A look at what's right (and what's wrong) with today's screenplays

Hold off for just a moment before you sharpen your pitchforks, knitting needles and miscellaneous other weapons of mass destruction so you can dice me up, boil me in the blood of failed screenwriters past and then eat my brains for daring to utter such outrageous sacrilege. I know perfectly well that directing on paper is the quintessential hallmark of the amateur and that nothing will get your script tossed in the recycling bin faster… except maybe for all the other things that will do the job just as well, including but not limited to poor grammar, boring and predictable plotting (or no plot at all), the lack of a good hook, misuse of the screenplay form, aimless characterization, painfully unrealistic dialogue, and bad breath. (And if you think I’m kidding about the bad breath part, think again.)

And you know what? In many ways, I agree with the conventional wisdom on this count. It’s no fun to read a bunch of crap like “THE CAMERA TRUCKS BACK FROM A MEDIUM SHOT TO A MEDIUM-MEDIUM-LONG SHOT” and “EXTREME CLOSE-UP OF AN EXTREME CLOSE-UP OF A WIDE SHOT”. And yet film, as we’re always told, is a visual medium, and screenplays without visuals — screenplays full of dialogue and nothing but, in other words — are sneered at just as much as scripts crammed with camera directions and explicitly called shots.

So how does the aspiring screenwriter reconcile this seemingly irreconcilable contradiction? Simply. By writing well. Great writing paints a vivid picture in the reader’s mind without conscious effort on the reader’s part. That’s why the stereotypical kind of directed-on-paper scripts don’t work. “THE CAMERA CRANES IN THROUGH THE WINDOW to a MEDIUM CLOSE-UP of BOB THE WANNABE SCREENWRITER staring at a rejection letter in stunned disbelief” doesn’t readily form a visual in most people’s minds. In fact, the more technical jargon you use, the more you’re going to pull your reader out of the story instead of pulling him or her into it, because technical terms requires mental translation and interpretation. So forget about the jargon. Just describe the image you want the reader to form, and make your description as vivid and effective as possible.

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about.

First, the typical “directing on paper” version.

INT. POWER PLANT - DAY

EXTREME WIDE SHOT of Tom.

He rushes up to the immense hydraulics assembly at the base of the power plant.

And now here’s the jargon-free rewrite.

INT. POWER PLANT - DAY

Looking like nothing more than a man-shaped insect about to be crushed under the looming foot of a giant, Tom rushes up to the immense hydraulics assembly at the base of the power plant.

Which one has more impact? Brownie points if you say the second one, since it’s pulled from one of my own scripts. Extra bonus points if you notice that my version also takes up less space on the page, a more and more important consideration as the acceptable length for screenplays in both Hollywood and the indie world continues to drop.

Anyway, by now you’re probably wondering what the heck any of this has to do with Tell No One. After all, it’s been fantastically well-reviewed, it’s a cinch to end up on a whole bunch of critics’ Best of the Year lists come December, and I’ll even admit that it’s my co-favorite movie of the year so far, along with Wall-E. So what the heck am I complaining about?

Instead of getting all abstract and theoretical, I’ll give you an example.

First, though, a little spoiler-free story background — nothing you wouldn’t get from the trailer. Tell No One is a thriller about a doctor named Alex Beck, whose wife, Margot, is killed while they’re vacationing in the country. He loved her so much, and he’s so broken up by her death, that eight years later, he still hasn’t moved on. He visits her parents each year on the anniversary of her murder, he lives a mostly solitary, almost monastic life, he’s not in the least bit romantically involved with anyone… and then one day, he starts getting emails that seem like they might just be coming from Margot, and his whole, carefully shielded life starts to fall apart.

It’s a terrific setup, and Alex’s yearning for Margot generates much of the film’s genuinely immense emotional power. Unfortunately, though, the director (Guillame Canet) plainly had no idea of how to use the camera — the film is shot in a very generic, workmanlike fashion which utterly fails to do its part to focus and magnify the power of the story — and there’s one scene in particular, the flashback to Margot’s cremation, in which he completely dropped the ball.

Probably because he thought it would be more visually interesting, Canet shot the actual cremation from inside the furnace. In the most superficial sense possible, it might seem that it would be more exciting to see flames licking over a coffin than it would be to watch a bunch of people standing around on the other side of the furnace door. Alex Beck, however, is the protagonist, and his emotions and his experiences drive the story. Instead of showcasing a piece of burning wood, that scene should have been shot from his perspective to make the audience vicariously feel the ultimate pain of his final separation from his wife. We should have seen him watching her coffin disappearing into the furnace. We should have seen the furnace door closing, cutting him off from her mortal remains. We should have seen the flames from his perspective, muted and obscured by the glass window in the furnace door, forcing him to experience the last moments of her mortal remains just he experienced the last moments of his wife’s living existence, at a distance, cut off from her. And throughout, we should have seen the pain written on his face.

All of that could have (and should have) been written in the screenplay without a single called shot, not too differently from how I described it above. That’s because the kind of “directing on paper” I recommend is really a writer’s task — deciding what to emphasize, what to include, and how to present it all… which is to say, writing. It’s a sad irony that as well as directing Tell No One, Canet also co-write the screenplay. But hey, he was an actor first; directing the camera isn’t his home turf. Just don’t make the same mistake yourself. And go see the movie while you’re at it, because for all its flaws, the good parts are really great.

“I’ve seen now what I have to become to stop men like him.”

That one line from the trailer sums up what The Dark Knight wants to be about — Bruce Wayne’s internal battle over whether he really wants to turn into the kind of person he’d have to become to defeat the likes of the Joker, and by extension the larger question of just how much good has to compromise in order to defeat evil. It’s a question which really connects with the zeitgeist right about now, what with all the fear and scare-mongering over terrorism and the justifications being thrown around for torture, rendition, spying and so on, which is one reason the movie is doing so well at the box office.

Note, however, that I said that’s what the movie wants to be about. Unfortunately, it doesn’t entirely hit the mark.  No process of internal change or growth happens all at once; it inevitably involves a series of steps.  In fact, that’s pretty much the definition of a character arc — the steps the character takes in growing and changing over the course of the story. Good screenwriting involves (among many other things) dramatizing all the important components of the protagonist’s arc in a smooth, believable and interesting fashion. In The Dark Knight, though, one of the biggest and most important steps happens entirely offscreen!

A little background. The Joker has announced that he’s going to kill someone new every day until Batman comes forward and unmasks himself, and he’s begun to deliver on his threat. Bruce decides he can’t take the guilt anymore, so he tells Harvey Dent, Gotham City’s crusading District Attorney, to call a press conference at which he’ll announce that he’s Batman and turn himself in to the police.  Batman hanging up his cowl and going to jail — pretty dramatic, huh?  Of course, we know it can’t happen because then there’d be no sequels and probably no movie either, but it’s a great idea because it creates a ton of tension: we’re dying to see what happens to change his mind and how much the decision to keep being Batman and risk the lives of more innocents costs him.

At the press conference, though, Dent is the one who announces that he’s Batman and turns himself in, and Bruce Wayne just stands around on the sidelines looking rich and lounge-y. WTF? Seriously, OMGWTFBBQ? Well, later we find out that Dent persuaded Batman to use him as bait to trap the Joker instead of just turning himself in and trusting the Joker to stop killing people. (Like that was ever a good plan anyway.) This makes for a decent moment of surprise at the press conference when the wrong Batman steps forward, but it comes at the expense of the most important turning point in Bruce Wayne’s entire character arc — when he decides not to give up and to keep fighting no matter the cost.

Look at it this way: for Bruce Wayne to decide to give in to the Joker’s demands, he should have reached the point of ultimate despair. He should have put everything he had into the fight against the Joker, and yet the Joker should have utterly defeated him. Giving up should have seemed like the only viable option remaining, because it should’ve been absolutely clear that there was just no conceivable way he could ever win without either killing a whole boatload of innocent bystanders in the process or turning into a monster even worse than the Joker — or more likely, both. Then surrendering would almost make sense, and we’d share Batman’s despair.

The problem is that at this point in the movie, we haven’t yet seen him give his all against the Joker. In fact, we haven’t even seen him come close. They’ve really only just begun to scuffle, and their biggest encounters are yet to come. So what does that make Batman, a quitter? A wimp? A loser?

Now think about what it should take to change his mind at this point. Remember, the Joker should have beaten him at every turn and left him with nothing but the nuclear option, becoming even worse than the Joker in order to defeat him, which would be the ultimate Pyrrhic victory. Given the theme of the movie, there are really only two basic options. First, something or someone could restore Bruce’s faith in himself, his confidence that he can win and his certainty that he’s inherently good enough that he could never become truly evil like the Joker. Or second, it could become clear to him that however horrible the collateral damage caused by his battle against the Joker might be, the damage done by a Joker unrestrained by the Batman would be far, far worse.

What The Dark Knight offers us, though, is Harvey Dent coming up with a new plan. This suggests that Batman’s despair was pretty shallow and unnecessary — that all he actually needed to do was put a little more thought into the problem, but that he decided it would be easier to just give up. It makes Batman look even look more like a quitter. And it also makes him look kind of stupid.

Luckily, most of the rest of the movie is so crackerjack-super-fantastic-awesome-good that it’s possible to sort of gloss over this flaw while watching it, but there are some other problems I’ll talk about in future posts.

…The Departed! Everyone give a big round of applause to William Monahan and Martin Scorcese!

OK, OK, calm down. It may seem foolish (and probably hella-arrogant) to criticize a movie that won four Oscars, including Best Adapted Screenplay, not to mention one that made almost $300M at the worldwide box office and was 93% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, but just as most awful movies have some good qualities hiding somewhere, at least if you look hard enough, most great ones have something wrong with them that we can learn from. It’s difficult enough for a single person to create something that’s truly perfect (and when I say “difficult enough” I really mean “so close to totally impossible that mere mortals need not apply, and that means you… and to be fair, me too, and also pretty much everyone else in the known universe”) but when creating that something requires dozens or even hundreds of people to work together despite disagreements, miscommunications, clashes of ego, and sheer outbursts of wrongheadedness, and when you also factor in time and budgetary constraints, the sales and marketing people who have to sign off on every significant choice anyone makes, and everything else that can go wrong in the complex and insanely rushed bubble universe of a film production, perfection is even more impossible to attain. (Work with me here; just like there are bigger and smaller infinities†, there are more- and less-impossible impossibles.) So it’s no insult to say that The Departed left a little room for improvement. It’s a great movie and I was rooting for it on Oscar night, but something bothered me when I saw it on opening weekend, and it bothered me even more when I watched it again on DVD last night.

By now, some of you have surely figured out what I’m talking about. Yes, ladies and germs, children of all ages, Future Oscar-Winners Yourselves, I’m talking about the rat. Watching that stupid bleeping rat scurry along the railing in the final scene was like having Scorcese walk up to my seat and personally bludgeon me to death with a giant fifty-pound wheel of stinky cheese while screaming at the top of his lungs, “Did you get it? Did you get it? Come on, did you get it? Corruption is everywhere! Corruption is EVERYWHERE! GET IT!!?!??” Gee, like the message hadn’t come through already.

Don’t get me wrong; the rest of the movie was great. The dialogue was fantastic, the acting was mostly†† stupendous, scene after scene unspooled to electric effect, and Monahan took a very difficult-to-structure story and structured it magnificently. Besides, the rat wasn’t what I call a “central” flaw, which is to say an element which significant other parts of the story depend on and are therefore undermined by, so in the larger scheme of things, it wasn’t all that important. But symbols shouldn’t be jackhammers (getting hit by a jackhammer hurts) and I wish a misstep of this magnitude had come earlier in the film instead of right at the end.

(Well, actually, I wish there hadn’t been any missteps, of this magnitude or any other, but that kind of goes without staying.)

Anyway, some people I’ve talked to about this have insisted that I’m missing the point, that the rat was funny. Maybe it would have been funny in another movie, but The Departed isn’t a comedy. It wasn’t supposed to be funny — or at least not funny in that broad, almost slapsticky way. Everything else in the movie, including its comic moments, grew organically out of the fantastic characters William Monahan created (based in part on the work of Siu Fai Mak and Felix Chong on Infernal Affairs) but the rat was pure editorial commentary. It wasn’t just a jarring tonal shift, it was Scorcese interrupting the story with a Very Important Announcement™, and as such it sucked us out of our state of investment in the characters and story and therefore reduced our emotional involvement in the film.

Since emotional involvement is the single most important thing a film or screenplay can hope to offer, I’m going to make double-damn sure that I don’t ever make that mistake now that I’ve seen The Departed a couple times and had the rat shoved down my throat so memorably and unpleasantly, and I suggest you do the same.

And with that, I’m off. I promise I’ll talk about some more recent movies — brand spanking new theatrical releases, in fact — very soon.

†Seriously, I’m not making this up, and if you look into it, you’ll find out it actually makes perfect sense.

††I felt that Mark Wahlberg was a slightly weak link. It’s not that he was bad; in fact, he did very solid work, and in any other movie, he’d have shone. It’s just that he paled by comparison next to the likes of Leonardo di Caprio, Matt Damon, Jack Nicholson, Martin Sheen, Ray Winstone, Vera Farmiga, and Alec Baldwin. The Departed had an extraordinary cast, maybe one of the deepest benches ever assembled for a movie like this.