Making a Winning Short, page 4
Let’s do a character profile of Linda, the actress in Happy Birthday to Me.
Sample Character Profile: Linda
Age: Today is her thirtieth birthday, a day of taking stock, a day of decision. She has one more day to harvest the efforts of her youth before saying good-bye to her dreams of success in show business.
Main Trait: She has a modest but not compelling talent, good looks, and good cheer but no star quality. She deceives herself with a head full of fantasies that tell her stardom is imminent.
Humanizing Trait: A capacity for honest self-assessment.
Profession: Actress. But is she? According to the timetable she established for herself, her early twenties were to be spent on preliminaries: taking acting classes, auditioning, getting an agent, following leads in the trade papers, working in summer stock. In her late twenties she wanted to get commercials to live on, off-Broadway parts to develop her art. In her thirties, she expected stardom. But success has eluded her. Her husband has moved to Chicago and wants to know whether she is joining him or ending the marriage.
Address: She lives in a seedy neighborhood in New York, in an apartment she never cleans, which has a bathtub in the kitchen and a floor littered with the trade papers of show business publications that feed her fantasies.
Values: Stanislavsky would say that she loves herself in art rather than the art in herself. She prizes the memory of her acting triumphs.
Foil: A self-deceived, pretentious director who fails to cast her in his poetic drama.
Obsession: To break her low batting average at finding acting jobs and get something worth staying in New York for.
Goal: To be an Academy Award–winning actress.
Idol: Claire Bloom, whom she resembles.
Epitaph: She Lit the Sky in Summer Stock.
Internal Conflicts: She doubts whether she has enough talent and staying power to be a working actor.
Interpersonal Conflicts: She and her husband will break up if she does not go to Chicago with him.
Societal and Environmental Conflicts: Her auditions cause her apathy or pain.
Best Thing That Could Happen to This Character (which could turn out to be the worst): She could get a part that sustains her illusions even if her husband leaves her.
Worst Thing That Could Happen to This Character (which could turn out to be the best): She cannot get the off-Broadway part she covets. She renews her marriage and has children.
Why the Audience Will Root for This Character: She is brave, gutsy, pretty, self-mocking, and not untalented.
Voice: The inciting incident is a telegram from her husband, who is coming to New York to settle once and for all whether their marriage will be terminated or renewed in Chicago. Her inner voice says: “Well, Linda. Happy birthday. Thirty years old and where are your little footprints in the sands of time? No husband anymore. No children. No Broadway stardom. Where are those headlines you were supposed to make?” She hears a minister delivering her funeral oration: “The early demise of Linda Brooks makes all our hearts heavy. The world, and especially the theater, seems dimmer without her radiant beauty. We remember especially her luminous portrayal of Elizabeth, the queen, at Roanoke High School. Others were privileged to see her off-Broadway debut in Out, Brief Candle.” The audience is beginning to root for Linda because her self-talk has irony and humor. Her inner monologues become a device in the film. They build a bond with the audience called empathy.
Creating Empathy
On the screen, we see an old man pushing a wheelbarrow up a hill. He doesn’t get our attention until suddenly the wheelbarrow starts to go backward. He starts to go backward too. Our muscles tighten. We have an urge to get up from our seats to help him regain his footing. He starts out slower than before, but pretty soon he gets up to speed. He passes the point where he lost ground before. He almost reaches the top, then stops. He starts again, goes backward a step, and then gives it all he’s got and makes it to the top. This man could be a mass murderer in the next scene, but right now we are bonded with him.
This is empathy, identification with a character that causes the audience to root for him or her. The empathy can build slowly as the character gradually responds to choices and obstacles. The audience will be more likely to root for a protagonist if he or she responds in an endearing way, is funny, charming, more skillful than most of them are, more appealing than his or her adversaries, undervalued by other characters, wrongly accused of or over-punished for a wrongdoing. Jean Valjean in Les Miserables is sentenced to a long prison sentence for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his sister’s starving family. The Russian émigré writer in The Laureate is modest, shuns praise, makes the most of his circumstances, is undervalued in his menial job. The hero of Welcome to I.A. is certainly undervalued when people in the same room with him cannot even see him at his own birthday party. All the skaters in Skater Dater, especially the lead, are extremely skillful. The protagonist gets our sympathy when he breaks ranks with the other boys in order to pursue a girl.
Dialects of the Film Language
As you write your film and begin to visualize it, you may be attracted to any number of technical choices to enhance your story. The normal camera speed is twenty-four frames per second in film and thirty frames per second in video. You can undercrank (shoot at eight, twelve, or sixteen frames per second), which speeds up the action in a comical way. To make action appear slow, graceful, and poetic, you can overcrank (shoot at forty-eight, sixty-four, or more frames per second), using a camera with a variable-speed motor. For even slower action, you can use a high-speed motor. You can do time-lapse photography wherein you shoot one frame every few hours for the purpose of showing a flower bloom or wither. In the lab, you can use fades, dissolves, superimpositions, and so forth. In video, you can use a paint box and do tricks with your image.
You can also shoot in black and white, which is used to evoke earlier decades of the twentieth century or to inform your audience to brace itself for a sober film. One such film is That Burning Question, a very serious look at relationships. You can scratch and dirty your negative to make it look like archival footage as in With Hands Up.
Opticals and effects are nice, but a good story is your best bet for reaching an audience. In chapters 4–8, we’ll consider how to develop your story from a rough idea to a finished screenplay. This means starting with experiences you know to be true and expanding them in ways described in the next chapter.
4
Developing the Idea
EVERY SCREENPLAY HAS A PREMISE AND A PROTAGONIST. You can start with a premise and then use the character form to design a protagonist whose action will illustrate the premise. Or you can start with a protagonist and then find ways to develop and test this character, often by asking those questions on the form: what are the best and worst things that can happen to him or her. The answers should help you find a premise.
After you decide on a premise and a protagonist, you need to do the following in order to develop your script. Create an antagonist, a character who opposes the protagonist with sufficient force to threaten him or her and put the outcome in doubt; add other characters as you need them. Develop plot and structure ideas found through the step outline. Expand your story after using a story checklist. Write the treatment; revise it after feedback. Write a first draft with dialogue; convert dialogue to action. Discover the controlling idea (what your screenplay is all about); restructure; focus and unify the screenplay by asking yourself how every scene supports the controlling idea. Unify your script and check your structure to make sure you have taken the audience on a good roller-coaster ride. And finally, hold a reading to get feedback; revise. After that, the dialogue refinement continues through rehearsals, shooting, and editing.
Learn from Early Dialogue
The above sequence is the ideal, but, in fact, the mind and imagination are wayward, like toddlers, running from one distraction to another with you in pursuit. You may be plotting your story and get dialogue ideas. Write them down, but remember that you want to show, not tell. The most honored shorts have little or no dialogue. Visual storytelling often comes after replacing dialogue with action. Committing to dialogue and polishing it before you know much about your hero and your screenplay will cost you time, and then you will be reluctant to throw the dialogue out if it no longer works. The most valuable thing about early dialogue is that you can comb through it for ideas, actions, and scenes. If two brothers are talking and one tells the other about saving his life when he was drowning, you may stumble into a rescue scene that will show in action, not words, how their relationship develops. More on conversion of dialogue to action later.
The Status Quo
Drama is sudden change under pressure from fast-breaking events. Your audience needs to know the point of departure, what the situation is before the action of the screenplay creates changes. Is your story about the class clown who contracts a mortal illness, loses his sense of humor, and then goes out laughing? You need to establish the clown before you tell the audience about the patient. If a daughter rebels after a lifetime of compliance, the audience needs to see the daughter conforming so that her later rebellion is gratifying.
The Foil
Unlike the protagonist, the foil does not change his or her values and is often a force to bring the protagonist back to the way things used to be. Suppose you want to write about the decline of a promising high school pitcher from a small town who goes away on a scholarship, meets a sexy townie on drugs, and self-destructs. His status quo is that he is a model son, has top grades, a girlfriend he has known since kindergarten, with whom he has a chaste relationship, and a great shutout record. When he changes later, his girlfriend does not. She retains her wholesome hometown values and becomes the foil when she goes to his college to try to reclaim him.
The Inciting Incident
The inciting incident upsets the status quo and causes the character to take an unaccustomed action. It has been said that many great stories begin with a journey, which takes the protagonist to new experiences, a new set of people, values, and issues. The character then makes choices that cause him or her to relinquish original values. This is also called taking an action. A female cop goes undercover. A runaway wife joins the circus. A truant officer runs off with a teenage singer.
The pitcher’s journey begins when he says good-bye to his parents and girlfriend at the bus station and heads for the college town where he meets the pivotal character, the femme fatale who awakens appetites he has suppressed. Meeting her and feeling hopelessly attracted to her is the inciting incident. She uses drugs, gets him to buy a motorcycle with his housing and food money, dares him to do dangerous bike stunts with her, and embroils him in a triangle when her violent boyfriend gets out of jail. Just before the pitcher gets into a violent fight with the biker, which will lead to his self-destruction, his hometown girlfriend comes to visit him. She pleads with him to give up the other woman, the violence she attracts, and the drugs she uses.
The inciting incident need not be a person. It can be a storm, a car’s or plane’s engine trouble, the outbreak of war. It can be a sudden quarrel, robbery, or murder. On TV sitcoms, the inciting incident is frequently the visiting relative or the old war buddy who shows up with a different set of values and tests the status quo values of the principals. In Hamlet, the death of the prince’s father is the inciting incident which brings Hamlet home to explore foul play. In Hamaki, the destabilizing event for a twelve-year-old girl of mixed ancestry is the arrival of her Korean grandmother, who upsets the girl’s expectations.
Raise the Stakes
This term, of course, comes from poker. It is what the character has at risk, stands to lose. In most stories, the stakes go up at least twice. In The Bet, a short directed by Ted Demme, a compulsive gambler is late with his payment on a wager he has lost. At first he is warned verbally. Then the stakes get raised when a collector breaks his thumb as a stronger message to pay up. When he still does not pay, the mob wants a share in the deli business he owns with his upright brother. An uncle gives him a tip that pays off; he wins enough money on the bet to cover the debt and more. But then, on the way out, he overhears a tout talking about another sure thing. Instead of paying the mob, he goes back to the betting window for one more score.
Plotting Takes Patience
Plotting can be a slow process. My own mentor, Thornton Wilder—whom I met when he became a daily visitor to rehearsals of his play Skin of Our Teeth, which I was then directing at Harvard—used to find plotting exhausting. He could do it for only an hour at a time. Yet his play The Merchant of Yonkers was an intricate farce rewritten in his later years. The idea started out as a play by the German Johann Nepomuk Nestroy. Wilder’s version flopped on Broadway, was revived successfully, and later was made into a movie. Then it was adapted for the musical stage and became the long-running hit Hello, Dolly! So patient plotting can pay off. Developing the plot requires you to make your protagonist pay an increasingly greater price for his or her initial choice.
Creating a Step Outline
Many professional screenwriters prepare a step outline to develop their plot. Here’s how to create one. Get a set of three-by-five-inch index cards that you can put on a table or bulletin board and move around. Each card will represent a specific scene in your story. It helps to number the cards, but use a pencil because you will be reshuffling the order of scenes and will have to do some erasing. You can also do a step outline on a computer, but the cards work better because your fingers make tactile contact with your story.
You will be writing the actions, the building blocks of your plot, in caps. Use action verbs that lead to change. So don’t write, “He ENTERS room, LIGHTS lamp,” but rather, “He BREAKS INTO room, FINDS crack.” “Boy FISHES” is not going to get your story very far unless it is followed by “PULLS UP dead body.” That will jump-start your story.
Finding Structure After you have filled out twenty to thirty cards, study them and try to see the structural arc of your story. Have you found the best order of scenes so that you are introducing progressive complications and increasing jeopardy, causing the audience to worry about the protagonist? These two elements help build tension. The other part of structure is orchestration of the plot—the rising and falling of tension. In a well-orchestrated story, a tense and serious scene is followed by a funny scene, a fast scene by a slow one. A rise in tension is often followed by a plateau where you can let the audience rest, lulling them into a false sense of security as the action appears to de-escalate. During a plateau moment when the tension cools, a man and woman running from the bad guys feel safe enough to explore their own relationship. But in many films, when they start to make love, their pursuers resurface to keep the tension unresolved. Usually, a man and woman do not complete the act of lovemaking until the antagonist has been vanquished.
A plateau scene could also be a comic montage with music. Or it could be a subplot scene. In Time Expired, mentioned earlier, the main action is the triangle between Bobby, his wife, and his transvestite lover. The comic subplot is about Bobby’s mother, who obsesses over the shepherd’s pie she wants to cook for him and the new clothes she wants to buy him. Another subplot involves the brother, who is obsessed with comic books and would never notice anything amiss. We are amused at the irrelevance of these issues to a man trying to decide whether he belongs to his wife or his transvestite lover.
While looking for structure, do not overlook the obvious. Do you have a first, second, and third act—a beginning, middle, and end? Even if the rules for shorts are somewhat relaxed, your audience must have rising expectations.
Sample Step Outline: Jonathan’s Story
The following step outline is an expansion of the anecdote about my son Jonathan’s and my trip to Washington, which I recounted in chapter 3. The premise is that a shy child blossoms rapidly when the right circumstances permit him to flower. A psychologist told me a few years later that Jonathan was perfectly normal. He was just, in her words, “Slow to warm up.” The acceleration of such slowness could be gratifying on film. Watch out for the sudden twist of plot. I have advanced the children’s ages because older child actors are easier to work with.
1. Brothers Danny and Jonathan (J.), ages five and seven, QUARREL over blocks.
2. Boys RACE to intercom to greet divorced father (F.), calling from lobby. Danny WINS.
3. F. SWOOPS them up at downstairs elevator. OFF TO PARTY.
4. At party J. MEETS Aunt Linda and Cousin Peter. Peter is different; he shares.
5. A mime ENTERTAINS, IMITATES loud, aggressive Danny.
6. Two cousins bond. Linda INVITES J. to D.C.
7. F. BUYS sons ridable toy car and WATCHES. TELLS them to share.
8. J. FIGHTS with brother over car. PHONES F. to arrange promised trip to D.C.
9. F. PHONES Linda with flight info. (landing D.C. 9:00 A.M.). She will watch J. while he goes to Senate, then White House.
10. F. PICKS UP J. Danny DEMANDS F. FIX broken car, which makes him LOSE briefing paper for senator.
11. On plane they LEARN of flight delay.
12. Stewardess ANNOUNCES further delay. Finally, flight CANCELED.
13. Linda WAITS at gate with Peter. ANNOUNCEMENT. Linda DRIVES OFF. Peter LOOKS OUT window, forlorn.
14. J. and F.’s plane TAKES OFF.
15. They ARRIVE D.C. No Linda. F. PHONES Linda. No answer. J. watches closely.
16. F. and J. TAKE cab. J. STUDIES watch, ASKS how long to Capitol. Talkative cabbie EXPLAINS four sections of D.C. zones.
17. Senate. Projectionist STARTS film in darkened committee room. Film RIPS.
18. In cab, F. TENSELY WARNS J. to be on good behavior with senators.
19. Senate. Projector RESTARTED. Film RIPS AGAIN. Lights GO ON.
20. J. and F.’s cab ARRIVES Senate Bldg. F. TRIES TO HURRY J., who says “Carry me.” “Why?” “I’m afraid the men won’t like me.” F.: “You’re too old to be carried. I refuse.”
