the blog. (2012)

The Blog’s 2012 archives showcase the power of short-form storytelling curated by #WW Laureates Evan Jobb & Zach Herrmann.

The Blog > Archives > 2012

Five Favorite Film Moments of 2012

Zach Herrmann

19 Dec 2012

Because I’m a sucker for listicles and ’tis the season for such fare, I’d like to take this week’s post to highlight five of my favorite film “moments” of 2012. That isn’t to say that the five films I have chosen were necessarily my five absolute favorites, though they would all warrant a place within my theoretical “Top 10″ or so.

Instead, I stuck with the images I’ll remember most. A few films/moments I decided to leave off, since I have already explored a few at greater lengths in the CSSC space (Cosmopolis and The Comedy specifically come to mind). Studying these moments within these films may not make me (or you or anyone) a better writer in any sense. But as I’ve relentlessly advocated, it pays off to examine and recognize what, specifically, you react to as a viewer. Why do these things strike me the way they do? Are they merely shocking or truly provocative?

–

1. Holy Motors (pictured above) – The “mo-cap” scene

Leos Carax’s everything-all-of-the-time ode to the cinematic medium is a compendium of film history. By design, each segment is distinct, but none more so than the strange, dialogue-free sequence in which Monsieur Oscar (Denis Lavant) performs motion-capture on a video game sound stage.

The bit is fascinating in its physicality and contortion of forms. Carax, ever the prankster, tacks on a punchline that either underscores or undermines the preceding “dance” between Lavant and another performer, and frankly, I’m not sure which side of the argument I side with. I laughed at the reveal — which isn’t entirely shocking, in a sense given the build up — and was left a bit gut-punched. Maybe there’s meaning in the imagery (finding art in new forms? even in pornographic fantasy video games?), and then again maybe not.

To quote Nick Smith (Chris Eigeman) in Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan: “I guess you could say it’s extremely vulgar, I like it a lot.”

“Vulgarity” is the perfect segue into Killer Joe and its infamous scene from Tracy Letts’ original stage play (he wrote the screenplay adaptation as well). To spare the readers, I have to gloss over the specifics. At first, I resisted focusing on this scene because in doing so, I fear I am detracting from everything else that is unholy/wonderfully pulp in what is still my favorite film of 2012.

But I couldn’t resist. When my brother and I first talked about the film, my gut reaction was to over-simplify things by deeming Killer Joe a “Kentucky Fried-Blue Velvet for the reality TV generation.” Joe (Matthew McConaughey brilliantly against type) is a different animal entirely from Blue Velvet’s Frank Booth, despite the overlapping psychosis. The two films from which these villains come, however, both deal in an extreme form of generational satire. For David Lynch/Blue Velvet, its Reagan America and its fetishism of a 1950s suburban fantasy that never truly existed. And for William Friedkin/Killer Joe, its the Aughts and its craving for dehumanizing so-called “reality” entertainment.

Joe shows the trailer park-dwelling Smith Family itself (could there be a more American family name?) through a glass very, very darkly.

The fried chicken scene is debasing, misogynistic and, yes, incredible to behold. This is what a family dinner devolves into, and if it’s hard to swallow (sorry, couldn’t resist), than that seems appropriate… even if Joe’s behavior is as far from appropriate as one could fathom.

My unabashed love and respect for the films of Wes Anderson has been well-documented throughout this blog from post #1. There are many, many images, snatches of dialogue I could have picked. Moonrise Kingdom has only risen in my personal hierarchy of Anderson’s filmography, and one of the numerous reasons is its opening scene, a perfect distillation of Anderson’s domestic-minded recurring themes.

Family – literal or figurative – is at the heart of every Anderson feature. He takes great simultaneous pleasure & pain in dissembling & reassembling these family units, narrowing in on the competing friction & unity which occurs as the members collide.

Ever the avid soundtrack compiler, Anderson selects for his opening, “The Young Person’s Guide To The Orchestra, Op. 34: Themes A-F” by Leonard Bernstein. As the camera tracks through Suzy’s house, the narrator on the record singles out each individual instrument in the orchestra. These disparate elements begin with a solo, and then, they are introduced in the orchestra, until we hear the full company.

Moonrise Kingdom — equally balanced in its melancholy and joy — is a story of (two) loners banding together.

Claude Sautet’s 1971 film Max et Les Ferrailleurs – which translates (roughly, and I can only assume poorly) toMax and the Junkmen – received its first stateside theatrical release this year. Good things are worth waiting for, and Sautet’s tale of entrapment goes beyond its “corrupt cop undercover” trappings, into a twisted psychological tale of despair.

To state the betrayal upfront is not at all spoiler-worthy, since Max’s (Michel Piccoli) deception and its consequences are a given from the get-go. We know the other shoe will drop, and when it does, Sautet pieces together the sort of cracker-jack botched heist sequence his contemporary, Jean-Pierre Melville, built his reputation on.

Where Melville ends and Sautet begins comes in the scene after the inevitable police round-up of the blindsided gangsters. Max ventures into a cafe where Lily (Romy Schneider) – the unwitting instrument of her boyfriend gangster’s demise – has watched everything unfold.

The sting operation fades into the background, and the emotional destruction takes hold near-silence. Max has used and destroyed this woman, and his reasoning as to “why” is disturbingly personal. He has robbed them both of their identities flung them headfirst into an existential brick wall.

In this last entry, I will endeavor to tread carefully, lest I spoil the single defining moment of The Loneliest Planet. At the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival, I made the decision to squeeze in an early morning screen of Julia Loktev’s film, and did so at the expense of getting only 2 hours of sleep before I caught a flight home.

And frankly, I can’t think of a better state of mind for viewing The Loneliest Planet. The film washed over me. Oblique, hypnotizing and foreboding, not unlike stretches of Aguirre: The Wrath of God.

I can’t recall if I actually gasped when the “single defining moment” came — I’ve never been a vocal moviegoer, but in a split second, The Loneliest Planet winded me. It’s there and then it’s gone.

This moment which shall remain vague and nameless not only defines all that follows, but reevaluates everything that came before it. When a good relationship goes bad, it can’t all be boiled down to one, single defining moment where it all went wrong, can it? There must have been signs earlier, and perhaps there were… and then, perhaps, only with the knowledge of that one moment, do these prior warnings have any real meaning.

Sympathy for the Despicable Protagonist

Zach Herrmann

21 Nov 2012

“… some antagonisms and inadequacies are too deeply rooted to be wholly explicable or curable.” – James Agee, reviewing A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Feb. 17, 1945 in The Nation)

Rick Alverson’s film The Comedy is making waves. And by “making waves,” I of course mean causing a brief spit in the tiny pond of my daily blogosphere/Twittersphere perusing. The film is, undeniably, tailored to a niche audience, which is just as well since its the sort of film that will never reach beyond that relatively small group of moviegoers (or VOD-watchers in all likelihood).

All the hubbub is warranted though. With several days of reflection beyond my viewing of The Comedy, I’m ready to put it beside Killer Joe as one of 2012′s great American cinematic statements. But where Killer Joe hinges on the duality of its central character – a figure equally psychotic and seductive – The Comedy rests upon the shoulders of a consistently repellent creation.

Swanson – as portrayed by Tim Heidecker from a script written by Robert Donne, Alverson and Colm O’Leary – is, perhaps, without redemption. He is a trust-fund, thirtysomething hipster, wandering the city aimlessly. His banter pitches between misogyny and racism, and his actions frequently reflect the same. When Swanson jokes about Hitler’s novel ideas regarding social hierarchy, there’s a ring of truth. Whether or not he actually believes it, Swanson belittles those less fortunate than he: his dying father’s male nurse, taxi drivers.

His decision to wash dishes at a restaurant smacks of irony – even in doing so-called honest work, Swanson makes a mockery of anything beneath his station.

Who would subject themselves to a 94-minute film centered on such a character? The question must have occurred to those who were among the reported walkouts, stemming back to the film’s premiere at Sundance last January. My issue is not with them, nor is it with A.O. Scott, whose pan in The New York Times elicited the ill-advised response from Alverson (both of which I linked to in the lede). Although I disagree with Scott in his assertion that Alverson, like Swanson, “enjoys humiliating people he takes to be his social inferiors,” I do recognize Swanson and The Comedy both as completely reprehensible.

Both should be. Indie and Hollywood cinema alike have an obsession with the myth of the man-child. He is, like Swanson, often a thirtysomething (or late twentysomething), equal parts regressed and fun-loving. All he needs to set him straight is the right woman, ill-timed pregnancy or hell, why not both?

With its opening images of bloated, naked beer sloshing bodies, The Comedy immediately suggests infancy sustained past the point of comfort. The musical choice of Donnie and Joe Emerson’s “Baby” might be a bit on the noise, but for a film with little narrative thrust, its a crucial cue.

One of the reasons I’ve always preferred The Sun Also Rises to The Great Gatsby (I’m referring to the books, not the films) is the molding of the respective narrators. In Gatsby, our audience surrogate is Nick Carraway, a man who indulges in the Lost Generation’s hedonistic lifestyle and still has the gall to admonish those around him for their transgressions. The Sun Also Rises uses a similar narrative point-of-view, but through a far more nuanced character: Jake Barnes despises the world around him and those closest to him, but he’s helpless to escape it. His self-loathing is evident, and for all his cynicism, he gives in to it all and knows he always will.

I don’t know a think about Alverson as a person, nor do I know anything about his co-writers on The Comedy or Heidecker for that matter (beyond what I’ve seen of him on Time & Eric). What Alverson and Co. have given us, though, is a sort of Jake Barnes-eye view of New York City entitlement. The creators in this case show a sharp, studied eye for detail, and if they exaggerate slightly, their embellishments fit the occasion.

This is a generation of regression, and clearly, these are people and feelings the director and his collaborators are wholly familiar with. Scott does them a great disservice in his assertion that Alverson “enjoys” humiliating the sorts that Swanson does. Alverson neither idolizes or demonizes Swanson and his actions – there are no cheap shots nor any finger-wagging.

In Swanson, he has co-created a plausible nightmare of a human being, one who escapes reductive psychological explanation. The most troubling aspect on display is that shred of humanity Alverson’s leaves him. If I were to do some educated guessing, it’s not Swanson’s worst moments (I’ll spare any spoilery details, but fair warning, there are plenty) forcing audience members out of the theater, but the spaces in between, where Alverson allows Swanson to reveal himself for what he is: sad, lonely, pathetic.

At the screening I attended, Alverson and Heidecker provided a brief introduction before the movie. Alverson spoke to his aim, to create something with real “ambiguity.” Frankly, the intro smacked of pretension, or so I felt before watching the film. After the fact, I think the issue was less with what Alverson said and more with the fact he said it better within the film itself, without having to actually come out and say anything.

The Comedy and its main character are an audience litmus test, and I think our reactions to this sort of film and this sort of (anti) protagonist warrant discussion. What’s interesting is not, as AV Club’s Scott Tobias pointed out, that 99.5% of America won’t care for The Comedy, but that maybe 50% (or more?) of the film’s target audience seem pretty turned off by what they’re seeing.

Most of the laughter in my theater was of the nervous variety, and I’d hazard to say that’s because we all recognized* Alverson holding a mirror to Brooklyn, to New York City. To us. I don’t think he was excusing himself either.

–

*For what it’s worth, my audience at Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) was probably about 90% Caucasian, maybe 60% or so male. The capacity in that specific theater is 222, from what I can find online, and it looked like a near sold-out show. Not an overwhelming sample size, but I don’t think I’d be surprised if the make up of all The Comedy‘s screenings at BAM looked basically like my crowd. The point I’m trying to make is, there were plenty of people who either were or would soon be part of the demographic shared by Swanson and his male, Caucasian, Brooklynite (or possibly Lower Manhattan?) friends.

Dispatch from the Trenches

Zach Herrmann

14 Nov 2012

No disrespect to Ashley Cooper, who suggested I write up a post this week about taking notes, i.e. how to accept, sort through and learn from criticism. We’ll put a pin in that and get back to it, because it is something both relevant and worthy of discussion here. Between self-defeat and self-inflation, every (good) writer should arrive at self-awareness. And a very large part of self-awareness is the ability to absorb criticism.

As I said though, another post for another week.

My reason for delaying a perfectly good suggestion for a perfectly good post is simple: that’s just not where my head is at right now. I call out to you all from the trenches of the rough draft of a feature script.

I’m loathe to add this disclaimer, but in the interest of full disclosure, nothing in this post may be of any relevance to any of you. I fully expect scatterbrained, disconnected threads that forgo their logical conclusions, developed only half way to half-baked. There will be no great revelations, or even anything resembling a minor breakthrough. Hell, I can’t even pretend to give sound advice.

So yes, things this week are running fairly true-to-form over at the Zach Herrmann-curated incarnation of the CSSC Blog.

All kidding aside (Ha! Never!), I’m fishing for empathy* from the writers out there in the crowd. Excuse the war analogy in the blog title, I meant neither to belittle the hardships of war or elevate the craft of screenwriting. But those who have written know the feeling of a rough draft. You’re in the thick of it, locked into a fictional world of your own creation.

People are around you, but you’re alone. Not in a depressing sense. There’s something oddly empowering about being away from your writing, in the middle of the rough draft. You’re cradling secrets, an inside joke between you and yourself – one that you’ll be able to share, all in due time.

The better (and coming only a day after Veteran’s Day, less insensitive) analogy I should have started with comes from my high schools as a competitive runner. Cross Country is, in actuality, scored as a team sport. You have teammates and competitors all around, external influences and conditions. Ultimately though, the competition is within.

So too is the gratification, and not only in the racing. I no longer race, but I still go for long distance runs – and it’s still the time where I do the best reflecting on my writing. These two passions – writing and running – are inextricably linked for me. Perhaps it’s the allure of finding an outlet for insularity, safe harbor for the interior life of the mind.

Head down, keep running. Keep writing. There’s a similar mental payoff too. Running alone in the park, writing alone in a room – there’s joy in the sheer discipline of it, but even more so, I think it’s the satisfaction of avoiding mental clutter.

–

*Thankfully,Fishing for Empathyis NOT the name of my current screenplay. However, I do reserve the right to use the title later on, most likely for when I pen my self-help book targeted at displaced liberal arts’ graduates.

The Importance of Objects

Zach Herrmann

7 Nov 2012

In screenwriting, as in any sort of creative writing, character is king. Or at least, it should be. The preference to character-over-plot runs through most of my favorites, and explains my fondness for anything from the BBS films of the 1970s, to the American screwballs of the 1930s, up through current entries from the Whit Stillmans and Wes Andersons of today’s cinema. Plot seems incidental when the characters pop.

There is, however, a caveat I would like to posit for this week’s blog entry: the often overlooked importance of the inanimate. The crucial construction of signifiers that, while indicative or symbolic character, exist in a story as plausible objects. These pieces visually connect character to plot without detouring through weighty exposition.

As the Master of Suspense, Alfred Hitchcock had a keen understanding of how character must relate to story and plot. He understood casting, even, as a visual shortcut to storytelling. We immediately recognize the faces of celebrities such as Cary Grant or Jimmy Stewart, and therefore, immediately identify with them. The decks are already stacked in favor of our investment in these protagonists. Same goes for his rotating carousel of striking blonds, be it Vivian Leigh, Kim Novak, Eva Marie Saint or Tippi Hedren.

Hitchcock’s structural process included a (perhaps unparalleled) penchant for investing inanimate objects with extraordinary excitement. The best example I can think of would be in Notorious, where the passing around of a wine cellar key becomes the focal point of one of the Master’s greatest sequences, beginning with this famous crane shot.

The key becomes an isolated signifier of trust between the main characters. It helps cement the relationship between one side of a love triangle, while eroding it the marriage on the other side. Of course, there are more sinister stakes at play involving Nazi intrigue, but the central mystery and character’s personal intrigues blur together in Notorious.

In the film, alcohol bottles first appear as the main character, Alicia (Ingrid Bergman at her absolute best) drowns her sorrows following her father’s sentencing as a Nazi war criminal. Her alcoholism ties directly into the plotting later, when Devlin (Cary Grant) mistakes her poisoning for a nasty hangover. The bottles appear again, within the “key” sequence, in the wine cellar. Their appearance is deceiving, however, as some of these bottles prove to carry a deadlier payload.

The consistent appearance, threading and then re-threading of these images becomes the fabric Hitchcock relies on. Mystery and resolution comes not only in the plot but in character as well, and as these objects becomes invested with new meaning, the characters’ relationships become redefined as well.

My idea for this post came not from Hitchcock, actually, but from another visual master: Krzysztof Kieslowski. While stranded (with power and heat) in Brooklyn, I did a lot of catching up on movies I hadn’t watched for a year or so. On second viewing, Kieslowski’s White (from his Three Colors trilogy) is every bit the structural equal of the other two, more-lauded entries.*

In a film about a divorce, cut into two clear halves, taking place in two countries (France and Poland), White appropriately features a very two-Franc coin. Karol Karol (a man with two names, played by Zbigniew Zamachowski), the dejected Polish hairdresser demands the coin back from a French Metro employee, robbed by a payphone in his moment of greatest need. He carries the coin through most of the film, despite trying to throw it into the river upon his return to Warsaw.

What began as a symbol of dejection, becomes one of prosperity. On the flip side, in Poland, the coin literally sticks to Karol Karol. His luck swings in the opposite direction, and money flows quickly in what eventually amounts to a capitalistic fantasy, where the West must suffer for a change, while the East gets rich. “These days, you can by anything,” as a couple characters observe.

Kieslowski toggles an immense feat here, piling layer upon layer of meaning within a simple object, in this case, the two-Franc coin. It mirrors the structure, the main character’s duplicity, the split nature of Europe, and naturally, the drive of money itself.

His meticulous use of color and symbol extends across the film (and the trilogy, for that matter); “white” represents the middle of the French flag and its corresponding ideals of the French Republic: “equality.” Kieslowski twists this idea of “equality” within a marriage – both the literal one and the idea of a “marriage” between East and West – and so, the objects within the film twist as well.

A comb becomes a musical instrument; a suitcase becomes a mode of transportation. Guns fire blanks, people attend a funeral for a man who isn’t dead. Everything is an extension of Karol Karol’s bifurcation, and when he comes up on the other side of rabbit hole in his native Poland, we’re transported to his personal Wonderland.

*For the record, Red is still my favorite of the three films, but White is a very close second. But really, the power of each gets amplified in retrospect, by viewing them in order.

The Apartment is a film of fine detail work – Joseph LaShelle’s deep focus cinematography leaves no stone unturned, each corner of the frame accented by an almost obsessive use lighting. Director Billy Wilder (who also receives screenwriting credit along with I.A.L. Diamond) crafts a tale of false exteriors, told almost completely through interiors, and in doing so, leaves no small visual token unturned.

Perhaps the most pervasive — and consistent – token Wilder returns to throughout The Apartment is the hat. At first, Baxter (Jack Lemmon) dons a more commonplace stetson, eventually trading up to the “Junior Executive” model bowler hat. It’s a fair ridiculous affectation, an obvious status symbol for Baxter, purchased shortly after his first big promotion.

His moment of triumph is undercut as he examines himself (and his bowler) in Fran’s (Shirley MacClaine) make up mirror (pictured above). The broken mirror betrays Fran’s identity while falsifying Baxter’s. He is not “Junior Executive” material. As Fran – the elevator operator – observes, Baxter is the only one with enough decent enough to remove his chapeau when entering the elevator (implicitly, in the presence of a lady).

The hat motif reaches its pinnacle before the film’s finale. Fran suffers a listless New Year’s party with company executive Jeff Sheldrake, both of them donning tacky party favor hats, self-anointed King and Queen of the party. Fran leaves the hat and flees the scene for Baxter. Ready to move out of his apartment and on to something new, Baxter has nearly emptied his place of things. The tokens swept clear – save a bottle of champagne, a deck of cards and some moving boxes – there are no more false trappings, since so much of Baxter’s apartment (its contents) represents a lie rather than his true nature.

Material objects are, in this case, deceiving. Sheldrake doesn’t get Fran anything for Christmas, he hands her a $100 bill. While crude, Sheldrake’s action is, in this case, true to his nature. There’s no veneer behind the hard cash, and its a turning point, in Sheldrake and Fran’s relationship and in the film’s plotting. Every thing relates back to character.

From Boys to Men, Then Boys Again – Rian Johnson’s Looper and the Specter of Motherhood

Zach Herrmann

31 Nov 2012

Mother, you had me but I never had you
I wanted you, you didn’t want me
So I, I just got to tell you
Goodbye, goodbye
– John Lennon, “Mother”

As the final days of the U.S. Presidential Election rage (quiver?) to a close, I thought it would be as good a time as any to drudge up an old and, unfortunately, ever-present screenwriting gripe through a new and, thankfully, refreshing lens…

Hollywood’s War on Women, meet your able-bodied opponent: Rian Johnson’s Looper.

For those out there who have somehow been sleeping through over 100 years of feature-length film-making, the development of movies hasn’t exactly kept up to speed with the evolution of feminism.

I’m singling out the Hollywood or “studio” features here as the worst offenders of latent (and often blatant) misogyny, but in truth, the cinematic (and maybe systematic) mistreatment of women knows no budgetary restraints. The misogynistic offenses of an indie production aren’t necessarily any less egregious than those present in a studio picture – they’re just less likely to reach a wider audience.

The truth of the matter is that it all comes back to the writing. I wouldn’t saddle the screenwriter with all, or even most, of the blame in shortchanging their women characters, but instead openly challenge any writer – male or female – to reevaluate their work for gender bias.

With all the above in mind, I see Rian Johnson’s Looper as a thoughtful and thoroughly engaging corrective to the glorified “Manchild” cinema that has dominated post-Apatow Hollywood.* Looper is, first and foremost, a clever genre entry. Beyond its near-apocalyptic pulp conceit though, the film aches with absence of women.

*I mean no offense to Judd Apatow. But the recent wave of “Manchild” cinema – with its stories of twentysomething and thirtysomething bro-mances and arrested development cases – rides on the coattails of Apatow entries like The 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up. Much in the way Quentin Tarantino and Christopher Nolan could hardly be blamed for the ensuing movies hopelessly aping Pulp Fiction and Memento, respectively, Apatow simply provided the successful mold for the new string of carbon copies.

Mother, you had me but I never had you
I wanted you, you didn’t want me
So I, I just got to tell you
Goodbye, goodbye
– John Lennon, “Mother”

Hollywood’s War on Women, meet your able-bodied opponent: Rian Johnson’s Looper.

For those out there who have somehow been sleeping through over 100 years of feature-length film-making, the development of movies hasn’t exactly kept up to speed with the evolution of feminism.

Auspicious Beginnings

Zach Herrmann

24 Oct 2012

A brief anecdote to kick us off this week…

When I was (probably) about 12 years old, I had a Hebrew school music teacher who taught us a traditional Jewish prayer/song. Really, she taught us many songs, but I’m thinking of one in particular, which oddly enough, I can’t recall.

The actual song isn’t important. What is especially relevant is my teacher’s claim that the song in question could be fit to any melody. Anything whatsoever, from Beethoven’s Fifth to the main theme from Star Wars (or for that matter, “The Imperial March” as well, I tried both). I recall having a lot of fun stretching the Hebrew words to any piece of music I could fathom – at the time that encompassed a lot of Broadway show tunes… a story for another time perhaps.

Ever the cynic though, I started to flip through my Hebrew school song book, and thought, “Well, why couldn’t you do this with any of these songs?” And of course, you could just as easily take any one of those songs and break up the rhythm and phrasing to fit whatever melody you wanted. To this day, I can find no conceivable reason why my teacher would have singled out the song she did, but as far as I could tell at the time, it had nothing to do with the actual design or word structure. There was nothing unique about either.

As we would have had to do with any other song, we broke down the phrasing of the words to fit the melody of the music. It always took massaging, and even the more natural melodic fits were a bit awkward to sing.

The lesson to be learned here is that square pegs will eventually fit round holes if you hit the peg hard enough, or more tailored to our purposes, a preconceived structure can be imposed on a story retroactively if you decide rationalize every story point to death.

I’m sending mixed messages, I know. Structuring a screenplay is a very tricky thing – unlike the novel, it’s always incomplete. Because a script is always written as a blueprint to be followed, we inherit a great many rules & guidelines so (hopefully) the many collaborators can follow along see clearly the movie the writer we had in our heads.

A script that does not conform to these basic rules & guidelines will stick out, for better or worse. People become alarmed when they can’t find the normal signposts. And then, you find yourself on the defensive, looking back and trying to find evidence to support a Three Act Structure, because hey, you wrote something that could be commercial (or so you think), and why can’t people swallow what’s new and different and interesting in your writing?

I am of course, not writing about “you,” but, choosing as always to write what I know, I am writing about me. I struggle with conforming to structure, not because I am some sort of narrative maverick whose writing can’t be tied to anything so rigid and limiting, but because hey, if you haven’t yet noticed, my writing occasionally lacks focus. I choose to follow whims, veer off into tangents and (frequently) overuse the parenthetical or hyphenated asides.

When it comes time for revisions, I revert to my days as a bullshit artist – my sophomore English teacher always marked up my essays with “U.A.,” meaning “unsupported assertion,” which taught me to either source my work better or to cover my tracks with something oblique enough to sound convincing. In short, I rationalize what I have written, and find the points I can claim as signs of Acts or turning points or plot beats, etc.

My ideas tend to skew to the left of quirk. I like to keep things weird. At the same time though, I recognize screenwriting as a craft. This past weekend, I caught up with Marc Maron’s WTF interview with Loren Bouchard (TV’s Home Movies, Bob’s Burgers). Bouchard – a TV showrunner, writer and cartoonist – identified himself not as an artist, but a craftsman. He explained an artist as someone in a constant dialogue with the self, measuring progress as always relative to one’s previous work. A crafts-person (trying to be PC folks) creates, but as an entertainer, seeks the response of an audience and includes audience reaction into the process creation.

A screenplay, if it’s ever to be anything more than a .pdf file on your hard drive, must make some sort of concession to the reader or audience.

Concessions don’t have to be compromises of integrity, although frequently, they turn out that way. The conundrum is how to keep what’s interesting or characteristic about our style of writing while keeping in step with the established mores of our craft.

It’s time for the second lesson. Those of us who have read and written even a little of work intended for the screen should be (and probably are) aware of the 15-page rule. At page 15, the screenplay must arrive at the inciting incident.

For the longest time, the idea of Page 15 was one of those rules & guidelines I openly despised. In fact, when writing a feature length script, I have often deliberately eschewed placing my inciting incident at Page 15. And, in the process, have often deliberately cut off my nose to spite my face.

This past week, my brother (and sometimes co-writer) finally caught up with Kenneth Longergan’s Margaret, a magnificent and fascinating film that, despite its troubled production history, emerges mostly intact from a 168-page script.

In discussing the film, I argued that it was truly unlike any other script I had ever read. The scope grows so far beyond its main character (whose name, incidentally, is not the Margaret of the title), to encompass an entire city in mourning (for itself?). It breaks many of the established rules & guidelines of screenwriting, or at least that’s how I saw it.

As my brother was quick to point out, the overall template — let’s say coming-of-age melodrama to be horribly reductive — and a lot of Margaret’s main storylines are quite conventional. They’re presented on a much wider, generous canvas allowing for the sort of nuanced observation rarely scene in that type of film. But that’s what great about the film (and script) – it takes something we’re too familiar and comfortable with, and breathes life back into the characters.

How does Lonergan make all this work? He begins in intense focus and, lo and behold, strictly observes the law of Page 15. Nearly to the exact page/minute. Margaret — for all about the film/script that is different and true and raw and, unfortunately, defiantly un-commercial — hinges on its Page 15 Inciting Incident. Without the exact placement and timing of said Incident (which is, in spoiler-free terms, very much an Incident), nothing that follows would land properly.

Could you fit Margaret into the popular Three Act structure? Probably, but of course, the fit would be both unnatural and largely irrelevant. The narrative unfolds in a far more haphazard fashion, as life does. Characters drop in and out. The focus is less linear than it is orbital: As the world revolves around the protagonist, the various elements fade from sight until they come back around later.

As an audience member, I trusted Lonergan to take me where I needed to go, and whether I cared to admit it back when I first saw the film, he bought that good will upfront. Right at Page 15.

Especially across 149 minutes of film (Margaret’s theatrical running time), a little bit of discipline goes a long way.

Straight to the Punchline

Zach Herrmann

17 Oct 2012

Nothing like a teachable moment, eh?*

Last Friday night, after plenty of missed opportunities, I finally attended one of FilmGym’s short film screening programs. I enjoyed all four films screened – an impressively diverse slate – and could probably devote a single post to each individual short. However, I feel the readership (Hi Mom!), i.e. all us writer-folk, will benefit most from a look at Luke Matheny’s Oscar-winning short, God of Love (2011, Best Live Action Short Film).

Structurally, God of Love is short–form storytelling firing on all cylinders. As Bob Rafelson would say, it “cuts together like butter.”** The film moves through its 18-minute running time with blistering charm.

Matheny exhibits (and confirmed in a Q&A following the screening) an awareness for how the short-film must differ form its long-form counterpart.

Personally, I like to think of a short-film as a joke. That’s not to say one should rely to heavily on gimmick — there’s nothing worse than a “gotchya” ending. But the best of short-film does tend to follow a sort of tease/setup > build up > punchline format.

Look at any of Pixar’s many great (or in the least, very amusing) short films. Or, if you prefer something a bit loftier, Chris Marker’s La Jetee. All these films open with a conceit, and from that point on, they build toward some sort of final delivery – for lack of a better term, the punchline.

Back to God of Love. Matheny opens with the tease. Voiceover, the introduction to our hero. He rides a moped, armed quiver of arrows. It’s a tease of the final punchline, an indication that what we are watching is an origin story of sorts. By giving us the ending upfront, Matheny alleviates the pressure on the ending. The reveal is an easy one for the audience to accept. No Shymalan business here. Since we have already seen the finale upfront, there’s only the joy of contextualization in the finale, rather than the shock (and anger) of being tricked by the creator.

The build up, or the bulk of the film, sandwiched between these book-ended*** images glides by, since Matheny has already placed the ending in sight for the audience. That’s not to undersell Matheny’s clever script (and lead performance), nor his swift editing. Without all the aforementioned, the punchline wouldn’t matter.

But, conversely, without the organizing principle at work in God of Love, I would argue that the film wouldn’t work half as well, especially given the length.

For matter of comparison, I’ll offer up a little on what I’m up to. For the past two years, I’ve had a short film script I wrote out in a Word document that has sat in my Google Docs, sad and lonely, waiting for a formatting job. There’s hardly any dialogue, so going from scriptment to script took me no time at all.

I see my setup and my punchline (teased in the title) — it’s a five-page script (for now), and already I’m worried. Do I take too long to get to the punchline? God of Love couldn’t work at five – ten minutes. The punchline only gets better as it recedes into the back of your mind. My punchline only succeeds by nature of its proximity to the setup. Close, but not too close. The joke (in this case, yes it is a joke, it’s meant to be funny) lives and dies based not just on the delivery, but how long that delivery takes.

It’s a tricky thing to negotiate, and I suspect it will take a good deal of re-jigging until the set up, build up and punchline smooth out.

–

* From time to time, I try to remember that this is a Canadian blog.

** Rafelson originally said this in reference to the dailies coming in from The Last Picture Show. The studio was worried that Peter Bogdanovich had no clue what he was doing. After viewing the dailies, Rafelson assured the studio reps. that Bogdanovich knew exactly what he was doing — he was editing in-camera, in his head.

Anybody? Not even a chuckle? Fine.

*** A word on book-ending (starting and ending your script or film with parallel, or identical images)… generally speaking, I think of the “book-ending” device in storytelling as laziness. It’s far too easy, usually groan-worthy and predictable. The major caveat to my gripe against book-ending is short-film. Why the exception? Short-film is short-form. You must rely on visual short cuts. Returning to the opening image gives a sense of closure to the audience.

Now, I love a great open-ended film, short or otherwise. One of the films screened the same night of God of Love was a terrific Danish short, 13. It was an intense domestic slice of life piece with no real conclusion, almost like a Raymond Carver short story in a sense. I have a lot of respect for this sort of approach to a short film. 13 never needed a punchline and it was evident from the get-go that there would not be one. If you can go out and write a short like that, pat yourself on the back while the rest of us go in search of our punchlines. We need them and apparently, you do not.

Tig Notaro – Writing Through Your Persona

Zach Herrmann

10 Oct 2012

Week after week, I really do try and resist the urge to turn this space into the “What awesome thing did Louis CK do this time?” blog. So much of what he does as a content creator – be it writer, director, producer, comedian, etc. – makes him an easy place to return to. If Louis CK were simply a great storyteller (which he is), that’d be enough to warrant emulation. But his careful consideration (and melding) of storytelling forms and how his audience accesses these different mediums perhaps makes him the ultimate example of what the 21st century artist should be.

Really, this post isn’t about or his work, per say, though I have to give credit due where credit is deserved. Friday night, Louis CK sent out this message via email blast, and it caught my attention for several reasons. I’m not terribly in the loop when it comes to stand-up comics, so no, I’d never heard of Tig Notaro. Five dollars seemed a very fair trade for a download of a set by anyone so wholeheartedly recommended by CK. Especially given Notaro’s recent personal tragedies and CK’s donating 4/5 of the proceeds to Notaro, it was an easy buy.

Also, for selfish reasons, I had a two-hour bus ride the next morning and simple math (One episode of Marc Maron’s WTF + One thirty-minute comedy set = the length of my trip home) helped dictate my purchasing decision.

Reflecting back on what I felt after listening to Notaro’s set is… difficult, which is sort of inevitable given that Notaro comes right out and tells the audience she has cancer. CK’s assessment that the show is an “amazing example of what comedy can be” almost undersells the piece.

I believe it was Steve Wynn (of the band Dream Syndicate) who, when asked about what made an album a masterpiece, said he needed to hear the feeling that at any given time the album could completely derail and spin out of control. There’s some of that quality to Notaro’s live set, and can only imagine the effect would be that much more personal in full video, or better yet, in person.

Great art and – for the purposes of this blog – great writing needs an element of danger. And no, I don’t mean the real-life presence of something as horrible as cancer or a mother’s death, or in Notaro’s case, both. The danger in Notaro’s set is more complex than what she offers to her audience (her personal life, bared full). It has to do with what she’s given up – her peformer’s persona.

A stand up comedian, by nature, is more biographically exposed than any other kind of writer. The comic is the rare breed of writer who has to own every last word she writes. She becomes the face of those words and characters. Even if every last joke is a complete work of fiction, the performance persona and the actual person performing become harder for an audience to separate.

If you listen to Notaro’s set (and you should), listen to the audience’s first reaction to her admission of “I have cancer.” A lot of nervous laughter, understandably, and the laughter lessens with each time she repeats herself in the opening. Of course, the audience must be unsettled and genuinely caught off guard. Cancer is serious and this is comedy.

Let me suggest that a good deal of the audience discomfort comes to so much from what she said, but from the competing tension Notaro introduces. Any other night, Notaro would have stepped onto the stage and become Tig Notaro, stand up comic. The performance persona, Tig Notaro, who the audience pays to see. On that particular night, for that particular comedy set, Notaro came out and was, I can only imagine, herself.

It’s this odd pull-and-tug that makes Notaro’s live set such a fascinating listen. She is, undoubtedly, a talented comic. There are times though, when it becomes very hard to tease apart comedic timing from her true emotional responses. In fact, the two elements almost bleed together, and then, come apart again.

Again, I have to stress that this is the only set of Notaro’s I’ve ever listened to, so I can’t claim to be in tune with her usual comedic rhythm. I do honestly believe though, you can hear her giving up that performer-audience buffer. Ironically, this feels most evident in the finale, when at the end of the set, Notaro takes an audience request a performs a fan favorite from one of her older sets.

By comparison to the incredibly emotional, unguarded and yes, often hilarious set that preceded it, the “bee on the 401″ bit feels, by comparison, transparent and ridiculous. Notaro’s self-awareness – and also, eagerness to give the fans a so-called real joke after all the catharis – actually makes the “bee on the 401″ joke that much funnier. I’m not sure I would have laughed hearing the joke in any other context.

The point here is not to run out and mine your personal tragedies for raw writing material. More times than not, this will lead to maudlin exercises in self-torture followed by terribly awkward family get-togethers followed by vicious hangovers. Kidding (always).

Notaro’s live set is many things – admirable, brave, exciting, funny, sad – and being many things, it’s hard to pin down exactly what makes it beautiful rather than merely confessional. Her tone and delivery has a lot to do with it. But I believe it comes down to a question of trust.

She trusted her gut, and dropped any semblance of an act. She took her art to the most dangerous of places: autobiography. In doing so, Notaro trusted her audience to follow with her. And they did.

“Because All Your Stars Are Out”- Fictional Advice

Zach Herrmann

3 Oct 2012

“Give me a story that makes me unreasonably vigilant. Keep me up till five only because all your stars are out, and for no other reason…”

– J.D. Salinger, from Seymour – An Introduction

–

I’m not one of those Catcher in the Rye naysayers, and I’d venture to say a lot of that has to do with the fact no one ever forced me to read the book in high school. Long entrenched in the American high school curriculum, Catcher in the Rye mysteriously evaded my yearly reading lists, so I sought it out early on in college for fear of aging beyond the novel’s peak window of impact.

A great novel is a great novel, but in hindsight I do see how differently a teenager and an adult must experience Holden Caulfield. There’s a great thrill in discovering that book too early for said proper hindsight, similar to the way The Stranger and its anti-hero appealed to me when I was still in high school: You either feel too much or too little at that age, and always too easily. These two aforementioned are in sync with the rolling tides of adolescence, and therefore, should be (first) read then.

The young writer, however, might turn elsewhere within Salinger’s brief, potent bibliography. Specifically to “The Glass Family” stories as they’re known, a great inspiration to many creative minds, most explicitly one Wes Anderson.*

I would suggest that many in my generation never went beyond Catcher in the Rye for the simple reason that the book is always contextualized as Salinger’s only novel. This is, of course, technically true, but to present Catcher in the Rye in such a way is to bury the lede: Salinger published a series of short stories (collected in three different installments) that arguably surpass his one and only novel.

I’d rather not chew up precious blogspace arguing the greatness of Nine Stories, Franny and Zooey (probably my personal favorite) and Raise High The Roof Beam, Carpenters / Seymour – An Introduction. Nor do I intend to go through the many intricacies of the fictional Glass family – although, it’s worth noting that no tentpole film series to date has achieved the idea of “worldbuilding” as successfully as Salinger did, weaving together an entire fictional family history.

He created something in literature as immersive as any modern multimedia, multiplatform onslaught, and he knew where to leave the blanks.

For Blog the 14th, I want to bring your attention to one of those open spaces.

In Seymour – a rambling account of the title character written by one of his younger brothers, Buddy – the author (both the character and Salinger) divulges the great piece of advice I copied to open this post. The advice comes from Seymour, delivered to Buddy when he first started writing. Buddy would read his stories out loud to Seymour, who would then leave carefully considered notes and criticism hours or even days later.

Whatever Salinger’s intentions may have been, he has, in effect, delivered some terrific and encouraging words of wisdom – no small feat for a man who left the publishing world to live his life in seclusion.

For your benefit and mine, I’d like to excerpt a few more selections of “Seymour’s” advice:

“Please make peace with your wit. It’s not going to away, Buddy. To dump it on your own advice would be as bad and unnatural as dumping your adjectives and adverbs because Prof. B. wants you to. What does he know about it? What do you really know about your own wit?”

“It sounds like the beginning of something your arch-enemy Bob B. calls a rattling good story. Don’t you think he would call this a step in the right direction? Doesn’t that worry you? Even what is funny about the woman on the back of the truck doesn’t sound like something you think is funny. It sounds much more like something that you think is universally considered very funny… Are you a writer or just a writer of rattling good stories. I mind getting a rattling good story form you. I want your loot.”

“Were most of your stars out? Were you busy writing your heart out? If only you knew how easy it would be for your to say yes to both questions. If only you’d remember before ever you sit down to write that you’ve been a reader long before you were ever a writer. You simply fix that fact in your mind, then sit very still and yourself, as a reader, what piece of writing in all the world Buddy Glass would most want to read if he had his heart’s choice. The next step is terrible, but so simple I can hardly believe it as I write it. You just sit down shamelessly and write the thing yourself. “

Inspiring stuff. Which is how it’s supposed to read. The piece – and for that matter, none of the related Glass family pieces – fails if were aren’t properly enamored with the eldest of the siblings, Seymour Glass. But it’s Salinger, and he’s speaking directly to his reader/writer audience. It’s an incredibly powerful… so much so that I’m leaving you with on that thought. Because I need to set off and shamelessly write the one piece of writing in all the world Zachary Herrmann most wants to read.

*I’m not going into this at length since it’s been established all over the Internet (and I believe, affirmed by Wes Anderson himself), but The Royal Tennenbaums is very much influenced by Salinger’s “Glass family” short stories.

“Somewhere Without Language or Streets”

Zach Herrmann

26 Sept 2012

The first screenplay I ever attempted to write was, pragmatically enough, a short film script. It was June 2008. I titled the piece “Heartaches,” in reference to the Patsy Cline song.* Having re-read the short as recently as a year-or-so ago, I can proudly say the writing is not half as embarrassing as it could be. In fact, thematically, the script is still very relevant to much of what I have written these last four years and yes, what I still continue to write now.

Tracing back to the roots of “Heartaches,” I remember distinctly how the idea came to me. I had a sudden image: A car window in close up. Faint reflection of the sky and a college town street. The image shatters, literally, as a brick goes through the window.

In the final version of the script, I don’t think I even used that image to open up — although, I now realize I later used a very similar image to open a feature script. The broken window is never fully explained. A random act of vandalism that jolts the protagonist into acknowledging the predicament of his current living situation: He is in love with his best friend’s girlfriend.

Please, go easy on me.

My objective in this blogpost is not to examine that first script — we can save that for a rainy day, or better yet, never. I am far more interested in digging back to how, exactly, I arrived at that first image. Typically, my script ideas originate from a theme. I obsess over the theme for a while, the theme begets a one-word title, the title begets a main character and from the character emanates (hopefully) a story. Or, more times than not, a dead-end, but that’s all there in the process.

I rarely begin with an image. These mind-movies come early in the process, but the only occasion I can pinpoint where the first image preceded any semblance of a script idea would be “Heartaches.”

While exploring how I arrived at that image, it’s only logical I should look to my influences at the time. Toward the end of high school, through college and still to this day, I believed Woody Allen was king and Manhattan was my Bible. Robert Altman’s films had already made a huge impression on me, specifically how he was able to deconstruct and invert genre — McCabe and Mrs. Miller was an inside-out Western, The Long Goodbye an inside-out noir, both films tailor-made for a country caught in a severe identity crisis.

Mentally cataloging all these influences and inspirations, I became curious, less about what triggered that specific image, but what triggered my desire to be a screenwriter? The answer is, of course, a long one. However, I’m convinced I can trace it all back to one film, and even more specifically, one scene.

Paris, Texas. The scene is the second in the film between Travis (Harry Dean Stanton) and Jane (Natassja Kinski). You can find the scene on Youtube in full, though I’d hazard against watching the scene if you haven’t seen the film before. Not so much for the sake of “spoiler” content. In fact, I’m surprised at how well the scene stands on its own. Without knowing the preceding peep show scene (don’t worry, this is all SFW) and the context of all that comes before, you couldn’t take in a fraction of the emotional weight between Stanton and Kinski’s two characters.

Why this scene? What was it that resonated so strongly when I saw it for the first time as a freshman in college?And why, specifically, would this scene convince me that screenwriting was the only way for me to express myself?

Looking back at the excerpt now, I see confluence: how words on a page transform into cinema. The direct intersection between the dialog, performances, lighting, set design and editing to create something that has gravitas. On their own, the words are beautiful. See for yourself:

TRAVIS:
I knew these people...               

JANE:
What people?       

TRAVIS:
These two people. 
They were in love with each other.

Evocative, sparse. The 11-minute scene builds, unfolds, reveals as the emotional dynamic shifts completely between these long-separated characters. It feels like one giant torpedo exploding into the auteur theory: Here is a true collaboration. It’s all-hands-on-deck cinema and I cannot imagine the greatest (and yes, most famous) scene in Paris, Texas without each individual contribution.

When I first watched the film, I didn’t think about emulating Shepard or writing something of so-called “great importance.” For what it’s worth, I don’t even think of Paris, Texas as one of my all-time favorite scripts. What struck me, what drew me in was the place the writing had within the scene – how it was not the sole attraction, but a crucial element.

Suddenly, I saw an opening. The place where I could fit in.

*The Internet informs me that Al Hoffman and John Klenner are credited, respectively, with the music and lyrics. Cline’s version of the song is the only one I’m familiar with.

In Defense of the Non-Ending

Zach Herrmann

19 Sept 2012

The two most important scenes of a film (or script) are undoubtedly the opening and ending — the former setting up an entire self-contained world of possibilities, the latter slamming the door shut* and sending us back into the reality of everyday life.

My gripe on bad opening shots hardly requires an entire blog post. Please never open a film (or script) with a wasted establishing “shot.” We’ve all seen the New York City skyline** plenty of times before, and there are many other, better ways to signify location without wasting the first images on the screen/ words on the page.

For me, the richer argument lies within the context of endings, specifically the growing popularity of the so-called “non-ending.”

Films that end abruptly or trail off, seemingly without resolution. Because, hey, not every picture can end with John Wayne gazing longingly through the door frames, only to turn his back on domesticity, to return to the wild life of uncertainty. Many films feel the need to embrace that wild life of uncertainty, they embody it. Rather than leaving you fulfilled or reassured, the open-ended finale plants itself like a gut-punch.

Or, it can leave you hanging at the moment of greatest intrigue (sometimes we get what we need, not what we want). Each and every case is different, but I do find I’m more receptive than most to the idea of the “non-ending.” For your consideration and our discussion, I’ve included a few examples of what I believe are successfully non-endings.

Given the nature of this blog post, each capsule will contain SPOILERS, so consider this your alert. I have put the film names in bold, so if you want/need to skip over a section, no offense taken.

*Sometimes literally (The Godfather).

** Woody Allen’s Manhattan is exempt from this admonishment since the city and main character are inseparable. Also, no one has ever photographed New York City as beautifully as Gordon Willis did for that film – frankly, that in itself, would be enough.

–

PAYDAY

I quite nearly dedicated an entire post to this Daryl Duke-directed, Don Carpenter-scripted road flick about an up-and-coming country singer (Rip Torn) hellbent on going down as hard and fast as he can. Structured as a fairly accessible road movie, Torn’s performance as Maury Dann hijacks the proceedings, accentuating Carpenter’s studied approach of this reprehensible mess of a man.

Payday ends prematurely – I was shocked not at how, exactly, the film ended but how quickly and abruptly it arrived at its final, inevitable moment.

With a young aspiring singer – and newly hired driver/assistant – in tow, Dann (Torn) flees the local authorities, taking off in his prized Cadillac.

Mid-conversation, hooting and hollering as he imparts wisdom to the impressionable man in the backseat, Dann dies. The film ends with said spooked young man escaping the car wreck, running along the dirt road, Dann left hanging out of the car in the cornfield.

Dann’s taxing lifestyle – the ultimately fatal mix of booze, pills, pot and women in place of sleep & clean livin’ – is established from the get-go. The great irony is that while Dann does not make it to his physical destination (Nashville, for a run of career-boosting TV appearances), he does make it to the only destination that seems to matter to him: his final resting place.

The ending marks the film as a death journey, and I suspect on subsequent viewings, the allusions might only be that much more apparent in Dann’s intentions.

MEAN STREETS

Plenty have written about how to interpret the opening images of Mean Streets and how they relate to the ending of the film. After a brief introduction to Charlie (Harvey Keitel), his head hits the pillow to the drum beat of “Be My Baby,” the camera pans around a projector and we see a series of home movies flicker to life.

Given the intro – Charlie’s head hitting the pillow – this could be read by some as a metaphor, i.e. the projector of the mind. These home movie images could be Charlie’s dreams. And they are, in a sense, although a more literal analysis would require us to believe the home movies are just that – home movies.

Chronologically, when placed within the context of the the story that follows, these home movies would logically have to come after the end of the film.

Trouble catches up to Charlie, Johnny Boy (Robert De Niro) and Teresa (Amy Robinson). A sudden shootout, a car crash, and all three are left seriously injured. The film cuts to a series of quick shots of the San Gennarro Feast in Little Italy, ending on a shot of a neighbor closing the blinds to the apartment, shutting us out.

Like the film’s director Martin Scorsese, Charlie is a conflicted Catholic. If we accept that everyone survives the carnage at the end of the film, and they must given the events depicted in the home movies, than the bloody finale is necessary. Only once Charlie suffers for his sins can he attain everything he wants: a wife, a family, the restaurant. In a word: happiness.

BROKEN FLOWERS

At the end of Broken Flowers, Bill Murray’s John Johnston is at the crossroads, both literally and figuratively. He journeys out into America and through his past girlfriends to try and find the mystery woman who wrote him a letter revealing the existence of a son he never knew about.

The search is fruitless, at least in its main objective, as Johnston never does find the son or determine who the son’s mother was. Returned home in defeat, Johnston strikes up a conversation with a young guy (Mark Webber), and then scares him off when Johnston thinks he could be his son.

He chases after the young man, only to lose him at a cross-section. A car drives by with a different young man sitting in the back – he’s wearing the same track jacket as Webber’s character, and happens not-so-coincidentally to be played by Bill Murray’s real-life son, Homer.

The knowledge about Murray’s actual son reenforces the finale, though it’s not essential. Really, it’s more about the track jacket. Webber’s character could very well be his son, or just as easily, not. The search may have been a ruse by Johnston’s most recent ex (Julie Delpy), or one of the other exes could have been lying.

In the end, the answers do not matter, hence why the film ends without resolution. Johnston’s revelation is that he could spend the rest of his life chasing men who could be his son. If such a son exists, Johnston’s window of opportunity has already gone. He’s left with regret, uncertainty and the burden of his past relationships.

Do You Practice Deprivation?

Zach Herrmann

12 Sept 2012

Hi. My name is Zach and I haven’t written a script in an embarrassingly long time.

Sure, I’ve done revisions. I’d even call them “extensive” or “substantive.” I’ve plotted, outlined, taken notes, written sample dialogue, prepared, reconsidered, stalled, moved on and started over again. But if we’re talking, I sat down and wrote something at roughly feature length in a “finished” first draft, or hell, even rough draft form… it’s been too long.

Possibly revealing segue: I spent an entire afternoon/evening/night at Anthology Film Archives yesterday, an experience I highly enjoyed and did not feel the least built guilty over. The three films I caught were a part of Anthology’s ongoing “From The Pen Of…” series, which highlights the most overlooked member of filmmaking process: the screenwriter.

This time around, the theme was “Authors writing screenplays not adapted from their own works” and the three terrific films I caught were Downhill Racer (pictured above), Payday (a forgotten 1970s gem I will most likely write about within the next few weeks) and The Innocents (beautiful CinemaScope cinematography makes it a MUST SEE in 35mm, should you ever have the opportunity).

Back to Downhill Racer though, the James Salter-penned directorial debut of Michael Ritchie. Without getting exhaustive, Robert Redford plays an Olympic skier, both incredibly dedicated and utterly impenetrable. He’s hotheaded, egotistic and kinda/sorta a massive dick. But his devotion is unparalleled, enviable even. Whether or not you agree with his motivation is another case altogether.

At one point in the film, a British reporter stops Redford and asks him if he practices “deprivation,” clearly alluding to sexual deprivation in respect to sports performance.

Now now, I promise you we are not getting into anything too icky for the CSSC blog readership (Hi Mom!). This is not a post about sexual deprivation and screenwriting and no, that will not be a topic down the road. Sexual depravity, maybe — many people in my life take issue with my labeling of Blue Velvet as a “comedic satire I could watch over and over.” Sorry.

The talk of “deprivation” got me thinking as to what, if any, are the benefits of depriving oneself of the actual writing of a screenplay? Popular opinion would say that’s an awful idea. A writer should, above all other things, write. Everyday, if possible. Constantly.

However conscious or not, when writing a screenplay alone (my process is WAY different when writing with a partner), I realize I do tend to deprive myself of the actual writing for as long as possible. To rationalize this process, I could argue that in giving myself the maximum amount of prep time, the writing of draft one becomes that much smoother.

Looking through my old files, the “prep documents” or notes I take for a feature script usually numbers between 25 – 40 pages or so. This includes character, theme, motif and random notes (okay, mostly random notes), and usually, a fairly comprehensive outline depending on what mood I’ve been in one. In one case, I remember transcribing about three or four hours of audio notes I took while driving to and from Baltimore (Hi Mom!)*.

There’s something about these charades that go beyond diligence, though I do have a natural proclivity for planning things out to an unnecessary degree. The pattern of my pre-writing strikes me as intentional in the avoidance of writing. Anyone who has taken on a feature-length script can probably empathize – it’s a plunge. And one that rarely ever feels like it has an end in sight. The completion of a rough draft is as short-lived as victories come. A breather for some brief reflection, then back to the battle.

So it’s understandable why, subconsciously, I might try and put off the start date. I go out and see people a lot less when I’m mid-draft. I find I’m much more lenient on myself during the outlining stages.

If the time before the actual writing is spent productively, I see no issue. Aligning my viewing and reading habits to match whatever I’m working on, taking in as much as I can. Collecting, as we always do.

What, though, are the benefits of the waiting, the deprivation? It has definitely helped me with that initial momentum out of the gates. I tend to blister through my rough drafts (I’m a huge proponent of the Just Finish The F**king Thing school of writing first drafts). Correlation is not causation though, and I’m sure the pre-planning is more than responsible for that initial thrust.

But denying myself the screenwriting does do something. It keeps me excited, rather than fearful. A lot of that probably goes back to my love of dialogue, the fact least covered in my pre-writing exercises.

This idea of delaying and depriving is not one I would endorse. This past weekend, I buckled down and wrote a 4-page excerpt of a totally underdeveloped, unready feature — because I just couldn’t wait on the script I was currently prepping and felt I needed to prove something.

However long it’s been, I have to say, it’s definitely good to be back in the saddle.

*Completely hands free, I assure you – I had my phone recording from the center console, so please do not worry, it was all very safe driving. However, I do realize that the idea of my talking to myself (or my phone) for three or four hours may be something to worry about. Nothing to be done about that though, it was an odd script requiring odd measures.

New Spaces

Zach Herrmann

5 Sept 2012

Welcome to this week’s post, which unfortunately, comes to you in the aftermath of my moving apartments over the weekend. It’s left me exhausted (physically, mentally, emotionally, fiscally), but hey… in the midst of moving I found my long “lost” copy of Stephen Frears’s The Hit, and isn’t that what matters most?

The whole process of moving has left me pretty depleted, so I’ll be brief. In my last apartment, I did not have a very productive space carved out for my writing. Hell, until last night, I hadn’t owned a desk since I left college. But I wrote a lot over the last two years in that apartment.

Usually sitting cross-leg on my bed, hunched over my laptop (Spines? Who needs ‘em?) Occasionally, I used our coffee table out in the common area. Despite my stubborn nature, I now fully admit I could have purchased any number of items — a chair, a desk, even a small night table — which would have made my life easier, and my numerous hours spent writing, all the more pleasant.

As uncomfortable and hindering as these two setups were, I made them mine. I buckled down, and however I feel about the actual writing I did in that time, I did it as often as I could. What I wrote is undeniably tied to where I lived.

During the winter of 2010-11, I was barricaded in our apartment on Christmas thanks to 25 inches of snow and a silent strike from the city sanitation department. For 48 hours, I stayed alone in the apartment writing.

At the beginning of the snow storm, I felt something wet settle on the bridge of my nose. Then, a drop on my laptop. Our skylight had been left cracked open, and we hadn’t noticed until now. Snow was coming through.

Luckily, I caught our superintendent. All was well, and I was back to writing.

Until the screaming began. We had recently developed a mouse infestation problem. Or rather, a mice infestation problem – there’s never just one.

An exterminator had come by to bomb the place. The mice were screaming, I was writing and soon enough, New York was completely sealed in under the blizzard.

In those two days of isolation, I lost a little of my mind. More importantly though, I rewrote a feature script I had been working on, still with enough time leftover to have a tall bottle of ale and enjoy the Brian Desmond Hurst-direct version of A Christmas Carol as I have for as far back as I can remember.

Handling transitions is what (good) screenwriting is all about. Without a doubt, my new writing space is superior in every way imaginable to the old one. I wonder, though, if I’d be feeling so sentimental about my old apartment if it weren’t for the writing.

Anyway, next week, I’ll be on to something more substantial More writing, less assembling IKEA furniture.

Affection for the Affected Speech

Zach Herrmann

29 Aug 2012

David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis is abrasive cinema, though not necessarily in the way you might imagine given the writer/director’s track record. By the standards of Cronenberg’s past efforts, even some of his more recent entries, the film is only mildly graphic* (again, that’s relative to a guy known for scenes like this).

What I found most provoking this time around is the nature of the language in the script, Cronenberg’s first writing credit since 1999′s eXistenZ. Long monologues and dialogues spurt forth like the endless streams of financial data running on the video screens illuminating Eric Packer’s (Robert Pattison) stretch limousine. The screenplay – adapted from Don DeLillo’s source novel – is equally poetic and theatrical, a tough nut to crack for audiences, and presumably, the actors involved in the production as well.

Suffice to say, I loved the film and cannot wait to see it again. Along with the best of Cronenberg’s works, the threat of derailment on a narrative and structural level is part of what makes the film so exciting. No small feat for a script largely confined to the back of a stretch limo, however decked out it may be.

The reviews have been mixed, and if I were to make an educated guess, what’s turning people off to Cosmopolis is exactly what turned me on: the affected nature of the language. By largely sealing off the locations – the limo, lunch counters, book stores, a barbershop – Cronenberg forces the audience into the conversations. We burrow into the language of each interaction, which typically consists of Packer and only one other character.

Contrary to Alexander Mackendrick’s idea of triangulation – a scene instantly becomes stronger/more interesting by adding a third character, even if that character never speaks – Cosmopolis almost exclusively relies on one-on-one dialogues, or confrontations. Packer is a man who lives and dies by minutiae, so the specificity of each discussion cannot risk inclusion, save for a few notable exceptions.

Budd Wilkins, in his Cosmopolis review for Slant Magazine, likens the films pacing to that of the “the screwiest of screwball comedies,” and Wilkins has hit the nail right on the head. His Girl Friday, The Lady Eve, Philadelphia Story and all the rest of the screwball set hail from a period when Hollywood still fed off the aesthetics of theatre.

Thus, heightened dialogue was the norm. Now, the typical viewer has been conditioned to have a knee-jerk reaction to anything that doesn’t sound real – “real,” in this case, referring to the way people speak to one another in real life.

Which seems an awful double standard. If we go to the movies to see the fantastic, why shouldn’t we hear the fantastic as well?

In a recent interview with Cronenberg for Film Comment, Amy Taubin brought up the issues people had raised regarding the dialogue in Cosmopolis (see excerpt below):

TAUBIN: I don’t think it’s so much that people can’t follow it or can’t understand what’s being said as much as they think people don’t talk like that. But people in movies don’t talk the way people talk in life, even in movies that seemed realistic at the moment they were made.

CRONENBERG: They don’t. And why is that necessary? For me, the failing of a lot of movies is that the talking is exactly what people expect, even if you’re doing a period piece where people absolutely do not talk the way we talk now, or a sci-fi movie, where you’re imagining a future society…

Cronenberg goes on to note that all the characters speak in this strange vernacular because they come from the same world, or, “cultural place, which is to say, the obsessive world of money and the currency market.”

Think of other contemporary screenwriters (or writer/directors) who are similarly charged with writing in heightened, or, so-called unrealistic speech: Whit Stillman, Wes Anderson, The Coen Brothers, Aaron Sorkin. These writers deal in very specific subjects, instantly identifiable groups of people whose manner of speech imprints and transfers from one member to the other.

Archeris one of the best examples out there for this type of groupthink writing. Across three seasons, the in-joking and closeness of the cast of characters begets a very specific pattern of dialogue. Each character has his or her own distinct personality, but the similarities multiply as the show carries on.

Though the manner of dialogue on Archer is far more colloquial than the style favored in Cosmopolis, there is, oddly enough, a shared idea between the two. Ideas and information penetrate the body and pass from one person to another, either from physical proximity or, in the cinema of David Cronenberg, an astounding myriad of other means.

We rub off on one another, no matter how distanced we try to appear.

* Fair warning for those who have yet to see Cosmopolis – it’s still got its share of grisly moments.

I Wish I Could Be Like Ray Davies

Zach Herrmann

29 Aug 2012

Welcome to Week 8 folks. I’ve been fortunate enough to receive many a kind word in regards to weeks 1 – 7 (Hi Mom!), and so please, allow me a brief moment to thank everyone who has been reading.

Emboldened by your lovely attentions, I will step briefly outside the CSSC blog’s usual sphere of concerns into something tangential, but yes, relevant:

The Kinks. Specifically the band’s chief songwriter*, the interminable Ray Davies.

Why The Kinks? Why Ray Davies?

For the purposes of a more musically-inclined blog, I could speak volumes as to how sorely neglected The Kinks’ seven-album run from 1965 (The Kink Kontroversy) to 1971 (Muswell Hillbillies) is within the wider scope of 1960s-70s British Invasion rock. All great albums that anyone with even a passing interest in the music of that era should explore.

Alas, though, I promised relevance and relevance I shall deliver. When I first started thumbing through my Dad’s CD collection in middle school – the serious beginning to my British rock self-education – I started with the acknowledged heavy hitters: The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who. And I loved it all.

I resisted The Kinks. “You Really Got Me” was all I really knew of them, and as any dumb teenager would be when presented with greatness, I was unimpressed. Father knows best, and of course, he pointed me to The Kink Kronickles set — a double-disc of collected singles from 1966 – 1970, their golden years.

Here I was confronted with something wholly unexpected. John Lennon and Mick Jagger were the first two songwriters I seriously hooked onto. However diametrically opposed to one other, they both spoke to grand, universal ideas. Love, hate, exploration, (self-)destruction. Big canvases, and in that realm, they were better than anyone else.

But in the songs of Ray Davies and The Kinks, I found something wholly different. Small canvases. Little characters living cramped lives, the intense details taken down by a keen observer of human interaction.

The model songwriter for the aspiring screenwriter.

There are plenty of other writers who deserve such a distinction. Nick Cave comes to mind, although that’s a bit unfair. Neko Case, who really never needed to name check David Lynch for anyone to pick up on the influence – the connection between cinema and music is nearly cyclical. The inspiration comes back around.

I singled out Davies on account of two songs in particular: “David Watts” and “Two Sisters”, both phenomenal in their own right.

The genius of the latter song, “David Watts”, lies in Davies’s subtle interplay of show-and-tell. Through the unnamed Narrator (or singer), Davies tells us everything about the enviable David Watts, rattling off a laundry list of desirable qualities. On the surface, the lyrics are simple. What Davies shows us, though, is far more interesting than anything contained in the stated qualities of a character who appears, from what the Narrator tells us, to be absolutely perfect.

“David Watts” is a well-delivered piece of misdirection: The song isn’t about Watts at all, but the Narrator who “cannot tell water from champagne”. It’s a story of jealousy and longing, emotions the Narrator has transferred onto one single character. We can extrapolate more about the Narrator from his POV of David Watts than we can ascertain about Watts himself. The song is far less literal than it first seems.

And then, “Two Sisters”. The glockenspiel simultaneously establishes the melancholy and “drudgery” of Sybilla’s domestic life. Like “David Watts”, another story of jealously and disappointment. Both songs could almost be considered Hitchcockian in their obsession with duality & doppelgangers.

Later on, Ray’s brother Dave would have much a far more playful time employing a deliberately vague use of pronouns (see “Lola”). Here, in “Two Sisters”, the slip from Sybilla to her sister Priscilla comes on like a dissolved cut between parallel scenes: “Sybilla looked into her mirror / Priscilla looked into the washing machine,” and then, “Sybilla looked into the wardrobe / Priscilla looked into the frying pan.” The differences in their lives are readily apparent, but the shared thread of unhappiness runs through the structure.

Davies is a master of shorthand. In roughly two minutes apiece, he establishes two carefully drawn characters – people we understand and recognize without any lengthy explanation. It’s no surprise Wes Anderson has found inspiration in The Kinks (three times in The Darjeeling Limited, mining the Lola album, and once in Rushmore). Davies and Anderson share a mutual understanding of how to shorthand character and setting, without shortchanging either.

*No slight meant to Ray’s brother and band mate Dave Davies, a superb songwriter in his own right. One day, much to my family’s chagrin, I may insist his song “Death of a Clown” be played at my funeral. Though I admit “Strangers” would be a far more tactful choice, if I must compromise. Anyway, the point is Dave was every bit as talented as his brother. In fact, as I write this apologetic footnote, I’m nearly reconsidering my decision to focus exclusively on Ray Davies for this post. On “Susannah’s Still Alive”, Dave’s writing exhibits all the incisive probing of character I would usually attribute to his brother’s songs. The line gets blurry between the two, but ultimately, when I came up with the idea for this blog entry, I immediately thought of two Ray Davies songs,”David Watts” and “Two Sisters.”

What I’m trying to say here is… sorry Dave. Big fan.

Prometheus – Man, The Unmaker

Zach Herrmann

15 Aug 2012

“Please. Accept the mystery.” – from The Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man

“Nothing is revealed.” – Bob Dylan

“Nothing was delivered, But I can’t say I sympathize…” – also Bob Dylan

I know, I know. Two post in a row, two opening Coen Brothers quotes. I’ll stop quoting them when they stop writing such quotable dialogue, and that’s all I can say in my defense.

Also, three opening quotes??? Completely self-indulgent, right? But (stick with me as) I digress…

Hollywood has a serious prequel problem. And no, the problem isn’t simply that these prequels (and sequels, remakes, re-dos, re-imaginings, recyclings, etc.) exist. Okay, their mere existence is irksome in many respects. In theory, though, there’s nothing wrong in revisiting a canonical work.

L. Frank Baum wrote not one, but 14 Oz novels*. The Curse of the Cat People is every bit as essential as Cat People, not to mention Paul Schrader’s worthy remake of the latter. No shortage of great sequels and remakes, but great prequels? Try naming a few. Or even one.

Godfather II – an admittedly complicated case – gets major points for being the rare (semi) prequel that enriches the original story by filling in the blanks left open in part one. Besides simultaneously working as prequel and sequel to the original Godfather, the film proves the exception to the rule that prequels are, in my opinion, inherently ruinous.

Case and point: I never needed to know more about the Space Jockey.

The original Alien film is a textbook case of minimalist storytelling. Walter Hill’s definitive draft exhibits a less radical version of his utilitarian’s eye for character and dialog, which had previously been taken to the logical extreme in The Driver. Unnecessary exposition, circumstantial prattling – all fat has been trimmed, leaving only the essential sinews of storytelling. We are given evidence and atmosphere on the screen, nothing more.

All we need to know about the crew members of the Nostromo can be observed in their brief interactions. Same goes for the whereabouts of the Xenomorphs and what befell that Space Jockey in the abandoned spaceship. The audience must extrapolate, if they desire to, any back story not explicitly stated by the writers.

Alien‘s sorta-prequel, Prometheus, follows the complete inverse of the original’s “show don’t tell” mandate, resulting in a hodgepodge of disparate story & plot elements. The only real narrative thrust comes from outside the narrative: the authors’ desire to play connect-the-dots with the Alien mythos and undo the mystery.

When the money shot – the main thread tying Prometheus to Alien – finally arrives, there’s no power to the image. The only purpose lies in the connective tissue between the prequel and its source. You knew this is where Ridley Scott and Co. would take you – from the moment the project’s connection to Alien was first announced, then denied, then kind of admitted, then completely confirmed by the film’s promotional materials.

I could go on for hours about my many issues with the film – MINOR SPOILER ALERT: abortion machine, need I say more? END MINOR SPOILER. But why bother, when the root of the issue goes back to the film’s inception? Forget all the mumbo jumbo about meeting our makers**, suggested not so subtly by Prometheus‘s grandiose title.

This movie exists solely to explain a less compelling version of what so many attentive viewers have already imagined. This fatal flaw is endemic to the prequel. How did The Wizard of Oz become The Wizard of Oz? How did Anakin Sywalker turn into Darth Vader? How did Professor X end up in a wheelchair?

How did I end up paying $12 and two-and-half hours to wait for an answer I already knew? Therein lies the true mystery.

As usual, I’m willing to be proven wrong. Feel free to take up the comments section with suggestions of great prequels, official or otherwise. My only request is don’t bother bringing up Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom or Rise of the Planet of the Apes. I like the former well enough, and haven’t yet read a compelling-enough case as to why I should bother seeing the latter. So okay, if you want to really go to bat for Rise of the Planet of the Apes, fine, I’ll listen. Leave Indy out of it though.

* My Dad read all 14 novels to me as a kid. Ever since, we have both decried the senselessness in revisiting and bastardizing the Oz lore while there remains 13 perfectly good source novels to adapt. Walter Murch’s Return to Oz borrows from three of those subsequent Oz novels, and gets just about everything right… up until the severely botched visualization of the Nome King. However, the film’s Shock Corridor-referenced opening in an insane asylum scared the shit out of me as a kid: Dorothy strapped down, awaiting electroshock therapy for believing tall tales of faraway lands.

** And oh, by the way… For my money, Alien has infinitely more to “say” than Prometheus in regards to the tenuous existence of humankind. Because, of course, Alien doesn’t “say” anything about mankind’s impending extinction (yes, “mankind” is this sense, because Ripley, the heroine, wasn’t the chosen survivor by coincidence). Instead, the film shows us the end is nigh – we, as a species, are expendable. The future belongs to aliens and robots, and out of the ether of this societal mess, a woman discovers upward mobility through survival of the fittest.

Alien‘s famous tagline – “In space, no one can here you scream” indicates a silent death. Prometheus sports three taglines, but lord, will ya just look at this one: “They went looking for our beginning. What they found could be our end.” The movie hasn’t even started, and already, it’s talking our ears off to no avail.

Gene Hackman, Sucking in the Seventies

Zach Herrmann

8 Aug 2012

“Sometimes, there’s a man, well, he’s the man for his time and place. He fits right in there.” – Sam Elliott in The Big Lebowski

Four years. Three films. Three directors. Three screenwriters. One actor.

Gene Hackman.

Last week, I was fortunate enough to see a 35 mm print of The French Connection in theaters – which, by the way, is something everyone should do if given the chance. I hadn’t seen the film for at least five years or so. Most of the details remained pretty fresh in my head, with one major exception: the finale.

Popeye Doyle’s (Hackman) teasing hand wave to Frog 1, yes sure, and then the ensuing chase into the leaky warehouse wreckage… but I had completely forgotten the bleak ending shot – and I do mean “shot” literally, since the frame freezes on the empty corridor as Doyle fires his gun off-screen in vain. For whatever reason, I recalled Doyle as a headstrong, cocksure and, ultimately, pathetic character. Yet I had blocked out just how utterly powerless he was in the end.

With this in mind, I would like to propose a holy official triad of Hackman’s 1970s output. We’ll call it “The Man Who Lost Control” trilogy, spanning from 1971 – 1975: The French Connection (Popeye Doyle), The Conversation (Harry Caul) and Night Moves (Harry Moseby).

Each of the three men are detectives: Doyle the plainclothesman, Caul the wiretapper and Moseby the private eye. All three have their similarities. Blue-collar (at best in Doyle’s case) to middle-class Everymen with woman trouble of one kind or another. However unintentional, there’s almost an arch from character to character. An evolution, as if each writing/directing team (Coppola both wrote and directed The Conversation) were trying to build upon the last incarnation of Hackman’s Man Who Lost Control.

Chalk it up to the changing times – Laos and the Pentagon Papers, up through the Watergate scandal – or, perhaps, to Hackman’s maturing as an actor. There is something, though, about these three characters and Hackman’s respective performances that captures my imagination. They are variations on “God’s lonely man”.

In a sense, each man is a variation on the film noir (anti) hero. Like Wile E. Coyote after the Roadrunner, they chase their subjects with confidence – only to look down and realize the ground beneath them has disappeared. The world around them has disappeared and there is no sure footing ahead.

Doyle, blinded by anger. Caul, by his loneliness. And Moseby, by his desire to know all the answers, often without bothering to form the question first.

The three Hackman films in question become an interesting study of the dynamic between character and plot. Both The Conversation and Night Moves are regularly referred to as “character studies”. The French Connection, considerably less so.

Harry Caul (The Conversation) and Harry Moseby (Night Moves) move in reaction to the world around them. Popeye Doyle (The French Connection) drives forward relentlessly, until the moment he goes too far, and then he disappears from the screen. If Caul and Moseby are byproducts of Watergate – helpless pawns in larger-than-life conspiracies – then Doyle is the earlier prototype, the citizen-soldier lost in the jungle.

Sociopolitical events and the influence of European cinema took the stress away from narrative – in The Conversation, the central plot fades into the background; in Night Moves, plot/genre convention are mere illusions, stripped away in the final shot.

I’m stretching things here (forgive me, long week), but as I begin prepping notes and outlining for my next script, the importance of form & content comes up in (ugh, wait for it) conversation, time and again. When does the character move the plot? When is it appropriate for the plot to move the character? Can plot be a character in itself, as the other characters act and react to produce “circumstance” or, if you’re feeling lofty, “fate”?

When I re-watch Hackman’s three Men Who Lost Control, I see the tension of character and plot moving from exterior cause to interior motivation, inverted and twisted back over itself as these characters slip and err. The actor, Hackman, is malleable in ways his Men are not, capable of shifting from sad sack to raging bull in an instant.

He bends with the dynamic, adapts with the times. Only to be crushed again.

The Screenwriter’s Lede

Zach Herrmann

1 Aug 2012

I find it hard not to think of screenwriting – or for that matter, writing in general – within the context of my journalism schooling. Old habits die hard, and they also have a way of defining new habits.

While teaching an entry-level news writing course, one of my college journalism professors described two kinds of news writers: Those who can get past their lede, and those who can’t.

The lede – journo-speak for “lead” – simply refers to the opening paragraph of a news story. Ideally, your lede delivers the most bare-bones, essential version of the facts while establishing both the Raison d’être and tone for the rest of the story. Without an intriguing (or in the very least, sound) lede, you’ve lost your reader from the get-go.

The average morning commuter reading the paper before work doesn’t have time to be confused. He or she wants a clear communication of what they’re getting into. A jumbled lede says, “Move along, we’re still sorting things out here” rather than “This is what happened, see below for details”.

As my professor observed, some writers can skip over their lede – leaving a placeholder or nothing at all. They write the entire story and go back to the beginning, retroactively distilling the information of the piece down to a lede.

And the others… well, I was in that camp. The news writers who knew no shoddy temporary lede would suffice. In order to continue writing, I always had to have my lede more or less perfect, in close-to-finished form. Or else, no further work could continue.

The analogous “lede” for the screenwriter would logically be the opening of the script; Page 1, Scene 1, “We begin in darkness.”* However in my ongoing campaign to eschew logic, I’d like to suggest the titling of a script is much more akin to writing a “lede”, and in many ways, just as important.

*Please, for love of the written word, never begin a screenplay with “We begin in darkness” or any other variation on that all-in-it-together POV. I know there are different schools of thought on whether a (spec) script should ever implicitly include the reader/audience with references to “We see” or “We hear”, but I’m firmly against it.

Find a way to write the image or the sound. “Darkness.” establishes everything “We begin in darkness.” does while being more concise and evocative.

–

Francis Ford Coppola has talked about the importance of boiling down the central theme of a film (or for our purposes, screenplay) to one or two words. In times of uncertainty, this one or two-word focal point serves as a guide to the director (or for our purposes, writer). Every decision comes back to the theme. What is the film (script) about?

When I write, or even when I plan to write (outlining, note taking, etc.), I cannot work unless I have a title in mind. It may change, but I need a title and I need to know I at least have the intention of keeping/using the title. This is some serious cart-before-the-horse action when you’re talking about taking notes on an idea I may never follow through on.

The short answer is, hey, I’m a bit OCD when it comes to certain things. But if you’ll allow me a longer rationalization of my behavior, I think of the title like my lede. A script or movie title, by nature, will probably be a little more oblique than one of Coppola’s one or two-word thematic distillations.

For example, in the linked article above, Coppola mentions The Conversation, for which he summed up a film about “privacy.” The Conversation alludes to the central plot of the film – private investigator Harry Caul discovers a sinister plot while listening in on tapes he recorded for a corporate executive. There’s a suggestiveness to the simple title, which turns out to be ironic given Caul’s life in near-isolation.

Take a look at Sweet Smell of Success, a title that cuts right to the heart of the film: Mocking, sordid, both petty and grand. The sing-song alliteration even mimics them rhythmic flow of the script’s cracker-jack dialog.

Titles are promotional tools as much as they are true reflections of the works they’re attached to. At the writing stage however, a title should be your lede. Setting the tone, creating a hook or providing an answer for the questions that will follow. A place the writer can revisit to remember why he or she even started writing the piece in the first place.

The Cinema is My Home

Zach Herrmann

24 July 2012

“There are so many kinds of innocence to be lost at the movies.” – Pauline Kael

At first, I was very hesitant to address the tragic events that occurred last week in a multiplex movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. For all the heartfelt sentiment and good intentions pouring out and onto the Internet from the film-going/ film-blogging communities, the discourse didn’t feel right to me in the aftermath. I wanted no part in it.

Forget the gotta-be-first feeding frenzy of broadcast and cable news networks. Or the utter (if completely unsurprising) insensitivity from one particular entertainment outlet. I’m only referring to the cinephiles now.

All the talk of the supposed sanctity of the movie-going experience provoked my inner-cynic, which admittedly doesn’t need much prompting.

I was incensed by the knee-jerk reactions of people whose writing I respect and read regularly. Too much nostalgia in the air.

Anyone who has been to a multiplex in the last decade or so could not possibly ignore the crude bombardment of advertising; Broadband and cola ads, promos for garbage TV programs and yeah, the dismal and unending slate of tell-all coming attractions. The distractions come from within the theater as well, the audience itself – most commonly, the self-important glow of a person’s face illuminated by his or her cellphone.

As if the images on the screen should have to compete with something so small and insignificant.

Who could possibly look past all of this, and still, at the end of the day, make a statement as grand as, “Theaters are my church“?

That Friday night after the news broke, I had resolved to stay in and put on a movie. Not a severe departure from most of my Friday nights, but it was my plan and I had every intention of sticking to it.

First, I waffled back and forth between Taxi Driver and Dressed to Kill. Then, I made it into the first two scenes of Marnie, before I thought I had better revisit Strangers on a Train for educational (writing) purposes. DVD in hand, I realized all my previous considerations were far too nasty, and I narrowed things down to either The Red Shoes or Notorious, only to try about five minutes of Mystery Train. Then, finally, I felt pretty good about my final decision – French Cancan – only to eject the disc after reaching the menu screen.

I gave up.

Before going to sleep, I read over Christopher Nolan’s statement. Woke up, had my coffee, and started writing a post about Stanley Kubrick’s improvement from Killer’s Kiss to The Killing, thanks to ace collaborator Jim Thompson. Something something the importance of a writing partner something something… I scrapped the piece almost immediately, and that brings us up to speed. Right here, right now, this very paragraph.

A good night’s sleep and a fresh cup of coffee helped quell my ire and cynicism. I thought about small towns and the people who live in them. How their only movie theater option might be the multiplex at the nearest mall.

I thought about my inability to settle on a movie to watch in my bedroom. How my issue wasn’t what to watch, but really, where and how I was watching it.

And I thought about the cinephiles. How they were right to say something had been violated for them.

During college and for a brief time after, I attended press screenings and reviewed movies. Probably as a direct result of this experience, I see nothing odd about going to a movie theater alone. Nearly every weekend I go to Brooklyn Academy of Music’s (BAM) cinema for a matinee screening, and yes, I usually don’t meet anyone there.

I arrive early, plant myself middle-middle and read a book until the lights go down. It’s not the most social activity for me, and I guess some people who don’t understand how I feel might find the description a bit depressing.

When the soundtrack pops to life and the image hits the screen, the audience drops out and focuses in. Even if you arrive with people, and whatever affect the strangers around you may have, cinema – the act of taking in a movie, as it is said – is a solitary experience.

La Loi. Deep End. Four Nights of a Dreamer. The Devil, Probably. Tree of Life. Body Double. The Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle. Damsels in Distress. Johnny Guitar. Daisies. Notorious.

I’ve lost count of everything I’ve seen at BAM, not to mention the array of films viewed at New York’s other fine rep. houses scattered across the city. I tend to forget what an embarrassment of riches this city has in terms of cinemas, how many places we, cinephiles, have to call home.

Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe it was David Lynch who said you haven’t seen a movie unless you have seen it in theaters. If that’s a slight exaggeration, it’s still not so far from the truth.

My high-school film teacher, Mr. Howe, once asked me if I had ever seen Lawrence of Arabia before. I told him I hadn’t, and he said that was good. I should refrain from watching it on Turner Classic or on DVD. Lawrence of Arabia could only be experienced in a theater.

“It’s the only way you can feel the desert,” he said. And if you don’t feel the desert, than the movie doesn’t work.

So I waited for four years. Toward the end of my senior year of college, AFI’s Silver Theatre held a screening of Lawrence of Arabia in 70 mm, and I knew my wait was over. I took the bus to Silver Spring and went by myself.

It was a midday screening on a Monday or Friday, making me the youngest in attendance by at least 30 years. There couldn’t have been 20 people in the theater, maybe closer to 10.

The film had me completely memorized, from the opening scene of Lawrence speeding on his motorcycle. I felt the desert.

In our loving tributes to the cinema, we should be careful not to drown out the real issue of last week’s tragedy: America’s problem with gun control, though unfortunately, that’s a lesson destined to be swept under the rug until it rears its ugly head yet again.

Next week, I promise to return to something more directly linked to screenwriting. Forgive my indulgence, but when awful things happen, I have always turned to the movies as my most reliable source of comfort.

Better Ask Bresson

Zach Herrmann

18 July 2012

Here we are at Week Three of my interminable reign of terror, and well, I’m still pretty wary of directly offering any concrete Advice. However, for blog entry number three, I’ve devised something of a compromise: I will piggyback off of – and probably deliberately misinterpret – someone else’s thoughts on writing.

Last month, I picked up a copy of Robert Bresson’s Notes on the Cinematographer. The book – a collection of various musings Bresson jotted down over the years – reads like a filmmaker’s Hagakure. Bresson begins by setting up a distinction between “cinema” (filmed theatre) and what he terms “cinematography” (the full potential of the camera to create a unique cinematic medium). Over the years, he riffs and elaborates on this theory: Cinematography is pure, something unto itself. Cinema is cobbled together, feet planted firmly in other mediums, never achieving singularity.

This theory of cinematography-versus-cinema may fuel Bresson’s “discoveries”, but as J.M.G. Le Clézio points out in his introduction, Bresson isn’t writing to preach. Like any other man, the greater auteur of French cinema has his “likings and dislikings”. Take them or the leave them, these are simply Bresson’s opinions.

I, for one, put a lot of stock in Bresson’s Notes. Though Bresson seems to be addressing the filmmaker (writer/director/auteur) – or his filmmaker idyll, the “cinematographer”* – many of his ideas could be applied to the screenwriter as well. Even if what we write would fall under his category of “filmed theatre”, we, as screenwriters, should absorb from Bresson a Spartan sense of cinematic economy.

*To clear up any confusion here, Bresson’s idea of a “cinematographer” does not refer to the director of photography, commonly referred to as a cinematographer.

Below, I have pulled a few choice selections from Notes with my own thoughts following the quote(s). If you happen to have a few dollars to spare, I would wholeheartedly encourage any filmmakers/ writers out there to buy Bresson’s book. It makes for a great little pocket bible; full of inspiring thoughts, ripe for reciting and revisiting.

–

“Let it be the feelings that bring about the events. Not the other way.”

I wish I could recall where I first heard or read the idea that in a film or screenplay, the plot (not to be confused with the structure) is always the least important element. Too many films or scripts allow their characters to simply become slaves of circumstance. Which is all well and good if an exploration passivity is the purpose at hand, a la the holy trifecta of meta-cinema: Blow-Up, The Conversation and Blow Out.

But when that’s not the case, shouldn’t it be natural for plot to evolve as a function of character, and not the other way around?

–

“A single word, a single movement that is not right or is merely in the wrong place gets in the way of all the rest.”

“An old thing becomes new if you detach it from what usually surrounds it.”

“The most ordinary word, when put into place, suddenly acquires brilliance. That is the brilliance with which your images must shine.”

“One does not create by adding, but by taking away. To develop is another matter. (Not to spread out.)”

These four quotes are, admittedly, not among Bresson’s most revelatory. Grouped together though, they do reenforce the notion of addition-by-subtraction with respect to timing and placement. Countless times I have gotten lost in rewriting a scene, pulling my hair out over shaping just the right line of dialogue… only to come to the conclusion that half the page never should have been written in the first place. Strike it all out, and you have a solution.

Quote no. 2 could be read in much broader terms. It stresses the importance of specificity, in both setting and character. Bresson’s films (at least the nine I have seen) could all be described or pitched in a fairly succinct sentence, even in a sentence fragment. In the case of A Man Escaped, the title says it all. Why Bresson’s work is hypnotizing rather than mundane relates to the detailed interaction between to character and place.

To take the idea of originality through character/setting to its logical extreme, think of how John Carpenter recycles Rio Bravo in his film Assault on Precinct 13. Stripped of character/setting, the two storylines are basically the same. Identity comes from character and setting, not plot story.

As for Quote no.3 in the bunch – clearly, Bresson refers to the literal photographic image and its sequence through editing. Let’s destroy his analogy for a second (sorry, no disrespect intended), and think of the quote in terms of writing; dialogue and image.

Screenwriting, by nature, relies on an extreme efficiency of image and action. All the care and attention tends to go to structure and dialogue, scene description exists merely to establish something else, whether a reflection of character or a foreshadowing of plot.

And hence why, in my opinion, so many scripts immediately read as generic blueprints for soon-to-be generic movies. As I did in Week One, I shall go on pimping Paul Schrader, a major Bresson disciple, and his Taxi Driver script. Schrader understands the “brilliance” of image at the script-level, why it pays off to let your writing sit in a scene and soak up the details.

–

“Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen.”

Essentially, a more eloquent and descriptive way of saying “Write what you know.” Too often the worn-out “Write what you know” adage gets translated to a young writer as “only write the experiences that you have actually lived and experienced first hand.” Bresson’s version is far more resistant to that sort of reduction. No one thinks just like you, therefore no one writes just like you, therefore write your stories because no one else can.

–

“Words do not always coincide with thought. Earlier, later. The aping of this non-coincidence in films is dreadful.”

This goes beyond Thou Shalt Not Write Expositional Dialogue. When characters become all-knowing, they reveal themselves as characters. They lack truth and believability, and rather than speaking words that a person might speak, they spew out bits of script-speak.

–

“To forge for oneself iron laws, if only in order to obey or disobey them with difficulty.”

For the final thought of the day/blog, I leave you with the above double-edged doozie. Do I even have a set of rules, or “iron laws”, to govern my writing?

Should I?

Realer than Real (Learning from Louie)

Zach Herrmann

11 July 2012

“You can’t control life. It doesn’t wind up perfectly. Only art you can control. Art and masturbation. Two areas in which I am an absolute expert.”

Woody Allen (from Stardust Memories, 1980)

–

Nearly three weeks into the 3rd season of Louis C.K.’s phenomenal TV show, Louie, this post is admittedly too little, too late. There has been no shortage of lavish praise, critical insight and probing analytical discussion surrounding the series. If you’re interested, the history is all out there — the story of how C.K., burned by the relative failure of Lucky Louie (on HBO), sought a deal with FX that would grant him full creative freedom, so long as he didn’t mind working cheap.

He didn’t, and the end-product is probably the best half-hour of TV currently airing.

Even on paper, the idea of it is inspiring: A stand-up comedian writes, directs, shoots, edits and stars in a completely unhinged block of whatever he wants. No writing staff, (practically) zero network oversight. Louie is the perfect (and maybe one and only) model of auteur-TV. His signature stamp is all over everything.

–

I pinched the Woody Allen quote from Stardust Memories to open this post for a few reasons. First off, though stated by many others before me, including C.K. himself, Allen’s work holds a profound influence over Louie. Specifically, the films Annie Hall, Stardust Memories and Manhattan (check this Season Three promo for further proof or C.K.’s choice of editor) come to mind. But you can absolutely trace bits of Louie back to Allen’s earlier, absurdist-style comedies, all the way on through his 1980s classics to the Woodman’s discordant masterpiece, Husbands and Wives.

The connection between Allen and C.K.’s writing is a recognition that in order to truly capture the struggles of everyday life, an artist must resort to the surreal. What makes Louie so compelling to watch — and essential for writers to absorb & observe — is the specific way in which C.K. crafts his own slightly-warped version of reality.

C.K.’s simultaneous embrace/rejection of Louie‘s autobiographical nature brings to mind the quote from the opening of Phillip K. Dick’s novel, Valis: “I am Horselover Fat, and I am writing this in the third person to gain some much-needed perspective.” Even the show’s title — Louie — is only a single letter removed from its creator’s actual name.

The riff on C.K.’s first name is one of the more subtle ways in which he tweaks the concept of reality in the show. His recreation, and slight altering, of his real-life spat with Dane Cook (“Oh Louie / Tickets”, Season Two) could almost be viewed as mini-comedic take on Close-Up, if you’d allow me to get grandiose for a second (you’re going to have to do that a lot, I’m afraid).

Let’s take a quick look at a series of scenes from the Season Three premiere, “Something is Wrong.”

(Begin very mild SPOILERS): Louie parks his car and gets out to read the posted street signs to figure out if he can legally leave his car there. Each sign seems to contradict another, or in one case, the sign actually contradicts itself, or in the very least, the cyclical nature of time – parking in Manhattan can be pretty heady stuff.

C.K. gives up and leaves his car parked, signs be damned. He goes to lunch, passively endures the most bizarre anti-break up with his girlfriend of six months, and then, goes back to his car.

When he returns, he finds an entire construction site surrounding his car. As Louie protests with the foreman, a backhoe plows its way into Louie’s car. And then smashes it, over and over until the car is entirely destroyed (End very mild SPOILERS).

Basically every other event that occurs throughout the course of the episode requires little-to-no suspension of disbelief. For this once instance, however, C.K. resorts to the absurd, the utterly unbelievable. With concern for the narrative, there is no reason Louie couldn’t have walked out to find his car being towed. Having just endured the bizarre anti-break up, he would have been vulnerable enough that having his car towed would have been, if slightly cliché , a fitting conclusion to that segment of the episode. Emotionally satisfying and appropriately devastating in that petty, every-day-shit-happens-and-it-sucks sort of way.

Nine out of ten writers probably would have ended the sequence with the car being towed. C.K. doesn’t. He understands the logical conclusion — Louie’s car getting towed — wouldn’t sufficiently communicate the strange emptiness lingering from the preceding scene. So we take a few steps to the left of reality, and watch Louie as he sees a construction vehicle completely pummel his car. Crunching metal, splintering glass. He is disproportionately punished for a failure in understanding. As with the failed relationship, Louie’s fault in the matter gets overshadowed by the insanity of the reaction.

By taking us out of the literal reality, and showing us an image we immediately question, C.K. finds emotional reality: The destruction of the car and the end of the relationship will never make sense to Louie.

There will be no closure, and thankfully, no explanation from the artist.

#WW CSSC Writer Wednesday | Blog the 1st: Pardon the Introduction

Zach Herrmann

4 July 2012

“You are all my guests. It’s not the other way around.” – Lars von Trier, defending his film Antichrist at the Cannes Film Festival (2009)

–

Before the hostile take over can begin, I would like to thank my former CSSC Writer Laureates, Evan Jobb and Carolynne Ciceri. The two of you have built an incredible foundation of writing over at this space. May you both look over my shoulder as disapproving-but-secretly-proud parents, heaping loads of unreasonable expectations and residual guilt on their poor, bewildered child.

Figuratively speaking, of course.

Also, I must extend my gratitude to David Cormican. I already owe a great debt to Mr. Cormican and his Canadian Short Screenplay Competition for recognizing Elijah the Prophet in 2010/11. Now you’ve given me a soapbox to boot. Let it be said that money is not necessary to feed a writer’s ego; a forum for pontification will suffice.

Well then, it’s time to get down to the nitty gritty, a State of the Blog if you will. Whether or not I am qualified in any certifiable way to give advice on screenwriting, I really can’t say.

I started college as a public relations major, but we’ll casually gloss over the complicated history behind that. Long-story-short: If anyone ever says the words “compromise career” to you before you turn 35 years old – and especially before you graduate high-school – please, stop listening immediately. Even if it’s coming from someone you love.

As the head rush of my first semester away from home receded with the summer heat…

Smack! Bam! The realization sunk in: I had seriously fucked up.

Or to be less vulgar about it, I had grossly misgauged my interests and how they could relate to… well I hesitate to say a future “job”, so let’s go full-pretentious and term it a “calling.” Within the year, I was skipping Saturday football games to watch Written on the Wind and Last Year at Marienbad in the library basement.

I’m not entirely sure why I never attempted to write a screenplay before the summer of 2008. There were plenty of excuses: I didn’t know the correct format, I hadn’t read this screenplay or watched that film. I would like to chalk it up to a fear of embarrassment or failure, but in the past, I had been fairly confident when sharing my other writing samples (album and movie reviews, some dabbling in poetry and prose).

There are a few pet theories I have kicking around my head as to why it had taken me so long to define myself as a writer. As a (proud) product of a middle-class/upper middle-class suburban upbringing and education, I had instilled in me the value of “writing skills.” No matter what you do in life, you will almost certainly use “writing skills” in the professional world – words like these are stressed and re-stressed in various classrooms from K through 12.

To want to be a writer though… well that’s slightly audacious. Lawyers write, so do psychiatrists, general physicians, accountants, research scientists, professors and judges. There’s plenty of good work available to those who can write. But seriously, where the hell were the boozy-romantic Ernest Hemingway types in my neighborhood who were writers, and nothing but?*

Studying broadcast and print journalism, I learned the value of quick, lean copy. Much like news copy, a screenplay isn’t read; it’s devoured. Borrowing traits from the novel (Paul Schrader, Taxi Driver), poetry (Walter Hill, Alien or The Driver) and playwriting (Woody Allen, Hannah and Her Sisters), screenwriting is a true bastard form; the attempt to put images into words with the idea that the words will eventually have to be turned back into images.

Why then, do I favor screenwriting over any of its purer antecedents? Simple. Cinema is dangerous. And therefore, much more fun to play around with.

Around the time I was 11 or 12 years old, my father mistakenly showed me Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill. For those of you who have not yet seen Dressed to Kill:

a) Please, stop reading this nonsense and go watch Dressed to Kill. Honestly, I won’t be offended.

b) If you’re still reading and have postponed your planned screening of Dressed to Kill until after finishing this blog entry (I’m flattered!), rest assured, Dressed to Kill is COMPLETELY INAPPROPRIATE for a child who has not reached the recommended viewing age for Ace Ventura.

Small side-note: I used to sneer at a friend in high school who referred to her attendance at a certain Phish concert as “transcendental” and “life-changing.” While I would still thumb my nose at such an exclamation, especially at the former descriptor, I find myself a wee bit sympathetic to this friend’s experience as I try to explain the effect De Palma’s film had on me.

Dressed to Kill contains dark levels of humor and irony that reach far beyond the analytical capabilities of your average 11 – 12 year old. Besides severely freaking me out – and exposing me to my first cinematic dose of female full-frontal – Dressed to Kill taught me a valuable lesson with regards to the power of cinema at a very impressionable age. That film stuck with me for years, it dragged my pre-adolescent imagination down through the grimy, neon-lit streets and exposed me to a world I never would have wanted to go searching for (have I mentioned Blue Velvet is a personal favorite as well?).

Great literature can be memorized and recited, sure. But film imprints. You can’t fight off great cinema, or skim over it. The images seep in and make themselves known.

–

My apologies if you haven’t gleamed much of my purpose from the above introduction. There’s a good reason for that, and frankly, it’s because I don’t have much of a purpose. I’m not a teacher by nature; I’m a writer. I have no set agenda week-to-week for what will happen in this blog space. Safe bet it will have something to do with movies, and usually, screenwriting as well.

I was always taught that in creative writing, you’re best off writing for yourself. Never write for an audience. You’re not an authority on the hypothetical “audience”, but you probably know a thing or two about what you would like to see.

Hence the Lars von Trier quote opening the post. Ever since I read that, I’ve tried to carry it as my writing mantra, so to speak. It’s forceful, yet oddly hospitable.

In that vein, let me offer a kind welcome to all my guests. We’ve got a long year together.

*For good measure, I was raised on this:

All Good Things Come to an End

Evan Jobb

27 Jun 2012

Goodbye. This is it from me, a full years journey has come to its end. But before I leave you as promised I have a summary of screenwriting tips for you.

All of these tips I have mentioned somewhere over the previous 52 weeks. This is not a detailed list, it is simply something that I hope will serve as a reminder and a helpful guide while writing.

1. Always have a theme.
2. If it can’t be seen or can’t be heard it can’t be written
3. There is a reason for every word in a script.
4. Always seek advice, always give advice.
5. Location is more than empty space.
6. A protagonist’s physical want leads to the climax, their emotional need leads to the resolution.
7. The inciting incident occurs as soon as the audience can appreciate its impact.
8. Dialog shows personality not story.
9. If you were to remove dialog, you should still understand your character’s emotions.
10. A protagonist is only as developed as the antagonist.
11. Don’t speak for your characters; let your characters speak to you.
12. The resolution ends the story.

So thanks again for everything, it’s been a great year. Keep writing, keep filming and keep doing what you love.

Thank You

Evan Jobb

20 June 2012

Essentially the year is done. This is blog 51 and if you remember from my posts back in January I promised to post 10 screenwriting tips I have accumulated over the year as my 52nd post. So this is it, next week I will be providing these tips and a brief goodbye, but right now on week 51, this is my big send off.

It still hasn’t quite dawned on me that this 52 post task I nervously took on a year ago is finally reaching its end. This could simply be a case of denial because I think deep down I am going to miss this.

Which shows the terrifying change that has occurred in my over these last 51 weeks.

When I started these posts I was unsure of myself and nervous about every word I typed onto my computer screen. I thought for sure I would fail and that I would find myself on every Tuesday with a blank mind and nothing to write or contribute. As I writer I was shy, I rarely discussed the craft and I refrained from even mentioning I was a writer to many people.

I took on this task weary of my performance, but hopeful about what it could do for me. I felt that I had something to say, that I had some insights to give about screenwriting, but I was simply to shy to tell anyone. So I forced myself to give my opinion, every Wednesday I forced myself to come out from the safety of my living room and spread my ideas and thoughts to an audience.

And now after 51 posts I have covered a variety of topics from inspiration, to character arcs, to resolutions, endings, beginnings, character creation, audience empathy, spelling, white space, giving advice and more. I hope I have shed some light on these subjects and help spark and focus your creative mind.

Because at the end of the day, screenwriting is a craft. It has rules and principals that you must understand and there are certain ways to go about your craft. It is this understanding of the foundations of story that leads to a great script. The principals don’t dictate the exact way to write a story, but they offer suggestions and guidelines that work. And like anything, there is always more than one way to write. You just have to find what works best for you.

I have changed a lot over this year. I feel I have finally come out of my shell. I feel I can openly discuss screenwriting and story structure. I feel like I have an opinion and ideas and I no longer feel like I have to hide them for fear of ridicule. This blog has helped me grow as a writer. It has forced me to read more books and learn more and it has force me to focus my own ideas and given me an understanding and insight into my own methods I have created when I write. And for this I am very thankful to THE Blog and the CSSC for giving me this opportunity.

It has been a great experience and I thank every one of you who has made this journey with me. This is it for this week; join me next week for my last post and my 10 screenwriting tips (or 8 or whatever number I finally decide on).

Until then, keep writing.

The Art and Business of Film

Evan Jobb

13 Jun 2012

Fifty!? How did this happen. I only have 2 posts left after this? I may start to get sentimental about all of this. In 2 weeks I will be able to say I made it! I made it through a full year of blog posts. I will have made it through 52 weeks of giving advice on film and screenwriting. And in 3 weeks time I will be sitting around on Tuesday night feeling like I am suppose to be doing something (well probably not, Tuesday night is cheap night at the theatre, I’ll just go to a movie).

But then on Wednesday morning when the new Writer Laureate takes over and I can just sit back, relax and bask in their well of wisdom (I know who the new Laureate is, but I don’t think it’s been announced so I will keep it quiet).

In other news, the edit of Alyssa’s film, Brittle, has just been completed. There’s still some work to do in the post production department, a sound edit, color correct and a score. But our collaboration lives on and you will continue to hear from both of us in the world of film.

And a better late than never congratulations to the finalists in the CSSC. I believe I speak for all the judges when I say that I enjoyed reading your scripts and I hope you all continue to follow your passions and bring great stories to the world of film.

So, recently I just watched the beautiful film, The Passion of Joan of Arc, directed by Carl Th. Dreyer and I have something on my mind. But before I get to that, I have to give you some background about the film.

After I watched the film, I looked it up online and found out about it’s amazingly tragic history. The film was finished in April 1928 and screened once, it caused an uproar and the film was heavily censored and released again in October 1928. The church used it’s sway to change the edit so the Catholic judges, who would eventually condemn and burn Joan of Arc at the stake, would be sympathetic. Then in December of 1928 the original negatives were destroyed in a fire after very few prints had been made. But Dreyer would press on, he made a new edit from takes that he had originally dismissed from the film. However, in 1929 this negative would also be lost to a fire. Dryer was at a loss and had to watch as reissues of his film were censored, cut and distributed. In the 50′s a copy of the second negative was found and re-edited to include a soundtrack, subtitles instead of intertitles and pictures of stain glass windows and church pews behind the rest of the intertitles. This prompted Dreyer to write this in a letter to the studio:

“The editor… has tried to make the film more accessible to the general public – by appealing to the public’s bad taste. Since you appreciate art films, it would indeed be a worthy act on your part to make a copy of the silent version with the intertitles on a simple, black background, as I did in the original. An old film ‘classic’ is a museum piece that should be restored to it’s original form. In my opinion, to ‘modernize’ such a film is an absurdity.”

Dreyer wanted his film restored to it’s original form, the studio wanted to make it accessible to the public. It is these two conflicting ideas that I want to discuss.

Film is an art, you cannot say it any other way. It takes artists to make films, it is something that is created and displayed to the public and provide insight and emotion. But film is also the most business oriented art form. Film is a business, you cannot say it any other way. Film’s cost a lot of money to make and therefore films have to make a lot of money. Because there is so much money invested from so many different pockets, a film often comes under scrutiny and changes have to be made to best ensure it will become a commercial success.

And so a filmmaker must always attempt to balance art with commercialization. And since commercialization is a stigma of artists, it can be difficult to find this balance.

But Dreyer brings up a very good point. In no other art form would anyone EVER consider making changes to an art work instead of restoring the original. Imagine someone discovering a lost Picasso and deciding they would ‘modernize’ it. It’s unimaginable. But in film, it is a relatively common practice. It is even becoming a practice to re-edit your own films in order to modernize them.

Film is also the one art form that every single human being is qualified to critique. I could tell you if I like a painting or a sculpture or a dance number or any other art exhibit, but I don’t know enough of the subject to really give a good critique beyond I liked it or I didn’t. But when it comes to film the general public is an experienced art critic. They have seen countless films and TV shows from very soon after birth right up until the present and they know what they like, what they don’t like and they can often determine some of the reasons for their feelings, one way or the other. This means that to be a filmmaker means to put your film up to scrutiny to the entire world. This combined with the business end of filmmaking will make the dollar the most powerful force dictating a film.

Unless you stand up for your artistic integrity and find a balance.

So what I want to say is, never forget that film is an art and never forget that as a filmmaker you are an artist. If you are making film’s to make money, then you are making films for the wrong reason (or you need to be a producer). You are an artist, you want to create, inspire and evoke emotions in the general public with your art work.

So stand up as an artist, never forget that film is a business, but never be consumed by it. Film is an art form like any other, and so it should be shown the same dedication and respect.

Dreyer would later get his wish (although after his death) in 1985 when The Passion of Joan of Arc was restored to it’s original form from a copy made from the original negative. The copy was found in a mental asylum in Oslo, Norway.

What I Write

Evan Jobb

6 Jun 2012

A writer should always know their genre. Not to restrict their writing, but to focus it. If you look at writers and directors in film for the most part they follow a certain type of film, they follow certain themes. They follow what interests them.

So recently in an effort to find a genre for me, I asked myself a question, “What films do I like?” And I found myself struggling to find an answer.

Because I watch just about every type of film there is. I have never been a person with favorites, I just never bother, so when I am asked my favorite film I tend to sputter and fumble because I don’t really have a favorite, I mean how could you? Out of the thousand or so films I have seen, I have to pick one? Out of the millions of films that exist that I haven’t seen, I am to assume that I have watched the film that I like the best? The task is to great so I often just fall back on an answer, M.

M by Fritz Lang is usually the answer I give. I first saw it about a year after I truly became interested in film. It was amazing, it was crime, it was horror, it was thriller, it was a police procedural, it was a bit of everything. But above all, it was powerful. The film gives me the chills to watch because it shows the horror that can lay within the human mind.

But the film is from 1931, and I wonder how my favorite film can be from 81 years ago, it seems to make a statement about my feelings of films those 81 years. And sure, I do have a soft spot in my heart for older films and I have an attraction to foreign films, but I still watch and enjoy a lot of films from the more recent years.

So I asked myself again, “What films do I like?”

And this time I took a look at a person who heavily influences me. I am a huge fan of Ingmar Bergman. I understand that many of his films lean a little bit more toward the theatre than most films and that they are quite wordy (ideas that I do not put toward my own writing), but what I do take is his depth of character and emotion. This is what I find most powerful with his films. Winter’s Light, Autumn Sonata, Cries & Whispers, Persona, The Virgin Spring and The Seventh Seal. All insightful and powerful films the delve deeply into the human condition.

And I realized that this power is what I strive for.

This has brought me to a conclusion. I am drawn to films not for the entertainment, but for the emotions. I want the films I watch to be an emotional experience. I want to be brought into a world different from me own and experience what it is like to live a new life.

But not only that, I realize I am drawn to tragedies. I want to feel that pit in my stomach from the safety of my couch, I want to bear witness to the tragedy and harsh reality of life.

And this is important to my writing. It allows me to focus in on what I want to accomplish and what each script needs for me to be satisfied with it. I don’t want to just write a script for pure entertainment or action, I want there to be something else behind it, I want there to be a theme, a message and a reflection on life.

This is why I have found myself drawn to the genre of dark comedy. I am a person who likes to laugh and I have a rather sarcastic sense of humour, but I am not interested in writing a comedy for the sake of laughs alone. I want to provide an insight into life and comedy can be easier to bring in an audience than drama alone. Drama can be emotionally exhausting and that can be a turn off for some viewers who don’t want to go to a film to be depressed. But with comedy you lure them in with laughs but you can let the tragedy linger, slip inside and take root in their brain. Comedy can make big statements about the dark sides of life easier to consume.

And this is what I should be writing. This is what I want to write. This is where I draw my inspiration and this is where I should be focusing my creative powers.

I have found my genre and I understand my connection to it. And now when I am asked, “What films do you like?” I may still sputter out my pre-decided favorite film, but at least now I can explain and give examples of the films I like and that inspire me.

Reacting to Emotions

Evan Jobb

30 May 2012

Each action your characters take has to be motivated by an emotion.

I’m writing about this topic because of a script I was writing. I found myself stuck, sputtering ideas around in my head and not going anywhere. I had the characters, I had the story arc, it all had a beginning, it had an end. But everything was going wrong because I found my characters trapped in the middle of the story. It was clear why the characters were all there, and I knew where they would all be going. But they didn’t want to go there. I found myself forcing them to make decisions, I found myself making them say what I wanted them to say. And I was getting nowhere.

And the problem was motivation. The characters didn’t have any. Like a square peg in a round hole, I was trying to force something that didn’t fit. My characters were resisting my plot and nothing was working out.

It’s always a bit of a juggling act, trying to balance where I feel the story needs to go and where the characters want to take the story. But I can’t force the characters into my story, so instead I have to use emotions to gently guide my characters through my story and to it’s ultimate conclusion.

As I said a few weeks ago, a character like a person will always take the easy road if they can. If the characters are making tough decision without external and internal forces pushing them to take the difficult road then the characters are being forced to follow the story.

And then what ends up happening is that the audience feels disconnected from the characters. They can’t understand why the characters are acting so unnatural and making decisions that don’t make sense. But the audience wants to understand. They came to the movie to make a connection to the characters.

To create this connection, the audience needs to understand the character’s motivation. Both the task they want to accomplish during the story and the reason for their actions and reactions during a scene. The audience should not be a passive observer or a mere witness to the events. They should feel apart of it, they should feel apart of the characters and be able to not only describe what happened, but how the characters about what happened. They must be able to experience what it is to live the life of that character.

For every image in a film, the audience must understand the emotions behind it. When we see the childhood photo, or they look upon their wife, or see the dent in their new car the audience must know how it makes the characters feel. They must be able to connect with the emotions and understand the reaction that follows.

Otherwise all you have is talking heads being forced along an emotionless story.

And this brings me back to my script. I was ignoring my character’s emotions and focused entirely on the plot. My characters were not reacting to their feelings, they were simply doing what needed to get done. They were taking the difficult road, but without knowing why. All they knew was they had to reach the destination I had predetermined for them.

So I have had to edit. I had to describe body language, I had to cause emotional responses in the characters and and I have had to follow the chain of actions and reactions in my characters. To do this I have had loosen my grip on my plot and let the characters guide me to the end of this story.

Twisting the Ending

Evan Jobb

9 May 2012

The twist ending is both beloved and hated. It offers an ending that makes the audience rethink the film they have seen and makes them crave a second viewing. But it also can take a perfectly good story into the perfectly wrong direction and leave audiences forever complaining.

To help keep your story on the right track, I have prepared 3 guidelines that, as I have seen, have to be met in order to provide a proper twist ending.

The twist has to make sense.
The audience cannot have predicted the twist before it happens.
The twist has to feel like a natural progression of the story and lead to a satisfying ending.

Now before I go any further, I have to give a warning. I am going to attempt to not ruin any films for you. But I cannot discuss twist endings without giving away some part of the ending away. I will attempt to highlight the structure of the twist and not the details, but even that may give too much away.

Spoilers Ahead.

1. The twist has to make sense.

This one should be apparent to everyone, but I’m sure you can name a few films that ignore this guideline. The easiest way to have a twist make sense is to set it up early in the script or to foreshadow it. You don’t even have to draw much attention to it, if it’s an item, just mention it in passing. Every word in a script is important, so if it’s written it’s important at some point in the story, otherwise why would you have written it?

The other side of this guideline is that the twist has to make sense in the world of the film. This is where a story can really lose an audience. If your story takes place in the real world, then you are bound to the physics and laws of the world, you cannot break them for a twist.

Good Twist Ending: Planet of the Apes (1968). The protagonist is trapped on this planet, he wants to get home. After all of the events of the story he tries to get home only to find the Statue of Liberty and he realizes he has been home all along. A nice, simple ending, it works with all the mythology mentioned throughout the film and though there may be some debate as to whether it fits perfectly into the world of science, the accepted knowledge of space travel allows use to believe in time travel.

Bad Twist Ending: Planet of the Apes (2001). I will ruin it here, because it doesn’t affect the plot of the film in any way. The protagonist escapes in a space ship and returns to Earth, but Earth thought seeming the same, is now populated by Apes instead of humans. There is no rational to this, there is nothing in the film that foreshadows or explains how this could have happened. Is it a different planet? A different part of the same planet he left? Another dimension? An altered timeline of Earth? We don’t know.

2. The audience cannot have predicted the twist before it happens.

Audiences are always trying to figure out what will happen next in a story, however they don’t actually want to know what happens next because that would spoil the story. So a twist predicted by the audience falls flat and instead of being a twist, it is just an obvious event being portrayed as a twist. You need to balance the foreshadowing of your twist with giving the audience too much information. You need to withhold just enough information so that when all the pieces are presented, the audience understands, but not enough that they already saw what picture the puzzle pieces where creating.

Good Twist Ending: Oldboy. This one succeeds because the twist is not the questions the protagonist has been searching for, it is something he and the audience has failed to consider. This makes for the best twists. Since the audience is always trying to guess the twist ending, make them guess some other part of the plot. Give them another mystery to consider. Make them focus on the story of a man learning his true potential and make them forget about that horrible train crash at the start.

Bad Twist Ending: Secret Window was a film that the only way it made sense to me is if the twist happened, and then it did happen. End of story.

3. The twist has to feel like a natural progression of the story and lead to a satisfying ending.

This ties in to the first guideline but must be noted separately to prevent two things, dream sequences and events that were all in the mind of the protagonist.

The audience has been with your story from the start, they have learned to empathize with your characters the last thing they want is to find out that all they have cared about never happened. The audience wants to see how the story ends, they are invested in it, they want to know how THIS story ends, they don’t want you to suddenly switch gears and show how another story ends. Therefore a twist involving a dream or memory must still fulfill the resolution and climax the story has been building up to. Make the twist feel natural, make it fit within your story, don’t make it destroy your story.

Another aspect of this guideline is that the twist should be the answer to a mystery. If there is no mystery, if the audience completely understands every aspect of the film then a twist that confounds the story just complicates something that use to make sense and the audience will just be wondering why the author ruined their story. So create at some mystery, have the audience trying to figure out the answer, make them want the to know the answer so bad that when you finally give them that tantalizing twist, they will be able to put their mind to ease.

Good Twist Ending: The Wicker Man (1973). In this the protagonist is looking for a missing girl. In the end he finds her, but he also finds out he was set up. The story concludes, the loose ends are tied up and the audience is satisfied. Other films like The Orphanage, Memento and The Sting all work for this reason.

Bad Twist Ending: Next. This film bugged me. It is about a man who can see a little bit into the future, so of course you know that the end will involve a fake out and have it just be a vision, but this film took it to far and completely skipped the climax of the film. The protagonist has the revelation that he can in fact complete the task put before him (which he was reluctant to do) and then it ends. It is implied he will save the day, but we never see it happen. Completely unsatisfying.

Then there is a film that is a personal favorite for having the worst ending possible, violating guidelines 1 and 3 while leaving only 2 in tack because you couldn’t have possibly seen it coming, Monster-A-Go-Go. The twist doesn’t solve any mystery, it creates one, it makes no sense in the context of the real world or the film world, and it is akin to a dream twist ending, which would leave the audience unsatisfied if it was possible to be satisfied with the film to begin with.

There you go, 3 simple guidelines, try them out, see if they work for the films you’ve seen and if you find a twist ending that doesn’t seem to follow any of these guidelines, please share it with me.

Connecting to Characters

Evan Jobb

2 May 2012

Continuing on from last week, I will once again be presenting my thoughts on two types of scripts that I often find when reading scripts or watching short films. So without further adieu.

Message Script
This type of script often gets mixed up with the Diary Entry type, but can also exist on it’s own. This type of script is defined by its primary focus being on on a message instead of the plot. What I mean by this is that this film really wants to tell you something.

Since every script/story should have a message (at least I believe so), having a message is not a bad thing, in fact it is a must for any story, however, this type of script has taken the message a little too far. The message in this type of film is usually laid out in a long speech that details every little nuance of the message or quickly said by the characters in a way that has very little subtlety. Such as a character stating, “This is why drinking and driving is bad!”. Though the message of your film may be, “drinking and driving has devastating consequences” that message should never be stated in those exact words.

Instead, the audience wants subtlety in their characters thoughts and emotions. This is because in the real world, most people don’t bare their souls for others and often keep a lot of their thoughts and feelings on the inside. So when a character speaks their mind with little regard for how a typical person would react in that situation, the audience starts to question the believability of the story.

Audiences don’t go into a movie looking for a lecture (unless it’s a documentary) they expect a story that is an exaggeration of reality but still contains the same interactions between real people. So if you are writing a story and you find that your message is being stated in a long essay of dialog, remember, actions speak louder than words. So pair back the dialog and instead reflect your message with actions.

Talking Heads
This type of script focuses on dialog rather than action which leads to a bunch of characters standing around talking, hence the name Talking Heads (sorry, it’s not named after the band). This type of script is commonly seen when adapting plays as a play focuses more on dialog rather than action, but it can work as a script as long the dialog is full of conflict.

All stories revolve around conflict. Conflict is the thread that binds the story together. Conflict is either shown through action or dialog, so if you are writing a story that has very little action occurring (not strictly action scenes, but characters doing or experiencing things), then you have to have conflict in your dialog. You will need to highlight your characters emotions and ensure that there are many opposing ideas in the room.

But even if this is your intent, I would still recommend you find some action for your characters to do. Even eating, or leaving the room, or some other simple movement will break up your dialog a little bit and give the audience something to look at besides a bunch of Talking Heads.
Well that’s it for me the week. Next week I will be back to discuss two more script types, but until then remember you leave a comment/suggestion or email me at jobb.writing@gmail.com. Until then, keep writing.

Make a Film, See the World

Evan Jobb

25 Apr 2012

I typed up the first draft of this post on an electric typewriter that Alyssa bought for me. It still had the ink ribbon in it. But talk about spelling mistakes. It’s one thing to be be a terrible speller, it’s another to be unable to go back and fix every time you hit the wrong key on the keyboard. It’s a real eye opener. I can type with all my fingers, without looking at the keyboard, but clearly I can’t hit the right keys as much as I should.

But I must say, the clacking as the letter appears on the page is more satisfying than any keyboard. I’m going to need to find out where to get more ribbons so I don’t have to ration the one I have.

So I have some news to report, I have been putting it off for awhile, but I have let it build up and now I just need to say it.

I am excited beyond words about Those Forgotten, the short film I wrote and produced. It just won a Gold Remi award down at WorldFest-Houston International Film Festival and now we are gearing up for the film to play at the Female Eye Film Festival in Toronto and at the GI Film Festival in Washington, D.C. The GI Film Festival is the only military themed film festival in the United States (and as far as I know, Canada as well). But the festival gets cooler than that. Pat Sajak (yes the one and only from Wheel of Fortune) will be hosting the short screening that features Those Forgotten at the Canadian Embassy! Not cool enough yet, the festival rates the films out of 5 stars in 4 categories, Bravery, Courage, Honor and Sacrifice.

But as awesome as that is, there is another reason why this week I can’t bring myself to write about screenwriting but instead write about my own film. It’s because Those Forgotten has been selected to be apart of the Short Film Corner at Cannes!

To say I’m excited is an understatement.

So this week I want to remind you have another reason to make a film. Traveling.

We all are writers, we all write because we have to, because we all live with stories inside of as we are compelled to put them on a page. But after you have written the film, and when you are knee deep in the grit of production or worse the film shoot, sometimes you can lose sight of the reason why you are putting your blood, sweat and tears into the film.

In case the thrill of the film and the passion to see your story come to life begins to fade due to the stress of production, always remember that festival submissions mean travel. It’s like well deserved vacation.

Think about it, what’s better than visiting a new place? Visiting a new place, seeing some great films and partying with your fellow filmmakers.

I went up to the Yorkton Film Festival when Those Forgotten was awarded 4th prize at the 2009 Canadian Short Screenplay Competition and had the time of my life. Great films, great people and great food. How many film festivals feature a lobster boil and skeet shooting? Now I can say with pride that I have been skeet shooting and I hit 7 of 10 targets.

So if you like seeing the world, make a film.

Now if only I could afford to go to all these places…

And once again, I could use for votes in the “Guerre des Flicks” for YoungCuts Film Festival. $15 and you can watch the films, including Those Forgotten, and vote on your favorites.

http://www.youngcuts.com/static/festival_audience_subscription_payment

Write What You Know

Evan Jobb

18 Apr 2012

“Write what you know” is a common phrase used by anyone giving advice to screenwriters. But I have never been a fan of the phrase, I have often found it misleading and troublesome.

The phrase does have it’s merits. It states that you can’t write what you don’t know, which makes sense. But the lesson you should take from it should not be to avoid what you don’t know, but to increase your knowledge until you do know it.

If you interpret the phrase as only writing what you know and what you have experienced then you are limiting yourself and the range of your stories. Besides, under that interpretation fantasy and science fiction could not be written because no one has ever experienced those situations. Instead you are limited to autobiographical and sometimes self indulgent stories. Perhaps you do in fact lead a thrilling life the demands to be told as a work of fiction, but I know that my life as a twenty-five year old aspiring screenwriter and youth programs supervisor in Nova Scotia is not boring but it certainly isn’t thrilling enough to need an autobiography. Instead you need to pull out the exciting parts and give them their own story.

Story is life streamlined.

Writing what you know should not be limited to your life. You can always learn more about another life. You can research another time in history, you can learn about another place. You can even learn about what has already been written on the subject in other stories. You can always learn more and increase what it is that you do know.

I am currently writing a short story where the protagonist and his family go to hell. I have obviously never been to hell, but I can still write about it. I can still learn about hell and about the interpretations that have already been made and then make my own version. So as long as I do my research, I will still be writing what I know.

Where I find the phrase is most important is when it comes to your emotional experiences. In this case, write what you know. Have you experienced every emotional situation? Of course not, do you need to? Of course not. But if you are writing about an emotion, you must have some way to tap into it and share it with the reader.

But once again you know more than you think. I may not have experienced a father being betrayed by his son, however I have a father and I can take those emotions and express them in this story. I also know the feeling of betrayal, so I can take that emotion and express it in this story. So even though I have not experienced the exact same emotional state, I can build it from the emotions I have experienced and create a truthful emotion to connect with the audience.

But you’ll find that there are many experience you cannot properly express and relate a story to. In that situation instead stick to what you know.

So to recap. It is flawed to think you know everything and can write anything. However, as I have stated, you know more than you think. You can research and learn more about the situation and you can take emotions from other experiences in your life and shape them into you story. So it’s not a matter of writing what you know, it’s learning what you don’t know.

So let’s rephrase it. “If you don’t know it, learn it.”

Footnote:
Those Forgotten has been accepted to the “Guerre des Flicks” People’s Choice voting for the 2012 YoungCuts Film Festival. So if you get a chance, check out the film and maybe even vote. There is however a subscription fee unless you have a film in the festival. But it’s a small price to pay to see a great collection of short films.

http://www.youngcuts.com/guerre_des_flicks

What a Coincidence

Evan Jobb

11 Apr 2012

Everyone knows that your protagonist has to be actively seeking what he or she wants. They have to be fighting the events in their life and they have to be overcoming obstacles. The protagonist must never be given a free ride, they must never be handed a conclusion, they must never be handed a way out.

So it’s clear that coincidence must never help your main character.

In the real world we are accepting of coincidence because there aren’t any other options. Once a coincidence happens, it happens and we deal with it. So we accept and they know someone chose the coincidence to happen. So no longer is a coincidence a chance event, it is a calculated event by the writer because they couldn’t think of anything else. And the story ends up being resolved by outside forces other than the protagonist. So instead of the protagonist striving to overcome the obstacles, someone or something else overcomes the obstacles for them. And the audience is left feeling cheated.

But don’t confuse coincidence with a set up plot device. In Aliens the power loader is seen, and Ripley is seen using it, so when she uses it to fight the Alien Queen the audience accepts that in the given situation, she would think to use this machine. It is lucky for her that there is a power loader on the ship, but since the audience already knew it was there, they accept that she uses it. Instead coincidence would be when there is no set up and the event just happens without any prior notice. So if in Aliens someone walks up to Ripley and presents her with a power loader without the audience ever seeing one or knowing what one was.

Or take a look at Life of Brian. Brian is running away from the roman guards. He runs up a tower to escape only to find that the tower is incomplete and he is trapped at the top. The guards are closing in and there is nowhere to go. While trying to escape he falls off the tower and… lands in a space ship which fly around the galaxy in a dog fight before crashing back to Earth leaving Brian unharmed. It is pure coincidence that Brain is saved, but in this film it’s done as a joke and a passing character even remarks how lucky Brian is.

If this had happened in serious movie, the audience would go completely mad and demand their money back.

But this happens in serious movies. And audiences have been fine with it.

Look at Jurassic Park, the T-Rex saves Professor Grant and the kids from the velociraptor just in time.

Or the end of Return of the King when the Eagles show up to save Frodo and Sam.

Like everything in film, the rules don’t apply to every situation. Even though it gives your protagonist a way out of the situation, coincidence can be part of films, but it has to be used properly. To avoid the audience rejecting coincidence I have found you have to do one of the following 4 things.

1) Set it up. If the item or event in question is set up then the audience will accept it. Be it the power loader in Aliens or the Ark of the Covenant in Raiders of the Lost Ark

2) Show the repercussions of the coincidence. This works when the coincidence occurs near the start of the story. If you spend enough time showing what happens due to the coincidence, if you show the effect it has on the character’s life, then we accept the character’s struggle and accept that chance events can happen. The audience doesn’t think about the coincidence, they just think it’s the story. Look at The Virgin Springs when the 3 herdsmen arrive at Tore’s house Or how there are only ever supervillians the moment a superheroes is created.

3) Put the characters through so much turmoil the audience will be thankful they get a break and are saved by coincidence. This one usually works best in comedies because the coincidence can be played off as a joke, but it works in other films too. This why the above mentioned scene in Jurassic Park works and Return of the King and even Toy Story 3.

4) It is used to make a statement, to show the powers of the unseen forces of nature or the karmic powers of the world. Take for example, The War of the Worlds. Bacteria kill the aliens. It is a poignant look at how we are all just fools for thinking we are stronger than nature and capable of overcoming the natural world. It works because it provides a commentary on life.

Do I recommend you use coincidence in your stories? No. It is a slippery slope and you can very easily go astray. But I also recognize that it can work sometimes. However for every time coincidence works in a story, I’m sure you can find ten stories where it didn’t work. So look for coincidences, see where it works and where it doesn’t and decide for yourself if there is any place for it in film.

Open a Conversation

Evan Jobb

4 Apr 2012

Today I have a topic that all writers must know but many writers don’t realize the importance of the skill to their job.

Giving advice.

The mentality seems to be that writing is a solo journey, that the writer is a socially awkward introvert. But writing cannot be accomplished on your own. The writer must always have friends and acquaintances that can read over their work. Because after weeks and months and years of writing a story the writer knows the story inside and out, they know everything about how the characters think, feel and act, they know the effect of those actions on the arc of the story.

However they don’t always know what appears on the page.

After being absorbed in the story for so long, the writer loses objectivity and can have trouble determining what the words on the page say and mean compared to what the writer thinks the words say or mean.

To solve this problem you need to seek out advice from someone who can bring fresh eyes to your story, someone who will read your script without any pre-existing ideas about it.

But not only do you need to seek out advice, you have to seek it from the right people. Family and close friends are not often reliable, they often don’t want to be overly critical and will often tell you what you want to hear. The most you will get is a remark about a scene they didn’t like that much, but nothing really constructive or helpful.

It’s best if you can find another writer to get advice from. Someone who knows all the aspects of writing and can look critically at your story and not only tell you what areas need improving, but give suggestion on how to make those improvements.

And in return, you have to know how to give advice. Because eventually another writer you know is going to ask you.

An added bonus is that it can be hard to find short scripts to find. There are plenty of sites that you can find feature scripts, but short scripts get made into short films and that is the end of the script. You have to watch the film and see what became of the script. But if you open yourself up to others you can read their short scripts and open your eyes to other styles and stories.

Lastly, be encouraging. Because the end goal of writing is to write a story. And the goal of every writer should be to encourage great story writing. Writing is not a competition, it is an art and all arts benefit from a world full of great art.

So open a conversation with the writer, find out what they wish to accomplish with their story and help them accomplish it. Always be constructive, never critical. No matter how many problems a story has, it can be fixed and the writer can achieve the story they have dreamed of.

If you just tear apart their ability and their story, then not only are you hindering the development of a writer, but you will cut yourself off from another writer who could help you further develop your craft.

Unnecessary Phrases

Evan Jobb

28 Mar 2012

There are a handful of phrases that often get used in scripts but shouldn’t. They violate the rules of screenwriting, but they do it so subtly we are often blind to their negative affect on the story. But if your script is going to be perfect you are going to have to take notice of these phrases and make the necessary corrections.

Avoid these phrases.

“We see” should be banned, plain and simple. “We see” is simply a replacement for saying, “the camera sees” and thus is the exact same as directing the camera. Since the camera should never be mentioned in a script, any phrase that implies the camera also cannot be used. You will even find that removing these words from the sentence has no effect on the meaning or visuals of the sentence. They provide nothing to the story except to point out the camera. For example:

We see the flames leap from the window and consume the building.

The camera sees the flames leap from the window and consume the building.

The flames leap from the window and consume the building.

The sentence works just fine without “we see”, so don’t use it.

Another commonly used phrase is, “is like”. This one bugs me because it is vague. Scripts need to be specific, if not the actors, director, DOP, art department and everyone else on your film may bring different interpretations to the film which will muddle up the story. A script can be subtle, the ending can be open to interpretation, but the writing has to be specific. The writer has to have a full understanding of the story and the actions and emotions of the characters. “As if” shows that the writer is unsure of how their characters act. For example:

He nods his head, as if he can’t understand.

He nods his head, pretending to understand.

In the first sentence you don’t know if he understands or not, the “as if” implies that he might not understand but it doesn’t specifically say it. Instead just say what you want to say, be direct, don’t tip toe around it.

Another version of “as if” is used when trying to imply something, yet also trying to keep it mysterious.

The ground shakes as if a huge weight had been dropped.

The ground shakes from an unseen weight.

Once again, “as if” just casts doubt in the mind of the reader. Instead be direct and say exactly what you mean.

Finally, similes and metaphors should also be avoided in scripts. They are a staple of other forms of prose, but not scripts. It’s not because they are not visual, they can be quite visual, but they cannot be visualized on film. For example:

She moves through the room like an eagle.

She darts through the room like an eagle.

She darts through the room.

In the first example it isn’t clear how an eagle moves, are they fast or are they majestic? Unless you take the literal meaning of the simile and she actually moves around the room in the form of a literal eagle, then the message is unclear, the reader cannot accurately visualize this motion and this action cannot accurately be translated to film.

In the second example I used the more specific word “darts” instead of the vague, “moves” which now shows that he moves quickly through the room and thus removing the confusion about how an eagle moves. However, now the part about the eagle just seems to reiterate the word dart, so in the third example I have removed the reference to the eagle. The word “darts” tells the reader all they need to know.

I strongly believe that every word in the script is critical. The challenge of a script is to say the most with the least number of words. So you have to make every word count. And this means removing unnecessary words and it means you have to carefully choose your words to get the most specific and powerful response. Change your generic words like “move” into something more specific, find a word that not only says that they move, but how they move, “darts, zips, swaggers, soars, lunges” whatever you can think of that clearly illustrates the action. Do this and you’ll find you don’t need similes and metaphors in your writing.

So don’t muddle up your script with these unnecessary phrases. Be direct and specific in your writing and you’ll end up with a more visual script.

Treating the Script

Evan Jobb

21 Mar 2012

Before I start my post for the week, I want to give a shout out to my new friends with InkDrinks Halifax. Who knew a three hour get together could turn into six so quickly. I hope we can all do it again soon.

Now as promised from last week I will talk about script treatments.

I have not had much experience with treatments, they have been something I have avoided, not because they aren’t helpful, but because I struggled to write them. But recently I decided to push through to the unknown and write a treatment.

A treatment is essentially an outline of your script, for a feature it is usually between 1 and 15 pages depending on how detailed you want or need the treatment to be. But the function is the same. The treatment details your story from the opening scene to the final shot and everything in between. Every character, plot, subplot, location, theme, plot point. If it’s in your story it’s in your treatment.

Now if your treatment is only 1 page long than this isn’t true. Since you can’t condense the entire story into 1 page, you’ll have to only hit the major events, characters and plot points. But this is why I recommend a treatment closer to 10 or 15 pages because it allows you enough room to write your entire story.

Because the whole point of a treatment is to see your whole story laid out before you. It allows you to zoom in and see your story play out. You can see what works and what doesn’t. You can see if your characters act with the proper emotions or if the story is forcing an unrealistic plot driven emotion. You can see what scenes you have fully developed and what scenes still need more development.

And by writing a treatment first you can avoid something called the snowball effect. It isn’t as apparent in short scripts, but when editing a feature script, a small change will often cause a chain reaction leading to more and more changed later in the script which will lead to more and more changes again, just like a rolling snowball starts small and can end up larger. When you have to make a lot of changes to a script, this will snowball into more and more changes to later portions of your script and this will make rewriting difficult and time consuming. If you write a treatment before you write your script, you will hopefully find a lot of the problems with your story and characters beforehand. And it’s easier to rewrite 10 pages than 90 pages.

And now we get to the part of writing a treatment that I struggle with. The style. Writing a treatment is often referred to as writing the script as a short story. This is true in some sense and a lie in others. Regular readers will remember that I am terrible at writing short stories, my style of writing doesn’t fit into the descriptive prose. I am much better at scripts. So I had to learn this the hard way, I had to just pull up my bootstraps and wad into the mess of writing a treatment. And here’s what I learned:

1) Treatments use dialogue sparingly.
2) Treatments are allowed to talk about things that are not visual.
3) Treatments must be engaging.

Dialogue is a key part of short stories, but not treatments. A treatment should not have dialogue in it, or if it does it has to be dialogue that is so strong it is justified as being the only dialogue used. Treatments are descriptions of the scenes, of the actions of the characters. They are not radio plays of the dialogue.

Since treatments don’t use dialogue and since they don’t delve deep enough into the story to show all of the subtleties of the character’s expressions, you have to find a way to show what your characters are feeling. This is the part I have the most trouble with. Because the rule in scripts is that you should evaluate each sentence and if you can’t create a visual out of the words, than you have to cut the sentence. Film is visual so scripts have to visual. For this reason a script doesn’t state a characters feelings, it doesn’t say what a character is thinking, it doesn’t state their hopes and dreams. All of these things have to be expressed through body language and dialogue. But in a treatment you can state these things. You can say how the character feels and why they feel that way. Like a short story you can reach into the character’s head and pull out their thoughts for the reader to see.

Finally, your treatment has to be engaging. I mention this one because when you are writing an outline of everything that happens in your story, it can get really bland. So don’t treat your treatment as an outline, treat it as a story all it’s own. Make it interesting, bring in tension, make the reader want to know what happens next. Use all the skills you have from script writing and apply them to your treatment.

All of this I state for your information. I am not an avid treatment writer. As I said, I struggle with the style and I would rather write the script because my treatments tend to be boring and unengaging and I get frustrated because I know that it is a problem with my ability to work within the format and not a problem with the story. It is an inability to express my story properly and a treatment doesn’t do my story justice. But for features it is something I am going to have to work on. Because the amount of knowledge and insight into your story that you can learn from writing a treatment is invaluable and will save an untold amount of time in the rewrite. But for shorts, I would rather write the first draft and do the necessary rewrites. I am not against rewrites, I often do 8 or more drafts of a short before I can say it is finished. If I wrote a treatment beforehand I may be able to knock off a couple drafts, but I am willing to make the rewrites so the story works out in the end.

So try writing a treatment, see if it works for you, and if it doesn’t then just make sure you have your own system that can provide you with the information needed to polish up your story and produce a script deserving of the film world.

Ten Telling Tips

Evan Jobb

14 Mar 2012

I almost forgot to write this post, I only remembered on Tuesday night. I’m not sure where my mind went, but I almost completely forgot. This is the first time in 37 weeks I have actually neglected to start my post on Sunday. So I apologize for the shortness of this post, I am quite tired from some long days at work and my spirit just isn’t in it right now. I have part of a post started from last week, but I just don’t think I will do it justice if I finish it this week. So instead of a half-hearted lecture on screenwriting, I have some other news to give to you.

First of all, Those Forgotten, will be getting it’s American premiere playing at the 45th WorldFest-Houston International Independent Film Festival in April! Which is huge news. I don’t have a date or time yet, but I will provide it when I can. They even provided one of those logos to put on posters, you know the ones, with the leaves on either side, so you can say your film was an official selection. So if you’re down in Houston in April, go check it out!

Alright, so instead of a lecture this week, I have some information about this Blog that I want to pass along. I have been turning this idea around in my head for the last few weeks and now I want to make it official. I have determined what I want to accomplish by the time I end my term with this blog. At the end of my run, at the end of all 52 of these posts, I want to post a short and simple list of 10 screenwriting tips. A summation of a year of posts that you can all take and use as your further your careers.

I haven’t finalized my list of 10. I have about 4 that I am happy with right now. But I still have a few weeks to put it all together. I will have to go back through all my previous posts and see what lessons I can extract. But I will work on it and in 14 weeks I will provide it for you.

After my time on the blog is over I doubt anyone will go back and read my posts and I don’t expect anyone to. So I will streamline my year with the CSSC and leave my legacy behind with one simple post and these 10 screenwriting tips.

So now as I wrap this up for the week I offer you the inspiration for my plan, the great Billy Wilder who has already provided 10 screenwriting tips that everyone should know. Read them over and learn them:

The audience is fickle.
Grab ‘em by the throat and never let ‘em go.
Develop a clean line of action for your leading character.
Know where you’re going.
The more subtle and elegant you are in hiding your plot points, the better you are as a writer.
If you have a problem with the third act, the real problem is in the first act.
A tip from Lubitsch: Let the audience add up two plus two. They’ll love you forever.
In doing voice-overs, be careful not to describe what the audience already sees. Add to what they’re seeing.
The event that occurs at the second act curtain triggers the end of the movie.
The third act must build, build, build in tempo and action until the last event, and then—that’s it. Don’t hang around.

If anyone knows how a screenplay works, it’s Billy Wilder. So take his tips to heart any script that uses them will be better off for it.

Well, that’s it for this week, tune in next week when I will be talking about script treatments. And I will start writing it on Sunday, I promise.

Disrupt and Balance

Evan Jobb
7 Mar 2012

The CSSC has been busy this week.

A well deserved congratulations to everyone who made the Top 53 this year. Each and every one of you as earned the right to take a second out of your busy day and bask in the glory that is yourself. And to everyone who didn’t make it, I would also like to congratulations you because you deserve it as well. You handed your heart and soul wrapped in a story for others to judge. The ability to do that does not come easy but it’s an important step in becoming a writer. So keep writing, keep creating, and I hope to see you in the Top 53 or 58 or whatever number it is next year.

As well as the announcement of the Top 53, regular readers of THE Blog will also have noticed that Surita Parmar is raising momey for her upcoming film, Render. Surita placed 2nd in 2009/10 CSSC with her script Minus Laura and now she looks to have another wonderful film on her hand. If you get a chance, give the site a look.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1250301361/render

Alright, today I have structure on the mind again. Importantly the the incident that triggers the story.

An incident is one of many parts of a story. An incident is the catalyst or the starting point of your story, so to speak. If you want to write a story about a crossing guard who is hit by a car, then that will be your incident.

The incident is often the idea I come up with and is the first place I work my story from. Everything before the incident is the set up and everything afterwards builds to your conclusion. So before the incident, show what a normal life for the characters is like. Show the balance in their life, let the audience know who they are, what they do, what they stand for, anything relavent to establishing who they are has human beings (or animals or aliens or whatever your characters may be). Then disrupt this balance with the incident and spend the rest of the story picking up the pieces until in the end when you bring balance once again to the characters lives.

Disrupt the normal flow of life and then make your characters work to bring balance to their life once again. This is the basics of structure and the bases for all stories.

When the incident goes unresolved, the script reads as underdeveloped and flat, the story tends to end more abrubtly than it should and the audience is left feeling unsatisfied with the results, they feel that there is more that should have been said. A story needs to come to some sort of resolution. Everything doesn’t have to be perfect in the world, but a stable life that has been accepted by the characters has to be established. But an incident doesn’t bring closure, it doesn’t bring a resolution, it does the opposite. It disrupts and causes chaos. So develop the incident, bring the story to a conclusion.

In features it is often said that the incident must occur at around page 10. This gives 10 minutes of film time to establish the balance in the characters lives. Now if a feature script is apprioximatly 100 pages long then the incident occurs 1/10th of the way into the story. Which means if you write a 10 page script, then following the same logic, the incident should occur on page 1. Giving you 1 page to establish the character’s lives. And a 5 page script should have the incident at 0.5 pages into the story. Which doesn’t give you a lot of space to establish the character’s lives, but it’s all the space you have.

What I want you to take away from all of this is twofold.

1) The incident must occur early in the story. Stories are built off conflict. In the opening of your story, everything is in balance and though the real world and your story world is never free of all conflict, the conflict that occurs is manageable. It isn’t until the incident that the conflict reaches a level that requires action from the protagonist. So you can’t dwell on the introduction for two long, you can’t meander through a conflictless world, or else the audience will get bored. So bring your incident in early.

2) Find the perfect place for your incident. First of all, ask yourself what in your story is throwing your protagonist life out of order. Whatever it is, that is your incident. Then take that incident and put it as early as you can in your story. Finding the right spot for you incident can take some practise and is dependant on your story. But what I recommend is that as soon as you have established everything your audience needs to know about the protagonist life in order for them to appricate what kind of change the incident has caused to the protagonist’s life, then you have found where your incident should go. Depending on the length of your story, this could be after one paragraph, or up to ten pages.

I hope this helps, keep writing and I will see you next week.

Don’t Just Stand There

Evan Jobb
29 Feb 2012

The Oscars have come and gone and The Artist was the “big” winner of the night. Even though Hugo received the same number of Oscars. And for this reason I have to rant for a minute. The Artist won Costume Design, Score and the “big” awards like Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor while Hugo only won Best Cinematography, Production Design, Sound Mixing, Sound Editing and Visual Effects which are clearly lesser awards. I’m not sure what makes these awards less important, but if you read all the news articles about the Academy Awards, you will see they’re all about The Artist. And though The Artist did win best picture, I think Hugo deserves more praise than I have seen and the “technical” awards deserve more recognition than they are given.

On another film note, has anyone seen the most recent trailer for The Lorax, I know that after the word has gotten out to the public they cut down the trailer to smaller bits, but I saw one that went like this.

Girl :”I wish I could see a tree.”

Boy: “I will show you a tree.”

Then he shows her a tree.

That was about it. There is no mention that trees have died out or are rare or something like that and there is no struggle to get the tree. He just does what is asked and that’s it. No conflict, no tension, no hook. And I doubt the trailer will interest anyone in the movie.

Alright, that’s enough about what I’ve seen on TV, let’s get on with the topic of the day. Today I have dialogue on my mind again. Regular readers will know that I have talked about dialogue many times before and this week I want to expand a bit on my ideas.

Two rules of screenwriting that I have mentioned before are as follows:

1) Film is visual

2) Dialogue shows character

From this we can see that dialogue comes secondary to description because it is not visual. Thus the story should be propelled forward by visuals and dialogue should instead be used to reveal character.

These rules are important because many times you will sit down to write a script and produce what I call a “talking head script”. These scripts contain huge portions of dialogue exchanges without any actions or descriptions to break them up. You just have two people talking to each other. The issue with a talking head script is that it has placed the importance on dialogue and audio over action and visuals.

It can be perfectly fine to have a very dialogue heavy script if that is what your story deserves, but a talking head script with pages of dialogue is missing an important aspect of communication, body language.

A lot can be seen from body language, watch any silent film and you will see that you often know what the intertitles will say before they are shown (and sometimes the director scraps the intertitles altogether because they know the audience understand the body language). People don’t sit down and talk without moving. People react physically to their state of mind and you need to show this in your script. You need to see how these words affect your characters. It will breathe more life into them and your story.

Another aspect of the story that can be undeveloped is the setting. Again with talking head scripts the setting becomes irrelevant. It could be in a cafe, a dinning room, a grocery store line, a space ship, whatever, if it is just two people talking then the surrounding environment may end up playing little to no role in their lives.

But this leaves so much opportunity unused. Think about the conversations you have, do you often sit or stand there unmoving or are you usually doing something else at the same time?

A room doesn’t have to be just a set of four walls. There are objects that occupy the room. So fill that room, bring the setting to life and have your characters interact with the setting. If they are outside, think about everything that can exist around them. And then think beyond the setting to the rest of the physical world. What sounds are there? What smells? And what of your character’s clothing? They may have pockets, a bag, a hat. All of this can be part of the story. So open up your mind and build up an entire physical world for your characters to live in.

Instead of having talking heads flip the balance from dialogue to action and give your characters some life, give them a setting, give them body language and breathe life into your visuals.

Lost Week

Evan Jobb
22 Feb 2012

What a week this has been. A mere twelve hours since I made my last post I fell ill and I am still feeling quite sick as I write this. You know how it is, your eyes start to hurt when you’re watching a movie and for the rest of the night there is a running joke that the film physically made my eyes hurt. And then the jokes on me when I wake up the next day with pink eye in both eyes, a sore throat, nasal infection, migraine, fever and eventually an ear infection.

So needless to say, it’s been a wonderful week of lying around and not being productive.

The Oscars are on the horizon. I have seen 5 of the 9 Best Picture Nominees and I will make an attempt to see a 6th. So I am where I am usually at, just over 50%, which isn’t bad. I think I have seen enough of them to make some informed picks. At least I hope, I am hosting a party and I have bragging rights to win.

Since it seems a fair assessment that The Artist will win most of the awards it is nominated for, and since every other site has talked about who will win the acting Oscars the so called, big awards, aren’t even hard to predict. It’s the technical awards that really take talent because no one talks about them. Here are a couple of my insights if you are picking the winners.

The Artist will win Best Original Score for a couple of reasons. Since it’s a silent film it is very dependent on music. So if it doesn’t have the best music, than the film itself is in trouble.

I am predicting The Tree of Life is going to win Best Cinematography. I don’t think it will win any other awards, but it deserves this one.

Also for the last few years I have had luck picking Best Sound Mixing and Sound Editing by picking the film with the most cars crashing or exploding. The exception to this is Sound Mixing will often go to a musical or music themed movie instead of the one with a car blowing up. Don’t believe me? Look at the winners in the last few years. So when a musical featuring cars exploding is made, you can bet it will win these Oscars.

Under this theory, Transformers is as far as I know (since I haven’t seen all of the films) is the one with the most cars blowing up. But I think the Academy will be edgy this year, Hugo has a train crash, and that’s much better than a car.

Though Best Costume Design tends to go to an English monarchy film, I think that the momentum of The Artist will continue and it will take this.

So now on Sunday we can see if I am right or if I have lead you astray.

So as well as being sick this week I am working on a treatment or an outline or synopsis or whatever other synonym you want to use. There is an upcoming script competition here and I want to put my hat in the ring. The problem I face, and the problem I knew I would face is that I am terrible at writing treatments. The style is different than scripts and it trips me up. I have the story all planned out and I am working on the finer details, but when I know that everything I write would sound better as a script, I get discouraged.

A treatment is like writing your script as a short story. It is still in the present tense, but it is in paragraphs and not in proper script writing form. And for the most part you don’t include dialogue. When writing in paragraphs I have trouble depicting visuals. I can write scripts through a bit of a fluke, scripts for whatever reason blends well with my writing style, paragraphs however do not.

I am often told that before writing a script you should always write a treatment, and it seems like this would be good practice. It forces you to know your whole story before you sit down and write. There are always small holes in your plot (and sometimes big holes) that might be overlooked until you get specific and write the whole story down. A treatment puts it all down on the page and from there you just need to write the script. It gives you a template to work on and a guide to follow as you write. More importantly, if you write 5 pages and discover major plot problems that require rewrites, then you only have 5 pages to rewrite instead of 40, 50, 90 or however many pages of a script you have written before you discover your problem then you will have a lot more to rewrite.

So this will be good practice and maybe I’ll even get good at it. Or at least I can hope. It’s going to take a lot of drafts to get through it. But it’s something I am going to have to push past and ignore.

Until next week, I will be working tirelessly on my treatment and I will give you a full report next week.

Learn From the Mistakes

Evan Jobb
15 Feb 2012

Today I have to admit a shameful secret to you. I love bad movies. There is something magical about them that always lures me in.

I make this confession in light of the movie marathon I just had with some friends. It was a follow up to last year’s best/worst movie marathon, where you watch the most hilarious and awesomely terrible movies. However, this year we toughened up and watched the worst/worst movies. The movies that are just so awful they become painful to witness. I don’t think anyone can give a clear answer as to why we did this, but it happened.

Besides the fact that even at their most painful, bad movies bring me great joy, they also offer a valuable learning experience. It can sometimes be difficult to place what makes a great film great. When you are watching a great film, you are absorbed into its world and the mechanics of story structure become lost behind the characters and the entrancing story. But a bad film doesn’t hold your attention and you start to realize everything you took for granted in that great movie.

And you see the mess that can happen to your story.

So to help you avoid these problems, I have complied a list of five problems I witnessed over the weekend. These are simply problems that can be easily avoided, but if ignored will spell death for a film.

1) Lack of Tension
If everything goes smoothly for your protagonist, or worse, everything goes better than expected, then the audience is going to get bored. It’s a simple fact. The audience is looking for a story, they are looking for drama, they are looking for conflict. They are not looking for a character to win without trying. That’s not a story, that’s not life. If your protagonist goes through life getting everything (and more) that they wanted, than they live a boring conflict free life. They have no struggle, no turmoil, nothing. Which means you have no story and no audience.

2) Nothing Happens
Something should always be happening in a scene. It seems like an idea that doesn’t need to be stated, but when you are deep in your story, sometimes you can forget that behind all of the words on the page there is nothing really happening. If your scene is not driving the plot forward, if it is not developing your characters, than it needs to go. If your scene shows your protagonist commute to work, and he just drives for a while, gets stuck in traffic and then gets to his destination and nothing more, then nothing happened (we may know that he has an irritating drive to work, but unless that is relevant to the story, don’t show it). If on the way we see how he reacts to situations, if he gets an important call, if he is running late and really needs to be on time, or he get’s into an accident then something is happening.

This is the same reason why you don’t often see characters walk up to the front door of a house, the movie just cuts to them standing there. Because it’s not important that they walked up the front walkway, it’s important that someone answered the door. So start your scene when the door opens.

3) Explaining What the Audience Already Knows
It’s like watching a crime being committed, seeing who did it, seeing why they did it and then watching the police look at all the clues and discuss how/why it could have happened. The audience isn’t going to care about the police’s theories and opinions because the audience already knows what happened. You need to leave some mystery, you have to withhold some information from the audience. If your audience knows all the hows and whys, then there is no reason to continue reading your story or watching your film.

4) Telling, not Showing
Film is visual, so you should always show rather than tell. Too many times films prefer the opposite. I find this is especially troubling when introducing protagonists and antagonists. If you say your protagonist is a good person, if you say he has a good job, a good life and takes care of his grandmother, than the audience knows that he is a good person. However, they may not believe it. People don’t believe everything they hear, so if your audience hears that your protagonist is a good person, but they don’t do good things, they will get suspicious that they are in fact not such a good person and may not like this person anymore. So don’t say they take care of their grandmother, show them doing it. It will dispel all the doubt. Seeing is believing.

For the antagonist, I have found that there is a bit of myth that can be created by talking about their evil deeds. However, the audience will once again want proof. If you just say someone is bad, but they never do anything bad, than it just seems like this person is being badmouthed and slandered which could invoke sympathy, which is not typically what your antagonist should invoke. So show them doing bad, leave no doubt in your audiences mind as to who the villain is.

5) Disregard for the Way the World Actually Works
Films don’t have to operate in the real world. They can have their own rules, especially in sci-fi and fantasy. But you have to explain the changes. Your audience understands how the world works and they will notice when your film is not following the rules of the world. And if that happens, they will not believe in your film and you will have lost them forever. If you have to change the rules, if something happens that’s contrary to how one might expect, then you have to explain it. It doesn’t have to be an exact scientific explanation, but if your future set sci-fi film involves the recovery and flying of 1000 year old jet planes, you had better explain how they could still be in fully functional and in working order. Because any computer has struggled to last half a decade.

So there you go, five simple steps. Always follow them. They may seem obvious, but sometimes we all need a reminder.

And now I will leave you with one last important lesson that comes from watching bad films. No matter how bad the film is, it is still a film. It was made and it was finished. A crew worked on it, actors performed in it, a script was written and money was put into it. Which means there is nothing stopping you from making your film. So get out there and make it.

One down, Two to go!

David Cormican
9 Feb 2012

Well, it has been a bit of a whirlwind of a few weeks here with the CSSC. The 2011/12 submissions have been closed with the passing of the I-Missed-The-Deadline deadline and Principal Photography has come and gone on 2008′s 2nd place winner’s (David Carey), “NO MAN’S LAND”. Which, by the way, we have also decided to change the title to “WILL”.

We shot over two days in Simi Valley, in beautiful and sunny Los Angeles, CA during the beginning of February.

We had a fantastic crew being helmed by Laurence Cohen (you may recall his work from the Cannes and Worldwide Short Film Festival bows on “RUSTED PYRE”), and no less than four Canon 7D’s on the go, capturing what seemed like every angle– giving a lot of footage for Director/Editor (Laurence) to sift through to pull our story together in the edit and magic of post-production.

A huge shout out and thanks to our amazing co-producer and composer Andrew Raiher and our wonderful cast and crew, who gave 110% of blood, sweat and tears in the mud, all Super Bowl weekend long– and as well to Siobhan McCarthy, the CSSC Short Film Fund and the rest of the team with the BC Kick Start Arts Foundation, whom without their generous support, we would not have been greenlit for this most excellent weekend of filming.

It is also important to note that “WILL” has already been invited to it’s first film festival. “WILL” will premiere March 21-25th, 2012 in Vancouver, BC as part of the Wide Angle Media Festival! We hope to see you there.

Now, I mentioned one down… two more to go. That’s right folks. You may recall that we ran a KickStarter campaign earlier, or rather, later last year we ran a KS campaign for the Herrmann brothers’ and 2010/11 first place winner, “ELIJAH THE PROPHET” to be directed by James Cooper and starring Brian Markinson, Melanie Nicholls-King and Tonya Lee Williams… and you may also recall our 2009/10 first place script “SOMETHING POINTLESS”, written by Neil Graham. Well, thanks to all the generous backers on KickStarter and a generous contribution by the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, both projects have been greenlit for production over the Spring/Summer of 2012.

Casting will begin shortly on “SOMETHING POINTLESS”, which is set to be directed by Cohen, and we will be looking to complete our casting on “ELIJAH” with Mr. Cooper in the coming weeks.

Once production is complete on these two additional projects, they will mark the 5th and 6th short films produced and arising out of the CSSC since it’s inception and only 3 years of winners.

Boy, it sure does feel good to be kicking off 6 careers with produced scripts and professional IMDb credits for Gordon Pengilly, Surita Parmar, Daniel Audet, David Carey, Neil Graham and Zach & Jesse Herrmann.

….Ahhhhhhhhh.

Sorry about that. I’m just taking a post shooting/pre-production soaking of it all in.

Okay. Back to work.

And, with that said… and the 2011/12 script submissions being closed, I have a tonne of scripts to get through to find out WHO’S SCRIPT IS GOING TO BE MADE IN TO A SHORT FILM NEXT!!!

Check back on February 29th right here on THE Blog to see who will be announced as a TOP 50 Finalist in the 2011/12 Canadian Short Screenplay Competition.

Waiting for the End

Evan Jobb
1 Feb 2012

I just found out yesterday that THE Blog has won Silver in Writing & Literature as well as Bronze in Arts & Culture at the Ninjamatics 2011 Weblog Awards and I have been riding a high all day. It would be an understatement to say that I was apprehensive about taking over this Blog last June. The fact is I was terrified. I don’t like to talk about myself, and I don’t like to talk about my writing, so why would I ever want to do that in a blog? I was sure I would get a few posts in and then just run out of things to talk about. But I took on the task because sometimes you just have to step out of your shell and take on something that is out of your comfort zone. I’m not sure I would recommend stepping into a year long commitment, but to each their own.

I want to stay humble about this, but I am pretty excited. I went into this nervous and assuming I would fail. But now I have received a pat on the back and been told that someone appreciates all the hard work I have put into this blog. And I want to thank Ninjamatics for that. I also want to thank Carolynne and David and everyone else at the Canadian Short Screenplay Competition for everything they have put into this blog and this competition.

Two years in a row. And I’m sure we’ll be back for three.

Now let’s get back to business. It’s February 1st. The end of the first step in the Canadian Short Screenplay Competition. The deadlines are all past, now there is nothing to do but wait. And believe me, it’s not easy. I’m sure you will all be checking in periodically, waiting for the day when the results will be announced. In the meantime, I hope you still visit the site and check in with me at THE Blog. I still have more tips to share with you.

And as you wait, fingers crossed, in anticipation, I’ll be right there with you. As I have just applied to go back to school, and now there is nothing more I can do but wait.

And wait.

Now, I’m sure you’ve all been here: you print off your script, or assignment, or application or whatever it may be and you begin to look it over and you start seeing problems. Not big problems, just little ones. You start to see words you don’t like any more, you want to go in and make some changes to the flow of the sentences. So you make the changes and print it again. And again you see these little changes. So you make changes and print it again.

And this continues till you finally say, stop! You put your foot down and declare that it’s done and that no matter what you may see, you are not going to make any more changes. Your script is finished!

Well you’re wrong. A script is never finished.

I have been working on a script for the last 6 months, it is 3 pages long and every time I think it’s done, I suddenly have a “Eureka moment” and find a way to make it better. As of right now I think the script is done, but this is the 3rd time I have felt this way and I know it will keep evolving. As I keep reading, as I keep searching for the hidden structure buried beneath a story, I discover more and more about my own story and the direction I want to take it.

And you’ll do the same thing. The next time you look at the story you just wrote, you will come at it with a different viewpoint, you’ll be in a slightly different place in your life, a different place in your journey as a writer and you will find things to change in your script. Be they small or large. And you are just going to have to make these changes until you finally decide to put your foot down and say stop!

But it won’t last long.

When you finally take your film into production, you will find that your finished script is going to change. As you add a creative team, changes will be inevitable. As you work with your actors, as you find your locations, you will discover new subtleties in your script. When words are translated to visuals, there are always changes, for good or bad, changes will occur and you will need to adapt the script to them.

But remember that no matter what, when you make changes you must stick to the heart of the story. You will find that if you stay true to your story you can change dialogue, actions, characters even whole scenes and still keep the heart of your story.

Whatever your story may be about, don’t compromise it.

So don’t be afraid of change. Don’t stamp your script as a masterpiece and move on. Because scripts continue to evolve and you need to accept that.

That’s all for this week. I have the day off today and I plan to spend it writing. Tune in next week, I’ll be talking about the heart of your story. Theme.

Speaking with Visuals

Evan Jobb
11 Feb 2012

My tips this week come in the form of dialogue again. I talked a few months ago about dialogue (Blog 13 to be exact) and I talked about whether or not you every line of dialogue. This week I want to expand on that idea. Some new ideas have come to light, and I would like to share the illumination.

Lesson one: Film is a visual medium.

Lesson two: Dialogue is not visual.

What we get from these lessons is that dialogue is at odds with film. It doesn’t mesh with it and isn’t needed (as silent films will prove). But of course we also know that “almost” no one makes silent films anymore, so it’s obvious that there is a reason for dialogue and sound but it’s still important that when you write you don’t lose sight of these two lessons. Because both these lessons can be molded together to form the following idea:

Dialogue should never tell the story what happens next, action should always dictate what happens next.

This idea shifts the focal point of your writing on visuals. Even when writing dialogue, you must always focus on the visuals. But it also removes exposition.

If dialogue never directs the plot, then dialogue can never be expositional. If characters can’t just say where they are going, what they are doing, why they are doing it, then your film is free of exposition.

So now instead of your characters saying where they are going, they just go. Instead of saying what they are doing, they are just doing it. Instead of saying why they are doing something, they just do it. Which makes your story faster paced and more interesting.

But, you ask, what if the audience doesn’t understand the character’s motivations for doing this action. Well, then make them understand, that’s your job as a writer, but you can’t do it with dialogue. Add visuals, find some way to show how your characters feel. Use a visual cue, use body language, use facial expressions, find the best way to connect your characters and the audience.

Case in point: I have a script that called for a character to have a heart attack. At first he acted relatively normally, seemingly healthy, but other characters mentioned he was quite ill. Now of course this is flawed, and in hindsight, obviously flawed. Why have other characters talk about his health? Why not just show it? So in a rewrite he became very ill, and very visually ill, and now I didn’t need all that unnecessary dialogue about his health, because the reader instantly knew he was in bad health.

Witnessing an emotion has more impact than being told about an emotion because visuals are more powerful than words, an audience connects better to visuals. It works the same way in life, witnessing an event with your own eyes has more effect on you than hearing about it.

Now, you may note that there are plenty of films that don’t follow this principle, in particular, film noir, mystery and detective films where it is important to have dialogue reveal the story. So if you are writing this type of film where exposition is expected then go right ahead. But don’t get carried away, don’t use the dialogue as an excuse for poor visuals.

Now this lesson is twofold, because the next piece of the puzzle was explained to me by a fellow screenwriter and is as follows:

If dialogue doesn’t reveal the story, then obviously it must reveal character.

This is a very, very important lesson and I was stunned that I had never thought of it before. This simple idea makes so much sense and fixes so many problems facing script writers. From this the definition of dialogue can now be changed from something said by your character, to something greater:

Dialogue is a vessel to reveal character to the audience.

Dialogue reveals how the character speaks (accents, stutters, ticks), style of speech (eloquent, simple, profound), it reveals mannerisms, it reveals what they care about, it reveals opinions, it reveals their distinct voice, it reveals their entire life.

It reveals their personality.

I can’t stress how important this is to a character. All characters have personality, but if your characters are constantly speaking in exposition, constantly pushing the plot forward with their words, then it’s hard to reveal personality. But if your characters can’t push the plot forward with their words, if you draw a line in the sand and declare that your characters words will never push the plot forward, then what is the use of their words, what is the only use of their words? To show their personality.

So now with these simple little ideas, you have a visual script for a visual medium, with no exposition and fully developed characters bursting with personality. What more could you want in a script?

A 3D Spectacle

Evan Jobb
4 Jan 2012

Over the holidays I watched two 3D films, taking a rare occurrence and making it happen twice. I am not a fan of 3D, to date, I have only seen six 3D movies. I have seen movies that were suppose to be in 3D, but I prefer my characters 3 dimensional and my movies 2 dimensional.

I could nit pick my dislike of 3D stems from something I call “eyegraines” (migraines in my eyes) and the tendency for 3D to cause them. Okay, well badly done 3D can cause them. Or I could talk about how I find it hard to focus on the background of some 3D movies. But if we dig past the superficial level we can see where the root of my disdain.

A few years ago I was watching the 1953 Vincent Price film House of Wax, with Alyssa and about halfway through the film there is an extended scene at a burlesque club. This scene seems to go on forever with girls dancing and kicking toward the screen. And Alyssa and I just looked at each other, what was the point of this scene? Vincent Price was hardly even in it, it was just these dancers. And it just kept going.

Eventually we realized the problem, House of Wax was originally shown in 3D, this scene with all the high kicking girls was showing off the 3D. But viewed 50 years later in 2D it just seems odd and misplaced.

Now jump forward to the present year and films are being made in 3D all the time. It costs 5 bucks more to see these films and audiences are willing to pay. Audience attendance is at an all time low but with the extra ticket prices the box office is sustainable. So despite everything, 3D is here to stay.

But I can still complain.

Back in the Avatar days, when 3D was new, I read an article by a screenwriter who was talking about 3D in films. He mentioned that with the way the markets were going, 3D was here to stay and screenwriters were going to have to adapt to it. He theorized that like an action film has an action scene every 10 minutes, a 3D film would need a 3D scene every 10 minutes. And since every film may one day be 3D we should always have these 3D scenes in our scripts. They will sell better if they are 3D.

Now as I said, I don’t like 3D, and though there is nothing wrong with adapting to a changing world, I don’t agree with parts of this idea. Sure 3D is here to stay, sure the big Hollywood films are 3D, but a 3D scene?

Okay, first off what is a 3D scene? The world is naturally 3D, and a 3D film is in 3D, isn’t every scene 3D?

So I assume this scene has to exploit 3D. Opening a door is an action but we expect more from an action scene, so naturally we expect more from a 3D scene.

And I worry that we will just end up with scenes like the one in House of Wax or all those other terrible scenes where things jump out at the audience.

See as it currently stands, 3D is a spectacle. Nothing more. A gimmick, it enhances the viewing experience, it gives depth to the image. But it adds nothing to the story, it is superfluous. Like fireworks, it is a spectacle. And I can guarantee even the best fireworks will bore you long before the 2 hour mark.

There needs to be substance. A story cannot be driven merely on visuals and spectacle. There has to be substance, there has to be well developed characters, a tightly written story arc there has to be an emotional connection between the audience and the characters. There has to be a story to be told.

3D doesn’t add to this.

The old “rule” is that in an action script there is an action sequence every 10 pages (or 10 minutes screen time). Die Hard is often cited as an example of this. But sometimes this “rule” is thought of as “every action script must have an action sequence every 10 pages.” This is misguided, this passes over substance for spectacle. It should read, “a well written action script justifies an action sequence every 10 pages.”

See you can’t just have an action sequence for no reason, the story needs to require it. The story needs to build up till the action sequence is the natural outcome of the situation. Your story needs to deserve the action sequence.

So your story needs to justify that 3D scene. So when I ask myself, what scenes need to be in 3D, I instantly think a scene that needs that 3rd dimension, a scene where things are constantly moving in 3 dimensions, or where there is a lot of depth to the scenery. But I can’t honestly think about any kind of story that would require a 3D scene, that a 3D scene would be the natural next step in the plot. Because when it comes down to it, 3D adds nothing to the story, so it can’t be needed.

And you end up with House of Wax and a 3D scene with kicking girls. The story is not about these girls, it is simply in the movie for spectacle.

Unlike action scenes, I think it’s hard for any film to justifies a 3D scene.

And here in lies the problem. You don’t typically need 3D. Unless you are exploiting it, you don’t need it. It adds spectacle, but it isn’t needed. Everything written can be shown in 2D or 3D. But it can later be exploited in 3D. It can become a spectacle.

And then when you watch that same scene in 2D, it just seems odd and misplaced.

As I see it, 3D should be used for scenery, for the background. That is where it works best. 3D can create an encompassing and full landscape, it can surround you and trap you within it’s world. It can reach out and place you in the setting. 3D can bring you into the film and make you feel like you are really there. Cave of Forgotten Dreams is an example of this. The film shows you the Chauvet caves, it brings you in and allows you to experience the caves and the art in a way that is 2D can’t offer.

But often 3D is used for action, it is used to throw objects at the audience, to exploit actions along this new dimension, and it just brings you out of the movie, the film is in your face, it reminds you that your watching a 3D film and you are taken out of the story. And then on DVD, these scenes are annoying and point out that at one time this film was in 3D. And if you are watching the film and being constantly reminded that you are watching the film, then you lose immersion, and you lose your connection to the story.

So instead be subtle, bring the audience into the 3D, bring them into the story, immerse them. Highlight the dynamics of the landscapes, invite them to fully enter the world you have created, don’t exploit the dimensions. Show the world this story is in. But leave the story alone, it doesn’t benefit from 3D.

The best review I gave a 3D movie was that I had forgotten it was in 3D. It brought me into the story and held me there until it all just seemed natural.

Aspiring screenwriters and filommakers may agree or disagree, but 3D in movies will likely be a topic that comes up in popular film school programs in, for example, California.
So forget the spectacle and write the story.

SHORT. IS. BETTER.

Join the email list

Press Releases