by Jeff Kitchen
William Thompson Price said that the work of the amateur is characterized by the Unnecessary. Dialog and descriptions are overdone, scenes tend to be overwritten, acts are bloated, and so on. Price recognized that whole scenes may be unnecessary, or perhaps even an entire act. For that matter, your entire script may be unnecessary. This may sound humorous or harsh, but if you’ve ever worked as a studio script reader, you’ll know it’s no joke. Good cause and effect is important; it moves the material forward smoothly and solidly without going off on tangents that slow the story down. When you set up a cause you create an expectation in the audience, and when you deliver on it, then you’ve got them hooked. If you wander off into something else, then you’ve got a dead spot—a section that’s dramatically flat.
So the trick is to ask, What is the cause of something?, and not what came before it. Suppose your sister orders you to buy a lottery ticket because she had a dream, and you do so, winning a ton of money. A number of things might happen before you win the money—you lose your car keys, buy some cigarettes, get a parking ticket—but the cause of your winning is that your sister made you buy a ticket, and the cause of that was her dream. Reasoning backward through a story in this way helps you find the main building blocks of the plot. It keeps you from being blinded by a blizzard of unnecessary detail.
This freedom from a profusion of unnecessary detail enables you to escape the trap of not being able to see the forest for the trees. It’s easy to get caught up in your story, and it’s difficult to achieve genuine objectivity. Reverse cause and effect allows you to strip your plot in the same way that radically pruning a tree exposes the major branches. Working this way helps you to get at the essentials and make them function. Many screenwriters have a beautifully written scene in a script that doesn’t work, which is much like having an ornately furnished room in a house that’s falling down. There may be oak trim, gold leaf, and carved marble, but the house itself is caving in. If the big picture doesn’t work, then the particulars do not matter. Getting caught up in too much detail can make that hard to do.
When you’re building a skyscraper, the steelwork comes first—the girders and beams. If one of your workers came rushing up in a panic and said, “Hey boss, what about the wallpaper in the bathroom on the tenth floor?” you’d say, “We’ll deal with that when it becomes necessary.” You’d just be gumming up the works by worrying about wallpaper at that point. You’ve got to get the girders and beams up first to establish the shape of the building, the superstructure. Once that’s completed, then it becomes necessary to put in floors and walls; next comes the plumbing and wiring, and then the sheetrock and painting. Finally it’s time for the wallpaper in the bathroom on the tenth floor. You execute each step as it becomes necessary. Getting caught up in details before they’re required only clogs things up. This understanding is all part of a trained dramatist’s habits of mind. We’re thinking systematically about deep structure, getting the macro up and running. We’ll gradually work our way down from the general to the specific, weaving in more and more detail at the appropriate time.
Reverse Cause and Effect for Training Day. Let’s look at our Sequence for Training Day at this macro level and demonstrate the process of building backward by reviewing a section of the film. Remember, we’re analyzing here, but primarily to learn how to construct an original screenplay.
Object: Jake defeats Alonzo, completes his training, and emerges anew as a powerful man.
Final Effect: Alonzo is executed by the Russians and Jake goes home.
Immediate Cause: Jake takes Alonzo’s $1 million as evidence, so Alonzo is unable to pay the Russians.
Cause: Jake defeats Alonzo in the fight with some help from the neighborhood locals.
Cause: Jake drops onto Alonzo’s car, and Alonzo gets stunned from smashing the car around to shake him off.
Cause: Alonzo beats the stuffing out of Jake and attempts to leave with the money.
Cause: Jake tries to arrest Alonzo and a gunfight erupts.
Cause: Jake goes to the home of Alonzo’s girlfriend to arrest him and seize the money as evidence.
Cause: Smiley lets Jake go.
Cause: Jake says he found the wallet when he saved a girl from rape, and she verifies it on the phone.
Cause: The gang members jump Jake and are about to kill him when they find the wallet that belongs to Smiley’s niece.
Cause: Alonzo drops Jake off at Hillside Gang with payment to kill him.
This Sequence continues on back to the beginning of the plot, as you’ll see.
Developing Just a Little More Detail. Having sketched in the big picture using reverse cause and effect, you will repeat the process when you divide the script into acts. Fleshing out each act by chaining backward, you weave in a little more detail as you go. Then when you divide each act into sequences, you reason backward through each sequence, amplifying the particulars yet a bit more. (There is an overlap in terminology here because we’re applying a tool called Sequence to a section of an act known as a sequence. There are two to five sequences in an act, and two to five scenes in a sequence. In a bank robbery movie, for instance, an act might consist of the planning sequence, the robbery sequence, and the getaway sequence.) Lastly, you divide each sequence into scenes, expanding the detail a little further with reverse cause and effect, and now you’re down to the full specifics of the scene. You’ve added to the weave on each pass, gradually filling it in. This progression is shown in the diagram below:
Say you’re developing a hard-boiled noir thriller and in one of the plot points needed to make your story work, your ex-cop-turned-undertaker finds the mob boss’s accountant and extracts some financial records. You’ve only got a rough idea of how it all works at this point, but all you need for now is the big picture (Diagram A)—it’s hard enough trying to make the whole script work. Too much detail would only clog things up and make your job more complicated than it already is. However at the act level (Diagram B), it does become necessary to think it through a little more, so you create some specifics as you chain backward. Maybe this ex-cop/undertaker is out to avenge the murder of a neighbor that he hated. Just because the guy was a foulmouthed drunk who played his music too loud doesn’t mean he deserved to get his head blown off in front of his kids for refusing to pay protection money to a mob boss. So our ex-cop follows some leads to the hit man and uses his undertaker skills to extract the whereabouts of the mob boss’s accountant. Then he uses similar techniques to torture the financial records out of the accountant.
Then at the sequence level (Diagram C) it becomes necessary to figure out even more of the particulars. Let’s say the ex-cop asks around, gets a description of the hit man, and follows his trail to the race track. Then he takes the hit man back to his funeral home and threatens to cremate him if he doesn’t talk. He gets the information he wants about the mob boss’s accountant, snatches the bean counter, and brings him back to the funeral home where he terrorizes him into revealing information about the mob boss’s hidden accounts.
At the scene level (Diagram D) you’d develop final detail by visualizing everything a little more completely. Let’s say that when the ex-cop finds the hit man at the race track, he’s out behind a kennel about to poison one of his dogs that’s too old to race anymore. The ex-cop pistol-whips the guy and forces him back to the funeral home at gunpoint, bringing along the friendly greyhound as a pet. In the basement, he makes the hit man get into a steel casket that’s in front of a cremation furnace, and threatens to burn him up if he doesn’t spill about where to find the boss’s accountant. When he gets that information, he locks the guy in the casket and goes for the accountant. He grabs the accountant coming out of church and takes him back to the funeral home in the hearse, then takes him downstairs where the hit man is still locked in the steel coffin, yelling his head off about how he’s going to kill everybody. The ex-cop tells the accountant that it’s the boss’s hit man in the coffin and demands the boss’s offshore accounts
and passwords. When the accountant won’t budge, he pushes the button that slides the coffin into the furnace. The hit man is cremated alive while the horrified accountant listens to his screams. Now the accountant offers so much information that our guy has to make him talk slower so he can write it all down.
Notice how we worked our way from the general to the specific, at first just needing our guy to find an accountant and get information out of him but gradually expanding the particulars, working systematically on each successive pass to flesh it out a little more until we had enough detail to write the scenes. We’ve followed Aristotle’s incredibly astute recommendation to a T: “first sketch in its general outline, and then fill in the episodes and amplify in detail.”
A Note About Scene. It’s important to know that a scene is not merely a camera set-up; a scene is a complete unit of action. Imagine a comic mugging scene in which the victim is not at all intimidated. The mugger grabs the victim in the subway and demands all her money, but she laughs in his face and throws him down the stairs. The mugger races after her and accosts her again on the street. It’s a new location and a new camera set-up, but it’s still part of the same scene. He pretends to have a gun in his pocket but she just breaks his finger. She climbs in a taxicab and the mugger leaps in after her with a knife, but she disarms him with karate, steals his wallet, and throws him out of the cab. The scene ends with the woman finding a huge wad of loot in his wallet and asking the cabbie to stop at an expensive shoe store. Even though it took place in several locations, all of this was the mugging scene. It’s one complete action.
Step 2: Proposition
Next we’ll perform a second procedure on the story material that you just stitched together with reverse cause and effect (Sequence). Now we’re going to use the second step of this tool: Proposition. It’s like doing several different processes to one piece of raw wool. First you groom it, then you dye it, and then you weave it into cloth. We’re doing the same thing here.
The next step is to take this tight sequence of cause and effect and frame it as a conflict using a more advanced form of the Central Proposition from Chapter 6. We’re still setting up a potential fight and touching off a fight to the finish, causing the Central Dramatic Question to arise in the minds of the audience. But here we’re working with a two-sided proposition in which both the protagonist and the antagonist put forth their own argument. What we call an “argument” actually consists of two separate lines of reasoning. If we’re having an argument, then you have your position and I have mine. There are literally two opposing arguments, as you can see here:
Protagonist
Antagonist
Setting up a potential fight
Setting up a potential fight
Touching off a fight to the finish
Touching off a fight to the finish
Central Dramatic Question
In formal logic this is called a double proposition or parallel syllogisms. Before we see Proposition in its final form, there’s one more thing to take into account: audience sympathy. Part of your job as a dramatist is to capture audience sympathy for the protagonist and keep it. The audience must side with the protagonist’s argument. If our hero starts doing something despicable, we usually stop rooting for him. You must both secure and maintain audience sympathy, because if we’re not interested in the fate of the protagonist, then the movie isn’t compelling.
Directing Audience Sympathy. One way to gain the audience’s sympathy for the protagonist is for the antagonist to strike first. This is known as the Initial Act of Aggression, and it’s part of setting up the potential fight. It’s the evil land-grabber coming in and saying, “We’re taking over your ranch and there’s nothing you can do about it.” Once you become aware of this, you’ll see it in films all the time. In Training Day, the Initial Act of Aggression is when Alonzo almost gets Jake killed when they rob the Sandman’s house. This opens up the active conflict and allows the protagonist to retaliate while maintaining the sympathy of the audience, which is called Justified Retaliation. In Training Day, Jake answers the Initial Act of Aggression by angrily challenging Alonzo about committing the robbery.
Next, in order to advance the conflict toward the point of open warfare while still keeping audience sympathy for the protagonist, we can have the antagonist exacerbate the situation, which we call the Aggravation of the Issue. In Training Day, this is when Alonzo tries to have Jake murdered by the Hillside Gang. It’s in response to this escalation by the antagonist that the protagonist can throw the first punch—the Precipitating Act that literally starts the fight to the finish. To precipitate means to make something happen before it’s ready to happen naturally. You precipitate rain by seeding the clouds, you precipitate a psychosis by pushing somebody’s buttons, and you precipitate a fight by jumping in on someone, taking the fight to them. An audience wants its protagonist to be proactive, the maker of events—the one who takes the offensive rather than the one who merely reacts.
This can be a subtle distinction, because the protagonist is obviously reacting to the antagonist in various ways, but the Precipitating Act involves going on the offensive—taking the conflict to a whole new level. An excellent example of someone precipitating a fight is in Tootsie, when Dorothy shows up for the first time and Ron, the director, tells her she’s not right for the part, not tough enough. She explodes on him: “How about if I knee your balls through the roof of your mouth? Is that tough enough for you?” She’s not merely reacting to him—she jumps right down his throat, suddenly escalating the fight. She acts precipitously. In Training Day, the Precipitating Act comes when Jake touches off the fight to the finish by trying to arrest Alonzo and seize the $1 million as evidence.
Proposition for Training Day. Essentially what we’ve described here is the big picture—a map of the conflict for the whole story:
Protagonist
Antagonist
Initial Act of Aggression
Alonzo robs the Sandman with a fake warrant and risks getting Jake killed or arrested.
Justified Retaliation
Jake challenges Alonzo, saying he stole that money.
Aggravation of the Issue
Alonzo tries to have Jake murdered by the Hillside Gang.
Precipitating Act
Jake comes after Alonzo, and tries to arrest him and seize the $1 million as evidence.
Central Dramatic Question
Will Jake take down Alonzo or will Alonzo destroy him?
In the top two blocks of action we’ve set up the potential fight, then in the next two blocks we’ve touched off the fight to the finish, giving rise to the Central Dramatic Question in the minds of the audience. The question is two-sided now because the Proposition is two-sided. The Proposition also directs the audience’s sympathy by making the antagonist the aggressor.
Step 3: Plot
The third part of the Sequence, Proposition, Plot process answers the Central Dramatic Question and completes the action, essentially wrapping up the plot. Within the context of Sequence, Proposition, Plot, the term Plot has a specialized definition. With Sequence we reason backward, tying the story together with cause and effect, and with Proposition we set up a two-sided conflict and touch it off, leaving it hanging in the form of a question. With Plot we answer the question and complete the action. This is distinct from what we normally refer to as the plot of a movie—the incidents that comprise a story.
The fight to the finish is touched off at the two-thirds or three-quarters point, and now we’re continuing on from the Central Dramatic Question to the end. We’ve already established the ending because we’ve done reverse cause and effect. As defined by Price in The Analysis of Play Construction and Dramatic Principle, Plot is “the steps necessarily taken to get from the central dramatic question to the pre-established ending.”
In this diagram, the first triangle sets up the potential fight (Initial Act of Aggression and Justified Retaliation) and the sec
ond triangle touches off the fight to the finish (Aggravation of the Issue and Precipitating Act). The section after the fight to the finish starts, indicated by the dashes, is Plot.
Rather than just listing the steps that answer the question and complete the action, let’s continue on in the two-sided format we’ve been using for the Proposition. This helps map out the rest of the conflict through to the ending with what is known as balanced opposition—an even mix of the back-and-forth between the protagonist (on the left) and the antagonist (on the right). The section below the Central Dramatic Question is Plot.
Central Dramatic Question
Will Jake take down Alonzo or will Alonzo destroy him?
Alonzo fights back, almost kills Jake, and is leaving.
Jake attacks again, roughs up Alonzo badly, and takes the money.
Alonzo tries to intimidate Jake into quitting, and the locals into killing Jake.
Jake beats Alonzo and gets away with the money as evidence, finishing him off.
Plot is really a continuation of the two-sided argument from the Proposition stage, with the Central Dramatic Question as the pivotal point. Mirroring how Proposition builds opposing arguments toward the fight to the finish, Plot is the back-and-forth between the protagonist and antagonist once the fight to the finish has started.
THE FULL APPLICATION OF SEQUENCE, PROPOSITION, PLOT
So that explains the individual parts of this tool. Now let’s see how the whole system of Sequence, Proposition, Plot works, because that’s where the real magic kicks in. You use it first to sketch in the general outline of the story, rendering it both tight and dramatic. Then you break the script into acts and apply Sequence, Proposition, Plot to each act. You start with the first act, saying, “What’s the Object of this act?” and “What’s the Final Effect that demonstrates that Object on-screen with real actors?” and so on. Next you frame the conflict for that act in the form of the double Proposition, either mapping out the conflict that’s inherent in the act or creating it if it isn’t there. Then you answer the Central Dramatic Question and wrap it up with the third step, Plot. You do this for all the acts, making each one tight and dramatic, and then you divide the acts up into sequences.