by Jeff Kitchen
Reverse Cause and Effect for a Scene
So let’s develop the scene using reverse cause and effect:
Object: Mitchell convinces Melika to let him use the funny money to frame Kepler.
Final Effect: Melika agrees and gives Mitchell a duffel bag full of counterfeit money.
Immediate Cause: Mitchell says he’ll cut Melika in on the take of a future robbery.
Cause: Melika will not give Mitchell any of the counterfeit money.
Cause: Mitchell argues that with this fake money, they can take down Kepler once and for all.
Cause: Melika doesn’t care if she can’t move the money now—she’ll just wait it out.
Cause: Mitchell says that the money’s too hot now anyway, since there’s too much of it in circulation and the Secret Service is on to it.
Cause: Melika says that she doesn’t want anything to do with Mitchell’s plan—or with him.
Cause: Mitchell tells Melika that he’s got a chance to take down Kepler if she’s willing to hand over a bunch of her world-class phony Benjamins. He tries his sexual charm on her.
What we’re doing here is to think our way through one possible take for this scene. Notice that as we map reverse cause and effect for this scene, we’re actually writing out more detail into each cause, answering the questions raised earlier. In many instances, we’re even paraphrasing dialog.
Consider another possible direction for this scene: Mitchell could just as easily have to fight for his life, killing Melika in self-defense, and still end up with the fake bills. Remember that with this sophisticated outlining tool, any framework can be scrapped and redone. It provides an easy way to sketch out some possibilities and then revise things as much as is needed.
Now let’s do Proposition and Plot for this scene to make sure that the conflict and Dramatic Action really pop. One of my main questions for this scene is, what’s the fight? Is there a conflict that the whole scene builds toward? If so, then our job is to set it up and touch it off. If not, then we should seriously consider creating some opposition in this scene in order to make it more substantial for the actors and more gripping to the audience.
Developing Proposition and Plot for a Scene
Proposition is intended as a proposal for the conflict between the protagonist and the antagonist. Here is just one possible way to shape this scene:
Protagonist
Antagonist
Initial Act of Aggression
Melika says she doesn’t want anything to do with Mitchell or his idiotic plan.
Justified Retaliation
Mitchell tries to control his temper and tells Melika to get real—the money’s too hot for her to use for quite a while anyway.
Aggravation of the Issue
Melika says it’s her damn paper and she’ll sit on it if she wants to, or burn it before she gives it to him.
Precipitating Act
Mitchell becomes furious and insists that her anger for him shouldn’t stop a golden chance to stick it to Kepler, whom they both hate.
Central Dramatic Question
Will Mitchell get the money from Melika, or will she refuse?
Melika says nobody tells her what to do, and besides, why should she risk getting in trouble for him?
Mitchell is desperate, says he’s got a big job coming up, and offers her 25 percent of the take, which would be $1.5 million.
Melika demands 50 percent, but says she’ll throw in the counterfeit plates, which will get Kepler royally screwed.
Mitchell’s mad about the 50 percent but takes the deal, and loves getting the plates.
Do you see how we escalated the conflict between them? The Proposition solidifies the conflict and the dramatic power of the scene. Obviously, Melika doesn’t want to hand over her fake dough, but we worked to develop the scene with some personal animosity between them, heightening the intensity and making the interaction less dull, less cut-and-dry. In using a tool like this, you’re bringing everything in your arsenal to bear—not just mechanically filling in the outline. While this process may appear mechanical, you’re acutally creating on the spot—literally bringing the script to life as you go along, filling in the flesh as you construct the skeleton—based on the structural outline you’ve already put together.
Writing Dialog Based on the Structure We’ve Developed
Let’s continue introducing innovative detail: It’s time to write the dialog for this scene. The Sequence, Proposition, Plot above is really just a guide to the dialog, similar to the way jazz musicians know they’re going to play A, B#, D but improvise all around that. We will be following the basic form, but playing with it as well. While writing a scene it’s imperative to be looking at the layouts for Sequence and for Proposition and Plot. Taken together, these represent the complete blueprint to the scene.
When writing dialog, bear in mind that there’s a huge difference between real conversation and great dialog. Real conversation can ramble forever, say nothing, and be extremely boring. In a scene you’ve generally got to achieve an objective in a limited amount of time. But the conversation also has to live and breathe and have room to wander a bit. Dialog must be interesting, and it also needs to be immediately comprehensible because the words are flying at the audience. They have to understand what’s happening right as it happens.
All the character should sound distinct from one another, such that you could remove their names from above the written dialog on the page and still know who’s speaking. They each need their own speech patterns, vocabulary, flavor, personality, color, rhythm, cadence, and diction—and these should all change as their emotional states vary. People often don’t speak in full sentences, and they cut each other off in mid sentence. You don’t want “on the nose” dialog, in which characters simply tell us what they’re doing (“I’m leaving now” as they walk out the door) or what they’re obviously feeling (“I’m furious with you”) because it’s boring, redundant, and amateurish—think third-grade theater. Things are often said in subtext, in which what’s really being said is camouflaged or being delivered indirectly, so that the words spoken might even be the opposite of what is meant. If you’re angry with your spouse, but are having difficulty addressing the subject directly, your conversation about might be about, say, yard work, but you both know exactly what’s being communicated in disguise, beneath your words.
Daily speech is peppered with humor, sexual innuendo, anger, affection, danger, love, desperation, seduction, outrage, silliness, and the thousand other things that flow out of us on a constant basis. Listen to real people in your daily life and acquire an ear for dialog. The best test for how your own written dialog sounds is to hear it. Organize a reading, preferably with actors who perform the various roles, and tape it. Then you can, for instance, listen to your entire first act while driving to work. Some writers act out the parts to get in character, and many writers say that their characters start talking to them after a while.
INT. DENTIST’S OFFICE - DAY
MITCHELL sits in the dentist’s chair, his mouth pried open, as MELIKA, 36, a female dentist with long, red hair cascading down her back, stares into his open maw.
MELIKA
Spit it out . . . then get out.
MITCHELL
Yeah, yeah. Great to see you too, babe. Look, I need a little favor, you know?
MELIKA
(as she pokes him with an instrument)
How little?
MITCHELL
OW! Damn it. I need a hundred pounds of your Benjamins.
MELIKA
MY Benjamins?
(jabbing him again)
You get dropped on your head?
MITCHELL
OUCH! Don’t friggin’ do that! Look, I got a chance to set up Kepler and put him in the slammer, big time.
MELIKA
With my money . . . what’s wrong with your money?
MITCHELL
Well, I ain’t doing so hot righ
t now and—
MELIKA
Precisely.
MITCHELL
And mine ain’t counterfeit.
(as he makes eyes at her)
Plus, you make the best in the west.
MELIKA
I don’t fall for your pick-up lines . . . anymore. So it’s no to both questions . . . and especially to you.
MITCHELL
Look babe, you’re gonna have to sit on it for years before things cool down enough to move any more, and you know it.
(she jabs him again)
OW! Christ! Come on! He’s out to sink me! I ain’t kiddin’, all right?
MELIKA
(grabbing a drill and revving it up)
I’ll burn it before I let you waltz out of here with my artwork, you lousy, two-timing piece of. . . .
She leans in with the shrieking drill and he grabs her arm in a death grip.
MITCHELL
She didn’t mean nothing! Damn you! Just gimme the paper! You hate Kepler as bad as I do, and you know it! COME ON! I need this!
He shoves her away and leaps out of the chair, but she rams him back into it.
MELIKA
You want to talk Benjies, you stay in the chair. Rules are rules.
MITCHELL
Okay, okay. But keep that crap outta my face!
MELIKA
Everybody hates that crooked dick, but nobody tells me what to do with my greenbacks, you read me?
(he nods, swallowing his anger)
Besides, what’s in it for me? I stick my neck out and I’m the one who gets the guillotine.
MITCHELL
All right, all right. Listen, I got this job on New Year’s worth a bundle . . . I. . . .
(hating to say the words)
I could cut you in for a . . . a quarter. Be worth a million five.
MELIKA
Now you’re talking, stud, but I’m gonna need half—
Mitchell surges out of his chair, but she holds a finger to her lips and he stops.
MELIKA
Half, because I got one Special Agent Dykstra of the Secret Service scouring the entire Southwest for the purveyor of these picture-perfect hundreds.
MITCHELL
He onto you?
MELIKA
Hell no. You think he’s gonna look twice at a wholesome little dentist who drives a Honda?
MITCHELL
Okay, okay . . . fifty percent. Goddamn you.
MELIKA
And I’ll throw in the plates.
Mitchell stares at her in utter disbelief, a smile blooming on his face.
MELIKA
They’re blown anyway. This batch is too hot, like you said. You plant the plates in Kepler’s house and we make sure Special Agent Dykstra knows where to look.
(laughing raucously)
Kepler’ll be pulling Social Security before he sees the real world again.
MITCHELL
I swear to god I could kiss you.
MELIKA
Well, damn boy, don’t let a little thing like me busting your jaw for sleeping with that cheap-ass skank stop you.
He kisses her and she kisses him back, pinning him to the dentist chair.
As you can see, Sequence, Proposition, Plot for this scene provided a great platform from which to build. But it still allowed us to create a cool, fun scene based on that structure by improvising along the way. No need to be a slave to the structure or to robotically fill in the dialog and details. Let it breathe. Just like weaving live plants into an arched garden trellis, you get the basic shape of the trellis, but it’s filled with a living organism. You’ve established the basic shape of the script—and then filled it with life and breath.
A Quick Review of What We’ve Done with this Demo Story
Let’s get a brief overview of what we’ve done by applying Sequence, Proposition, Plot to the sequence and to the scene in this demo story. The sequence is shown on the left and the scene on the right:
Sequence
Scene
So that’s how to use Sequence, Proposition, Plot to construct a script, working from the general to the specific. You’ll see a lot more of this tool in Part Two of this book. You saw that when it came time to actually write in the dialog, a solid structure already existed to work from—and yet still we created more detail, the true final detail. The scene achieves its Object: for Mitchell to obtain the counterfeit money. It also fits into the larger sequence, which achieves its objective: for Mitchell to successfully frame Kepler. Presumably, taking Kepler out of the picture helps achieve the objective of the act in which the sequence resides, and that act helps achieve the objective of the whole script. This is Unity of Action—a structurally integrated plot—which means that each unit contributes to its constituent larger unit, all of which contributes to the whole. That’s exactly what Price means when he says that “a play is a Unit made up of other Units”. Sequence, Proposition, Plot is a unique, innovative, and powerful tool for plot construction that will help you engineer your script properly before you write it.
START USING SEQUENCE, PROPOSITION, PLOT IN YOUR OWN SCRIPT
1. Use this tool once your story is pretty well in hand. Start by stating the Object of your script simply and clearly. The Object is the mark you’re shooting for, the point on the horizon that your script is trying to reach. Do the same for each act, focusing on the point the plot should reach by the end of the act, and again for each sequence and each scene.
2. What’s the Final Effect that demonstrates the Object on-screen, with actions exhibited by real actors? The Object is what you want to achieve; now you have to create a real event.
3. What’s the Immediate Cause of the Final Effect? This is not merely the incident that comes just before it, but instead the one action that actually causes it. When you’re mapping Sequence—the reverse cause and effect for the overall story—make sure you’re not getting into too much detail. The first pass through the material is just a scouting trip; you’re laying down trail markers, so keep it simple and travel light. Free yourself from the profusion of unnecessary detail, as though you’re wearing snowshoes in very deep snow, enabling you to walk along the surface, instead of sinking up to your hip with each step.
4. Keep working backward through your script, only seeking the cause of a given effect, there by separating the Necessary from the Unnecessary. This will make your script lean and mean. You’ll be surprised at the things that don’t make it into your first pass. True, they may be picked up on successive passes, but even when you’re done there will still be story elements that never become necessary and can be left out of the script. After all, when you’re done making a suit, there’s always cloth left on the floor.
5. As you map out reverse cause and effect for the acts, then the sequences, and then the scenes, add in only a little more detail as it becomes necessary. You’re gradually weaving detail into the telling of the story, working from the general to the specific with each successive pass.
6. When doing Proposition, remember our proportion diagram. The antagonist’s Initial Act of Aggression—the set-up of the potential fight—generally comes one-quarter or one-third of the way into the script, not at the very beginning. It can certainly come earlier, but allow some exposition before the conflict gets rolling.
7. Does your protagonist retaliate? Justified Retaliation helps create a proactive character who garners audience sympathy. If this element of the conflict isn’t there, the Proposition will indirectly suggest it. Then you can introduce or develop it to enhance the Dramatic Action whether at the overall script, act, sequence, or scene level.
8. Remember that the Aggravation of the Issue tends to occur at roughly the two-thirds or three-quarters point. Again, this is true for the overall script, and also for each act, sequence, and scene. This sense of proportion is crucial in working with Sequence, Proposition, Plot.
9. The Precipitating Act should be a strong action by the protagonist that really touches off th
e fight to the finish. It will get the audience members on the edge of their seats, and will help turn mere Story into true Drama.
Part Two of this book is markedly different from Part One. It will plunge you into an intense experiential learning process, giving you the real experience of using the Key Tools covered in Part One rather than merely discussing them. All the tools will be demonstrated by inventing and structuring an original screenplay—a script I’m actually writing as a commercially salable project—and developing it from the ground up. In my classes, I work hands-on with each student on his or her own script; here we will get as close as possible to that process by building a script as you watch over my shoulder. I want to take you from an intellectual understanding of the Key Tools to the firsthand familiarity of seeing them in action as we apply them to a real screenplay.
This depth of process means that Part Two of this book is as different from Part One as working in an emergency room is from studying in medical school. It’s real, it’s messy, and it’s immediate. Now that we’re constructing an actual screenplay, it’s much harder to compartmentalize the use of the Key Tools. They can’t necessarily be used sequentially, since the story creation process is chaotic, wild, and free-flowing. Part Two will be a living, breathing, growing creature within a similar chapter framework to Part One, but with more wiggle room. Compare it to wrestling a bear in the wilderness versus studying one at the zoo.