Straying from the Party Line (Except for the Deleted Scenes): Chris Never Gets His Hopes Up in “Get Out”

As I watch movies for this blog, I find that most movies meet most steps of the structure I expect them to have. Sometimes, when they don’t, I find that they actually did at the script stage, and even in the shooting stage, but the scene got deleted from the final edit. Think of how Star Wars once started from Luke’s point of view, or The Terminator once had a shift to the proactive.

One beat that Get Out doesn’t have in its final version is the one I would expect to find right before the midpoint disaster: “the hero has a little fun and gets excited about the possibility of success.”

But if you look at the deleted scenes on the DVD you’ll see that such a scene did once happen in that spot. There is still a scene at that spot in the movie where Chris meets Jim the blind art dealer, who apologizes for the racism of the other guests and praises Chris’s photography. But originally the scene went further: As Rose’s brother Jeremy tried to call Chris away for badminton, Jim went so far as to offer Chris a show in his gallery in the coming weeks. Chris is very happy to hear that:

• Jeremy: Yo Chris, can we borrow you? I need to kick someone’s ass in badminton.
• Chris to Jim: Nice to meet you man
• Jim: Stop by the gallery, it’s about time you had a solo show.
• Chris: Really?
• Jim: Mm-Hm
• Chris: Wow, okay, that’d be…that’d be a gamechanger!
• Jim: We’ll get together sometime.

Emotionally, for the audience, this is just the right beat: We want to go on an emotional rollercoaster with the hero. We want his efforts in “the easy way” to seemingly be rewarded. We want to get our hopes up, right along with him, and then share his agony when it all comes crashing down at the midpoint (more like the 2/3 point in this movie)

So why was this cut? In his commentary on the deleted scenes, Peele doesn’t address this dialogue exchange, because he’s already talking about how the unnecessary badminton sequence had to go. I got the impression that the only reason this exchange was cut was because it overlapped with that sequence.

But it can go. After all, why would Jim say this to Chris? Whether or not Jim wins the auction, he knows Chris isn’t going to live through the weekend. Possibly he would say it just to keep Chris happy until the auction is over and he can be seized, but that’s a bit of a stretch.

Ultimately, this beat just existed to increase the emotional gutpunch of the midpoint disaster for the audience, but once the movie was firing on cylinders, it wasn’t necessary. The movie was impactful enough without it. But it’s telling that Peele did feel it was necessary to hit this expected beat in the script stage, before he knew his movie wouldn’t need it.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Sometimes the Hard Way is the Bad Way

In my recommended structure I sum up the second quarter as “the easy way” and the third quarter as “the hard way”. The hero has a problem to solve, commits to it at the ¼ point, tries the easy way for the 2nd quarter, expecting a quick resolution, then everything culminates in a big crash at the midpoint, so the hero starts over again a little wiser, identifies a better and harder way to solve the problem, fails again at the ¾ point, finally adopts a corrected statement of philosophy, sets off on the real right path, and heads off into the finale.

So usually the hero is trying a better (but still not best) way in the third quarter. But not always. “Lady Bird” shows us a not-uncommon tweak on the structure.

The titular heroine still tries the easy way in the second quarter, has a big crash, tries a harder way in the third quarter, fails again, then gets on the right path, but in this case, the easy way was naïve-but-admirable, and the hard way turns out to be the bad way.

But the structure still works: It’s still the case that she’s working harder and more resourcefully and accomplishing more. The only difference is that, in conjunction with that change, she loses her moral compass.

This puts the audience in a tricky relationship with our heroine: We love her, so we’re hardwired to want her to get what she wants. In the second quarter, that’s no problem, because we love everything about what she’s doing. We love her best friend Julie, we love that she’s decided to fix her life by starring in a Sondheim musical, and we love her love interest Danny.

But then, in the big crash, Danny turns out to be gay, so we’re glad she moves on, and glad that she decides to be more active and canny in the third quarter, but, suddenly, she starts alienating us along the way. She cruelly ditches her best friend and the theater program, pursues a friendship with a mean popular girl and a relationship with a cool, anarchistic boy.

We quickly realize after the midpoint, “Whoa, I still love Lady Bird, but I no longer want her to get what she wants. I’m rooting for her to fail, or, if she’s going to succeed, to make it out the other side of this and be reunited with her original decency.”

And that’s what happens: She cannily befriends the bad girl and beds the bad boy, but then she ditches them at the last moment and runs back to her previous best friend. She gets a corrected statement of philosophy and gets her life back on track, so then we can fully root for her again in the final quarter.

Podcast Episode 10: More Fun with Jonathan Auxier

The Secrets of Story Podcast · Episode 10: More Fun with Jonathan Auxier

Hi, guys, long time no see! Here we are with a new Podcast episode! Special Guest Jonathan Auxier returns to the podcast to give us some pushback for our last three episodes! It’s a good one! Exclamation point!

I also had some follow-up thoughts for those of you that have listened to it. Have you listened to it yet? Good, here we go: Jonathan points out that the Rank-Raglan 22-step structure wraps around to overlay on top of itself, with the hero going through the first 11 steps while the villain goes through the last 11. As I edited the episode, I wondered if that was true of Harry Potter, and it is true with Voldemort to a certain extent, but where it really applies is not to the villain but to the mentor, Dumbledore. Harry meets most of the first 11 steps while his mentor meets all but one of the back 11.

12. Marries a princess (often daughter of predecessor): This is obviously the one that fits the least since, as we later found out, he’s gay, but basically the princess is Hogwarts itself.
13. Becomes king: He’s offered leadership of the whole wizarding world but chooses to just rule the school.
14. For a time he reigns uneventfully: For many years.
15. He prescribes laws: He also chairs the Wizengamot.
16. Later loses favor with gods or his subjects: People are constantly plotting against him in the books.
17. Driven from throne and city: He gets fired in books 2 and 5.
18. Meets with mysterious death: Seemingly killed by his follower, but there’s more to it.
19. Often at the top of a hill: He’s atop a tower.
20. His children, if any, do not succeed him: He’s childless, his killer takes his place.
21. His body is not buried: He is laid in an above ground tomb, which is later raided and desecrated.
22. Has one or more holy sepulchers or tombs: See above.

I thought that was neat!

New Video: Irony

Remember how shocked you were when I put out a new podcast episode, after more than a year away?  Well get ready to be flabbergasted, because here’s a new video after more than two years!  When I launched my book in late 2016, I had an ambitious plan that I would have a new video every other week from then on and a podcast episode on all the off weeks.  Ha!  Turns out that videos are a lot of work.  But I'm very happy with the four I’ve made and I’ve wanted to do a new one on irony for a while.  And I’m mostly talking about a movie we haven’t already discussed to death on the blog!  Let me know what you think, please.

(I’ve also replaced the Moment of Humanity video with a cleaner version, since kids like the videos.  No more 40 Year Old Virgin opening shot!)

Rulebook Casefile: Manufacturing a Bigger Midpoint Disaster in Selma

I’ve talked about how the most common story structure is simply the most common structure for solving problems in real life, so, if that’s true, a true story like Selma should naturally hit our story beats without a lot of fictionalization. And it kind of does, but DuVernay (and it does seem to be DuVernay and not Webb), like most docudrama makers, chooses to magnify that. Is that fair? Let’s see.

The real story does have a natural “Big Crash / Midpoint Disaster / Lowest Point” for both LBJ and MLK: The first bridge crossing, which King misses, leads to horrific violence on national TV, mortifying Johnson. But DuVernay wants more, so she takes an event that only kind of really happened and inserts it here.

The change involves King’s reason for missing the march. The big crash usually happens because of the hero’s flaw, forcing them to confront it for the first time. The real reason King missed the march speaks to one of King’s potential flaws, but DuVernay created a different reason that speaks to another flaw.

In the true story, King felt he had to stay home in Atlanta and preach to his congregation, so he planned to join the marchers later (There are some suspicions that his father, who was his co-preacher, suspected that there would be violence, feigned illness and asked King to make sure be there to preach.)

If DuVernay had kept this reason, would that speak to a flaw of King’s? Well, it’s a controversial thing to say, but sort of. In fact, DuVernay does come close to making this criticism elsewhere. It’s hard not to notice that King keeps missing the violence: He’s not at the night march where Jimmie Lee Jackson gets killed, he misses the first bridge crossing, and he turns back the second bridge crossing when he sees the cops, disappointing everybody. It feels awful to criticize a man who would soon give his life for the movement, but in this campaign, he kind of looks like someone who is willing to put others in danger but not himself.

But DuVernay decides to bring in another of King’s flaws here instead. To do so, she must do some fictionalization, creating an event that didn’t really happen …but basically happened. In the movie, King is stuck at home dealing with a marital crisis.

It’s true that J. Edgar Hoover was an employee of Johnson’s, and while working “under” Johnson recorded King having affairs and mailed those tapes to Coretta who then confronted her husband. That really happened. But Hoover didn’t really do it at this point in history, and Johnson probably never knew he was going to do it. Hoover was totally rogue by this point, and historians believe that Johnson only kept him on because Hoover was blackmailing him. Certainly, whenever it happened, it was not Johnson’s attempt to stop events in Selma.

This is obviously a big point in favor of the case that DuVernay is unfair to Johnson, but is it really? Johnson should have known this was happening and should have stopped it. It’s only fair to show that the Johnson administration, in the person of an employee Johnson refused to rein in, was viciously attacking King’s marriage, so it’s fair to include that in a movie about King’s relationship with Johnson, even if history has to be rearranged and Johnson’s sin of omission turned into a sin of commission.

And it certainly works in terms of creating an effective lowest point for both protagonists. Johnson hits a moral low point, making his eventual moral redemption more powerful. King suffers greatly, is forced to admit his worst behavior, and feels even guiltier when the problems results in his missing the violent march. (But it is awkward that King’s adultery is neither set up beforehand nor paid off afterwards: We never see him commit adultery beforehand nor refuse to do it afterwards.)

Basically, the best reason to insert this moment is to include King’s biggest flaw and one of Johnson’s biggest flaws into this story, so that the portrait of each man will be more complete and complicated, even if these two flaws didn’t actually play a big part in this particular event. DuVernay is being true to history on a broader scale even if it means fictionalizing this event. I can accept that.

Best of 2017, #1: Lady Bird

What a wonderful film.  Our top two movies are so similar: Both were created by performers who weren’t known as writers or directors but both turned out to be geniuses in disguise.  It makes you wonder who else is sitting on hidden talents.  Some old rules this reminded me of:

Begin When the Problem Becomes Undeniable, End When It’s Resolved: What is the story of this movie? If I was describing it to someone, I would probably say “It’s the story of a girl’s senior year of high school,” so the most obvious structure would be to begin with an aerial shot of the kids entering school on the first day and end on another aerial shot of her flying off for college, but the movie is smarter than that.

This is a movie with several plotlines, but Gerwig knows she has to choose one storyline to predominate, begin the movie when that problem becomes undeniable, and end when it resolves. Gerwig probably could have structured the movie around Lady Bird’s relationship with her best friend, or her attempts to lose her virginity, but she ultimately decided that the conflict with the mom was the emotional heart of the movie, so she begins a little bit before the school year (iirc) with the moment that relationship becomes open warfare, and then she actually keeps the story going a little bit into college to find the moment when that storyline resolves itself, because Lady Bird has to go away to get some perspective on their relationship.

The Trailer Scene: So let’s talk about the opening scene, because it’s a great example of a “Holy Crap” moment that’s necessary to make a trailer work. The movie is a low-key coming of age story, and those are notoriously hard to sell. The trailer does include the best moment in the movie, when Lady Bird asks her mom, “What if this is the best version [of myself]?” and her mom gives her that wonderful look, but that’s not really a great trailer moment. Even if your movie is very realistic, it’s good to have one moment that strains that realism to the breaking point to put a moment of outrageousness in the trailer, and jumping out of the car while her mom is driving is a perfect example. It’s not so extreme that it would make the news, but it’s definitely nothing the characters will ever forget.

I know that for me, jumping out got a big laugh when I saw the trailer and made me want to see the movie. It assured me that this wouldn’t be that kind of movie (which is to say, the kind of movie Gerwig usually stars in), too low key to care about, or too cool for school. It assured me: This is going to be a comedy, and you’ll be allowed to laugh.

Reversible reversible behavior. But this is a realistic movie, and it’s going to also score points by undermining our traditional narrative expectations in favor of greater realism. One great little moment: Whenever a character, especially a teen character, insists on an alias, we also await the moment when they drop the façade and admit their real name, because that’s classic reversible behavior, and sure enough this movie delivers that moment when Lady Bird is at her first college party, but then it wonderfully undercuts that breakthrough. She admits her name, but then the boy asks her where she’s from and she panics and lies. One step forward, one step back. This is what we want out of realistic movies: clever subversion of tropes in a way that makes us think, “Finally a movie that’s willing to show how it really is!”

Podcast Episode 2: The Easy Way

The Secrets of Story Podcast · Episode 2: The Easy Way

Well, folks, it’s been a month since Episode 1, but life got in the way. We first recorded this on the night before the election, but we ran out of time and decided to meet again to finish it later. Then disaster struck. Afterwards, we decided to re-record it for a post-Trump world, and did so, but the dour Trump-themed version was too depressing, so then we decided to splice just the end of the later recording onto the first recording. So most of this episode is a relic of a happier world, before evil triumphed (and the end bit doesn’t acknowledge the new post-apocalyptic reality.)

You can stream it here, or, even better, subscribe to us on iTunes, then like us and review us!

At the end of this episode, we have a surprise for you, so I won’t spoil it here, but it involves a download, so here’s that link!

(Once again, the music is from FreeMusicArchive.com. It’s “Lucky Me” by Scott Holmes, with an Attribution/NonCommercial license.) 

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!

Rulebook Casefile: The Big Crash in Frozen

In my notes service, this is a note I give all the time. The heroes begin “Act 2” with a goal, and then they reach that goal far too many pages later, just in time to begin the climax in “Act 3”. But one reason I’ve never been a fan of the “Three-Act Structure” is that it ignores the real turning point, which should usually be the midpoint.

If your heroes commit to a big goal at the ¼ point of your story, they should reach that goal at the midway point, fully assuming that their challenge is now over, only to find that the easy way has culminated in a disaster. Either they fail spectacularly, or they find that achieving their goal has only made things worse.

In Frozen, Anna, Kristoff and Olaf reach Elsa’s palace, only to get kicked out and mortally injured, which sends them off on another quest, temporarily forgetting their quest to get Elsa to shut down eternal winter. Here’s that Scriptnotes podcast again:

• John August: So, one of the most surprising things that happens next is Anna gets to Elsa, which you sort of think of the quest of the movie, well eventually they’re going to get there and it will all be resolved by then. But at the midpoint of the movie —
• Jennifer Lee: That’s a good point, yeah.
• John: They actually get there and they have the conservation and The First Time in Forever and then like things seem like they’re going to be okay.
• Aline Brosh-McKenna: God, another great tip for writers which is you can just go and do it.
• John: Don’t delay it. Actually just start it. And it surprises you because you’re not expecting, you know, you establish a journey. So, like, oh, the journey is to get there. And like, oh, but we’re here. And so what else can happen? Well, she can shot in the heart with it and Elsa can refuse to change and shut them out and build an abominable snowman and sort of become more monstrous herself.

This can be a painful note to get, because it forces you to restructure your whole story, compressing your “Act 2” down to half as many pages, then adding a midpoint disaster and a second, harder quest before the climax is reached, but audiences demand this. They don’t want you to park it in cruise control for the middle of the story. They know how long your story is, but they don’t want your characters to know it. Your characters should be shocked to discover that their story is only half over after the big crash.

Straying from the Party Line: Rushmore’s Offscreen Catharsis

In Rushmore, at what point does Max Fischer finally turn a corner, get a girlfriend, and vow to make peace with everyone? Well, we don’t know, because we don’t see it. Instead, we see just the opposite.

We do get to see some personal growth: He finally apologizes to Dirk (spontaneously) and Margaret Yang (when prompted), he starts his first new society at his public school, he reaches out to Blume and exchanges medals with him. He reaches out to Miss Cross again with another aquarium scheme. But then, after that falls apart, we see him ordering dynamite and heading off to Rushmore with a rifle: “I have one more piece of unfinished business.” We then see him in a window aiming the rifle at his bully. To our relief, he just shoots him with a potato gun, then gives him a script for a play.

Nevertheless, as the next scene begins, somewhat-ominous drum music plays and we see that Max has gathered all of the characters from the movie, both friends and enemies, in one room for his play. Of course, we soon realize that, while his Vietnam play is far from safe, his intentions are entirely positive and this is a different Max: He’s got a girlfriend, he’s introducing everyone to his father, and he’s implicitly making peace with everyone he’s wronged.

This is tricky. Audiences do like going back and forth, sometimes getting ahead of the characters (we know what’s going to happen to them but they don’t) and sometimes falling behind (we can’t figure out what they’re doing for a few scenes), but this movie features false alienation: Intentionally making us doubt our trust in the main character, only to please us by re-affirming it.

In this case it works: it adds a little tension and excitement to an ending that might otherwise be anticlimactic. Yes, it’s a little disappointing that they have to skip over some of Max’s personal breakthroughs, but it’s a comedy, not a drama, and we’d rather get an nervous final laugh than a heartfelt catharsis.

In other cases, it doesn’t work: There’s a moment in the first season of “Mad Men” when Matthew Weiner decides to create the false impression that Don is preparing to kill his half-brother (instead, he’s going to pay him to leave town, which, as it turns out, causes him to commit suicide.) It’s essential to build identification with anti-heroes: We can’t sympathize, but we can at least empathize. By breaking identification in those scenes, Weiner briefly pushed our already-limited tolerance for Don past the breaking point, and struggled to get it back. When I recommended the show to people after that first season, I warned them about that episode: “At times the show will seem darker than it really is, but stick with it.”

Rulebook Casefile: The Progress of the Problem in the Opening of The Babadook

The Babadook also exemplifies three more rules:

• A story follows the progress of the problem, not the progress of the character
• Cut ten pages out by starting scenes late and ending them early
• Never let your characters apologize

By the time the story begins, Sam’s behavior has already gotten pretty bad, and things are quickly getting worse. The first ten minutes feature breathtaking storytelling in every sense of the word: We begin with ten 30-second scenes of Sam’s escalating violence and monster-obsession, then at the 5-minute mark he’s kicked out of school. After ten more 30-second scenes, he pulls the “Mr. Babadook” book off the shelf exactly at 10-minute mark, and the real terror begins.

How on earth does Kent get such a richly-characterized movie to move so fast? How can you say anything with a 30-second scene, and how can you keep up that pace for 20 quick scenes in a row?

The lack of apologies has a lot to do with it. Presumably, after each of Sam’s problematic incidents he apologizes abjectly to his mom or she to others, but the movie has no time for that. It’s tricky, because those scenes are tempting to write: after all, that’s big drama …but it’s empty drama. The audience doesn’t want to watch characters talk about something that’s already happened, they vastly prefer to watch characters discuss things that might happen, or that are happening. What’s done is done.

Here’s what Kent has to say:

• “Deciding the structure of it, I was always trying to make it more and more constrictive. It’s a matter of rhythm. For me, films have more in common with music than with novels or literature. The flow of this movie was determined by its musicality. We didn’t stop in the edit until it felt that way. We clipped out a lot from the first half until we got there, about 10 minutes, I’d say.”

Getting out of scenes also creates a nice effect near the end, cleverly manipulating our genre expectations. The scene:

• Once we know that Amelia is over the bend, their kindly old neighbor knocks on the door to make sure they’re okay. We see wild-eyed Amelia trying to send her away. We then cut to Sam discovering their dead dog on the kitchen floor, only to have him turn around to find his murderous mother standing over him, explaining that the neighbor won’t be bothering them anymore.

So did Amelia kill her neighbor? Well, no, but we don’t find that out until the epilogue when the neighbor is babysitting Sam again. Not only is this a great example of the power of cutting away to keep tension high, it helps with the problem we discussed last time: In the end, Amelia kills no humans. This violates our genre expectations, but it’s necessary in order to have a semi-happy ending, so one solution is to cut away from that scene early, implying just for a while that maybe she has killed someone, which makes the rest of her rampage that much scarier.

It’s a brilliant cut: If we figure out that she’s not going to kill anyone, then the movie loses tension, but if we know for certain that she has killed someone, then we lose all hope of a happy ending, which also decreases tension (our tense hopes that this might still turn out okay).  By cutting away, both sources of tension are kept alive.

Straying from the Party Line: Overdoing the Ticking Clock in the “Scandal” Pilot

Ticking clocks are great. They escalate tension and stakes. They create a sense of urgency. They pre-establish the ultimate goal and clarify the main dramatic question. But they must seem natural. If they go too far, and violate our sense of how the world works, all that good will suddenly be reversed.

“Scandal” is a show with built-in weekly ticking clock: They’re trying to get out in front of scandals before they become known to the public, and that impending danger is always nipping at their heels.

The pilot does a nice job of making the clock more explicit: After the blood-covered war hero stumbles into Olivia’s headquarters after midnight, she heads over to the D.C. district attorney, wakes him up, and tells him that she doesn’t intend to hand over her client for another 24 hours, and she’ll politicize it in the press if he shows up before then. This is a stretch, but it’s believable enough for TV. This is a huge high-profile arrest, and a political football, and the D.A. might give some leeway to a well-connected bulldog defense lawyer.

But then things get needlessly silly. Just when the case is faltering, the D.A. and the police shows up at Olivia’s door with a warrant, but she brashly tells them that she still has 40 minutes on their agreement and so they reluctantly agree to stand outside in the hallway for that time while Olivia’s team tries one last hail-mary to find the alibi.

Nope.

Audiences have a sense of how the world works, and they generously allow a certain amount of wiggle room beyond that. Most stories, after all, are about extraordinary crisis situations, and in that high-stakes world the rules for what would usually happen are allowed to stretch a bit. But come on, people. Don’t violate our good will. 

Why do this? Why not just have Olivia say, “The D.A. might be here in less than an hour! Get me something!” Because TV networks love visual ticking clocks, and pilots especially often have such ludicrously exaggerated scenes. Does this mean that spec pilot writers should include such scenes? Probably not. Don’t voluntarily sacrifice plot logic before they get a chance to take it from you.

Straying from the Party Line: Reversing Payoff and Set-Up in The Fugitive

The Fugitive doesn’t plant its clues early on. In fact, it reverses the traditional set-up and pay-off structure. Every time Kimble gets a new piece of the puzzle, we get belated flashes of things he heard on the night of the murder which now make sense to him: We only get the set-up after we’ve seen the pay-off.

Interestingly, this was not the case in the script, which begins with a much longer party sequence in which we hear all of these set-ups casually mentioned. Indeed, director Andrew Davis’s DVD commentary implies that the first cut of the movie matched the script: we’re seeing clips that were originally shot to be in the first scene.

Withholding the set-up until after the pay-off has risks. The movie has a whodunit aspect, but thanks to these withheld scenes, we can’t play along at home, congratulating or kicking ourselves when we see the connection we either noticed or missed. Instead, we feel alienated from Kimble’s quest: we want to help him solve this puzzle, but we don’t have all the pieces, so we can only watch him do it.

Nevertheless this version does work well, and I think Davis was right to reslot those moments as belated flashbacks. Why? Because there just isn’t time to set them up properly. This was never primarily a whodunit: It’s called The Fugitive and the bus crash happens precisely at the 15:00 mark, the point at which most movies get going. If the final cut had stuck to the script, the crash would have happened 22 minutes in, and those extra seven minutes might have left the audience exasperated and bored.

(Davis also does something else to focus our attention on the chase and away from the whodunit element: He parcels out the opening credits over that entire fifteen minutes. This is a clever way to say, “Don’t worry folks, we know that this isn’t what your came here for: the real movie hasn’t started yet.”)

Davis even reverses set-up and payoff within that opening fifteen minutes: In the script, we see her 911 call as it happens, and then we hear it again in the courtroom, at which point we belated realize how damning it sounds. That would have been a powerful and chilling moment, but it also would have been a repeated beat, so in the final cut, we’re belatedly introduced to the 911 call at the same time as the jury. There’s no time for chills: we have a chase to get to.

And of course, the final reason to deny us a “play fair” mystery is that the movie wants to frustrate our expectations and desires. This is a nightmarishly unfair situation, and Davis makes us feel that. His final cut frustrates and cheats the viewer in the same way that fate has frustrated and cheated Richard Kimble. In its own way, that’s only fair.

Rulebook Casefile: The Masterful Weave of The Sopranos Pilot

One of the hardest parts of television writing is “The Weave”. You not only have to come up with several excellent storylines that each have their own beginning, middle and end, but all of those storylines need to fit into the same timeline and interweave in a seamless and satisfying way. The “Sopranos” pilot, has an especially hard job to do, because it’s a full hour and weaves together seven different storylines. It does a fantastic job. Taste the Rainbow!

The Storylines:

1. Restaurant story
2. HMO story
3. Therapy
4. Mother
5. Ducks
6. Christopher and the Czechs and the Triborough towers contract.
7. Meadow and mom Aspen drama.

How They Weave:

1. 2:00 Tony in Melfi’s waiting room, then in her office 
2. 3:48: Tony talks to Melfi as we see a montage of his life “I came in at the end, the best is over. My father never reached the heights I did, but he had pride”
3. 4:30: Flashbacks continue: Tony is ecstatic about he ducks, nobody shares his joy, 
4. 5;19: Wife, daughter, son, friend. Wife: Him with those ducks!
5. 6:00 Tony in pool sees ducks trying to fly. 6:14: Carmela thinks friend is bad influence, Meadow wants to go to Aspen. Tony kisses his son, wishes him happy birthday.
6. 7:13: Nephew Christopher is learning the business, mentions Tri-Borough deal, doesn’t have Tony’s work ethic 8:08 They see guy who owes them a debt. Melfi gets ethical ground rules out of the way. 9:14 Rolicking doo wop song kicks in, they kick guy’s ass. Tony runs the guy over, breaking his leg, laughing and having fun. Tony lies to Melfi. While beating, Tony says “you tell people I’m nothing compared to the people who used to run things.”
7. 11:28: Social club, meet Pussy and others. Fucking Garbage Business, it’s all changing. 12:25: Uncle is going to do a wack in Artie Bucco’s restaurant 
8. 12:51: Tony and Christopher meet in Artie’s restaurant. Tony eyes his Uncle
9. 13:57: Tony brings a boombox to his mother Won’t answer phone after dark. Mom guilts him about not calling. Tries to dance with her. She refuses to go to retirement community. She won’t intervene with the uncle.
10. 17:49 Tony Jr. complains to parents and priest, grandma isn’t coming. No fucking ziti now?
11. 18:35 Tony is grilling, ducks fly away, he has panic attack and collapses, lighter fluid explodes
12. 19:14 Tony in MRI, wife rolls eyes at his pain. “What’s different between you and me is that you’re going to hell when you die”
13. 21.03: Christopher waits in butcher shop. Christopher has large poster of movie stars. Chris shoots the guy, buckets of blood, (FIRST NON-TONY SCENE, UNMENTIONED IN THERAPY)
14. 23:02 Meet with Uncle “You may run North Jersey, but you don’t run your Uncle Junior”
15. 23:41 Carmella and priest have a date, discuss Godfather II, Goodfellas, they hear an intruder, Carmella gets assault rifle. Intruder is daughter. Wife tells her she can’t go to Aspen. (NON-TONY SCENE)
16. 25:00 Tony confronts Melfi about Italy, hits on her. She pushes him back to anxiety attacks. “Whatever happened to Gary Cooper, the strong silent type? He wasn’t in touch with his feeling.” He finally admits that he feels depressed since the ducks left, but then storms out. (END FIRST THERAPY SESSION AND FRAMING SEQUENCE)
17. 27:04 Chris and Pussy dispose of body. They compare their situation to the Godfather. They change their mind “cut him up.” They discuss Tony’s panic attack. (NON-TONY SCENE.)
18. 28:34 Family and mom tour retirement community. Mom sees nursing unit, complains. Tony collapses.
19. 29:39 Tony back in therapy. (SECOND SESSION) They talk about the Depression. Now that my father’s dead, he’s a saint. Troubles because of RICO. I have to be the sad clown, laughing on the outside, crying on the inside. Nowadays, no values, guys have no room for the penal experience. She gives him prescription.
20. 32:02 Strip club: Tony, Chris and Silvio meet with Hesh as strip club. “A man is driven in toto by his insecurities” They decide that HMO guy has to go into business with them. “Garbage is our bread and butter.” “Was.”
21. 34:24 Carmela wants to go to the Plaza with Meadow, who insults her.
22. 35:50 Tony brings Artie Bucco cruise tickets
23. 36:41 Tony stands Melfi up for their THIRD SESSION.
24. 36:59 Artie’s wife won’t let him accept gift.
25. 37:46 Hesh and Pussy talk HMO guy into doing the thing. He’s taking Zoloft to stop compulsive gambling. They threaten him into doing it.
26. 29:11 Tony takes prozac on golf course, meets lawyer, Artie, who returns tickets
27. 40:09 Melfi and husband wait at a bar, Tony and his mistress come in. He pretends she’s his decorator. Husband knows who she is. He gets her a table
28. 41:38 Tony has sex with his nude mistress on his boat, she plays with JFK’s hat. He admits to her that he sees shrink.
29. 42:08 Tony takes Carmela to the same place, Maitre’D pretends he hasn’t been there for a long time. He admits he’s seeing a therapist and he’s on prozac. “You’d think I was Hannibal Lecture.” “Therapy doesn’t address the soul, that’s different, but it’s great.” “The wrong person finds out about this and I get a steel jacket right in the back of the head.” ESTABLISH STAKES. “You told him about your father, right? Your therapist?”
30. 44:43 Tony and wife come home, Chris calls—Little Pussy news story on TV
31. 45:14 Tony and Silvio watch Meadow’s game, obliquely discuss a solution to the Artie problem. Tony talks to daughter, Dad doesn’t listen, walks into church, talks about stonemasons. “Go out now and find me two guys who can put decent grout around your bathtub.”
32. 47:37 Silvio torches Artie’s restaurant.
33. 47:37 (FOURTH SESSION) Tony tells Melfi he’s not coming back, because the prozac is working. She tells him it’s not prozac, it’s the talking. He talks about dream: his bellybutton was a Philips head screw. He unscrews it and his penis falls off. He looks for the guy who used to know how to fix it, but a bird flies off with it. They talk about ducks. He starts to cry. She says that the ducks became a family. He admits that he’s afraid he’s going to lose his family. “Dread is always with me.”
34. 51:22 They all talk to Artie. Tony says he’s figured out that talking helps. Quotes Melfi: hope comes in many forms. Tony talks to Chris, who’s petulant about Tony’s lack of praise. Tony: that’s how I was parented. Chris threatens to sell his life story. Tony threatens him.
35. 54:28 Uncle Junior is angry about the restaurant blowing up. He drives Livia to the party and recruits her for plot to kill Tony
36. 56:02 Mom arrives at party, They all eat. Pan to pool, sound of ducks.
37. 57:00 end credits. Cover of “The Beast in Me” plays.

As you can see, there are rarely two scenes in a row from the same storyline, and several scenes contain more than one storyline. So how does Chase keep it from seemingly totally disjointed?

In some cases, he finds clever ways to jump from storyline to storyline: In the first Christopher scene he’s still reading his duck book. Later, the HMO guy says that he’s taking Zoloft for his gambling problem, then we cut to Tony taking his Prozac as Artie drives up to return the cruise tickets. After that, Tony talks about his penis being taken away, then we start the next scene with him frying sausages on a grill.

But most scenes have no such bridge, so Chase simply relies on the underlying thematic similarities between the storylines to maintain a sense of continuity: Most (but not all) of the storylines have something to do with food, and most (but not all) have something to do with comparing Tony to his father.

Next time, we’ll look at another way the first half is tied together: the framing sequence.

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…

Straying from the Party Line: The Three Henchman Structure of The Bourne Identity

Two final deviations from the checklist rules:

• Deviation #3: This movie is making me look bad. I wrote a while back and the danger of a “three henchmen” structure, in which the second act is taken up with the good guy fighting the bad guy’s three henchman, and then the third act fighting the bad guy…but I was shocked to realize upon re-watching this that this movie I love has precisely that structure!
• The Problem: This make the 2nd Act into a snooze, marking time until the real movie begins in the last half hour.
• Does the Movie Get Away With It? Yes and no. Seeing it again, I remembered that the “three assassins all get called up in the middle of their cover jobs and go into action” montage did make me roll my eyes when I saw it in the theater, but the cheesiness of that moment quickly passes and it doesn’t really turn the second half into an intermediary slog, as I would have predicted. It helps that the heroes don’t ever know who the main bad guy is, or that three guys have been called up, so although it creates an expectation for us of the movie’s structure, it doesn’t for him, so he isn’t marking time or saving his best stuff for the big bad. 

Once again, the acting sells it: Clive Owen is so good as the main assassin that a potentially cheesy moment (the hero gets the dying assassin to give him the clue he need to get to the big bad) feels painful, real, and well-earned.

And one last one, the most problematic of the four:

• Deviation #4: There are a whole lot of repeated beats in the third quarter. We have three men all trying to piece together what happened on the boat, Conklin, Wombosi, and Bourne. Bourne is way behind the other two, and since we’re watching all three, we frequently see him uncover the same clues that we’ve already seen the other two find. This is especially true when Bourne visits the morgue and realize it’s a fake body after we’ve already seen Wombosi do the exact same thing in a very similar scene.
• The Problem: Audiences hate repeated beats. Yes, we care about our heroes getting what they want, but they should also serve as our eyes and ears as we piece the plot together alongside them: if they’re shocked, we want to share that shock. It’s hard to get excited about a scene where they discover stuff we already know.
• Does the Movie Get Away With It? Not really. This is the slowest patch in the movie. It culminates in Bourne and Marie both realizing who he is, and we appreciate the devastating emotion of that realization, but it’s frustrating because they’re so far behind us. Once they accept that he was a bad guy, give up on finding out the whole truth, and decide to flee, the movie picks up again. In retrospect, they should have cut the Wombosi morgue scene and not let Bourne and Marie repeat any beats that we’ve already seen anybody else cover.

Okay, okay, enough with the rules it broke, let’s move on to some rules it exemplifies...

Straying from the Party Line: The Bourne Identity, Part 2 (When Invisibles Go Too Far!)

This movie has a surprising number of deviations. Will it get away with all of them?

• Deviation #2: There is a HUGE missing beat in this movie: A guy wakes up with amnesia, realizes that he’s probably a US secret agent, and goes to the nearest US embassy to report in and find out who he really is. So what goes wrong with that plan? Well…nothing. For some reason, while he’s in line at the embassy, waiting to talk to somebody, he just suddenly changes his mind and decides to go on the run instead, figuring out for himself who he is using a few scant clues, instead of just asking his boss.
• The Problem: This should be a huge problem, right? Basically, there is no inciting incident. The entire plot is unmotivated. Sure, he doesn’t remember anything, but he knows that the answers are just a phone call away or embassy visit away. So why doesn’t he just make the call and end the movie?
• Does the Movie Get Away With It? Yes, for two reasons: The first, amazingly enough, is that most viewers don’t even notice this huge whole the first time through. The second is that, when we spot it on subsequent viewings, we know enough in retrospect to explain it.

This moment was explained by “invisibles” in Tony Gilroy’s script:

• BOURNE on the U.S. line. Standing there trying to think. What's he gonna say? What can he say? With the cops outside, and the incident in the park, then the bank... A WOMAN CLERK waving him forward. BOURNE trying to think -- what the fuck is he doing? -- what's he gonna say? -- now he's at the window, and if he was looking for a friendly face, he came to the wrong place -- But he's already bailing, walking away from the woman, the window, the room -- he's out of here – 

But while I’m usually a defender of invisibles, in this case they push it too far. Even an actor of Damon’s caliber can’t convey this life-shattering choice entirely through facial expressions without having a chance to explain himself.  Instead, they just zoom past it...and that works! I only noticed the problem later, and by that point, I could see in retrospect that Bourne’s crisis of conscience is beginning to re-assert itself, and that’s why he realized it would be wrong to turn himself in...but it was a hell of a risk on the filmmakers’ part.

But wait there’s more: Tomorrow we’ll have a record third day of deviations!

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!

Storyteller's Rulebook #202: The Internal Conflict Must Climax at the Same Time As (or After) the External Conflict

A short one today before the big climax tomorrow...

All-Too-Common Flaw #11! 

Pacific Rim feels like it’s over 90 minutes in, (which would have been a much better length, as Gravity showed us). Our heroes have successfully overcome their personal problems, learned to work together, killed every monster on Earth and received a hero’s welcome. But, as it turns out, there’s still 40 minutes left! To fill up the rest of the time, they have to generate up a new personal storyline, involving their boss’s illness, but it’s too little too late.

If they were going to stick with the mind-melding idea, then they would have needed to create a finale in which our heroes can’t finish the final monster off until they resolve the problem that’s been keeping them back the whole time. Then one of two things happen: either we see them solve it moments before they use the resulting power to kill the monster, or we see them kill the monster, then let them have a conversation later about how they were able to pull it off, and only then realize what they’ve achieved.

The point is that the flaw should be resolved either simultaneously with or after the external challenge is resolved, because as soon as the internal challenge end, the rest “all runs downhill.” An external challenge gives your movie visceral thrills, but the internal challenge gives it emotional power. If the thrills continue long after the emotion is gone, then it will feel empty and ultimately boring.

Which finally brings us to my biggest problem…

Rulebook Casefile: Psychological Arcs in Groundhog Day

Groundhog Day is a classic example of a movie that follows the general 14-point structure of most stories that are about the solving of a large problem…and it’s also an example of how to incorporate specific pre-described psychological arcs into that structure. Phil’s journey mirrors not one but two psychological models. The story as a whole follows Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s five stages of grief…

• Denial: Phil thinks it’s all a dream
• Anger: Punches out Ned Ryerson, blows off his broadcast.
• Bargaining: Tries to take advantage of situation.
• Depression: Attempts suicide many times
• Acceptance: Tries to make use of this gift.

…but those last two steps can also be broken down further, because they mirror the “twelve steps” of Alcoholic’s Anonymous as described by that group’s founder “Bill W.”. We talked before about how Phil doesn’t have much chance to think about his past or make amends for past wrongs that pre-date what we see, but even within the movie’s narrowly-proscribed world, he pretty much manages to cover all 12:

1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol -- that our lives had become unmanageable: In this case, it’s not alcohol, it’s just selfishness. He hits rock bottom when he ends eight days in a row by getting slapped by Rita, then commits suicide for several days in a row, saying, “I’ve come to the end of me, Rita. There’s no way out now. I just want you to remember that we had a beautiful day together once.”
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity: Finally, he decides to just be honest with Rita and tells her that he suspects he might be a god, “Well, not the god, I don’t think, but a god.” After proving that he’s now almost omniscient, she agrees to spend the day with him. At the end of the day, she falls asleep on his bed as he reads poetry, and the only line we hear is “Only god can make a tree.” He realizes that he’s not god after all, because god is a greater power than him.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him: He pauses after reading that line and thinks.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves, and...
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs: He says to her. “The worst part is that tomorrow you’ll have forgotten all about this. And you’ll treat me like a jerk again. It’s alright. I am a jerk.”
6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character, and...
7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings, and...
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all: The next morning, he brings Rita and Larry coffee and muffins and does a much better job with his broadcast..
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others, and...
10. Continued to take personal inventory, and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it: He tries to save the homeless man who he refused to give money to before, but he finds that the man will die no matter what.
11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out: When the homeless person dies again, he gives up on saving him and looks up to the sky with a questioning look.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we tried to carry this message to others, and to practice these principles in all our affairs: He helps as many people as he can in the town, doing good all day long, until the whole town is moved by his example, which finally allows him to break out of his spiral.

Of course, it could well be that neither of these arcs was conscious on the part of the screenwriters, and that’s the beauty of it.  These thinkers were describing the nature of problem solving, and any well-written story about solving a similar problem will make the same discoveries on its own.  Ultimately, self-help gurus and writers are doing the same job: identifying the universal human nature underlying our problems.