by Jeff Kitchen
Price reflects on this in his book, The Philosophy of Dramatic Principle and Method:
One main proposition is the essence of unity; it is unity, and unity can be procured in no other way. It is impossible that two main ideas exist in the same play. The house will be divided against itself. Two bodies cannot occupy the same space at the same time. The play itself, that which is developed from the one idea, is about many things; but the discerning eye of the author should penetrate to the heart of things. True dramatic instinct (which is largely the product of training) usually does this with unerring promptness, for that one idea is naturally the largest idea. . . . A proposition involves the whole play. It must have a certain magnitude and the play must be commensurate with it. It suggests action, for the last clause requires that a problem be worked out. Doubt is expressed. The facts are given. Opposition is encountered.
It is from this kernel of action that your script blossoms, from this skeleton that you can flesh our your story.
When I started learning to write, I spent three years reading two books: Price’s The Analysis of Play Construction and Dramatic Principle and Krows’s Playwriting for Profit. After that, I decided to see what other playwriting books had to say about Price. I didn’t find many references, but one book—the aforementioned book, Playwriting—had lots of them. I looked it over and read the following quote to my playwriting teacher, Irving Fiske:
Eventually Price was able to formulate his law of plot, the proposition—which, we are quite willing to agree, is the one significant contribution to the science of playwriting since Aristotle’s Poetics. This was the judgment of many of his students, among whom were the most successful American dramatists of their generation. It is a large remark, but as we say, we do not dispute it—even though Price’s very name seems unknown to the public or to the scholars these days. If we ourselves were asked to whom we were indebted for the basis of our ideas about playwriting, we should have to answer, “Aristotle and Price.”
Irving said, “Wow, he really understands Price. Who wrote that?” I turned the book over and read the name off the cover: Bernard Grebanier. Irving jumped and exclaimed, “He was my teacher!” It turns out that he had studied playwriting with Grebanier in Brooklyn years before, and the textbook for that class was Playwriting for Profit. This is how I found out that I was the fifth generation in this school of playwriting, something I never would have known that if I hadn’t stumbled over that quote.
USING THE CENTRAL PROPOSITION IN A DEMO PLOT
Let’s use the gold miner’s claim-jumping story that we worked with earlier (starting in chapter 6) to practice the five-step process and then lay out the three-sentence proposition. Remember that Tasker is our protagonist and Sharp is the villain. In order to visualize the fight to the finish, think through what we’d be seeing on the actual movie screen. We said earlier that Sharp returns to the mine with reinforcements and tries to eliminate Tasker, who then goes on an all-out attack to finish off Sharp. What would this fight actually look like? Wouldn’t it be a kind of mountainside shootout, with some dynamite thrown in for good measure? Perhaps Tasker has prepared the ground with booby traps like landslides and cave-ins. Now can you see it?
Step 1: Visualize the Fight to the Finish Tasker and a heavily reinforced Sharp fight it out on a mountainside for control of Tasker’s gold mine.
Step 2: What is the Central Dramatic Question? Can Tasker fight off Sharp and keep his mine?
Step 3: What Action by the Protagonist Touches Off the Fight to the Finish? Tasker launches his attack on Sharp’s raiders by detonating twin dynamite explosions in a canyon, killing half of Sharp’s men in one move.
Step 4: What Earlier Action by the Protagonist Sets up the Potential Fight? Tasker drives off Sharp and his fake sheriff when they try to force him from his claim.
Step 5: Do the Set-up and the Touch-off Have Anything in Common that Can Bind Them Together? Tasker is determined to hang on to his mine.
Here’s the stripped-down, three-sentence proposition:
Set up the potential fight
Tasker, determined to hang on to his mine, chases away Sharp and his fake sheriff when they try to drive him off his claim with fake documents.
Touch off the fight to the finish
Having unexpectedly found a massive vein of silver and now totally desperate to hold his mine until his brothers arrive, Tasker launches an all-out attack on Sharp and his band of mercenaries.
The Central Dramatic Question
Can Tasker fight off Sharp and keep his mine?
Again, let’s assemble the full proposition, with a little more information included:
Set up the potential fight
Tasker, a gold miner in 1880s Nevada who has found a vein on his claim, is being watched by Sharp, an unscrupulous claim jumper who preys on solitary miners. Seeing Tasker’s success, Sharp shows up with a friend disguised as a sheriff and presents some forged paper work purporting that the claim actually belongs to Sharp. Tasker refuses to be bullied and chases them away, firing his shotgun above their heads.
Touch off the fight to the finish
Sharp is not scared off so easily, and as he rounds up some hired guns to try again, Tasker discovers a stunning vein of silver in his gold mine. Keeping it quiet, he telegraphs his brothers come out as partners, urging them to rush as things are becoming dangerous. Sharp brings his group of killers up Tasker’s mountain to ambush him, but Tasker has prepared the ground beforehand with dynamite booby traps and landslide triggers. He launches an out-and-out attack by detonating twin dynamite explosions in a canyon, decimating half of Sharp’s men at once.
The Central Dramatic Question
Can Tasker fight off Sharp and keep his mine?
This has been a look at using the Central Proposition to frame up and reinforce the conflict in a script that doesn’t exist yet. As you saw, the exact same five-step process works to construct a script or take one apart for analysis. Practice it by dismantling some of your favorite films. Bear in mind that while it can take some time to master this tool, it’s definitely worth the work.
START USING THE CENTRAL PROPOSITION IN YOUR OWN SCRIPT
1. Make sure you’re thinking in terms of the full scope of your script—a sense of proportion is a skill crucial to gaining a mastery of the Central Proposition. Set up the potential fight somewhere around the one-quarter to one-third point. Touch off the fight to the finish near the two-thirds or three-quarters point in the story.
2. Have you developed conflict in your story? If you haven’t, the Central Proposition will point this out very quickly. This tool will suggest the generation of conflict or opposition, creating the suspense required to push the audience members to the edge of their seats.
3. Can you distill your script down to two central characters in conflict? Remember that the oldest Greek theater had only two characters in the whole play. Try to envision your plot that stripped down. It forces you to be very objective and very clear.
4. Does the conflict between the two central characters break out into a final showdown near the end? Can you visualize that “fight to the finish”—really see it—as though you were watching the end of your movie in your head?
5. Think about what touches off the fight to the finish. This is the onset of a war (entirely within the context of your material—whether an action film, a romantic comedy, a period drama, or whatever). Now let your imagination take you into the audience at this high point of suspense. Get a feel for the question in their collective mind as to how things will turn out for the protagonist. This is the Central Dramatic Question. Keep the question simple and direct because it’s usually a gut question for the audience.
6. Is the Central Dramatic Question powerful enough? How intense is the Dramatic Action it creates? Could it be more powerful or are you surprised by its strength already?
7. What action by your protagonist sparks the fight to the finish? It should be a powerful action touched off by your main ch
aracter, because we tend to want our protagonist to be proactive, a prime mover.
8. Step back to an earlier point in the plot. What action by your protagonist sets up a potential fight? This set-up tends to occur around the one-quarter or one-third point in the plot, so reason backward from the touch-off of the fight to the finish. Bear in mind that you should incorporate the proportion of the entire story. Is there some substantial conflict that starts to build the pressure early on?
9. Opposition comes in many forms. Don’t get too bent out of shape about the conflict aspect of this tool. All you’re really trying to do is to set up an action and then touch it off so that the audience is left hanging at the point of high suspense. If the viewers are really on the edge of their seats, then you’ve creating effective Dramatic Action.
10. Is there anything in common between the set-up and the touch-off of the fight to the finish that can bind them together? Some kind of valid, logical connection between the two will help unite the entire script into a coherent whole. Don’t get too hung up on this connecting element—it can be something simple, as long as it ties them together in some way.
11. Now stand back from the proposition and evaluate it. Does the core action of your script grab you as much as you hoped it would? Is it powerful? Is it pathetic? Is it somewhere in between? What are you going to do about it?
12. If your Central Proposition is weak, then play with either the set-up or the touch-off, or both, to invigorate the plot. Stoke up one fire or the other to increase audience sympathy and interest. Look at everything in the story that contributes to its dramatic power; alter the various factors one by one and observe what makes the proposition more powerful.
13. Configure the proposition several different ways. This is the right time in your development process to experiment with radically diverse possibilities. Measure various propositions in parallel so you can compare different takes on the material—perhaps wildly different takes.
Sequence, Proposition, Plot:
Constructing and Tightening Your Plot
equence, Proposition, Plot is a three-step process that helps screenwriters to build a sound plot. Academy Award-winning writer William Goldman (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Marathon Man) likens screenwriting to carpentry: “The single most important thing contributed by the screenwriter is the structure.” You must assemble all the parts discussed in this book so far into a coherent sequence of events that moves along well and grips your audience. Plot construction is both an art and a science. If you take the time to properly engineer your story structure before you actually write the script, then much of the misery of extensive rewrites can be avoided.
In order to construct a plot, you must think it through first. Most writers prepare an outline before they start, sketching out the basics of the story—the big picture—and then filling in the details as needed, weaving them in gradually, fleshing out the plot, working from general to the specific. As Aristotle says in the Poetics, in constructing the plot, the writer “should first sketch its general outline, and then fill in the episodes and amplify in detail.”
SEQUENCE, PROPOSITION, PLOT: A THREE-STEP PROCESS
Sequence, Proposition, Plot is an innovative outlining tool with several powerful features that strengthen and dramatize a script. It knits the incidents of your story together into a tight progression of cause and effect, such that the first event causes the second event (the effect), which then causes the third, and so on in a continuous chain. Sequence, Proposition, Plot also utilizes a more sophisticated form of the Central Proposition (from Chapter 6) in order to introduce conflict throughout all the different sections of the screenplay. The overall script should demonstrate good momentum and compelling conflict; each act, each sequence, and each scene should do the same. In this way, you can build continuous Dramatic Action into your script as you construct it from these building blocks. This can be much harder than it sounds. But Sequence, Proposition, Plot is so good at unifying and driving a script that the Hollywood studio creative executives who’ve learned it from me consistently say that it’s the most advanced development tool in the film industry. So now let’s see what comprises each of these three steps.
Step 1: Sequence
Sequence is the series of incidents that constitutes your script—the order of events that make up the forward flow of your story. These incidents should be connected by cause and effect such that, as we’ve said, the first event causes the second, which causes the third, and so on, through to the end of the story. This keeps the story moving forward smoothly and eliminates dead spots where you can lose the audience.
This book’s Introduction talked about the difference between Story and Drama. One of the symptoms of mere Story is that it’s episodic—a succession of unconnected episodes that don’t really go anywhere and don’t build much tension. Here’s how Aristotle defines it in the Poetics: “Of all plots and actions the episodic are the worst. I call a plot ‘episodic’ in which the episodes or acts succeed one another without probable or necessary sequence.” To create this tight chain of cause and effect, start from the ending and work backward, building from each effect back to its cause. It works like a charm, and once you get the hang of it you’ll wonder how you ever did without it.
To construct this reverse sequence, start by asking, What is the Object of the script? The Object is a simple, clear statement of where you want the story to end up—the point on the horizon toward which you’re moving. The ability to state the objective of any exercise can be clarifying and is crucial to obtaining results. If you go into a lawyer’s, a doctor’s, or a policeman’s office with bits and pieces of fact and emotions all over the place, you will hear, “Wait a minute. What’s the point?” When you succinctly reply, “Oh, I need this,” the lawyer/doctor/police officer will say, “Okay, now we can talk.”
In Training Day, the Object of the script is that Jake defeats Alonzo, completes his training, and emerges anew as a powerful man. This is the writer’s objective, not the protagonist’s. An actor might think in terms of his or her objective as a character, but this Object is where you, the writer, want the script to end up, and it might be diametrically opposed to what the protagonist intends. In The Godfather, Michael Corleone’s goal is not to become a soulless crime lord, but that was the objective of the writers.
Once we know the Object of the script, then we want to know, What is the Final Effect that demonstrates this Object on-screen with real actors? If the Object is what we want to achieve, then the Final Effect is how we actually stage it with action demonstrated by real actors. The Object can be abstract, but the Final Effect should be real and actable. The Final Effect in Training Day is that Alonzo is executed by the Russians and Jake goes home. This shows that Alonzo has been defeated, and Jake will move forward with his integrity and sense of self intact as a good cop.
Next we want to know: What is the Immediate Cause of the Final Effect? More specifically in this case, what is the Immediate Cause of Alonzo being executed? Jake takes Alonzo’s $1 million to use as evidence against him, so Alonzo can’t pay off the Russians. We use the word “immediate” here to make you seek the cause from among the events just prior to the ending, and not from some distant cause or abstract idea.
Now we ask: What’s the cause of Jake being able to take the money? Jake defeats Alonzo in the fight with some help from the neighborhood locals. We then continue reasoning backward from each effect to its direct cause. The cause of Jake defeating Alonzo is that he drops onto Alonzo’s car, and Alonzo gets stunned from smashing the car around to shake Jake off. The cause of Jake dropping onto the car is that Alonzo beats the stuffing out of him and attempts to leave him behind. The cause of Alonzo beating up Jake is that Jake tries to arrest Alonzo and seize the $1 million as evidence. Follow a straight line from each effect back to what caused it and you will build an unbroken chain of events that comprise the spine of your story. Jake tries to arrest Alonzo and seize the money, which causes Alonzo to be
at the daylights out of him and take off to pay the Russians, which causes Jake to drop onto Alonzo’s car in a desperate attempt to stop him, which causes Alonzo to get stunned when he smashes his car around trying to knock Jake off it, which causes Jake to punch Alonzo out and be able to take the money, which causes the locals to see that the loathsome Alonzo is weakened, which causes them to help Jake defeat Alonzo, which causes Jake to be able to leave with the money as evidence that Alonzo robbed and murdered Roger, which causes Alonzo to be killed by the Russians when he shows up without it, which causes Jake to be able to go home free, his training completed—now a powerful, honest cop.
Separating the Necessary from the Unnecessary. When building backward, notice that in each instance we ask what is the cause of each effect, not what comes before it. This is the major distinction that makes this tool work, and it helps separate the Necessary from the Unnecessary. The ability to separate the Necessary from the Unnecessary is a crucial skill for the dramatist because the screenplay is an extremely lean literary form that demands total economy.
You can really experience this if you’re turning a 400-page novel into a 110-page script. A lot of material simply cannot make its way into the script, and it’s your job to decide what’s Necessary and what’s not. Bernard Grebanier (in his book Playwriting) says, “Drama has a tendency to be stripped of matters unessential to the plot. . . . In the best plays everything counts. There is no place for tangential material or merely graceful ornamentation.”
The trick for separating the Necessary from the Unnecessary is to locate the true cause of a given effect, and not simply what comes before it. Any number of things can come before, but only one thing actually caused it. You are looking for the spine of the plot, unencumbered by unnecessary detail, to ensure that the action is continuous.