The Craft of Scene Writing
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Coccotti looks at him for a moment, then jumps up, whips out an automatic, grabs hold of Cliff’s hair, puts the barrel to his temple, and pumps three bullets through Cliff’s head.
He pushes the body violently aside. Coccotti pauses. Unable to express his feelings and frustrated by the blood in his hands, he simply drops his weapon, and turns to his men.
COCCOTTI
I haven’t killed anybody since 1974…
The villains didn’t get Clarence’s location from Cliff, but in a humorous twist, one of the henchmen finds it written on a Post-it Note on the refrigerator. The potent irony of this is buoyed by a suspense-building line of dialogue when Lenny (Victor Argo) says, “Boss, get ready to be happy.” And of course, once the point of the scene is accomplished, it’s over.
Despite the provocative and idiosyncratic dialogue, we see that the “story of the scene” can be told without reference to even one spoken word:
In order to protect his son, Clifflies but Coccotti sniffs it out and shuts him down repeatedly. Coccotti threatens Cliff with a story that shows that lying isn’t an option. In order to protect his son and avoid severe pain, he pursues a new goal of trying to enrage Vincent to the point that he will impulsively shoot him. Taking what he has learned from him in the few minutes spent with him (Coccotti’s Sicilian pride), Cliff concocts a story that gets under his skin and flusters him, which causes Coccotti to “put him out of his misery.” Then, ironically, the henchmen find the whereabouts of Clarence anyway.
The underlying goals of the characters and the beats—the systematic forays toward and away from the goal—are the real power of a scene. One of the misconceptions that aspiring screenwriters pick up is that the funny stories, audacious dialogue, and clever cultural rhetoric are the source of a scene’s magic.
This is not to downplay the skill it takes to write the entertaining stories told by Coccotti or Cliff. By no means is this book going to suggest that you strip your personality from your writing. But in drama, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Just put a twist on it.
The beat outline for the first part of the scene was pretty standard, and included a character asking for the location of the person who stole his money and another character making a few attempts to lie despite the first character’s threats. It’s not until the final zig and zag that the story of the scene becomes special and surprises us:
1. Character B realizes he is in trouble and enrages Character A in hopes that he will quickly kill him on the spot.
2. It works. Character A kills Character B.
When long stories spoken as dialogue fulfill a single action like “putting him in his place,” “cornering him,” or “trying to get under his skin,” we call them extended beats. If the story a character tells does not adhere to the dramatic progression of the scene, it will often fall flat.
The twists in a scene should both turn the story and create a new situation that your character must solve. However, screenwriting is a compact medium. There is not enough time for scenes to alternate between story and character—external goals and internal journeys. A scene must aspire to simultaneously generate changes in both the story and the character. Tracking the inner state of your character is an essential part of each scene.
Notice that in the Clear and Present Danger scene, once Jack and Clark have bonded and established trust, the sought-after information is sort of a fait accompli. Consider this a foreshadowing to later lessons on exposition. Yes, the clue is gathered, but we don’t need the banal details here. That matter is better demonstrated in the ensuing scenes. The challenge for Ryan’s character is to gain the confidence of the person who has the information that will drive the plot forward. Once Ryan finesses Clark and gets the clue, the character and audience are ready to move on.
In True Romance, despite the fact that Coccotti obtains the whereabouts of Cliff’s son, the powerful decision Cliff makes to die on his own terms, and to protect his son, is the source of the scene’s emotional power.
The Clurman Breakdown
A screenwriter needs to embrace two principles that work in tandem but sometimes feel at odds with each other. On the one hand, you must mine every moment and every element in a script to extract all of its essence. On the other hand, once the moment has played out, you must move on.
Without both change and progress, your narrative succumbs to rigor mortis, whereby you lose your momentum and audience. The “Clurman Breakdown,” which is a tool from legendary stage director Harold Clurman from his book On Directing, helps us to avoid redundancy and create variety and escalation.
Clurman instructed both actors and directors to pore over every line to identify the beats and label them. The beats are usually tagged as simple single-word notions, using the infinitive or participle form of a verb. Actors learn that if a beat cannot be translated into an action, they cannot play it. “Looks sad” or “becomes happy” are not beats.
Potential Beats
INFINITIVE
PARTICIPLE
To persuade
Persuading
To seduce
Seducing
To flatter
Flattering
To blackmail
Blackmailing
To crush
Crushing
An actor might fill in the beats only for her own character, whereas a director would break down beats for all of the characters. During rehearsals, the beats might change, whether subtly or drastically. Here, we apply it to a section of the Clear and Present Danger scene. Notice the difference in the scene and character if the first beat of “defending” is turned to “pleading” or “begging.”
The process of labeling the beats captures a big-picture overview of the scene and its key turning points. This allows writers to hone a long-winded and rambling early draft, whittling away at the beats until only the strongest remain.
You can replace an unpromising beat with a more promising one. You can merge or eliminate repetitive beats. Sometimes a decent scene can be distilled by simply “cutting the fat” and reducing the scene to its core. This is not a magic bullet or a by-rote prescription, but rather a practical way to size up a scene.
Although we have emphasized the structure and story of a scene, that doesn’t mean you will always begin writing a scene with a perfectly structured outline.
A realistic writing process involves a back-and forth between “free writing” unstructured pages and character rants, as well as careful outlining. If you start writing without structure in mind, labeling beats can help you to pin down the structure after the fact.
Your Turning Point
The notion that a scene is a story in and of itself is not merely a clever paradigm; it is a fundamental truth about the nature of storytelling.
Just as in a story, your goal in a scene is to structure the beats so that they escalate and don’t become redundant, confusing, or static.
It’s like a nesting doll. As we open up each element, we discover that a story is made up of progressively smaller stories that structurally and graphically look the same.
As often as possible, the turning points will involve both the story and the character.
Find the best possible surprises in your story and reveal them deftly to maximize intrigue for the audience. Make them yearn to know what will happen next while they simultaneously gain a deeper understanding of your character’s nature.
The skills you need to turn a sequence or act in your story are the same skills that help you turn a scene. If you master how to “turn” a line of dialogue, think of how much easier it will be to “turn” your second act into the third act.
The ability to turn a dramatic situation sharply, so both the audience and the characters perceive a new and opposite situation, is one of the most vital skills in screenwriting.
Writers who learn to craft reversals and turn lines of dialogue or bits of action see the growth immediately ripple throughout their craft. Mastery of this essential skill tran
sforms all aspects of their screenwriting and storytelling.
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REVERSALS: THE ESSENCE OF SURPRISE
“Surprises” in the climax of a scene or story go by various names. These include plot twist, turning point, plot point, event, and several others. Of all of the terms, my favorite is reversal, because it calls attention to the shape of the buildup and eventual surprise.
In terms of structure itself, a well-choreographed surprise in a light comedy will look exactly like the twist in a prestigious and stuffy Oscar-bait drama. A reversal in a sentence of action description will work just like the twist in your screenplay that hurtles your story into the final act and toward the showdown.
It’s not enough to veer sharply; the story must move full-speed from one direction to an opposite one. A powerful scene from L.A. Confidential shows how this principle creates a strong turning point and a crisp reversal.
In the film, the antagonist, Dudley Smith (James Cromwell), shows Bud White (Russell Crowe) a picture intended to spark his violent temper. The picture is of fellow officer, Ed Exley (Guy Pearce), sleeping with White’s girlfriend, Lynn Bracken (Kim Basinger). Predictably, White finds Exley, intending to hurt and possibly even kill him. Like any good “bad guy,” Smith manipulates White’s character flaw, his demonstrated habit of committing impulsive acts of violence.
When White finds Exley at the precinct working on the case, he begins to pummel him. The shots are fairly tight. The use of long lenses on a handheld camera, quick cuts, and an intense sound design create a chaotic look and feel. In a few brief lulls, Exley urges him to “think,” but the action continues and the scene culminates with a dramatic finale.
White picks up a chair and holds it above Exley. His choice is clear: hit Exley and succumb to his flaw, or choose to grow by not hitting him and make Exley his ally to help solve the case. Instead of slamming the chair down, he hurls it across the room through a closed window. In the literal split second that White makes his decision, the following elements abruptly change: focal length of the lens (long to short), proximity of subject (close-up to long shot), duration of shot (short to long), sound (frenetic to quiet), music (present to absent), steadiness of camera (handheld to locked-down), and depth of focus (shallow to deep). The blocking of the actor is also new. He stands still and faces away from us, in an emotional respite or disengagement.
Rather than taking this as an encouragement to overdirect on the page, you should see how all of these artisans—editors, composer, sound designers, cinematographers, and actors—are using the same storytelling principles. The director synchronizes these crafts to accentuate the heart of the scene and deliver the intended emotional impact. Every creative choice that contributed to the idea of violence, chaos, mindlessness, and loss of control suddenly reverses course to nonviolence, order, thinking, and control.
A playful moment in the western McLintock! mirrors the scene in L.A. Confidential in how it sets up a surprise twist. McLintock (John Wayne) steps in to defend young Ben (Bruce Cabot) from a shotgun-wielding father, Mr. Jones (Leo Gordon), who imagines his daughter has been disgraced. Jones pokes McLintock, the peacemaker, repeatedly in the gut with a sawed-off shotgun. McLintock finally loses his patience, takes the weapon from him, and turns the tables. Here is a description and transcription of the moment:
MCLINTOCK
I haven’t lost my temper in forty years, but Pilgrim, you caused a lot of trouble this morning, might’a got somebody killed. And somebody oughta belt you in the mouth but I won’t. I won’t.
He turns away from him but then quickly turns back and winds up…
MCLINTOCK
The hell I won’t.
McLintock hits him with a haymaker, causing him to flip-flop down a hill and into a giant pool of mud.
Despite the varying emotional depth of these two scenes, they use the same tactic. They twist from one extreme to the other. McLintock literally turns away from Jones before changing his mind and physically reversing direction to wallop him. Even the repeated line “I won’t” takes him further away from the eventual reversal. The moment undulates from one end of the spectrum (not hitting) to the other (most certainly hitting).
In L.A. Confidential, the moment before White throws the chair out of the window, he holds it over Exley’s head. It covers the same spectrum in reverse order, traversing the vast expanse between “most certainly hitting” and “not hitting,” in an instant.
Graphic of Last-Minute Reversal in Climax of Scene
The power of a turning point is in the surprise shift from one extreme to another. The juxtaposition of an idea and its opposite accentuates the twist and contributes to its effect. Simply, you have to go left before you go right. If McLintock announces, “I am going to hit you,” immediately before doing so, there is no discernible turn. An audience won’t enjoy the climactic “wallop” as a reversal without the sharp movement that immediately precedes it.
No one enjoys a story with weak, wishy-washy turns. This holds true for the split-second climaxes of scenes as well as in the climax of your 110-page script. Look for a crisp and surprising turn, a reversal, for the climax of every scene as well as in the climax of your overall story.
The breakout box below, Why Boy Must Lose Girl, further explores how this principle applies to the big picture of story structure as well as the climax of a short dialogue exchange.
Why Boy Must Lose Girl
The happiness of the happy ending in your script is relative to the depth of sadness at the end of Act II.
Think about it in terms of “moving” your audience. For a romantic comedy, instead of moving them from “boy and girl sort of get along” to “boy and girl take a temporary break,” move them from “boy and girl are crazy in love” to “boy and girl have epic breakup.”
Anecdotally, the emotional satisfaction for the audience is relative to the breadth of the abrupt change. A sharp and dramatic turn—from loss or separation back to love—will create the most uplifting happy ending.
In the romantic comedy Man Up, Jack (Simon Pegg) mistakes Nancy (Lake Bell) for the woman with whom he has a blind date. Nancy finds herself taken with Jack and stumbles into the idea of going along with it. The two spend several hours together and begin to fall in love.
When Jack learns of Nancy’s deception, he decides he wants to meet the original woman with whom he was to have the date. Ironically, the “boy loses girl” formula incorporates a self-referential instance of “boy meets girl” that serves to pull them apart.
NANCY
What do you want, Jack? My permission?
JACK
No, I --
NANCY
Fine, go and meet Jessica! Boy meets girl, that’s what you want, isn’t it --
JACK
Well, yeah but --
NANCY
There you go then. What are you waiting for?
And then moments later…
She turns, to look at him, but the crowd suddenly engulfs him -- poof! And he’s gone. Like he was never, ever there in the first place.
This downswing accentuates the eventual upswing, when Jack realizes his mistake and goes to find Nancy to be with her.
Inversely, a tragedy or sad ending gains its emotional oomph from the hope for a happy ending, which is suggested and set up before the ultimate downturn. In Chinatown, Jake commits to helping Evelyn before the brutal showdown where he becomes powerless to help her.
In any doomed romance, there must be one or more sequences in which the characters revel in their love. In The Wrestler, it looks as if Randy (Mickey Rourke) could have a new life full of love with Cassidy (Marissa Tomei) and her child, but because of his heart condition he would have to give up wrestling. Ultimately, he chooses the love of his fans over her love and returns back to the dangerous wrestling ring that will eventually kill him. The better you are at showing how it looks and feels to experience happiness and love, the more devastating the eventual loss will be for the audience.
KATHARINE
Will we be all right?
ALMASY
Yes. Yes, absolutely.
KATHARINE
“Yes” is a comfort. “Absolutely” is not.
Notice the crisp upward momentum of “yes,” “absolutely,” and “comfort” before the sharp downward turn to “not.” Essentially, we have yes, yes, YES. And then… surprise… NO!
Variety of Opposites
Seeing a reversal in terms of an abrupt shift enables you to mine your material for the best surprises by using what has come before as a resource. The implicit question, “Opposite of what?” allows you to find surprises that emanate from the expectations and setups in a scene. This will have a profound impact on the unity and coherence of your entire script.
If a character enters a scene fighting for an apology and instead ends up giving one, then that is a pleasant surprise. However, if a character wants an apology and ends up being abducted by aliens, the audience will be confused instead of satisfied.
Surprise happens when an action is a reaction or an organic offshoot from what we expect. Create a setup and twist the expectation. Confusion comes when a jarring action comes out of left field, disconnected from what came before.
Now, if you think you’re painted into a corner by always having your scene climax with an “opposite,” surprise, you’re not. You’re not limited to only a single choice, because any given scene provides a variety of opposites to explore.
In the scene in which Character A wants the apology from Character B, there is the question of whether or not the character gets the apology. But what if, surprise, the other person demands an apology instead? A valid opposite. What if Character A gets the apology but then decides it is not necessary and demands Character B retract the apology? Another great opposite.