should be phrased in the form of a question. And as I said here, sometimes this question is actually asked out loud (but not answered) near the beginning of a story, so that it comes to hang over all the actions that follow.

But only recently has it become clear to me how important this really is, and how important it is that the two ideas being pitted against each other are both morally good ideas. As McKee says, a story cannot be about good vs. evil or it will be a no-brainer. Every story must have at its heart a question of good vs. good: two equally appealing but irreconcilable ideas, such as…

  • Solidarity vs. individualism
  • Compromise vs. sticking to principles
  • Personal achievement vs. the greater good

These dilemmas need not dominate the story immediately. Slowly, over the course of the emerging conflict, it should become become clear that there is a fundamental human dilemma underlying the interpersonal conflict.

This should be an irresolvable dilemma, and so you should give both sides equal weight for as long as possible… until the climax. The trick is to come up a finale that addresses this conflict, and says something concrete about it, without definitively declaring one side to be right and the other side to be wrong.

The first three seasons of “Lost” each had a powerful overarching theme:

  1. First Season: Our future is dictated by our past vs. Our future is a blank slate
  2. Second Season: Faith vs. Skepticism
  3. Third Season: Strict, Safe Order (the Others) vs. Chaotic, Unsafe Freedom (the Losties)

At the end of each season, the characters advocating one side in this debate were proven “right”. The characters each find ways to move on from their pasts at the end of season one, and even sing “Redemption Song” together on a boat; at the end of season two, we find out that Locke was right to have faith in the button; and at the end of season three, the Losties finally defeat the Others, but in each case this “victory” is ironic and ambiguous. A statement is made about this dilemma, but it’s not settled once and for all.

Okay, I got that out of the way, now let’s move on to How to Structure a Movie...