by Jeff Kitchen
1. Cutter is living straight life with wife and son
2. Apollo appears and blackmails Cutter into job
3. Cutter meets Shallott, the crooked bank examiner
4. Senator is setting up bank with St. Nick as front
5. St. Nick’s illegal money will go into reserve account
6. Cutter and St. Nick fight—Cutter is called a liar and he’s furious
7. Cutter hears plan—government-guaranteed loans to dictator
8. Cutter learns St. Nick and Hutchings are ripping off taxpayers’ money
9. Apollo’s revenge plan put on hold—Cutter gets promoted
10. Cutter moving crooked money into reserve account
11. Cutter awed by St. Nick’s and Hutchings’s skills at lying
12. Stock market nosedives—messes things up for St. Nick
13. Complications on moving illegal money
14. FBI and IRS investigate St. Nick—Cutter tells stunning lie, which helps
15. St. Nick goes psycho in private—Hutchings chills him out
16. Hutchings helps get money into reserve account—bank is open for business
17. Old mob pal of St. Nick wants a cut or he spills on St. Nick
18. Umbotha shows up—sees Cutter deal with old mob pal and likes Cutter
19. Umbotha—limos, parties, diplomatic immunity, girls, drugs, and money
20. Umbotha wants St. Nick to launder drug money for him
21. Hutchings nervous about drug money—says no
22. Communist revolution in African country next to Mambia
23. CIA needs Umbotha big-time now
24. Umbotha meets senators, arms dealers, White House, drug smugglers
25. CIA wants St. Nick’s bank to be a CIA front
26. All limits taken off agricultural loans—now $8 billion
27. Investigation goes away—immunity—citing National Security
28. St. Nick is now in the VIP club—celebrating with Hutchings—above the law
29. Shallott freaks out and blows his cover
30. St. Nick flips and murders Shallott—turns on Cutter
31. Cutter does Judy Garland transformation and turns wild—Mischa watches
32. Wild Cutter emerges and scares St. Nick’s mob pal away
33. Umbotha loves Cutter and won’t allow deal to happen without him
34. Mischa gets found and brought in
35. Cutter pretends Mischa is his gay lover to cover for him
36. The wild Cutter goes after St. Nick to keep his trust
This helps me envision the whole plot up to the touch-off of the fight to the finish. It’s a very efficient way to lay out the story as it exists thus far. Notice that these cards don’t emphasize the beginning of the story, because I have a decent grasp of that; nor do they get into the ending, because that has yet to be invented. I’ve only just cobbled together a middle, and at this point I’m mighty glad to have that.
ANOTHER TAKE ON THE PROPOSITION
Now that I have evaluated my first attempt at boiling things down to the Central Proposition, I’m going to take another whack at it. This is very much part of using this tool—you set up a proposition, evaluate it, and try again if you’re not happy with it. Remember, it’s just a proposal.
Notice that since my Writer’s Notebook session I have changed the common term. With the strengthening of the thriller element, the idea that Cutter would be hung up on being called a liar in a situation of this magnitude no longer worked. I’ve underscored the new common term in each component.
Set up the potential fight
Cutter, a reformed pathological liar who has vowed to his wife never to lie again, is blackmailed into a revenge-oriented “perfect” crime by his former prison cellmate, Apollo, to whom he owes his life. Cutter finds himself posing as a bank examiner and being forced to start lying again in order to take down St. Nick, a legendary, savage crime lord who’s in the process of going legitimate by buying a bank in collusion with the corrupt Senator Hutchings. When St. Nick challenges Cutter for supposedly lying to him, Cutter, refusing to lose this opportunity to take down St. Nick, stands up to him angrily and lies his way out of it.
Touch off the fight to the finish
Cutter eavesdrops and learns of St. Nick and Hutchings’s secret plan to legally rob the U.S. taxpayers of billions and to make a fortune by using government-guaranteed agricultural loans in a crooked deal with a brutal African dictator, Umbotha. Cutter is unexpectedly taken deeper inside St. Nick’s organization, and when a communist revolution in Africa puts Umbotha in the driver’s seat with the CIA, they offer to make St. Nick’s bank a CIA front, with unlimited money flowing and immunity to prosecution. Cutter sees one of his partners murdered and, unwilling to lose his vanishing opportunity at revenge, snaps and kicks into his old lying self, launching a wild attack to stop the plan and destroy St. Nick.
The Central Dramatic Question
Can Cutter stop this plan and take down St. Nick?
You can see how the power of the Central Dramatic Question has altered, because both the stakes and the situation have changed significantly.
A THIRD TAKE ON THE PROPOSITION
As long as the script is in the works, the proposition is always subject to change. One of a trained dramatist’s habits of mind is to be wide open to change, always looking for improvement. In fact the more I look at it, the more unsatisfied I am with my second attempt at the Central Proposition. Wrestling with it further, I have come up with something that I think really works.
What’s been chewing at me is Cutter’s action that touches off the fight to the finish—I’m not happy with it. In general, touching off the fight to the finish is a real declaration of war—like the attack on Pearl Harbor or the destruction of the World Trade Center buildings. My instinct tells me that the touch-off should be an attempt at a killing blow.
Why does Cutter’s attack feel so weak to me? Because he’s boxed in and can’t blow his cover, especially now that Shallott’s slip-up has made St. Nick suspicious. Cutter’s hands are tied, and yet that’s no excuse—the premise is still weak. I’ve increasingly felt that I had to do better, and I’ve now spent hours wrestling with this, trying various options. One thing is certain, Cutter and Apollo are very smart and the audience will expect a powerful attack from them. Finally, I hit upon something with some real horsepower to it.
At the point when the old, untamed Cutter surfaces and goes on the attack, he’ll arrange for the delivery of a fabricated communiqué to St. Nick’s camp, allegedly from the communist group in the country neighboring Mambia. The communists claim to know that through a U.S. bank, the CIA is smuggling weapons disguised as agricultural shipments into Mambia, and they denounce the capitalist dogs for their blatant criminal acts. This is a hard-hitting act by Cutter, touching off a hornet’s nest of panic in St. Nick’s camp. St. Nick’s paranoia would flare up and they would search for a leak. It wouldn’t even occur to them that Cutter has anything to do with it, since he couldn’t possibly have any knowledge of the inner workings of the bank’s secret agenda.
This attack has real clout. It’s a true declaration of war within the confines of Cutter’s limitations. It still doesn’t blow Cutter’s cover, and it’s infinitely stronger than what I had before. So I’ll revise the proposition yet again.
Set up the potential fight
Cutter, a reformed pathological liar who has vowed to his wife never to lie again, is blackmailed into a revenge-oriented “perfect” crime by his former prison cellmate, Apollo, to whom he owes his life. Cutter finds himself posing as a bank examiner and being forced to start lying again in order to take down St. Nick, a legendary, savage crime lord who’s in the process of going legitimate by buying a bank in collusion with the corrupt Senator Hutchings. When St. Nick challenges Cutter for supposedly lying to him, Cutter, refusing to lose this opportunity to take down St. Nick, stands up to him angrily and lies his way out of it.
Touch off th
e fight to the finish
Cutter eavesdrops and learns of St. Nick and Hutchings’s secret plan to legally rob U.S. taxpayers of billions and to make a fortune using government-guaranteed agricultural loans in a crooked deal with a brutal African dictator, Umbotha. Cutter is unexpectedly taken deeper inside St. Nick’s organization, and when a communist revolution in Africa puts Umbotha in the driver’s seat with the CIA, they offer to make St. Nick’s bank a CIA front, with unlimited money flowing and immunity to prosecution. Cutter sees one of his partners murdered and, unable to let this evil go unchecked, snaps and kicks into his old lying self, launching into an attack by fabricating a communiqué from communist revolutionaries in which the communists claim to know about the weapons being smuggled into Africa as agricultural shipments, with the money coming from a U.S. bank.
The Central Dramatic Question
Can Cutter destroy this operation and topple St. Nick?
Now the central conflict is hitting pretty hard, and I’m satisfied with it. You can see that it took quite some doing, but I tinkered with the core of the plot and proposed several different takes on it. I found weaknesses in each take and kept banging on it until I came up with something that had much more power than my first take. I hope this example helps you acquire in full a working understanding of the Central Proposition, whose purpose is to tie the plot together and crank up the conflict. Working with the nucleus of the story substantially impacts the entire plot in a very powerful way.
Using Sequence, Proposition, Plot
ow it’s time for the actual construction of the script for Good Old St. Nick using Sequence, Proposition, Plot. But before I can do this, I need to figure out the script’s ending; I certainly can’t build the reverse cause and effect without a conclusion. This is daunting, as right now there is truly no ending. I have a few half-baked ideas, but they’re simply a set of unconnected concepts that have the luxury of floating free and untethered. I know the basic gist of the ending, because I figured out the story’s resolution earlier and the conclusion has been marinating in my brain as I’ve built the rest of the script. But when I sit down and stare at the empty page in my notebook, I draw a total blank. Now, in order to figure out the ending, I will change over to my Writer’s Notebook and do my thinking on paper.
(For a great exercise in screenwriting, stop now and come up with your own ending to this story before you continue reading. Imagine it’s your script and you’ve got to come up with a killer ending. Then come back and read along with the rest of us.)
DEVELOPING AN ENDING FOR
GOOD OLD ST. NICK
I left off with Cutter fabricating the communiqué from the communist rebels. Now I want to know how St. Nick, Hutchings, Umbotha, and the CIA agents are going to react to the communiqué. It’s easy to see them panicking: St. Nick’s paranoia would flare up, and the bank office would be swept again for bugs but nothing would be found. Lots of finger-pointing erupts both within St. Nick’s group and inside the CIA. Someone had to have leaked this information! Perhaps a patsy is found within the CIA—someone who gets thrown to the wolves.
St. Nick and crew continue to panic and decide to move ahead quickly with the loan operation before anything else goes wrong. They also decide to run as much of it in cash as possible, making it less traceable. Umbotha has had a huge shipment of drugs smuggled into the country, and he launders the resulting mountain of cash through the bank, giving them plenty of ready money. However, some of the weapons manufacturers get greedy for kickbacks and cash up front. Additionally, a U.N. fact-finding commission begins looking into Umbotha’s human rights record.
Cutter and Apollo, still raging with hatred for St. Nick, want to stir up more trouble before the bank scam meets with success and they lose their opportunity for revenge. Pretending to be Senator Hutchings, they make some phone calls to arrange for the covert delivery of a weapons system. But the delivery site is actually a food bank where members of the press have been summoned to witness a major donation, and when this Department of Agriculture crate is opened, it’s full of stealth missiles. This stirs up a hornet’s nest of trouble and in response St. Nick, in a blind rage, burns down an entire block of buildings—he is that vengeful, that evil. Cutter leaks some crucial dirt on St. Nick and Hutchings to a congressional investigative committee; steals some of the cash from St. Nick’s stash; and takes great joy in turning several random people into instant millionaires with gifts of cash.
But then Cutter’s and Apollo’s identities are discovered, and Mischa is taken hostage—I’m not yet sure how, but it’s probably Mischa’s own fault. St. Nick and Hutchings throw someone from the bank to the wolves, enabling the CIA to make the rest of the investigation go away, swept under the rug by citing national security. Cutter is trapped in his web of contradictory lies and sees no way out. Margarita, his wife, convinces him to go back to telling the truth. He agrees, but first he’s got to rescue Mischa and take care of a few things. Umbotha, who occupies the top five floors of his luxury hotel, is having a giant bash which has gotten so out of control that it has spilled out onto the street and become a raging block party. Cutter convinces a group of protesters to show up and they wreak havoc, protesting Umbotha’s human rights record. In the resulting confusion, Apollo has a band of hired thieves spirit Mischa out of the room where he’s being held under guard.
Cutter has learned that St. Nick and crew have the whole bundle of money—$8 billion worth—in trucks, ready to be shipped out as payment to arms manufacturers and agricultural corporations. Cutter and Apollo manage to steal the trucks, and in a riotous chase scene they elude St. Nick and crew by throwing bales of cash into a crowd to create chaos. To confuse things further, they burn a bunch of the counterfeit money. Cutter takes the trucks to an IRS mailing center where they break in, bribe the night watchman, and spend the night using the mailing machines to package, address, and stamp overnight envelopes.
The next day, Cutter arranges a press conference at which he tells the whole truth about the scandalous operation on live national television. In one last deception, he announces that St. Nick had a change of heart and has sent the money stolen from the taxpayers back to them. Packages of $50,000 in cash were sent to America’s poorest people. Pandemonium erupts and reporters point out that this will create a lot of chaos. Cutter agrees, but says what can you do? It’s all St. Nick’s doing and he’s nowhere to be found.
Now, I don’t know if Cutter and Apollo mailing out the stolen money to the poorest taxpayers is the strongest choice I could have made here, but it was an intriguing option and I kept coming back to it. There is a bit of a Robin Hood element to it, which tickles me, and it seems to go along with the hell-raising spirit of the story. Could I find something stronger for this pivotal point in the plot? Possibly. But I did question it rigorously and it kept working for me, so I retained it.
Senator Hutchings is arrested on a variety of serious criminal charges and sent to prison. St. Nick is grabbed by Umbotha and spirited back to Africa, where he will be a prisoner for the remainder of his days in his own private cell that’s too small to lie down in. Cutter goes back to his simple little life, now truly free and happy. Several packages of cash manage to find their way to Cutter’s home. Mischa is scared straight, and Apollo runs off to Rio with St. Nick’s secretary, accompanied by several bags of cash.
LAYING OUT THE ENDING ON NOTE CARDS
Now there’s plenty of material to work with. The ending has some fun elements as well as plenty of danger; it’s something I can really begin to shape and fine-tune. Much of it can still be revised or even thrown away. But before we start utilizing this tool by doing reverse cause and effect, I need to lay out the entire story on note cards to get it out of my head and in working order. Review the cards leading up to this point (see chapter 13) before adding the remaining cards to lay out the ending:
37. Umbotha takes Cutter to party with old friend and it’s Apollo!
38. Cutter fabricates false communiqué from
communists
39. Communists know about weapons smuggling and U.S. bank
40. St. Nick gets paranoid and suspects everyone
41. “Traitor” found inside the CIA
42. St. Nick and crew panic—move operation at full steam—all cash now
43. Umbotha has sold a big drug shipment—launders tons of cash—in trucks
44. Weapons manufacturer gets greedy, wants kickbacks and cash up front
45. Umbotha is a spoiled brat—can’t be told anything
46. U.N. fact-finding crew—human rights violations in Mambia
47. Cutter and Apollo rage in their hatred against St. Nick
48. Cutter has weapons system delivered to food bank
49. St. Nick goes crazy and burns down an entire block
50. Crucial info leaked to Congressional investigation committee
51. Cutter steals money and turns random people into millionaires
52. Cutter and Apollo discovered—Mischa taken captive
53. St. Nick plants evidence against Cutter in plan to frame him
54. CIA quashes new investigation of bank, citing national security
55. Time running out for Cutter
56. Cutter trapped in all his contradictory lies
57. Margarita convinces Cutter to go back to telling the truth
58. Protesters converge on Umbotha’s block party—chaos ensues
59. Apollo’s band of thieves gets Mischa out of Umbotha’s hotel