by Jeff Kitchen
Transforming the Audience
A dramatist is a bull in a china shop, going after the sacred cows, going where it’s verboten. That’s part of the fun! The key word in the entertainment industry is outrageousness. According to the writer Salman Rushdie, “One of the things a writer is for is to say the unsayable, speak the unspeakable, and ask difficult questions.” Your job as a screenwriter is a cross between a bomb maker and a poet: You’re blowing up ideas with language. The audience seeks a profound transformative experience, so as a dramatist you’re working with elements of great change, cataclysmic transformation, and powerful resolution. It’s a chance to really rewire the brains of the audience—to permanently change the way they think—and the audience is up for that. People come to the theater, open their minds, and say, “Come on. Do something, anything. Let’s party. I need change.”
Catharsis is an emotional release, a fresh start. Aristotle describes it as a cleansing of the undesirable emotions, a purging of the system. Think about how a great movie can make you feel energized or inspired. Sometimes you just need to burn off the normal day-to-day banter rattling around your brain. David Mamet, in Three Uses of the Knife (New York: Vintage Books, 1998), says, “The purpose of theater, like magic, like religion—those three harness mates—is to inspire cleansing awe.” Catharsis is like an oil change, and it brings up the question, “What do you periodically need to have cleaned out of your system?” Behavioral scientists have proven that people need to change states at least once a day. People come home, have a beer, go jogging, or go to the movies to shift into a different state. The ability to consciously change emotional gears is a vital part of staying sane and happy in a high-pressure world.
This book teaches classic structural technique for the dramatist—the time-tested structures of which most successful plots consist. It’s a good thing to have under your belt. You won’t want to rely on it for everything, but in my experience it will cover about 85 percent of the scripts you work on. Actor, writer, and director Tim Robbins said in an interview:
I respect the classical form of film and storytelling. I’ve done experimental, absurdist and Dadaistic theater and there are ways to incorporate those styles into storytelling, but you’ve got to go to the classical structure of storytelling. I don’t believe in indulgence for the sake of indulgence. I believe in the audience. I think they’re central to what we’re doing. That’s why we’re doing it. I’m always aware that an audience will be watching this. I don’t want to get too esoteric or intellectual with something I’m doing because it really is entertainment we’re doing.
My playwriting teacher, Irving Fiske, who translated Hamlet into modern American English in 1946, says in his Introduction, “The profoundest hunger of the modern audience is not for an escape from reality, as is commonly thought, but for an escape into reality from much of the meaninglessness of their everyday lives.” Certainly, escape from reality is a perfectly valid form of entertainment, but escape into reality is a much more powerful concept. A solid jolt of reality can connect an audience with what really matters to them in their lives.
THE CRAFT OF THE DRAMATIST
A big part of your job as a screenwriter is to dramatize your script. To dramatize a story means to make it gripping to an audience by creating continuous, coherent, compelling action. Essentially what we’re talking about is turning mere Story into Drama. Story means that the material is flat dramatically or is simply information, which doesn’t succeed in building the tension to grip an audience.
The following narrative is an example of mere Story: Joey wakes up in the morning, has some orange juice, ties his shoes, and walks his dog. This is merely a succession of events, and isn’t compelling to an audience. There’s a huge difference between narrative and drama. This book teaches the habits of mind of a trained dramatist, and part of your job as a dramatist is to recognize mere Story when you see it—and to be able to dramatize it. It’s much like turning water into wine.
Turning Story into Drama
You want your whole script to be Drama and not simply Story. You want each act to be dramatic and not just narrative, engaging and not merely informative. The same goes for each sequence, and for each scene. You never want to revert to mere Story. How do you avoid this? The short answer is: this book. There’s no one magic button you can push to turn Story into Drama, but the skilled combination of all the tools and techniques in Writing a Great Movie can render every part of your script dramatic.
While a good story is definitely the basis of your script, it is not enough. You need life in your script, but mere life is not enough either. You need character, but mere character is not enough, and you need action, but mere action is not enough. There’s an important distinction here: You need storytelling skills as big as you can get them. You need imagination, a sense of adventure and fun, an ability to weave a story together and to spellbind an audience—and you need all these things as big as you can get them. Bear in mind that when applied to bland material, even the most advanced dramatic structure tools simply won’t work. Well-structured junk is still just junk. It may run like a Formula One race car, but without great story material, it’s still not a movie that anyone will pay to see. To compete as a screenwriter you need a healthy and vigorous imagination. It is hard to stress this enough. But however creative your story is, it still has to be actable and it has to grip an audience if it’s going to work in this performance medium.
One of the single biggest misconceptions in the film industry is that a good story automatically makes a good film. There are many excellent novels that don’t lend themselves to the movie medium. There’s a saying in theater: “It may sound great around a campfire but it’s not stageworthy.” (Yes, it’s a good story, but we can’t act it out on stage in a way that will grab an audience.) Your script must be compelling, so that at the high point of suspense, you couldn’t pay the audience to leave—they simply must stay and see how it turns out.
Creating Dramatic Action
Your job as a screenwriter is essentially to create Dramatic Action. To keep moviegoers on the edge of their seats and engage them emotionally, your script must build intensity, and be alive and gripping. The concept of Dramatic Action is not car chases and shoot-outs, but a state of subjective excitement that a movie creates among the audience. You’ve probably seen movies in which half the world is being blown up—yet again—and you’re nodding off in your seat, while you’ve seen movies with two people arguing in a living room and you’re riveted. Only in the latter are you truly in a state of Dramatic Action.
It’s generally acknowledged that 90 to 95 percent of all scripts submitted in both film and theater are atrocious. (“Don’t kid yourself,” I often hear, “it’s 95 percent.” Script readers at Hollywood studios tell me it’s even 98 percent!) And atrocious is not just a figure of speech: These scripts are unreadable. This means only 2 to 5 percent of all scripts submitted are even worth reading. Is it surprising, then, how many mediocre movies get made? Writing a screenplay is much harder than most people imagine. So what is the problem? Many screenwriters are intelligent and have good stories to tell, but they have yet to grasp the craft of the dramatist. What they’re missing may be the riveting power of Dramatic Action.
Creating Unity of Action
Aristotle noticed that those dramas which grip an audience tend to consist of one complete action. He says this in the Poetics (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, LLC, 1961):
. . . so the plot, being an imitation of an action, must imitate one action and that a whole, the structural union of the parts being such that, if any one of them is displaced or removed, the whole will be disjointed and disturbed. For a thing whose presence or absence makes no visible difference, is not an organic part of the whole.
The ability to locate one main action at the core of a script can help unify it. Look, for instance, at a script as complex as The Godfather. There is one main action at its heart: Michael defeats Don Barzini and saves the
Corleone family. Can you find the one main action that constitutes the heart of your script? Aristotle talks about it as the telling of a deed—a hero’s deed. Is there one main deed that your hero performs? You’ve got roughly a two-hour window in which to tell your story, and this length is rather inflexible unless you’re successful enough to be allowed a three-hour film. That limit on your time forces you to focus your resources. It’s like being in a fight where you only get one punch—you really have to make it count. Find the main action of your script and build everything around it. The tools presented in this book will guide you through doing just that.
Unity of Action is a concept not well understood in either the film or theater industries, but this simple definition has held up well for me over the years:
1. A Single Action
2. A Single Hero
3. A Single Result
You have one main action happening, one central person doing it, and one result springing from it. All the elements of the film serve the one main action, and the script revolves around it. A good example of Unity of Action is a symphony: Each instrument does different things, but they all work together as an orchestra to create one piece of music. In the military and in sports, everyone has their own tasks but they’re all working toward the achievement of one goal. In drama, too, we’re talking about powerful ideas operating together as a unit to achieve a specific goal—structural unity and coherence. If it’s not part of the one main action, then it doesn’t belong in the script.
Getting Down to the Core of Your Script
Part of the definition of dramatic writing is that it’s a fight to the finish. The old saying goes: Conflict is to drama as sound is to music. Conflict creates suspense, so it is central to what makes a story compelling to an audience. A fight to the finish is two people in a knock-down, drag-out fight and only one of them will walk away. It’s two dogs fighting over a bone. This is true whether the struggle is over the fate of the world in a thriller or over where to go on the family’s Christmas vacation in a romantic comedy.
In the earliest Greek theater, only two characters were onstage—the introduction of a third character by Sophocles was considered a major dramatic innovation. Seeing two main characters in conflict helps you get down to the absolute core of your material. Strip it down to protagonist versus antagonist, and you’re at the nucleus of your plot. If this works, then the rest of your script has a good shot at working. If it doesn’t, then whatever you add to the plot probably won’t help.
Engineering Your Screenplay Before You Write It
William Thompson Price recommends taking all the energy that goes into rewrites and using it to engineer your screenplay properly before you write it. Doing the work up front is what Writing a Great Movie is all about. This book will show you how to build a script—how to create, develop, and construct a dramatic plot in any genre. It’s a lot of work—but so is doing twenty rewrites. Here’s what David Mamet has to say on the subject in his book On Directing Film (New York: Penguin Books, 1991):
It’s very difficult to shore up something that has been done badly. You’d better do your planning up front, when you have the time. It’s like working with glue. When it sets, you’ve used up your time. When it’s almost set, you then have to make quick decisions under pressure. If you design a chair correctly, you can put all the time into designing it correctly and assemble it at your leisure.
Dramatic Writing: An Elusive Art
Dramatic writing is generally considered the most elusive of all the literary disciplines. It’s hard to pin down; it’s slippery, thorny, and unpredictable. Why does something look good on paper but fail on-screen? Why does a script work most of the way through but then fall apart? How does a movie with big money and all the top people lose a bundle on its opening weekend, while the same basic story shot for a pittance goes on to make a fortune? Even the winners and losers in this scenario may not know. Dramatic writing is mysterious, and it can be a gamble.
Writing a script is much like building a car from scratch: You’re literally manufacturing the entire vehicle from the ground up, building tires out of rubber, stretching out your own brake lines, and building your own carburetor. You’ll end up with a vehicle, but it may not run. There could be a number of compound, complex problems, and fixing any one of them still doesn’t make the damn thing run. Just like this car, a screenplay may never work no matter what you do, and you may never know why.
I urge you to use the Key Tools introduced in Part One as precisely as possible. These tools and techniques cut through the native elusiveness of dramatic writing. They give you a set of talons that will grab on to this slippery thing and make it do what you need it to do. They create certain distinctions that are central to the craft of a dramatist and should not be muddied just because at times they seem inconvenient. As William Thompson Price says in his book The Philosophy of Dramatic Principle and Method (New York: W.T. Price Pub., 1912), “In dividing the drama into distinct principles or elements we get at the function of each. By this means we are enabled to make an implement of a principle. We do not confound the uses of each.” With Writing a Great Movie, you can train yourself in the craft of dramatic writing with the appropriate use of the Key Tools. Adopt the habits of mind of a trained dramatist, and you will learn to think in ways that will help your stories work.
Even as classic structural technique becomes second nature to you, it’s important to note that literally anything can work. And either it works or it doesn’t. A movie is two hours of entertainment—period. It can be someone shouting at a wall for two hours, and if viewers line up around the block for six months to see it, then it works. So learn the craft, but don’t limit yourself in how you apply it. And don’t worship it. As an artist, you should become the master of these tools, not their servant. The hammer and saw don’t dictate how the house will look—the builder does. Solid skills will help you be consistent as a writer, enabling you to successfully tackle a broad spectrum of plots and genres. Bear in mind, too, that precision of technique doesn’t negate the need for deep intuition, heartfelt passion, explosive creativity, and dynamic storytelling. If you combine these crucial elements with substantial craft as a dramatist, then you can assemble the complete package of a solid professional screenwriter—and that is rare indeed.
Principle and Method
This book teaches you to understand first principle and then method. Certain principles tend to make drama work, and certain methods embody those principles. Essentially, the principle becomes an implement. The more you understand the principle behind a tool, the more you understand its function, and the more you can adapt the tool as needed. In learning how to fly an airplane, it’s not enough to know which buttons to push at what time. You must understand the principles of flight, and your understanding will inform your application of method. Then, since you know what happens to the vacuum above the wings, you’ll know why you’re pushing this particular button at this time. In acupuncture, too, there are certain principles—balancing meridians and opening flow—and there are certain methods that abide by those principles—systems of exactly where to put the needles and for how long. In the same way, your understanding of the principles of drama informs your application of the methods. Some of my students understand the underlying principles but can’t grasp the actual techniques, and that only gets them so far. Others use the tools well but don’t know why, and that’s working blindly. You want to know both principle and method, inside and out.
Through teaching these tools for so long and using them hands-on with each student, I’ve acquired more and more expertise in the complete working process. A friend who is a martial arts teacher says that because teaching has forced him to stick to the basics, it has solidified his foundation as a martial artist in a profound way. He has realized that these basics are first principles for good reason. David Mamet talks about this in On Directing Film:
It’s good, as the Stoics tell us, to have tools that are simple to understa
nd and of a very limited number—so that we may locate and employ them on a moment’s notice. I think the essential tools in any worthwhile endeavor are incredibly simple. And very difficult to master. The task of any artist is not to learn many, many techniques but to learn the most simple technique perfectly. In doing so, Stanislavski told us, the difficult will become easy and the easy habitual, so that the habitual may become beautiful.
It would be easy to flit from one how-to book on screenwriting to another, never putting in the hard work to really learn the material, but rather hoping blindly that the next book will magically make it all effortless. This will never happen because writing is always hard, whether you’re an absolute beginner or one of the top scriptwriters in the business. However, if you put in the time to gain a substantial mastery of the Key Tools presented in this book, both the principles and the methods, you will emerge with the habits and skills of a trained dramatist—and then your scripts will consistently tend to work.
Storytelling
As a screenwriter, you must pay attention to storytelling—that’s the center of the whole process. As a dramatist you must be able to shape the story so that it can by acted in a way that grips the audience, but if the story is lame then the drama will be lame. You can’t turn bad grapes into great wine.
Study the best storytellers; steep yourself in them. Read all the time, listen to books on tape, see live theater. Find stories from different cultures and let them all inspire you, light you up, jump-start your imagination, and ignite you with their incredible amperage and magnitude. Refuse to be second-rate. Boil with creative energy. Get crazy. Go wild. Free your mind. Get outside your normal storytelling ruts. Explosive creativity is crucial—tap into it. Don’t ever let anybody order you to “stick to what you know” as the sole source for your stories. Astonish audiences. Blow their minds so they’ll never think the same way again. Shake up their worlds, shake them awake, shatter their sense of how things are and how they must be. Violate their secure little places as observers. Lift them out of their seats and plunge them into a world of greatness, a world of exuberant passion, exploding adrenaline, ecstatic freedom, untamed savagery, absolute fun, true love, boundless energy, and indomitable spirit.