What Should've Won (That Could've Won): 1929

The Year: 1929

What the Nominees Were: Broadway Melody of 1929, Alibi, The Hollywood Revue of 1929, In Old Hollywood, The Patriot

Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: 1929 was a weak year for American movies: Silent cinema had been abruptly abolished at its artistic peak and everybody was adapting to sound with much difficulty.  Only one American movie, our winner, is remembered as having made good use of it.  If the Academy had been more willing at this point to consider foreign movies, they might have found another filmmaker who instantly mastered sound: Alfred Hitchcock, with Blackmail.  Meanwhile, there were still great silent movies being imported from abroad, if the academy had been willing to consider them: the Soviet city-symphony Man with A Movie Camera and two German films starring expatriate American ingénue Louise Brooks: Diary of a Lost Girl and Pandora’s Box. 

What Did Win: Broadway Melody of 1929

How It’s Aged: Poorly.  As the first all-talking musical with a story, it was very impressive at the time, but it’s a very bland backstage melodrama with forgettable songs and stars.

What Should’ve Won: Applause

How Hard Was the Decision?: Tough...  Time after time in this series, we’ll have a great year with far too many good choices, like 1928, followed by a year with no ideal choices, though Applause is still great.  It was tempting to go with Pandora’s Box, but we all know that no European silent film could ever win Best Picture in the sound era, right?  That’ll never happen! (Until last week.)

Director: Rouben Mamoulian

Writer: Garrett Fort, based on the novel by Beth Brown.

Stars: Helen Morgan, Joan Peers, Fuller Mellish, Jr., Jack Cameron, Henry Wadsworth

The Story: Burlesque star Kitty Darling finds out she’s pregnant on the same night that  her Boss-Tweed affiliated husband gets the chair.  She sends her daughter off to Swiss boarding schools, but twenty years later her rotten new husband insists on bringing the daughter home and putting her in the act. 

Any Nominations or Wins: None

Why It Didn’t Win: For the second and final time, the awards were determined in a back room, and this time it caused a scandal because, post-crash, the moguls tossed artistic considerations aside in favor of their most commercial product.  Nominee Broadway Revue consisted of nothing but every MGM star standing in front of the camera one by one singing a song!  Melody tried a little harder than that and it was a big hit, so it got the award.  The scandal would lead to a new voting system the next year… 

Why It Should Have Won:

1. Besides, this never would have won with Louis B. Mayer still in charge since it’s the ultimate anti-MGM movie: a painfully naturalistic look at the most un-glamorous side of show business. Mamoulian’s gaze is withering yet still affectionate towards his tawdry subjects.  If anything, as the title implies, it’s the anonymous audience that are the real villains here, insatiably stripping the entertainers of their hopes, dreams and illusions along with their clothes. 
2. The opening is wickedly symbolic of what Hollywood was going through: A dead, quiet, street… A discarded, old-fashioned vaudeville poster blows along in the dust until it briefly sticks to a building so we can read it: Kitty Darling, Queen of Hearts. It falls the ground again and underfed dogs tear it apart.  Where is everybody?  Then, from the distance… sound!  A marching band approaches!  All the doors open and crowds come pouring out to hear it, trampling over the old posters. 
3. Astoundingly, this was Mamoulian’s first film.  He was one of the theater directors rushed into town to replace the old-fashioned silent guys, but the brilliant silent sequences here are the equal of the dialogue scenes.  He was simply an instant genius, but, because he’s mostly associated with the frequently-ignored early-sound, pre-code era, he remains very underrated.  
4. Terrified of camera noise, directors hid the camera inside a heavy box. Mamoulian not only had the bright idea to put wheels on that box, he also found ways to get back out on location, staging a dialogue scene on the Brooklyn Bridge and elsewhere around Manhattan.  Even more amazingly, he opened the windows, creating dense sound collages of the city’s cacophony of noises, providing one last round of applause for a fading star.  

How Available Is It?: It’s got a nice Kino disk with a few features.

Ah, 1929: Ah, Leyendecker!

Storyteller's Rulebook #128: Alienation is Easy, Sincerity is Hard

Long ago, I noted that one reason that beginning screenwriters love unhappy endings is that they’re a lot easier to write: You get to end your hero’s journey early, rather than guide them all the way across the finish line.  I’ve been reading a lot of the “Amateur Friday” screenplays over at Scriptshadow recently, and I’ve come to realize that there are some additional factors at work… 

One of the biggest mistakes that beginners make is that they mistakenly think their job is to come up with ideas that nobody else has come up with before.  So they look around at all these earnest movies about sympathetic protagonists experiencing growth and change, and they think, “Gee, how come nobody has ever tried to make a movie about a wretch who suffers and dies?  I must be the first person who ever thought of trying that!  I’m going to blow their minds!”

Of course, once they write those scripts, they find out that few people want to invest millions of dollars in a story that, even if it’s great, will make everybody feel like crap.  Movies like that sometimes turn out to be masterpieces, but not often, and you have to be a truly great filmmaker to make one worth watching.  

This is where you get to the real problem: How do you become great?  This is where misanthropic screenwriting can shoot you in the foot...

Let’s say you write an earnest, straightforward screenplay with the goal of making people feel good about life… If you send it out and discover that nobody likes it, then you obviously failed, and you end up feeling like an incompetent schmuck. 

On the other hand, if you try to write a misanthropic screenplay, and nobody likes it, then you’ll be tempted to say, “Great!  It works perfectly!  If they don’t like it, that just means that they can’t handle the harsh mirror I’ve held up to their reality.”  And maybe that’s true.  Or…maybe…the screenplay just sucks.  How can you know?

When you first start out, no matter what you write, it’s probably not going to be very good.  But at least if you’ve written something from the heart, you’ll know that it failed to connect, and you’ll force yourself to do better next time.  On the other hand, if you intentionally try to alienate audiences, then I’ve got some good news and some bad news... The good news: You’re guaranteed to succeed at that goal!  The bad news: You’ll never know whether you alienated them by writing something brilliant or by writing something terrible.

Even if you’re sure that you’re the next Lars Von Trier, and you can feed us castor oil and make us like it, you should first try to write something a little less bleak, just to make sure that you know what you’re doing.  That way, when you decide it’s time to hold up that harsh mirror and piss audiences off, you’ll know that they’re getting pissed at the message, not the messenger. 

Storyteller’s Rulebook #127: Have One Gutpunch Scene

A producer was giving me a long list of notes on a script, and then he tacked onto the end, as if it were self-explanatory, “Oh, yeah, and make sure you add one of those scenes that an actress will demand before she agrees to play the part.”  Huh?  What scenes?  “You know, one of those scenes where she takes a stand and then breaks down and cries.”  Um, okay…  I dutifully added such a scene.

Only months later did I really start to understand why.  The “American Horror Story” pilot got a very mixed reaction, but one thing that all the reviews had in common was a puzzlement that Connie Britton was willing to do such a cheesy show right after her acclaimed five-year stint on “Friday Night Lights”.

Watching the pilot, I was wondering that, too… until I got to the gutpunch scene.  Britton and husband Dylan McDermott have been ignoring their marriage problems throughout the episode… and then suddenly, unexpectedly, they finally let each other have it …and I finally understood that note. This one scene was so strong that it would have lured anybody into the role. 

If a script is all text and no subtext, it’ll suck.  Audiences will hate it, critics will hate it, and, more importantly, actors will hate it.  On the other hand, if your script is all subtext and no text, it’s more likely to win over critics and sophisticated audiences…if you can get it made.  The problem is that, if the subtext never erupts up to the surface, you may have a hard time attracting a good cast.  And if you can’t attract top talent, it’s almost impossible to get a green light. 

Listen to your actors.  Once and only once, let the emotions come roaring out without a filter.  Let your characters hit each other with everything they have and tear each other apart.  As with anything else, the trick is to first roll the rock uphill as long as you can.  The more scenes you have of sublimated emotion and indirect conflict, the more tension is going to build up, build up, build up…  Don’t worry: actors understand the power of those scenes, too, and they love to play them.  But once they’ve created all that potential energy, they’ll want to release it. 

I’ve discussed recently how hard it is to get a character to admit that they’re wrong in the middle of a scene.  Instead, I’ve advised that you should have as few direct confrontations as possible, and let your character trick and trap each other instead.  But eventually, all the tricks and traps are for naught, and the characters have no choice but to rip into each other directly.  When all else fails: let them go for the gutpunch.  Your actors will thank you for it.       

How to Create a Compelling Character, Addendum: Add A Moment of Humanity

Note: I’ve updated and expanded this post here.

Your heroes have a lot of work to do, so you want to hit the ground running: clarify who your hero is right away, then quickly establish their long-standing problem, their new opportunity, and the unforeseen conflict it causes, so that you can get into the heat of your story.   

But great characters should not merely fulfill their role in your story.  You need to give your hero at least one moment of humanity, which will convince the audience that this character is more than just a plot device.

The moment of humanity can take different forms:

• An out-of-character moment, where we realize that this character won’t just be one-note. 
• A unique-but-universal moment, that has nothing to do with the story, where the character does something we’ve all done, but we’ve never seen onscreen before.
• An oddball moment, where the character, rather than single-mindedly pursuing a goal, indulges in a bit of idiosyncratic behavior that briefly interrupts the momentum of the movie. 

When I was doing The First 15 Minutes Project, I asked for every movie “What’s the Moment We Realize We Love This Guy?”  In retrospect, the answer was usually the Moment of Humanity, so let’s look at those again:

• Silence of the Lambs: Clarice’s default personality trait is her humbleness, and in her first dialogue scene she’s awed by her boss, but she has a brief moment where she can’t help but remind him that he didn’t give her the grade she clearly feels she deserved. 
• The 40 Year Old Virgin: In this case, it’s the first shot, of Andy trying to pee with a morning erection, certainly a unique-but-universal moment I never thought I'd see onscreen.  (Another moment comes later, when Andy cleans up at the poker game, giving us a much needed brief moment of easy triumph for this very weak character.)
• The French Connection: We never really get any moments of weakness or humility from Popeye, but we fall in love with him when he suddenly veers off script in an interrogation and starts asking the perp if he ever picked his feet in Poughkeepsie.  It’s not a crack in the façade, but it’s certainly an oddball choice that doesn’t serve the forward momentum of the script, and that’s enough.
• Mickey in The Fighter:  Once again, this is an overly humble character who finally shows a moment of pride, when Charlene the bartender goads him into it.
• Casablanca: This is an interesting case, in that Rick is nothing but contradictions: tough but self-deprecating, feared but merciful, lacking in morals but strictly ethical… Rick is the most complex and least plot-driven character on the list.  He’s nothing but friction.
• Modern Times: Right away, we get a unique-but-universal moment, when the tramp is working the assembly line, and can’t take his hands off for a second, but he has to scratch his nose. 
• Breaking Away: As with Popeye, we love Dave because of his oddball choices.  Why is this whitebread Indiana kid  pretending to be Italian?  

I could go on, but I’ll stop there.  Obviously this is one of the most subjective and hard-to-nail-down rules, but it’s still worth thinking about.  In addition to establishing your character’s goals and flaws, do you give them a little moment to stop pushing the plot forward and show a little unvarnished humanity?

How to Create a Compelling Character, Addendum: Determine Their Default Strategy

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Before you write a script, there’s nothing harder than figuring out in advance how each character will talk.  It’s tempting to wait until you’re actually writing and let the characters themselves “speak” to you.  The problem with this is that there’s too much danger that they’ll all use the same voice.

It’s better to ensure beforehand that each character will have a unique voice, but how do you define something that elusive? In previous pieces, I broke the concept down into two qualities:

• Metaphor Family: some aspect of their life that determines which metaphors, curses and exclamations they use.  This source might be their job, their home region, or their psychological state. 
• Second is a concept I used to call Verbal DNA, but I’ve now changed the name to Default Personality Trait.  Characters grow and change throughout a story, and their mood can fluctuate wildly, even within each scene, but happy or sad, stunted or enlightened, they’ll still have some aspect of their personality that never changes. 

But is that enough?  I’ve been focused a lot recently on how important it is for characters to trick and trap one another.  Now I realize that, just as it’s important that character use unique metaphors, it’s equally important that they trick and trap each other in distinctive ways.  So now I’m adding a third aspect of voice that should be pre-determined: their Default Strategy. 

I identified metaphor families using “30 Rock” characters, so for default strategies, let’s look at that show’s Thursday night companion, “Community”, which thankfully returns to the air this week.  Let’s say that you’re withholding a secret from a member of the Greendale study group… How are they likely to try to get it out of you?

1. Jeff: Traping you with the evidence of your lies in a lawyerly manner.
2. Abed: Faux naïve questions, noticing little details and psychological “tells”
3. Annie: Genuine naïve questions, persistently interrogating until she gets the truth.
4. Troy: Half-heartedly attempting to lay logic traps and trap you with your own words.
5. Shirley: Passive aggressive guilt-tripping
6. Britta: Accusing you of hypocrisy, inconsistency, or general lack of morality.   
7. Pierce: He doesn’t strategize, he just insults.  Not coincidentally, he’s the most unlikable character. 

These strategies tend to have some overlap with metaphor families or default personalities: Jeff, Shirley and Britta have strategies that relate to their backgrounds (lawyer, evangelical, hippie).  Abed’s is related to his psychology (Asperger’s).  Annie, Troy and Pierce, on the other hand, use strategies that match up to their default personality traits (sweet, geeky and arrogant, respectively).

In dramas, the characters will be less broadly sketched, but still use distinctive default strategies: silence or verbosity, sexuality or piousness, logic or emotionality... Their default strategy need not be their only strategy, but it’ll be the first one they try.   

This is Hard

So there’s just not going to be a piece about which movie should have won Best Picture in 1929 today.  After committing to this quixotic project, it’s begun to sink in just how much work it’s going to be, especially if I’m going to go in order.  I’ve done some waffling about 1929’s pick, so it’ll have to appear next week. 

Additionally, I’ve only belatedly come to accept that I’ll have to do some actual research for this, and as books have come in, I’ve already got revisions to make on the one piece I’ve done.  To wit: in the slot for “Why It Didn’t Win” last week, I just b.s.’d an answer, but Mason Wiley and Damien Bona’s wonderful book “Inside Oscar” gave me the truth, which is much juicier.  Here’s what I should have said:

Why It Didn’t Win: For the first two years of the Oscars, the award were determined by a committee run by the biggest studios.  You might reasonably fear that this would cause each studio to game the system in favor of their own movies, but in this case the opposite happened.  Though MGM made The Crowd, studio boss Louis B. Mayer despised it from conception through distribution.  When the committee voted to give the movie its “Best Unique or Artistic Picture” Oscar, Mayer harangued them all until 5 a.m., demanding that they choose another studio’s movie instead.  Sunrise, after all, represented the small-town values that Mayer revered, while The Crowd failed to promote “constructive ideas”.  Finally, in order to get some sleep, the committee relented.  

Anyone who’s read Lilian Ross’s brilliant book “Picture” will recognize this portrait of Mayer’s rage, even towards his own studio’s product, if it failed to accord with his pollyanna-ish version of how America should be.    

Storyteller's Rulebook #126: Some Scenes are More Ambitious Than Others

So I’m working on a screenplay and I’m hitting all my beats, but too much of it is falling flat.  I now realize that I need to start evaluating my outlines to determine if the scenes are juicy enough.  Not every scene needs to be juicy, but you can’t just have scene after scene of low-conflict information exchanges, no matter how interesting that information is.   

There are three key elements of juiciness in a scene:

• There is conflict between the scene partners.
• At least one of them ends up doing something they didn’t intend to do when the scene began.
• At least one of them uses indirect tricks and traps, not just direct confrontation.

Mix and match those and you get the five levels of scenework, ranked from weakest to strongest:

1. The Listen-and-Accept Scene: Two characters listen to each other and accept each other’s information. They may be surprised or upset, but they don’t reject what they’re hearing as untrue.  There’s no conflict, nobody does anything they didn’t intend to do, and nobody is clever.
2. The Listen-and-Dispute Scene: Two characters tell each other things, but one or both of them rejects the other’s statement, so they argue, and then leave. There’s conflict, but nobody does anything they didn’t intend to do and nobody is clever.
3. The Extract-Information-or-Action-Directly Scene: Same as above, but one of them directly convinces the other that they’re wrong and gets the other one to give them what they want.  There’s conflict and one person does something they didn’t intend to do, but nobody is clever.
4. The Extract-Information-or-Action-Through-Tricks-And-Traps Scene: Same as above, but one of them tricks or traps the other one into giving up something unintentionally.  There’s conflict, one person does something they didn’t intend to do, and one person is clever.
5. The Both-Try-to-Trick-Each-Other Scene: This is as tricky as it gets.  There’s conflict, at least one character does something they didn’t intend to do, and both are clever.

Remember this massive chart we made of every scene in episode 2.04 of “Breaking Bad”, “Down”?  

Let’s evaluate the dialogue scenes according to our new scale: 

Wow, there’s a reason why the tag line for “Breaking Bad” is “Extremely Volatile”. On the first draft of the TV spec script I’ve been writing, it goes more like 1, 1, 2, 1, 3, 1… etc.  

(And let me reiterate here: Cleverness has nothing to do with being smart!  Both Jesse and his mother, I would say, have below-average intelligence, but they still find a way cleverly attack each other’s positions.  These are character who each feel that they are teetering on the edge of an abyss, and they find hidden resources within themselves in order to survive.  The world’s dumbest animal feels the need for self-preservation, and, when threatened, can outsmart the world’s snootiest college professor in order to get what it needs. This is why compelling characters should frequently be on the edge of disaster: because that’s when people are the most resourceful and the most fascinating.)

UPDATE: I later had this exchange about this post in the comments of a totally different post:

5 comments:

A.D. said...

So I'm working on a beat sheet for a comedy, and I cross referenced it with this:
http://cockeyedcaravan.blogspot.com/2012/03/storytellers-rulebook-126-some-scenes.html?m=1

And what I wound up with is something like this:
1, 1, 1, 2, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 3, 1, 1, 1, 1.

It seems pretty compelling on the page, but it doesn't pass the official cockeyed juice test. What I'm wondering is: am I just fooling myself, or does comedy work a little differently from drama/thrillers?

It seems like watching characters alter their behavior in drastic ways in order to AVOID conflict is one of the pleasures of comedy - but that will often yield a "1." Also, a comedic sequence might involve ten funny "1"s in a row before getting to a conflict-heavy "3" where it all boils over. Am I wrong?

Also - what would the pilot for Breaking Bad look like? Presumably you can't churn out 5s unless you've already built a substantial foundation over many hours of TV. From what I recall, there's not a lot of conversational trickery in that pilot.

In any case, it would be interesting to see more outlines rated on the juice meter, particularly in genres outside of Breaking Bad.

5:56 PM 

A.D. said...

After watching Breaking Bad episode 2.04 just now (the one analyzed in your post) I feel I've come to a better understanding of the principles you're describing.

What I wasn't fully grasping until now is that the "tricks and traps" you refer to are ANY form of manipulation, deception, or dishonesty that anyone attempts, including totally passive methods like silent treatment, omission of facts, or pretending not to notice something. It would seem that a lot of this could be added in the longhand scripting phase, even if it's lacking in an outline at first glance. For example, a lazily written one-line scene description could read "X convinces Y of the need to do Z," which is superficially a "3." But thinking through the scene in detail could easily lead to something more like:
-"X guilts Y into doing Z" or:
-"X feigns illness, which leads to Y volunteering to do Z" or:
-"X doesn't actively do anything tricky, but simply withholds information Q, so that Y agrees to join in doing Z" or:
-"X refuses to speak to Y, causing Y to go on a rant, leading to Y suddenly saying something he shouldn't have, in turn leading to X using that information to convince Y to do Z."

...instantly turning a 3 to a 4, or even a 5 in the last case. But every version could have the same lead-in and same outcome. The only absolute pre-requisite is that the characters actually affect each other's thinking and actions throughout the story, which should be a given.

Another thing I realized while watching BB is that having every scene score high isn't necessary as long as juice comes along regularly. A lot of those Breaking Bad scenes are LONG, and the "juicy" parts don't come until late. In a movie, you might have a sequence of three or four scenes in the same time span, and the first few of them could be fairly frictionless setups, and the last one would be the drama that resulted from those setups. So it might be helpful to think of it this way: every long scene or sequence should lead to an exchange with a score of "3" "4" or "5." If not, its inclusion should be questioned.

I know it's not science, but it's interesting to think about! I'm increasingly uninterested in orthodoxies of structure, and more and more interested in the details of execution - the things that make scripts better than "coherent" or "not terrible." Juice (or whatever you want to call it) is a big one.

8:53 PM 

Matt Bird said...

Great, I'm glad that you were able to look at the episode and get a clearer sense of what I was getting at. A big part of it is this:

http://cockeyedcaravan.blogspot.com/2013/03/storytellers-rulebook-173-beware-of.html

In each of those "Breaking Bad" scenes, both sides wanted something different, and only one was going to get it, which creates instant conflict, even if the conflict is very sublimated and unspoken. In true '1' or '2' scenes, the character exchange information positively or negatively, but their agendas don't really conflict. They both get what they wanted: the exchange of information. Even if that info wasn't what person A wanted to hear from person B, he still easily achieved the objective or hearing it. It's only when B doesn't want to tell A anything that direct confrontation or tricks and traps come into play, and the scene becomes a 3, 4, or 5. A wants B to tell, B refuses to tell, and only one can win.

Writing comedy is tricky because it's easy to generate personality-based conflict that seems fizzy and fun but is unsatisfying, because it isn't based on irreconcilable goals. This fantastic blog post by Ken Levine show how the power of extremely polarized agendas can be very funny even if you take all the "jokes" out (and all of the open conflict as well!):

http://kenlevine.blogspot.com/2013/03/how-to-get-laughs-without-writing-jokes.html

In the rewritten scene, she doesn't even know that she's thwarting his agenda, but she still backing him into doing something he very much doesn't want to do (sticking with the engagement, at least one more night.) (And let's face it, she does know, consciously or unconsciously)

12:08 AM 

A.D. said...

Yeah, luckily I'm no good at writing jokes. My preference is for characters who are serious but end up in challenging, absurd situations. For them, it's a nightmare. For the audience, it's funny.

I just re-reviewed my beat sheet and upgraded many 1s to 3s and 4s. Turns out there's tons of conflict and negotiation that I overlooked... it's just that it's in the form of low-key power shifts, not the kind of obvious conflicty-conflict where everyone's yelling and acting like assholes.

I really think this concept is one of your best. Is there a reason you haven't done more testing? I wonder what you'd find if you looked at the first acts of a couple good movies and a couple bad ones...

2:12 AM 

Matt Bird said...

Good idea! I'm doing a comedy tomorrow, so this week I'll do a scene by scene analysis. I expect a lot of '1's and '2's on this one, actually...

Storyteller's Rulebook #125: Let Them Sleep On It

Yesterday, I talked about those situations where a scene generates a lot more emotional friction than you thought it would, and your characters start refusing to do what the outline says they’re supposed to do.

One classic version of this, which I encounter all the time, involves pride.  In my outline, I’ve got two characters who are hashing out a heated disagreement.  Each character passionately argues their side, until finally my hero pulls out a devastating argument that demolishes all opposition.  The obstacle character has no choice but to admit that they were wrong.  Now they’ll come clean, admit the truth, and help the hero after all... 

...Except something goes wrong.  My hero delivers the coup de grace, and the obstacle character does realize that he or she is wrong, but then they won’t admit it.  Their defenses have been destroyed, but their pride is still getting in the way.  I try to write the ending of the scene, where the obstacle character says, “You’re right, I’m wrong, now let me tell you the truth,” but the character just won’t say those words. 

Luckily, I have one simple trick to get out of this situation: split the scene in half and cut to the next morning.  This is how life works.  I know that every time anyone has convinced me that I was wrong (which is to say, both times) I haven’t been willing to admit it until I’ve slept on it.  By the time the sun comes up, my last lingering illusions are gone. 

More than once, I written a scene and workshopped it with a writing group where all the writers said that the victory came too easily.  In response, here’s all I did: After the hero delivers the coup de grace, the obstacle storms out and says “Go to hell!”  leaving the hero to lament that they’ve lost this battle.  The next morning, the obstacle sheepishly knocks on the door and comes clean.  Every time, this two-day version of the scene received no complaints from the workshop. 

I noticed an example of this in Winter’s Bone, when Jennifer Lawrence is trying to borrow her friend’s car, over the objections of the friend’s abusive husband.  Lawrence pulls out all the stops to convince her friend, but can’t.  In the morning the friend shows up with the keys… and a black eye.

On a cheerier note, that scene where a girl awkwardly rejects a guy’s profession of love at night only to think better of it and jump his bones the next day always works, because we all know cases where that’s happened in real life.

These are examples of the way that friction can slow stories down, which is ultimately a good thing.  You never want things to be too easy for your hero.  If your characters object, listen to those objections and accommodate them.    

Storyteller’s Rulebook #124: Outlines are Frictionless Surfaces

EDITED TO ADD: From what I hear, “Person of Interest” became better and more complex in later seasons, but I won’t change the example because then the comments wouldn’t make any sense.

I’ve talked before about my tendency to overplot.  Here’s where I always get into trouble:  I write a 30-beat outline for my story, in which my heroes dart from place to place, ferreting out the information they need and solving big mysteries (whether personal or professional) until they reach their goal.  As long as each of my 30 beats is accomplished in 4 pages or less, I’ll come out under the dreaded 120 page limit.  No problem, right?  Wrong.

Remember high school physics? In order to make the theoretical problems easier to solve, they would always say “Assume that all surfaces are frictionless”.  Of course, in real life, there’s no such thing as a frictionless surface, so your calculations would be way off, but they were just trying to teach us the abstract concepts, not trying to get anything done.

The problem with outlines is that they, too, assume that all surfaces are frictionless.   In an outline, your hero glides into a room, collides with another character, and then the force of that collision sends the hero ricocheting off into the next scene.  And you can try to write the first draft that way, too, but it’ll be pretty bad, and you’ll just have to re-write it later. 

The more authenticity, verisimilitude, and texture your fictional world has, the more friction your characters will experience when they encounter it.  Your characters may walk into the scene with a straightforward confrontation in mind, but in order to reach that goal, they’ll first have to overcome some tactical mini-challenges and navigate some swirling emotional cross-currents. 

Here are some typical causes of friction that you may have failed to account for when you wrote your outline:

• Emotional fallout carried over from the previous scene.
• What the character in the room is doing (and may want to continue doing) when the other character walks in.
• Emotional fallout from the last scene these two characters had together
• Additional characters in the room who aren’t part of the main confrontation but may butt in.
• The physical challenges of the room’s layout.
• The decorum of the room, where a confrontation may be uncouth.
• When your character refuses to do what you tell them to do. 
• When the encounter turns out to be far more emotional than you thought it would be, leading to unforeseen consequences. 

If you just ignore all of these factors and write each scene as if it’s happening in a vacuum, you’ll get to where you’re going much faster, but the scenes will suck.  The more sophisticated a piece of writing is, the more friction it creates, and the less plot it needs.

Each episode of “Mad Men” has only a thin wisp of a plot, just enough to start these richly-textured, electrically-charged characters sparking off against each other. “Don and Peggy need to come up with a slogan for a luggage company” sounds like a dead-simple goal, but on this show the characters encounter so much friction along the way that they wind up being torn apart.  On a show like “Person of Interest”, on the other hand, the characters have no personalities at all, creating a frictionless surface, so tons of plots points glide by effortlessly (and meaninglessly).

Storyteller's Rulebook #123: There’s More Than One Type of Storytelling Irony

I’ve talked about irony a lot on this blog, including here and here, but it can all get a little unclear, because irony can have so many different meanings. 

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The best definition overall definition I’ve come up with is this: Irony is any gap between expectation and reality. ...But, in practice, this isn’t quite precise enough.  Irony, in common usage, usually also has some additional element of mortification to it.  The person experiencing the irony is trying to preserve their false expectation, or is actively working to make it come to pass, and then reality  upsets their expectation or their efforts.  For instance: the rise of an Asian-American basketball star defies our expectations, but it doesn’t really upset them, so it’s not really ironic.  Most of us weren’t especially invested in keeping this from happening or in proving that it couldn’t happen.

In the end, to define irony, we have to the fall back on the U.S. Supreme Court’s infamous definition of pornography: “I can’t define it exactly, but I know it when I see it.” 

But for our purposes today, let’s define irony broadly, so that we can figure out the many different types of irony a storyteller can use.  Some of you, such as last week’s commenter, may point out that some of these are technically just incongruities, but my point is that you can make any of these incongruities seem ironic in order to increase the impact of a story. 

Here’s what I see as Seven Types of Storytelling Irony:

1. Ironic Presentation: The gap between audience’s expectation of what sort of story this is and the audience’s ultimate experience.
2. Dramatic Irony: The gap between what the audience knows and what the character knows.
3. Ironic Characterization: The gap between a character’s hidden private self and open public identity.
4. Ironic Backstory: The gap between the character’s past direction in life and their current position.
5. Ironic Character Presumptions: The gap between character’s presumptions and the reality of their situation. 
6. Ironic Outcome: The gap between what the character intends to accomplish and the actual consequences of their efforts.
7. Ironic Title: An inherently contradictory concept.  

Now let’s go a little more in depth:

Ironic Presentation has nothing to do with your characters.  This is a type of irony that is felt entirely by the audience.  When people called the ‘90s the “Ironic Decade”, this is the type of irony they were talking about: “Seinfeld” played on our expectations that sitcom characters had to grow and change, then shocked us by having them learn nothing.  Tons of bands played on our expectations that rockers had to be earnest bad-asses, and treated the whole thing as a goof.  “The Simpsons” would occasionally do it the other way, setting us up for an irreverent Bart episode and then walloping us with an earnest Lisa episode.
The “Seinfeld” example could also (simplistically) be called “sarcasm,” which is one type of ironic presentation, but there are others... “Camp”, for example, is a little trickier.  “Low Camp”, such as the ‘60s  “Batman” TV show works on two levels: straight up fun for kids, sly satire for adults.  “High Camp”, such as the films of Douglas Sirk, tell a story that is so earnest that it’s absurd, forcing you to feel genuine emotion and yet, at the same time, forcing you to laugh at yourself for feeling it. 

Many storytelling gurus only use the term ‘irony’ to refer to what I would call Dramatic Irony.  This can work two ways:

• We know the reality of the situation but the character doesn’t, such as the boy who is unwittingly carrying a bomb in Hitchcock’s Sabotage, 
• Or the character knows the reality but we don’t, as in heist thrillers such as Ocean’s Eleven. 

Some stories work better when our point of view is strictly married to the hero’s, with no dramatic irony, but not always.  Sometimes, we appreciate getting the sort of perspective that can only be achieved by seeing more than anyone in the story, and other times, we enjoy playing catch-up.  In Ocean’s Eleven, we don’t catch up until the very end, but in another heist thriller, Charlie Varrick, we catch up several times, which is also satisfying. 

Ironic Characterization is the gap between this and this. Characters should never be exactly what they say they are, or they’ll be flat.  As Robert McKee says, Rambo is exactly what he claims to be, so the character isn’t compelling.  Superheroes literally have a secret identity, but all heroes need to have a hidden part of themselves in order to for us to identify with them, because we all feel misunderstood and underestimated.  We all have both hidden strengths and hidden weakensses. As Bob Dylan said: “If my thought-dreams could be seen, they’d probably put my head in a guillotine.”

Ironic Backstory is what I talked about here and here.  Not every character needs one, but it’s always powerful to reveal that a character started out headed in a very different direction from where they ended up. 

Ironic Character Presumptions are what I talked about here, here and here.  Every scene hits harder if we know that the characters naively think the opposite is going to happen. 

Ironic Outcomes are what I talked about here.  I liked The Help more than I thought I would, but I felt it deflated in the second half when Emma Stone’s actions had almost-exactly their intended effects.  If the story had been about the unintended effects of the book being published, it would have felt like literature, but as it was, it was just entertainment.  (Not that it needed to have an unhappy ending.  It could have ended happily but followed an ironic path to get there, such as in The Apartment)

Ironic Title: This last type is probably the least “ironic” of my ironies, but I’ll throw it in here anyway.  It always drives me crazy when I see a fantasy novel with a title like “The Knight’s Lance”, or a thriller with a title like “Deadly Assassin”.  These titles are telling you right off the bat that this book will be predictable.  A good story needs conflict, and why not start with the title, which is your first opportunity to set two incongruous elements against each other.
Let’s pick some from the list at right...   These titles are inherently intriguing: Blast of Silence, Dark Days, Killer’s Kiss, Kiss Me, Stupid, The Little Fugitive, Little Murders, My Favorite Wife, Safety Last, Unfaithfully Yours, and The White Sheik. 

The Court Jester, on the other hand, is a weak title, because where else would a jester be? Likewise, Shoot to Kill could be the title of any thriller ever made.  And Fritz Lang rightly complained when studio changed the name of his movie from the ironic The Human Beast to the unironic Human Desire.  Lang demanded to know, “What other kind of desire is there??” 

Good stories are packed with irony.  Hegel said that all meaning is created by the violent clash of a thesis vs. an antithesis.  The more ironies you pack into your story, the more meaning you’ll create.