Rulebook Casefile: The Peril of Bad Scenework in Justice League

So I finally got around to seeing Justice League, which is nowhere near as bad as Batman Vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice, but still terrible. I don’t talk a lot about “how not to” examples on this blog, but I thought we might pause to look some terrible scenework.

The original version of this movie was made by BvS:DoJ writer/director Zach Snyder, and then it was taken away from him (supposedly he left due to a family emergency, but many reports claim he’d already been forced off the project) and massively rewritten/reshot by Joss Whedon. Everybody liked Whedon’s The Avengers, so the hope was that he would purge Snyder’s darkness, lighten it up, add some jokes, and save the franchise. He did the first three, but not the fourth. From everything I’ve heard, Snyder’s version would have been even worse (Cyborg causes his mom’s death and then dies gruesomely at the end, for instance), but the scenes that are understood to be Whedon’s are pretty terrible, and worse than the remaining Snyder scenes.

To be fair, Whedon had to work incredibly fast and all of the actors were busy doing other things. Gal Gadot was off promoting Wonder Woman and had to be added to many reshot scenes using green screen later. Jason Momoa was shooting his own Aquaman movie. Henry Cavill was famously shooting the latest Mission: Impossible movie and not allowed to shave his mustache to play Superman. So it’s a miracle anything coherent was produced.

Let’s look at three bad scenes, all of which are rumored to be Whedon scenes: Lois Lane’s sit-and-talk with Martha (“Martha!”) Kent,

Bruce Wayne’s walk-and-talk with Diana Prince,

and Aquaman’s stand-and-talk with Mera.

These scenes break all my rules for scenework, and they show how my tips can be useful. Most importantly:

• There is no reblocking (Bruce and Diana walk parallel to each other, but that doesn’t count)
• There is no touching in any of the three scenes.
• There are no objects exchanged (Lois does give Martha [“Martha!”] a coffee cup before they sit down, but then the scene really begins)

Each of these scenes would have been helped immensely by literal push and pull between the characters, preferably with one significant touch. Each would have been far more dynamic if the plot point they were discussing was represented by an object that changed hands.

Worst of all is that, according to the scale I describe here, they’re all level-one “listen and accept” scenes. The first two are bland and placid, while the Aquaman scene is more volatile, but there’s still not any convincing going on. They don’t like each other, but Mera tells Aquaman what he needs to do and Aquaman agrees. In none of them does either party try to force or cajole or trick or seduce the other into doing anything, and nobody is being clever.

Now let’s look at a better scene. This one had reshot inserts by Whedon to interject jokes, but it’s mostly Snyder. Bruce Wayne meets with Barry Allen to try to recruit him for the team.

Bruce actually wants something and is determined to get it. And how does he do that? First Bruce forces Barry to accept a photo of himself showing him using his powers, then Bruce cleverly throws a bat-thingie at Barry to see if he’ll grab it out of the air, and by doing so Barry visibly admits his powers and tacitly accepts his place on the new team. That’s good, basic meat-and-potatoes scenework. It’s not an Oscar clip, but it’s a thousand times more engaging than the other three scenes.

Based on what we’ve seen in other projects, Whedon has more storytelling talent in his pinkie than Snyder has all over, so it’s pretty obvious that Whedon (who took a re-write credit but no re-directing credit) was just spackling in the cracks here. Snyder turned in an unwatchable three hour cut, WB cut all the awfulness out until it was an incomprehensible 90 minutes, and then Whedon had to shoot 30 more minutes to tie everything together with spit and baling wire, even though he couldn’t get all the actors in the same room. So he made it easier on himself by shooting listless unambitious scenes.

The result was a big flop that killed the franchise. The movie technically made a profit but it tanked its company’s stock, which is far worst than losing money.  Aquaman and another Wonder Woman are in the can, but The Flash and Cyborg seem to be cancelled and Affleck and Cavill were let go. Supposedly, WB executives rushed the reshoots so that they didn’t lose their year-end bonuses. Hope they invested the money.

Rulebook Casefile: Two Final Rules from Selma

We’ll move on after this, but I wanted to pause to point out that Selma has excellent examples of two more of our old rules:

Have One Touch in Each Dialogue Scene: The opening scene between MLK and LBJ begins with a handshake and aggressive shoulder grab, at which point they sit down and begin their meeting. After they really start their conversation, there is one more touch, and it’s a classic example of how the one-touch rule works.

This is a classically constructed scene: two fully humanized characters with justifiable points of view both want something, and they’re each confronting the other determined to get it immediately. In this case, each is the idol of millions and used to getting his way.

King sits down to make his case, and Johnson sits to listen for a while, then gets up when he makes his counterproposal, goes over to get his War on Poverty proposal from his desk and tries to hand it to King. When King refuses to take it, Johnson instead leans over and touches King once on the back as he says, “I want you to help. Help me with this.” King instead stands up to make his point more emphatically as Johnson backs off to listen. Things end there, with them both standing, at an impasse.

Obviously, in film, the blocking is more up to the director than the screenwriter, but it’s still good to indicate one touch in your write-up of each scene. In prose, you don’t want to spend too much time on blocking, which is up to how your reader pictures the scene, but again, it’s good to indicate that one touch, which is a simple way to show the crux of the scene.

The Hero Should Have Three Rules He Lives By: All heroes need special skills, so that they’re not just reacting the way an “everyman” would react. They need to have their unique volatility: Only this hero would have reacted this way to this challenge. That’s why we root for them.

King doesn’t know karate, and he never uses a blowtorch to build himself a tank. In his case, his specials skills overlap with another thing it’s good for every hero to have, three rules he lives by: “We negotiate, we demonstrate, we resist.” He has learned these rules slowly and painfully, over the course of some campaigns that failed and others that succeeded. They are pithy and definitively stated. He will brook no counterproposals.

Obviously, not every great hero has a list of three they enumerate, but many do, and most heroes have a list like this implied if not stated. This fits into another thing most heroes have, a default argument tactic. Heroes should be specific, both so that we believe in their reality and so that we can invest our hopes in them alone: Specific language, specific tactics, specific ethos.

Rulebook Casefile: The Power of Objects and Kitchens in “Beloved”

You can marvel over just about any paragraph from “Beloved”, but let’s look at this one:

• The fat white circles of dough lined the pan in rows. Once more Sethe touched a wet forefinger to the stove. She opened the oven door and slid the pan of biscuits in. As she raised up from the heat she felt Paul D behind her and his hands under her breasts. She straightened up and knew, but could not feel, that his cheek was pressing into the branches of her chokecherry tree.

I’ve written before, both here and in my book, about the value of placing scenes in kitchens. In this case we have a semi sex-scene in a kitchen, and because of the stove we already have a wet finger and rising heat before the man has crossed the room. The kitchen does half the work of getting characters where they want to go.

(And speaking of food, can we talk about how great the word “chokecherry” is? Sethe’s back has been whipped so badly that the scar tissue resembles a tree, but not just any generic tree, a very specific chokecherry tree. When Morrison encountered this word, you know she fell in love with it and cherished it until she found a devastating place to deploy it.)

At the end of the chapter, Sethe goes upstairs with Paul D, leaving her dejected daughter Denver downstairs:

• Now her mother was upstairs with the man who had gotten rid of the only other company she had. Denver dipped a bit of bread into the jelly. Slowly, methodically, miserably she ate it.

Denver isn’t just sitting there feeling miserable, she’s got some food in her hand and she’s eating it slowly, methodically, and miserably. The object allows Morrison to describe a state that is physically visible, instead of her inner turmoil. Seeing is believing. Behavior is better than internal description.  Put objects in their hands.

Best of 2017, Runner-Up #6: Call Me By Your Name

This is a good, old-fashioned coming of age romance. Beautifully shot and acted.  It felt like Truffaut.

Let’s talk about a twist on the “I understand you” scene: Call it the “I don’t understand you but I find that somewhat sexy” scene.

Both of our potential lovers are intellectual Jewish American young men enjoying a lazy summer in Italy, so they have a lot in common, but they’re also separated by temperament and age. They spend most of the movie circling each other and only get together late in the story.

Early on there’s a great scene where the older one, Oliver, begins to be smitten with the younger one, Elio, who plays a Bach composition on the guitar, and then, by request, plays it on the piano a few times.

• INT. LIVING ROOM - PERLMAN VILLA - DAY 15
• ELIO plays the piece on the piano. OLIVER leans on the door looking in. The music sounds very different from when he played it on his guitar.
• OLIVER
• You changed it. What did you do to it? Is it Bach?
• ELIO
• I just played it the way Liszt would have played it if he’d jimmied around with it.
• OLIVER
• Just play it again, please!
• ELIO begins playing the piece again. OLIVER listens, then speaks:
• OLIVER
• I can’t believe you changed it again.
• ELIO
• Not by much. That’s how Busoni would've played it if he’d altered Liszt’s version.
• OLIVER
• Can’t you just play the Bach the way Bach wrote it?
• ELIO
• Bach never wrote it for guitar. In fact, we’re not even sure it’s Bach at all.
• OLIVER Forget I asked.
• ELIO
• Okay, okay. No need to get so worked up.
• ELIO begins to play the Bach in its original form. OLIVER, who had turned away, comes back to the door. ELIO says, softly, over his playing:
• ELIO (CONT’D)
• It’s young Bach, he dedicated it to his brother.
• He plays it beautifully, as if sending it to OLIVER as a gift. 

Oliver isn’t just flirting, he’s genuinely frustrated by Elio’s intellectually-bratty explanations for the changes: He’s annoyed, but he’s also intrigued and bewitched. Elio is now a puzzle he wants to solve.  Crucially, we feel the same way.  Who would not be both repelled and attracted by this brilliant-but-arrogant kid?   The best romances are those in which we can see and feel contradictory reasons for the romance to succeed and not succeed, along with the heroes.

How to Build a Scene: The Archive

Listen to the Nazi monkey!

• How to Build a Scene, Part 1: Stop! Go Back!
• How to Build a Scene, Part 2: Figure Out What The Scene Has To Do
• How to Build a Scene, Part 3: Choose an Emotional Location
• How to Build a Scene, Part 4: Push and Pull and Give and Take
• How to Build a Scene, Part 5: Tricks and Traps
• How to Build a Scene, Part 6: Don't Stay on Topic
• How to Build a Scene: The Checklist
• How to Build a Scene, Epilogue: Mix and Match
• Storyteller’s Rulebook #108: Give Each Scene Its Own Ticking Clock
• Storyteller’s Rulebook #109: Create Subconscious Anticipation
• How to Build a Scene, Addendum: Know What the Audience is Rooting For
• How to Build a Scene, Addendum: Do You Have a Surface Conflict and a Suppressed Conflict?

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Never Change the Topic of Conversation in a Scene

Plays follow different rules than novels, screenplays, or comics. In a play, we’re plucked down in one location for a long time, and characters come and go to give us scene after scene set in that same place, right after another. It’s claustrophobic, but it’s an inherent limitation of the medium.

But if you’re not writing a play, you have the freedom not to do that, which means that you’re pretty much not allowed to do that.

I’ve found this frustrating in my own scripts: I have two characters, I’ve brought them together in a certain time and place, and they two different discussions they need to have, so why can’t I just get halfway through the scene and have them say, “Anyway, moving on, I also thought we should discuss…” But such transitions never work. After that scene gets attacked by every reader, I have to reluctantly break it up or cut it.

Scenes should be short. You should use any possible excuse to change the scene, and a change in topic is the most obvious excuse you could have. Cut to later, as the characters are doing something different, to cover the next topic of conversation. Ideally, in fact, you would break it up with another scene, because it’s best not to have two scenes in a row with the same two scene partners.

Another thing that they have to do in plays that you should therefore avoid in any other medium, in order to avoid staginess: Whenever someone enters a scene and announces that something visually interesting has just occurred elsewhere.  Cut away and show us the thing happening!

Storyteller's Rulebook: Avoid "Character Scenes"

I thought it might be instructive to look at a truly terrible scene. As you begin a story, it’s always tempting to just launch right into the plot, but of course most writers know that they need to first take some time first to establish their characters. But how do you write a good “character scene”? Not like this one, from Star Trek Beyond:

• [Montage of life on ship]
• KIRK: Captain's Log, Stardate 2263.2. Today is our 966th day in deep space. A little under three years into our five-year mission. The more time we spend out here, the harder it is to tell where one day ends and next one begins. It could be a challenge to feel grounded when even gravity is artificial. But we do what we can to make it feel like home. The crew as always continues to act admirably despite the rigors of our extended stay here in outer space and the personal sacrifices they have made. We continue to search for new life forms in order to establish firm diplomatic ties. Our extended time in uncharted territories has stretched the ship's mechanical capabilities but fortunately, our engineering department led by Mr. Scott is more than up to the job. The ship aside, prolonged cohabitation has definitely had affects on interpersonal dynamics. Some experiences for better and some for the worse. As for me, things have started to feel a little episodic. The farther out we go, the more I found myself wondering what it is we're trying to accomplish. If the universe is truly endless, then are we not striving for something forever out of reach? The Enterprise is scheduled for a reprovisioning stop at Yorktown, the Federation's newest and most advanced starbase. Perhaps a break from routine will offer us some respite from the mysteries of the unknown.
• [Kirk drinks in his quarters, looking glum. Bones arrives with a bottle]
• BONES: Sorry I'm late. Keenser's leaking some kind of highly acidic green goo and Scotty’s terrified he’s going to sneeze on the warp core and kill us all. What the hell are you drinking?
• KIRK: I'm pretty sure it’s the rest of that Saurian brandy we picked up on Thasus.
• BONES: My God, man! Are you trying to go blind? This stuff is illegal. Besides, I found this in Chekov's locker. [Offers bottle]
• KIRK: Wow.
• BONES: Right? I always assumed he’d be a vodka guy.
• KIRK: Vodka. Exactly.
• BONES: I wanted to have something appropriate for your birthday.
• KIRK: It's in a couple of days. You know I don’t care about that.
• BONES: I know. And I know you don't like to celebrate on the day because it is also the day your pa bit the dust. I was being sensitive.
• KIRK: Didn't they teach you about bedside manner in medical school? Or is it just your southern charm?
• [They drink]
• KIRK: That's good.
• BONES: Lordy. Are you going to call your mom?
• KIRK: Yes, of course I will call her on the day. One year older.
• BONES: Yeah, that's usually how it works.
• KIRK: A year older than he ever got to be. He joined Starfleet because he… he believed in it. I joined on a dare.
• BONES: You joined to see if you could live up to him. You spent all this time trying to be George Kirk, and now you're wondering what it means to be Jim. And why you're out here. [proposes toast] To perfect eyesight and a full-head hair
• KIRK: Kirk Here.
• SULU [on radio]: Captain. Approaching Yorktown Base.
• KIRK: I'm on my way, Mr. Sulu. [Hangs up] Let's keep the birthday thing under wraps, huh?
• BONES: You know me, Mr. Sensitive. 

This has so many elements of the bad character scene:

• They’re just sitting around talking, with no other activity to busy their hands.
• The hero’s selfless friend has come to have a conversation about the hero’s problem and nothing else. This is a classic “Do you know what your problem is?” scene. In real life, nobody ever asks that question, which is good because nobody wants to hear it.
• The hero is not worried about a specific problem or crisis, he’s just vaguely discontent with life. This is a problem so vague that it can addressed by virtually anything that might happen in the movie. Basically, he just wishes something interesting will happen. Unsurprisingly, it does, and this vague discontent is immediately dispelled, and never mentioned again.
• The closest thing he has to a specific problem is his father issue, but the actual story will do nothing to address this issue.

Ideally, a story will have no “character scene”. There will be early scenes that involve the hero engaged in some activity in which the hero and/or others will say things that speak to a growing annoyance (either from or towards the hero) with the hero’s longstanding personal problem, but the story won’t stop dead for a moment of reflection. The rest of story will stem from this personal problem and address it, directly and/or ironically. It’s good for a hero to have growing discontent with one specific, untenable situation, but not general discontent with life or aging in a vague way.

This scene sets up the movie for failure. It makes Kirk and Bones both seem annoying and unrealistic, and gives the hero a problem that we cannot invest our interest in. Do not write these “character scenes”.

New Video on Exposition!

Hey guys, it seems impossible to go on, but we must go on. Let’s all pretend that my silly little story advice has any meaning in post-apocalyptic America! That said, here’s a new video on exposition: This one is the shortest yet, barely squeaking in over three minutes. Is it too short? Let me know!

New Book Video: Tricks and Traps

Hey guys, time for video #2: Tricks and Traps. I’ll be honest with you, folks, I was pretty bummed to get no comments on the first video. Tell me what you think, guys! Could I do better? Should I do more? Comments, please!

Our First Video: Let Your Objects Do the Talking

Okay, guys, here’s a big change six months in the making: I’ll now be posting videos!  I had to relearn Final Cut Pro (the lobotomized version) to put this together, but I think it turned out well, so I’m glad I put that time in.

This one has actually been done for a while, but I’d intended to stockpile more before I posted this, because I’m now going to commit to posting one of these every week! Unfortunately, I’ve only got one more ready to go, so I’ve got a lot of work to do! Hopefully this huge deadline on my head will light a fire under me every week!

For our first weekly video, I cheated and combined several rules / blog posts into one, all about ways to use objects in your writing. I hope you like it!

Now I’ll be honest with you: My whole goal in making these videos is to get one hosted on a site like io9 or the AVClub, where they regularly host these sorts of videos, so I really need your help publicizing this video: Share it far and wide until someone up there likes me and posts this in a widely-seen venue. Please share it on Facebook, share it on Twitter, put it on your own blogs, etc. Please help me get these videos out in the world.

Let me know what you think! And look for another big multi-media debut soon! The site it is a-changin’.

Best of 2015 #3: Carol

This time let’s talk about some of the things we covered in the Books vs. Movies series. 

In some ways, novelists have it much easier than screenwriters, and in some ways they have it much harder. It’s easier because they don’t have to pack everything into the dialogue, they can just tell us what the characters are thinking and feeling. It’s harder, of course, because they don’t get to hand that job over to the director and actors: they have to do all the character work, exterior and interior, themselves. Patricia Highsmith was a very interior-focused writer. Her primary influence was Dostoyevsky, and her characters too, are filled with raging torrents of self-hate and self-doubt under comparatively calm surfaces. Let’s look at how she writes the first scene between Carol and Therese: 

 

 For every word of (intentionally banal) dialogue, there are three words describing the thoughts and feelings that underlie those words. So what does screenwriter Phyllis Nagy do when she has to adapt that dialogue for the screen? Let’s look:

She doesn’t try to put all that subcutaneous emotion onscreen (and she doesn’t try to slip it in using parentheses, thankfully), but she does make the dialogue more compact and a little more sprightly. Most intriguingly, she changes the two purchases, (a doll suitcase and then a doll) into one (a train set). Why change it to a train? Most obviously, because this adds an “I understand you” moment, or at least an “I want to understand you” moment: Carol and Therese can’t express as much through looks, so Carol is forced to actually ask Therese about her life and discover that Therese was the sort of girl who preferred trains to dolls. The novel scene is purely subconscious gay-dar at work, but the train set dialogue brings that slightly out into the open.

Ultimately, Todd Haynes was the perfect choice to adapt this, because he knows how to pack power into meaningful looks better than almost any director out there, but Nagy subtly gives him a little more to work with.

 Next: Another great adaptation of an interior novel

Best of 2015, #5: Trainwreck

It's ridiculous, I realize, to rank a movie like this above serious and powerful movies like The Revenant or Spotlight, but I always try to rank high-brow and low-brow together, according to how strongly I responded, and I responded more to this one, for good or ill.

As usual, we’ll talk about rules these movie exemplified, but this first rule is one that never got its own write-up, though it did pop up many times: We’ll accept your heroes’ bad behavior at lot more easily if they had atrocious parents.

As I said in my write-up of Downhill Racer:

• As with Kind Hearts and Coronets and “The Sopranos” they get us to sympathize with a bad man by giving him an infuriatingly disapproving parent. His father asks “What do you do it for?” Redford responds, “To be a champion”. His father sneers, “The world’s full of them”.

Trainwreck is also a great example of this. It’s hard to get us to identify with Amy Schumer’s character: We meet her as an adult with a montage of her contemptuously manipulating and lying to a series of one-night stands, despite the fact that she has a loyal boyfriend. Obviously, this is her flaw, as the title of the film indicates, but it’s hardly a job-interview flaw, and we’re strongly disinclined to care about such characters, not even long enough to root for them to overcome these flaws.

But the wonderful prologue scene takes care of the problem handily (click to enlarge):

 

This smash-cuts to the onscreen title “23 years later” and we’re off to the races. Instantly, Amy’s contempt for love becomes a flaw that we can root for her to overcome, because we see that she came by it honestly. She didn’t wake up one day and choose to be like this, she was programmed to be an engine of destruction. It helps as well that her father’s rant is genuinely funny and superficially well-argued: he’s bad but charming, and you can understand why a little girl would fall for his poisonous message (only to heroically overcome it 23 years later, of course.)

Next: A different type of wreck!

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Let the Listener Rewrite the Scene

Let’s follow up on Thursday’s piece, where I transcribed the long central scene of the “Transparent” pilot. As I said then, this scene throws the beatsheet out the window. The stated purpose of the scene is for Maura to tell her kids the truth, but instead they talk about everything but and never get to the point. This happens because the kids aren’t listening, and instead push their own small-minded objectives.

To a certain extent, this should be true of every scene you write: Let the listener rewrite the scene. Let them be just as aggressive as the talker. Let the scene become about what they want to hear, even more so than what the talker wants to say.

Writing cannot exactly resemble real talk (it should be more succinct, more focused, and have more personality) but it is always great to reflect the structure and nature of real conversations, even though you must do so in a punchier way. In real life, people listen poorly, and all scene partners always have their own agendas, whether they know it or not. Frequently, we have a conscious, intentional agenda and a subconscious, unintentional agenda, and great scenes can reveal both. Reread the scene to track all eight agendas at play:

• Maura intentional: Tell the truth / unintentional: test their love first
• Sarah intentional: Straighten everyone else out / unintentional: find a way out of her life
• Josh intentional: Get what’s coming to him / unintentional: confront dad about awful parenting
• Ali intentional: Get more money from dad / unintentional: demand respect.

With those eight agendas at play, it is any wonder that nobody ever hears that Maura has come to say?

When actors get scripts, they’re taught to go through each one of their lines and write the mercenary intention of that line out to the side of it, so why aren’t writers encouraged to do the same thing?  Even if we’re not allowed to pre-fill-in those margin-notes ourselves, we should be able to guess what each intention each actor will identify. 

(To be fair, allowing a scene to go this deliriously off the rails is a luxury of a more leisurely show, reflecting the facts that it has no commercials, runs a full half-hour, and benefits from the new reality of streaming, where you don’t need enough story progress to tide an audience over for a whole week. But no matter what the format, any scene written this well will hopefully be allowed to set its own rules.)

This trick can also be used to make scenes more momentous instead of less momentous: Your beatsheet might say “Lori confronts her father about his embezzling”, but that doesn't mean that you have to begin with Lori going to confront her father.  Instead, start the scene as “Dad proposes an expansion of the business to Lori”, and then as she resists, let her rewrite the scene to be about what it’s really going to be about.

Storyteller's Rulebook: Let Words Belie Actions (But Make Sure We Notice)

“Transparent” creator Jill Soloway has given several excellent interviews about the show. I recommend this in-depth “New Yorker” profile, and this much shorter list of advice she gave her writers’ room. One piece of advice is excellent by itself, but also points to one of the few failings of the pilot:

• “Allow room for the viewer to come and try and figure out what's going on by watching something interesting happen, watching the protagonist do something to get what they want.”

This plays out well in the pilot in many ways. Although the characters get frequent chances to talk at length, they remain pleasantly enigmatic, as they use language to camouflage their thoughts and actions, rather than demonstrate or explain them. One advantage this is that we learn to watch closely and eagerly, because we quickly learn that only by watching their actions will we find out the truth behind their lying words.

But in re-watching the pilot for this write-up, I discovered two scenes that I had totally missed/misinterpreted on my first viewing. In both cases, characters were lying about their actions, but I didn’t catch that, because I was still too busy trying to get a handle on this large ensemble, and depending on the characters’ words to help me along.

After the dinner, when he finds out he may be losing his home, Josh goes not to his house, nor to the home of the young singer he’s sleeping with, but to the home of a mysterious woman we’ve never seen before. They seem to be lovers, but he shrinks down and lays his head in her lap. The next morning, he joins the singer and she wonders why he didn’t come over the night before.

Here’s my problem: That brief scene was intercut with scenes of the other kids and I must have blinked and missed it. We find out in later episodes that this was his former-babysitter/statuatory-rapist (which his parents semi-condoned), who he still seeks out occasionally for solace, but the scene was just too subtle to register with me. (It’s wordless and shot in one take from a distance, so we can’t make out the woman’s dimly-lit face. Another thing to keep in mind on streaming shows: many people will be watching shrunk-down versions) When he lied to his lover the next morning, I forgot this enigmatic scene and believed his lies.

Right afterwards, Sarah tells her husband that her dad called them together the night before to announce his retirement, and her husband accepts this. In retrospect, she avoided mentioning the house because she was already planning to use that house to host an affair with her ex-girlfriend, but once again, I just believed her. After all, we didn’t see the whole conversation the night before, and selling a house and retiring often go together.

This is another peril of the new streaming world: Networks are infamous for re-shooting pilots until it’s totally clear who everybody is, even for casual watchers washing dishes. Soloway has much more freedom, both in writing and directing, and she pushes it too far at times, losing even a close-watcher such as myself.

The show doesn’t suffer as a result, but it’s a good cautionary tale nonetheless: It’s great to let your characters lie, but give us enough visual information to figure it out. For instance, if they’re going to lie about something they just did or something they’re just about to do, then don’t cut to someone else in between those scenes: Bang the lie up against the true action, so we can go “Ah!” instead of “Huh?”

Rulebook Casefile: The Masterful Subtext of Transparent

What happens when you throw a party and the text never arrives? You have to subsist on subtext. But really well-written subtext can accomplish more than text ever can. Let’s take some time to really dig into the pilot’s big (non-)scene: the three kids gather at Marua-as-Mort’s place for take-out barbecue and an announcement, but Maura chickens out and offers them the house rather than coming out as trans. Here’s the whole scene (This dialogue is all overlapping and rapid-fire):

• Sarah (about biscuits): These are really amazing. Ali, you haven’t had one of these.
• Ali: Are you kidding? I’m gluten free.
• Mort: You having problems with gluten?
• Josh (talking over Ali): Yeah, she is, she’s having a lot of problems with gluten. Also with restless leg.
• Ali (playing along with mockery): It’s restless leg syndrome.
• Josh: Also, Epstein Barr…
• Sarah: Mercury poisoning…
• Josh: Chronic fatigue…
• Sarah: Fibromyalgia…
• Josh: Lyme disease. She had Lyme disease. Four people in Los Angeles have ever had Lyme disease, and Ali is one of them, but it was temporary.
• Sarah (to Mort): You have sauce right here (touches her own chin)
• Ali: Oh my god, leave him alone, he’s mid-meal. This is the golden rule, let him be as messy as he wants, we’ll hose him down at the end.
• Sarah: No! You clean up as you go along!
• Josh (to Mort): You guys never taught us how to eat. You realize that, right?
• Mort: Because we come from shtetl people. Your grandma Rose actually ate lettuce with her bare hands.
• Sarah (watching Josh eat) Josh, seriously, do something about yourself.
• Josh: Actually, on principle, I will not. I’m eating barbecue, it’s on my face, I’m not perfect like you.
• Mort: Okay…
• Josh: Sorry Miss Cleanliness USA.
• Sarah: It’s not that hard (wipes her own face) Wipe!
• Josh: Why don’t you clean up the barbecue sauce inside your vagina?
• Mort: HEY GUYS…
• Ali: Sorry.
• Mort: Listen, I have, I, I need to talk to you about something, there’s a big change going on, and (starts to cry) Oh God, I love you kids, I love you kids, I love you kids, I love you kids,
• Sarah: It IS cancer!
• Ali: Dad, are you dying? Just tell us if you’re dying. Daddy, are you dying??
• Sarah (overlapping): Oh my god, you were right, I knew it was cancer.
• Josh: I don’t think he has cancer. He looks good.
• Mort: Thank you.
• Sarah: It doesn’t matter how he looks! Remember Jill Goldberg? She had a melanoma for three years, they couldn’t see it, then BOOM, she’s dead.
• Josh: Jill Goldberg is dead?
• Ali (talking over Josh): Yeah, and if Daddy had the kind that looked like, (to Mort) What did all your friends die of?
• Mort: Prostate
• Ali: Prostate! That’s the one that you’ve probably got, right?
• Ali, Sarah and Josh all start talking at once and we can’t understand a word. We close in on Mort/Maura’s face until she finally slams her hand down on the table.
• Mort: God! Stop it! God, I don’t have cancer! [long silence] You kids want me to have cancer??
• They don’t answer, but Josh licks barbecue sauce off his fingers greedily.
• Mort: All right… So… [chickens out] I’m selling the house. I’m done with the house.
• Josh: I’ll take it.
• Sarah: No you won’t. You’re not going to move to the west side.
• Josh: No, not to live in, I’m going to flip it. I’m going to Zillow the fuck out of this place. Do you know how much it’s worth right now?
• Mort: Well, I…
• Sarah finally leans over and starts wiping barbecue sauce off Mort’s face.
• Mort: Well, I, --Oh, that’s cold—
• Sarah: I’m sorry (keeps wiping)
• Mort: Please?
• Sarah: I’m sorry.
• Mort (to Sarah): I was thinking that you and Len would love to live in this house.
• Josh and Ali: Oh my GOD!
• Josh: No fucking way! Jesus Christ! [Jumps up to do the dishes in an adjoined kitchen]
• Sarah (touched): Why do you want to give the house to me?
• Mort: Because I do.
• Ali: This is crazy. Now she has two sugar daddies?? She already got one!
• Josh: I want a husband to buy me a house who works his ass off so I can just go to yoga and just take naps all day. I’d love that.
• Ali: Why should you two get to decide who gets the house? You both have a house! I don’t have a house!
• Josh: You can’t have a house, because you can’t handle money, which is proven by the fact that you don’t have a house.
• Ali: ‘Proven’ is not a word like that. “As proven by the fact”? That’s a verb. As an adjective, “A proven fact”, that works. See? This is why you have to date children, because they don’t correct your grammar.
• Josh: I do not date children!
• Ali: Yes you do.
• Josh: You’re a child, actually. (to Mort) Listen dad, it would have been really nice if you’d talked to me about this privately, before you turned it into a free-for-all. You know what? I have a show, and I love you guys very much, I will speak to you later. Good-bye.
• After a cut that may be a time jump, or maybe not, Sarah gets up to clear the table.
• Sarah: Okay. (to Ali) You want to take this home?
• Ali: Yes, please.
• Sarah (to Mort): Daddy, you don’t need all this food, right?
• He doesn’t answer but looks somewhat forlorn as it’s take away.
• Sarah: Dad, I’m going to put these baby-backs in a ziplock for you.
• Ali (notices how depressed her dad is): Where you gonna live, Daddy?
• He looks at her but doesn’t answer. He’s going to live in an LGBT condo complex, but he can’t tell her that.

End of scene (Sorry for the long transcript, but I found it helpful to type it out.) So what do we have here? A metric ton of subtext:

• They begin by mocking Ali as a hypochondriac = Don’t come to this skeptical family for sympathy.
• Then Sarah complains about their eating habits = They micromanage each other’s lives and resent each other for it. We see that Sarah is anal retentive, Josh is anal expulsive, and Ali is conflict-averse. Josh turns this into a criticism of their parenting.
• Mort interrupts, starts to cry, they all assume it’s cancer = Mort is (literally) death in their eyes, they’re fighting over her type of cancer = fighting over her corpse = fighting over her money.
• She decides not to tell them, offers them the house instead = “Fine, kill me”. He offers it to Sarah = “You control yourself, you keep it in, let’s keep it in together.” Josh explodes = “I want to liquidate you” “I never got quality from you so I’ll quantify you instead.”
• All three kids lash out at the home situation of the other two = “I may suck, but you two suck more so I get dad’s love/house by default.”
• Josh storms out. Sarah takes the food away from dad = “I take your offer of power and leave you with nothing. I’m now the power broker and the other kids are now dependent on me.”
• It’s only with the final line that Ali tries to really listen, but now Mort/Maura is unwilling to talk, and who could blame her?

On a beatsheet, the line for this scene would be “Maura tells the kids,” but instead we get five minutes of everything but that, and the result is wonderful. Let your characters say it all by avoiding saying what they need to say.

Rulebook Casefile: A Subconscious Ticking Clock in The Fighter

The Ultimate Checklist for The Fighter examines the wonderful scene in which Charlene forces Micky to confront his mother and brother about their mismanagement of his career. Let’s look at how the scene subconsciously creates suspense.

Scenes always benefit from a “ticking clock”. The simplest form of this is a scene in which one side was ambushed and tries to get away from the conversation the whole time. But in the scene we looked at, the meeting was planned in advance and both sides seem to be willing to discuss this for as long as it takes (even though nobody wants to be there). So how do you add suspense?

The answer has to do with another post: have a non-story element in each scene. In this case, we begin as Micky and Charlene wait uncomfortably for Alice and Dicky to arrive while Micky’s seven sisters glare at them. Charlene glares right back, then aggressively engages them in conversation, attempting to determine which sister goes with which nickname (“You’re Beaver? And you’re Red Bear? Red Beard?”). The girls sneer that those nicknames are only for family. Micky snaps at them “Be nice!” But then, a beat later, even though the sisters haven’t said anything else, he wilts and says quietly to Charlene, “Don’t use the nicknames.”

So now we’ve established the problem: Micky will only stick by Charlene so long until he caves to family pressure and his own conflict-averse nature. Just then, Alice and Dicky arrive, and we have the subconscious sense that Charlene is going to have to fight against the clock to get keep Micky on the offensive before he instinctively “goes back to his corner.” She’s got a long way to go and a short time to get there…and as Burt Reynolds can tell you, that’s the heart of good drama.

How to Build a Scene, Addendum: Leave the Hero and/or the Audience with a Growing Hope and/or Fear

I’ve talked about the importance of ending a scene on a question (often to be answered immediately by the circumstances of the next scene) but you should also keep your audience looking further ahead, breathlessly wondering how the events they’ve just witnessed will affect the rest of the story.

If your scene has pushed both the outer and inner journey forward, then we’ll be left with more and/or different hopes and fears going forward. By now, our initial hopes for what the hero might accomplish in this scene have either been gratified or dashed, resulting in a surge of hope or a deepening dread (and sometimes both).

• I’m excited by the romantic potential of the person the hero has just met.
• I’m scared by this villain-scene, and increasingly tense about what will happen when the villain collides with the hero.
• I’m becoming confident that the hero’s plan will work.
• I can see what the heroes can’t see, and I’m dreading the consequences of their limited perspective.
• I’m rooting for what the hero is doing, but I’m also dreading the inevitable consequences of this action.

A scene can be very well-written, but if it comes to its own self-sufficient ending and tries to create its own meaning, rather than propelling us forward to future events, then it can still hurt the overall story.

The scene that we looked at in Iron Man has just one big problem: it doesn’t affect our hopes or fears for the rest of the story, so it creates a dangerous moment of dead momentum. The next scene could be the beginning of a new movie. In this case, the movie quickly recovers its momentum, but that break in anticipation was a big risk.

Let’s look at the scenes I chose to examine from these movies and how those scenes left audience with growing hope or dread.

• Casablanca: We’ve already seen people get killed over these letters of transit, and now our hero has them. There is talk of a deal going down in the bar that night, which makes even our unflappable hero nervous, so we’re nervous about it, too.
• Sunset Boulevard: We have a dread that Joe’s scheme to extract money out of Norma will probably fail as much as his other schemes, but with worse consequences. (Partially because we’ve already seen him dead in her pool!)
• In a Lonely Place: After intercepting that phone call, we are downright terrified of what Dix will do when he catches up to Laurel (terrified for both their sakes)!
• Alien: We have a surging hope that Ripley is finally going to kick some ass and solve the secondary mystery (What’s up with Mother/Ash?) and a fear for what will happen to Parker when he goes off alone.
• The Shining: Yes, we’re terrified now that Jack’s really going to kill his family, now that the former caretaker has pushed him to do it.
• Blue Velvet: Yes, we’re now worried that Jeffrey is losing his soul in the process of his investigation.
• Silence of the Lambs: We are left with a hope that Lecter’s info will advance Sterling’s career. (I’m not sure that we’re really afraid yet of what he’ll do to her. It still seems like she can outsmart him at this point.)
• Groundhog Day: Yes, we are happy that Phil now has a confidant and hopeful that she is about to help him figure his way out this.
• Donnie Brasco: We’re filled with a growing dread for the future, now that Donnie is alienated from Lefty and more tied to Sonny Black.
• The Bourne Identity: Yes, we’re glad that Jason’s going to keep Marie safe and we’re anticipating that he’s finally going take care of the problem.
• Sideways: Not really. Miles is stuck in a holding pattern and we don’t feel much hope for it getting better or fear of it getting worse.
• How to Train Your Dragon: Not really. Things haven’t gotten much better or worse for the hero in this scene.
• Iron Man: Not really. Things haven’t gotten much better or worse for the hero in this scene.
• An Education: Yes, we’re anticipating a thrilling time for our heroine but dreading the downfall even more now that we know her parents can’t protect her.
• Bridesmaids: Yes, we’re happy to finally have a bit of a light at the end of the tunnel, now that a new guy has appeared, but we’re also wary of the likelihood that she will mess it up.

So this was true in 12 of the 15 scenes we looked at. This is another big task that you should take on in almost every scene.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Differentiating the Many Types of Irony

When stories seem meaningless, it is usually because they lack irony. When stories are especially powerful, you can be certain the author has packed it full of many different types of irony. Learning to recognize and control irony in your story is the most important skill a writer can have.

I previously attempted to list the many different types of irony a writer can use here, but I’ve offered up many more since that, so here’s a new list, in the order of the seven skills that organize the checklist:

1. Your story will be more meaningful if you present a fundamentally Ironic Concept (which will sometimes be encapsulated by an Ironic Title.)
2. There are three big ways to have ironic characterization: A character’s past will be more meaningful if it features an Ironic Backstory, their present should feature both An Ironic Contrast Between Each Character’s Exterior and Interior, and A Great Flaw That’s the Ironic Flip Side of a Great Strength.
3. One’s overall structure should not necessarily be ironic, because you want your structure to resonate in a straightforward way, but the theory of structure that I’ve put forward does center around a great irony: Though the hero might initially perceive this challenge as an unwelcome crisis, it will often prove to be A Crisis That Ironically Provides Just the Opportunity that the Hero Needs, directly or indirectly, to address his or her longstanding social problem and/or internal flaw.
4. Each scene will be more meaningful if the hero encounters a turn of events that upsets some pre-established Ironic Presumptions. Likewise, the conclusion of each scene will be more meaningful if the characters’ actions result in an Ironic Scene Outcome, in which the events of the scene ironically flip the original intention.
5. There are several types of ironic dialogue: On the one hand, there’s Intentionally Ironic Dialogue, such as sarcasm. On the other hand, there’s unintentionally ironic dialogue, such as when there’s An Ironic Contrast Between Word and Deed or An Ironic Contrast Between What the Character Says (or Does) and What We Know.
6. The one type of irony that most stories shouldn’t have is an Ironic Tone, although it can be a useful tool for certain very specific types of stories.
7. Finally, we’ll look at three more ironies that every story should have: The story’s Ironic Thematic Dilemma, in which the movie’s overall dilemma comes down to a choice of good vs. good (or bad vs. bad) as well as several Smaller Ironic Dilemmas along the way, in which your characters must consistently choose between goods, or between evils throughout your story. This will culminates in an Ironic Final Outcome, separate from the ironic concept and the thematic dilemma.

If you can control your audience’s expectations, then you can upset them, and that’s how meaning is created.

Next time, we’ll look at a brand-new checklist question…

Best of 2013 #3: Gravity (Motivation, Rules, and Ticking Clocks)

When I was arguing to a friend that Leo gave a terrible performance in The Great Gatsby, one point I made was that he should have insisted that his character not say “old sport” 59 different times, and instead he should have forced Baz to cut out at least 40 of those. The other writer was aghast: “Actors have no right to do that!” Yes, they do. At the risk of getting kicked out of write-club, I say that actors have both the right and the responsibility to demand script changes in order to enrich their performances. Baz was clearly shooting a lazily slapped-together first draft, and it was Leo’s job to put his feet down and refuse say a lot of that lazy crap. Unfortunately, Leo couldn’t be bothered to do that. What does this have to do with Gravity? That brings us to #1:

• Don’t Over-Motivate: By all accounts, the greatest aspect of this story came from Sandra Bullock. Here’s an interview she did with “Entertainment Weekly”: “The whole thing with the character losing her child? I said I didn’t want her going back to a child, because of course someone’s going to fight for that. So what if she had absolutely nothing to fight for—she’s lost a child, there’s nothing back home, she’s a person who’s basically a machine? That was my idea, and Alphonso was so open to it.” This was a brilliant change, and flies in the face of every screenwriter’s instinct. Writers are under tremendous pressure to over-motivate their characters: It ups the stakes, ups the urgency, and makes everything move faster...but it also takes away all of the hero’s agency. Drama is about choices, and over-motivated heroes never get a chance to choose. Bullock knew that it would be so much more powerful if her character had nothing but pain to go back to and had to will herself to live again.
• You Have to Make Rules to Break Rules: Several years ago, I wrote on this blog about the difference between writing a foundering sailboat movie vs. writing a founding spaceship movie. That was just a hypothetical at the time, but no longer, because this year we had very pure examples of each. What I said at the time was that we all understand what can go wrong on a boat without talking about it, and we all have an instinctive fear of drowning, but we don’t understand what could or couldn’t happen in space without a lot of talk, and so the danger is too abstract. Well guess what, I was wrong! ...Okay, not really. In this case, the sailboat movie decided that its situation was so self-explanatory that it didn’t need to explain anything, which was a little too cocky. The spaceship movie, on the other hand, explained its jeopardy quickly and eloquently, then stranded its heroine as soon as it could (then came up with a neat trick to have her explain one last thing to herself). Beautifully done.
• The Power and Peril of the Ticking Clock: This movie had a really nice example of a ticking-clock...but then it ran into a problem. After the first junk storm, Clooney warns Bullock that it’ll be back in 90 minutes and they set their watches accordingly, adding one more source of impending doom for the middle of the movie. Sure enough, it hits again just in time to create a spectacular sequence...but then my wife Betsy noticed something that I missed: Bullock resets her watch to 90 again...but this had the opposite effect the second time: Betsy found herself relaxing, sure that nothing bad would happen until that second wave hit. Why did the effect flip? When they set their watches the first time, that meant that at least one of them would last 90 minutes, but we could still worry about the other (with good reason, as it turned out). But once Clooney was dead and Bullock was alone, and the movie foreshadowed another storm in another 90 minutes, then it had the opposite effect, because we only had one character left alive, so that meant that the one bad thing that could happen (the only remaining character dying) wouldn’t happen until then. When Betsy pointed this out to me, I was glad that I hadn’t seen Bullock reset her watch. 

Next: Number 2, Part 1!

New Checklist and Rulebook Casefile: Exchange of an Object in The Shining

I’ve updated the Checklist road test for The Shining and you can check it out here. Now let’s look at one of the answers in more depth:

Let’s take a closer look at the scene we examined:

At the beginning of this sequence Jack is mildly surprised to find a huge party going on in the ballroom, and orders a drink from the bartender. The bartender serves him and then says that his money is no good there. Jack looks confused, but doesn’t this make sense? Isn’t he the caretaker, and should therefore drink for free? You can see a moment of confusion flit across Jack’s face: he’s not sure what role he’s playing in this little fantasy scenario. At first, Jack says, “I’m the kind of man who wants to know who’s buying his drinks,” The is the first time that he’s shown some interest in probing the ghosts for some time, but he quickly loses interest

This sets up the next beat, when Jack takes his drink and tries to join the party, only to have a waiter accidentally spill an avocado-coctail on him, and insist that they go to the bathroom to take care of it. In the bathroom, Jack realizes that waiter is actually Dexter Grady, the former winter caretaker who chopped up his wife and daughters with an ax. Jack asks Grady about his family, and Grady says yes, his family is there with him. So Jack asks, “Where are they now?” Grady responds, “Oh, they’re somewhere around, I’m not quite sure at this moment,” while dabbing at Jack’s jacket.

Suddenly, Jack grabs the towel away and says, “Mr. Grady, you were the caretaker here. You chopped them up to bits, and then you blew your brains out.” Grady only smiles mildly and says, “I’m sorry to differ with you sir, but you are the caretaker, you’ve always been the caretaker. I should know sir, I’ve always been here.” Someone, after all, has to remove a lot of stains in this place.

This is a classic example of a seemingly-innocuous exchange of an object that actually encapsulates the meaning of the scene. Jack thinks he’ll get a rise out of Grady by grabbing the towel away, but Grady only smiles: the towel has been passed on to his successor, in every sense.