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

Last night, I watched the first couple episodes of Island at War, a BBC miniseries from a couple years ago. (Yes, apparently it’s British Week in the Screenplay Science laboratory.) Overall, it’s proving to be a nicely executed but not particularly exceptional show about the invasion of the British Channel Islands by Nazi Germany in WWII, but one scene in the first episode really popped. Cassie Mahy (played by Saskia Reeves) has just lost her husband, an amiable civilian, to enemy fire, and rather than exhibit the standard, obvious signs of grief — tears, weeping, proclamations that she can’t go on without him, etc. — she gets angry. The fact that this is entirely in character (partly for reasons that aren’t revealed until the second episode) is a bonus, but the real point is that her bitter, furious tirade at her dead husband for going out on the pier and getting shot make us feel her grief far more viscerally and immediately than any mere crying jag ever could. As executed, the scene is tremendously powerful. If it were written “on the nose” (in industry term for dialogue in which characters say exactly what they’re feeling, e.g. “I miss my husband terribly”) it would’ve been mediocre at best.

OTN writing is a deadly mistake that’s unfortunately very commonly made by new screenwriters… and by a surprising number of more experienced ones, too. Part of the problem, I think, is that while teachers and screenwriting books almost all warn against the practice, they never seem to give a very good explanation of why it’s so bad. Oh, they’ll say things like “it has no subtext,” but that’s not really helpful to someone trying to acquire an emotional understanding of what works and what doesn’t work.

The real reason OTN writing is a disaster is actually very simple: it provides no conflict, so it just lies there dead on the page or the screen. Think about it. In Island at War, Cassie Mahy is trying to fight the anguish and desolation which threaten to overwhelm her. We already know she’s grief-stricken, because we saw that she loved her husband. A scene in which she merely expressed her grief wouldn’t tell us anything we didn’t know, and it wouldn’t contain any conflict, either. Conflict, though, both internal and external, is literally what stories are made of. And conflict provides tension, because we want to see how it resolves and whether the characters get what they want or not. Without conflict, you don’t even really have a story at all. Subtext is important not only because it adds layers of meaning to your story, but because it adds conflict — between what a character is saying and what he or she really means, between characters who may not fully understand each other, inside a character who is trying to fight some sort of feeling or drive, and so on.

And yes, the infamous rat (which has now shown up in FX’s otherwise somewhat promising new show Damages!) is quintessential on-the-nose writing.

Well, it’s been a very long day, so I’m off to watch disc one of the Fanny Trilogy. Maybe it’ll spawn a new blog entry, but even if it doesn’t, I’m finally going to get out of the office and see some new releases this weekend, so come hell or high water, I’ll start talking about current movies again within the next few days. Hope you all have a great night.

Last time out, I talked a little about House of Cards, and in doing so, I mentioned Richard III and Profit. Later that night, I got to thinking about the three of them, and I realized that for all their similarities, there’s actually a very interesting difference between them — while Profit goes to great lengths to reveal Jim Profit’s backstory and explain (and even justify) his dark and twisted nature, House of Cards tells us just about nothing about the life story and origins of Francis Urquhart, its own scheming, amoral protagonist. (Richard III strikes something of a middle ground, so I’ll leave it out of this discussion.) Yet House of Cards still expects us to empathize with Urquhart enough to be captured by the narrative, and in fact the miniseries was so successful that it spawned two sequels and much critical worship, while Profit suffered abysmal ratings and tragically premature cancellation.

This seems to fly in the face of the conventional wisdom, which dictates that everyone’s problems and pathologies be explained in terms of abusive parents, traumatic childhoods and the like. Probably the best single example of this pop-psychology approach to writing is the upcoming Halloween remake, written and directed by Rob Zombie based on John Carpenter’s and Debra Hill’s original. By all accounts, we’re going to see a ton of flashbacks to Michael Myers’ childhood, as well as a lot more material with Dr. Loomis, all in an attempt to make Myers understandable in contemporary human terms. Yet the original, with its faceless and incomprehensible villain, is a landmark, and made close to $50M in 1978, or over $150M in today’s dollars. The book hasn’t yet been written on the remake, but I doubt it’ll be nearly as successful.

Why the seeming paradox?

You could answer that House of Cards aired on the BBC while Profit was on Fox, and there’s certainly a lot of truth in that. Mainstream American audiences, and especially American broadcast networks, have very little patience for morally complex characters and low ratings, and in fact niche shows with deeply flawed protagonists (such as FX’s outstanding The Shield) have almost entirely flourished on cable, an option that unfortunately wasn’t nearly so available back when Profit debuted. But that’s not the whole story.

What’s really making the difference is something I alluded to in another recent blog post, that time about On the Lot: namely, how understandable and relatable the different stories’ protagonists are. House of Cards was successful not only because it found the right home, though that was undoubtedly very important, but because everyone watching the show could understand why Francis Urquhart, a man who spent his entire life behind the scenes making sure that other people’s careers stayed on track, would give into the temptation to sieze some power and glory for himself. And from the moment he made that initial decision, he found himself on a slippery slope, with each subsequent decision he made completely understandable given his circumstances — he had to do everything he did, almost as much to keep himself out of jail as to achieve his goal of becoming Prime Minster. Profit, however, failed because when you get right down to it, Jim Profit was a really weird guy, and very few people could find it in their hearts (or minds) to understand him. He had sex with his (step)mother, he slept in a cardboard box instead of a bed, he seemed to play games and manipulate people just for the sheer joy of it… None of these are traits that the average person can relate to even a tiny little bit. That doesn’t make the show any less brilliant, but it does mean it would’ve had a heck of a time finding an audience no matter when and where it aired.

In the end, I’m not sure what the lesson is in terms of craft. If you want financial success, obviously, design a protagonist who’s understandable and relatable even if he is antiheroic. Flawed and evil protagonists, after all, are a tough enough sell all by themselves. But Profit is probably my favorite show of all time, and I certainly don’t want to discourage anyone from trying to make something just as daring and inspired, so part of me hopes that at least some of you try to buck the system, if only just once.

My apologies for the ridiculous delay since the last entry. I pitched a serial to a producer last week and he was very interested, but as soon as I got home from the meeting, all ready to fire off a couple scripts and a bible, I had a blinding revelation which completely changed a significant aspect of the story. Ever since then, I’ve been working feverishly on revising the episodes and replanning the whole story (as well as dealing with a hundred other things) so I haven’t managed to make time for the blog until now. I’ll try not to let that happen again; in fact, I’d like to get onto an every-other-day schedule if I can, though I’m not going to make any promises. Anyway, all that personal jabber aside…

I’m one of the five or six people watching On the Lot. In some ways, it’s a huge mess of a show, but I’m surprised anyone ever thought it would be a hit regardless of how well executed it might have been. The sad fact is that most people just don’t give a crap about filmmaking. They don’t dream of becoming directors. They don’t wonder what it’s like to make a movie. And they don’t envy anyone in the business who’s not a celebrity. This manifests quite clearly in the dismal ratings and box office of every behind-the-scenes project that comes down the pike — I think without exception — so it’s a mystery to me why the financial types in the business keep greenlighting them. Of course I gobble them up, and I’m sure many of you do too, but we’re the exception that proves the rule. We’re the proud few who actually want to make movies, so of course we care.

But enough of that. I come not to bury On the Lot, but to praise (some of) its filmmakers. Telling a story in two minutes is hard. Damn hard. For the longest time I had no idea how to do it. Virtually all my shorts have been much closer to ten minutes than two, and some were a lot longer than that. Nor could I seem to get the knack of telling an episodic story in short, bite-sized chunks of no more than three or at most five minutes… i.e. for the web. Several years ago, in fact, after working for an animated TV show and totally failing to get any of my scripts on the air, I decided to roll my own show on the web. To make a long story short, while I set out intending to keep each episode under five minutes, I quickly wound up with a stack of really great 30-page scripts, perfect for conventional television but totally untenable online, and since I’m not a certified, accredited showrunner, into the closet they went. So I can sympathize with contestants who have trouble telling a complete and compelling story in just a few brief seconds. But I’ve long since gotten over my mental block, and anyone who’s made it this far on the show should have too.

Telling a story this compressed is all about shorthand; it requires quickly establishing characters and problems we’re all familiar with and can understand immediately. If this sounds like broad, shallow writing, that’s because in a way it is. In just two minutes, there’s no time for subtlety or complexity. Of course you have to personalize your stereotypes to make them feel fresh and new, but they still have to be familiar, or you’ll spend all your time and then some just setting things up and you’ll never get to the actual story. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what many people do — sketch out a character but neglect to put him or her in a story. (In fact, that happens with depressing regularity in features, too.) Other people try to assemble a plot but neglect to populate it with characters. (Likewise depressingly common in features.) Both mistakes are fatal.

So how did the filmmakers in last night’s episode do? Well, they were all over the map. Andrew Hunt’s Zero2Sixty was the best of the bunch (you can thank me later for avoiding the pun) because he came up with a funny, exciting scenario filled with well-drawn characters — a nebbishy, ineffectual car salesman gets caught up in a frantic car chase when a thief steals a car off his lot (thank me again!) and an FBI agent needs to borrow a car to go in pursuit; the car salesman accompanies him to protect the car and finds himself rising to the occasion and successfully selling the car to the agent. Jason Epperson’s Sweet was also very good. It’s about a guy who gets home from work and realizes he’s forgotten his anniversary, so he has to make a mad dash to get his wife some flowers and arrange dinner reservations in the few short minutes before she gets home. Everyone can relate to that dilemma, and the story was told in a fun and amusing fashion. Unfortunately, Sam Friedlander’s entry, Key Witness, was a dud. The story had something to do with a cop trying to bring in a reluctant witness, but we never found out why the witness wasn’t cooperating, and more importantly, neither the cop nor the witness ever became characters. So not only did we not really know what was going on, we didn’t have any reason to care. I halfway hope he squeaks through the voting, because his earlier Replication Theory may have been the funniest 90 seconds about farting that I’ve ever seen, but Witness showed none of the visual flare or storytelling panache of his earlier work, and I’m afraid the truth is that he deserves to go home.

The lesson to draw from all this is that even though shorts (and commercials) are very different from feature films, the basic rule of establishing character and situation immediately actually applies to both. You have very little time to grab your readers’ or audiences’ interest before they toss your script into the trash, hit the ’stop’ button or walk out of the theater. And if you think about it, why would you waste your time and theirs on scenes and material that aren’t actually a crucial part of your story? Get right to the point, or you’ll get kicked off the lot too. (What, you thought you were going to get away without any bad puns at all? Not a chance!)