by Jim Mercurio
We can find textbook alley-oops in Good Will Hunting and Dead Poets Society. Recall in Good Will Hunting that Chucky’s speech to Will about how happy he would be if he shows up and Will’s not there is essential for us to understand the moment as a victory, of sorts, when it actually happens later in the film.
A few words planted early in Dead Poets Society clarify the ending. In the first scene with the students, Keating takes them out into the hallway and quips, “You can call me Mr. Keating or if you’re daring, 0 Captain, my Captain.” At the end of the movie, when the boys stand on the desk and recite the words, “O Captain, my Captain,” consciously or unconsciously we perceive this as a sign of courage.
Let’s broaden and expand the concept of alley-oop. Alley-oops or whatever you want to call them—setups, foreshadowing, plants, reframes—can be words, images, props, or actions that set up words, images, and actions, and not necessarily just in the climax.
For instance, an action and idea work together to bolster the ending in Dead Poets Society. In another classroom scene, Keating makes his students stand on their desks and challenges them to look at the world from a different perspective. So in the final scene, the boys’ decisions to honor Keating by standing on their desks show his influence on them, that they have grown, and that they are able to see the world from a new and enlightened perspective.
Charging
When an item or visual becomes an alley-oop I refer to it as “charged” or “to charge an item” because it’s a simple mnemonic device that allows us to see how the process works. When you charge an item, you imbue it with a figurative glow or energy field. It’s a reframe that says “Pay attention to this image because it will be important later.”
We looked at a simple scene from The Departed in Chapter 6, “Dilemma: Importance and Digging Deep,” in which a real estate agent challenged Colin’s entire sense of self (his profession, his net worth, his self-worth, his power as a man, and his sexual identity). What made the subtext clear was that the scene began with Colin looking out at the gold dome in Beacon Hill.
The dome could possibly represent several ideas, such as legality, morality, society, government, or political power. However, after a rugby match between the policeman and the fireman, a short conversation between Colin and his buddy Barrigan (James Badge Dale) charge the dome and reframe it so that there is no ambiguity about its meaning.
EXT. THE BOSTON COMMON. DAY
The game breaks up with each group giving each other the finger. FIREFIGHTERS are moving away triumphantly.
COLIN
F*****g firemen are getting pussy for the first time in the history of fire. Or pussy.
COLIN sits on a bench looking at THE GOLD DOME OF BEACON HILL. The terraces of fine townhouses. Aqueous golden light behind. Misty golden beauty.
BARRIGAN
What are you looking at? Forget it. Your father was a janitor, and his son’s only a cop.
Could this setup be any clearer? We’ve got two orders of men playing a violent sport, calling each other “pussies,” and one of them is admonished as if his father’s inability to reach a high enough status denies him the right to even look at the gold dome. It’s pretty obvious that this is about personal power, status, and, in some ways, manhood.
Within an Image System
The most subtle way that dialogue can contribute to theme is when it merely evokes or relates to an image system or motif. If the subtext of a reframe suggests, “Let me show you the context with which to view this,” then this dialogue asks for even less: “In case you weren’t paying attention, this motif or image system is intentional.” Instead of cajoling, words here simply haunt.
Here is a direct reframe from The Dark Knight:
DENT
Well, I guess you either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.
The Dark Knight contains several snippets of dialogue that work more indirectly and merely evoke the imagery of light and dark, the idea of white knight versus dark knight. Consider these separate exchanges between Batman and Harvey Dent.
BATMAN
Your stand against organized crime is the first legitimate ray of light in Gotham for decades.
DENT
The night is darkest just before the dawn. And I promise you, the dawn is coming.
These lines exist merely within the framework of the overall motif but aren’t doing the heavy lifting to create meaning; they are not fully aligned with the theme.
Wrapping Up What We Saw and Heard
The articulation of theme happens at several levels simultaneously in your script, all the way from the structural level down to the scene level.
Most of the expression of the theme is created in the big-picture elements of your story. It solidifies itself in the climax of the film and in the way the protagonist resolves his dilemma. In Avatar, Jake embraces the concept that humans and Na’vi are the same.
The supporting actors represent various takes on that idea, and we progress to smaller and smaller elements, starting with subplots and supporting characters and moving toward setting and motifs, and then all the way down to minutiae, such as a line of dialogue or character name.
At the scene level in Avatar, the idea that everything is connected permeates through attitudes, props, visual details, and dialogue:
• Action description uses a “same versus different” contrast in the depiction of Pandora: “a blue and surprisingly Earth-like world.”
• Disgusted by Jake’s reckless attitude toward nature, Neytiri runs away from him. The manner of his pursuit shows a clash in perspectives: “He crashes through some plants, catching up to her.”
• “You do not see” is the alley-oop that humans cannot learn or understand the Na’vi way of life and relationship to nature. Later, “I see you” replaces “I love you” and contributes to the power of the closing image.
• Their deity, Great Mother (Eywa), consists of all living things.
• The neural interface, the way Jake’s tendrils interface with his direhorse (his eventual chosen mountain banshee), allows him to “become one” with the animal.
• Jake begins to see the deep connection the People have to the forest. “They see a network of energy that flows through all living things.” His clash of perspectives with Quaritch plays out in language from the same image system: “You’re not gettin’ lost in the woods, are you, son?” Later, Selfridge’s dismissal of Grace’s perspective uses it, too: “They’re just. Goddamn. Trees.”
• When Jake and Neytiri eventually make love, it plays out in terms of the intertwining of their tendrils: “the ultimate intimacy.”
• A beautiful series of shots of all of the species of animals swarming together is powerful because it has been reframed as a mystical event. When Jake sees a swarm of riderless banshees, even he is surprised as he understands it: “ON JAKE—slowly getting it. EYWA is in the fight.”
• Although it has been uprooted, Mother Tree’s tendrils undulate subtly as Jake asks for help from deceased ancestors and their deity.
• When Tsu’tey dies and Jake tells him, “Go now to the Mother Spirit,” it echoes the first time Neytiri approved and the forest allowed him to kill an animal. “I See you Brother, and thank you. Your spirit goes with Eywa, your body stays behind to become part of the People.”
• Into his digital recorder, Jake shares that the Na’vi honor two birthdays: the day you are born and the day when you find where you fit in society. This alley-oop creates context for the ending when he says he can’t be late for his own birthday: the ceremony where he becomes a Na’vi.
• The final words of the script describe his eyes opening. This reveals that he survives the transformation process, with the alley-oop that “seeing” means both understanding the Na’vi way of the world and “I love you”; it reveals his final character arc and theme as he literally becomes one with the Na’vi.
Your power to deliver theme lies in the proliferation
and sheer number of clues that you can pepper throughout the script. It’s preferable to have one hundred innocuous setups that don’t call any attention to themselves than to have a few clunky ones. If a scene’s sole purpose is to be a setup for the theme or story and it doesn’t have any dramatic substance of its own, it sticks out like a sore thumb. The scene will lose its effectiveness as a subtle plant and telegraph the surprise, thereby damaging itself and its eventual payoff.
If you want to see how all of these elements work in harmony, check out the breakout box above that discusses a beautiful set of motifs in Breaking Away and how the subtle work you do in setups can create organic opportunities for powerful payoffs.
Creative Counterpoint
Despite the fact that your thematic premise is created by an Aristotelian logical deduction, by no means should you think of theme as a left-brained-only endeavor. The more complex your theme is, the more creative you have to be in embracing surprising perspectives and making novel associations (comparisons and contrasts). More than any other technique described in this book, this skill develops in parallel to your growth as a human, your growing wisdom about life, your empathy, and your compassion for other viewpoints.
Consider these several beats from various movies:
• In Love & Other Drugs, Jamie (Jake Gyllenhaal) expresses, “We are going to beat Parkinson’s disease.”
• In Superbad, Seth and Evan drunkenly profess their “love” for each other.
• In Dead Poets Society, Knox proclaims, “Seize the day,” just before he kisses Chris, the girl he is pursuing.
Out of context, these moments seem like victories of sorts. However, I believe these are actually rock-bottom moments for the characters, when they have regressed to a point as far away as possible from their eventual growth.
In Love & Other Drugs, Jamie is in denial. Instead, he needs to resign himself to the fact that he has no power to cure her or defeat the disease. He can only accept his fate.
In Superbad, the characters are losing themselves in the stunting safety of childhood friendship, and refusing to face the possibility of risking pain and rejection in finding love and romantic love elsewhere.
In Dead Poets Society, Knox is surrounded by the idea of “kissing.” The kiss is not evidence of courage or passion but, rather, cowardice and peer pressure. He even takes a swig of alcohol from his flask, before he kisses her. His “liquid courage” is anything but.
The filmmakers do their best to create clues as to why these seemingly positive takes on the films’ issues were actually more like the worst. Watch the movies carefully if you want to see this in action for yourself.
Embrace the creative challenge in identifying and communicating to the audience your unique, personally crafted thesis. At the end of Dead Poets Society, Todd signs the document that condemns his beloved teacher, Keating, yet when he stands on his desk and recites, “O Captain, my Captain,” we still admire him. The filmmakers establish the context in which to understand the ultimate and exact meaning of Todd’s actions.
Earlier in the film, Nuwanda/Charlie (Gale Hansen) gets punished for a pointless prank that spurs Keating to warn the students: “Sucking the marrow out of life doesn’t mean choking on the bone.” Part alley-oop and part theme line, the advice reminds us that empty or pointless rebellion is not passion or “seize the day” at all.
If Todd had refused to sign the document, he would have hurt himself yet accomplished nothing. Keating would have still taken the fall and Todd would have been expelled. He has the wisdom to understand that no amount of courage in the world was going to change Keating’s fate.
Make Your Case
The audience—viewers and readers—aren’t perfect. They may miss a connection, misunderstand a clue, or bring their own baggage into your script and imbue a moment with a personal resonance that is unrelated to your story. Without overexplaining, we can control how an image or action is perceived.
Use dialogue and visuals to reframe your actions and coax the audience toward a deeper and more meaningful experience. A line of dialogue might give us a surprising context to understand an action. A “charged” item might provide us with an understanding of what’s really going on. A color might say to pay attention to this and compare it to what has come before.
Look at the climax of your film as the ninth inning of the last game of the World Series. When the center fielder catches the pop-up for the third out, there is no explaining in that moment. We experience the joy and meaning from the action itself. The rules of baseball and your relationship to the winning team are the setup that allows the moment to exist as merely a single uninflected action. That’s the subtle work you have to do. Make up the rules of the world. Explore the thesis of your theme subtly throughout the story. Use an alley-oop far away from when you really need it.
With enough attention to your details, you can corroborate your case and give the audience the coherent understanding that you want them to take away from your most arduous labor.
9
ADVANCED SCENE WRITING: BREAKING THE RULES WITH STYLE
Ambitious scenes that are lengthy, rely heavily on dialogue, or involve subtle and surprising conflict sometimes cause problems for writers. Instead of looking at the underlying issues and empowering writers to overcome the challenge, many books and resources create arbitrary rules that encourage them to skip these types of scenes altogether.
An old screenwriting adage says, “There are no rules, but break them at your peril.” As you master the subtleties of the screenwriting craft, you will discover that almost every great scene that “breaks the rules” obeys every principle we have discussed, and, if anything, follows additional implicit rules.
All of the skills needed to write a short, simple scene are relevant when writing a longer, more complex one. However, in the latter, mistakes are less forgivable, and additional skills can help you to overcome some of the intrinsic challenges.
Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Network, his adaptation of Ben Mezrich’s book The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal opens with eight pages of verbal sparring. It’s mostly dialogue, and Sorkin knows the rules he’s breaking. The “opening image” isn’t an image at all, but the scene does everything an opening image and introduction should do. It sets up the main character, his way of talking, and some of the rules in the story’s peculiar world, and it foreshadows theme.
However, Sorkin immediately follows up his opening with this short quarter-page scene:
As Mark continues, he passes a group of people heading in the opposite direction for a party.
As Mark’s steady and determined stride continues he’ll pass by all kinds of (seemingly) happy, well-adjusted socially adept people.
The filmmakers turn these few lines into one of the most expensive and elaborate sequences in the entire film. It visually clarifies everything for us. Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) walks in the opposite direction of people who are together, socializing, and having fun. A moment later, he sits down on his computer to use the internet as a weapon of revenge against his girlfriend (Rooney Mara) who just broke up with him. Closing the short sequence is a tiny little contextual cheat that feels earned: “This is the only place he’s comfortable.”
What The Social Network did wasn’t so much break the rules as bend or rearrange them. Sorkin opens with a dialogue-heavy scene but then doubles back and reinforces everything with a clear and telling visual. That’s the essence of getting away with breaking the rules with style.
Anytime a movie or scene transcends expectations, it almost always does so by adding something. If you look closely, you’ll usually see that anything subtracted will be replaced with something that equals or exceeds what you would normally expect to find.
Even in Robert Altman’s films, which offer brilliant, clinical deconstructions, i.e., methodical explorations and breakdowns of popular genres—M*A*S*H (war movie), The Long Goodbye (detective
movie), Nashville (musical), or McCabe & Mrs. Miller (western)—I would argue, add more than they subtract.
If the nonexistent rules apply to Aaron Sorkin, then they most likely apply to us, too. Let’s look at some of these arbitrary rules and find principles that will allow us to address the underlying issues in any challenging scene.
Rule #1: Avoid Long Scenes
One of the most prevalent obstacles in ambitious scenes is their length. Some of the greatest scene writers on the planet, including Quentin Tarantino, David Mamet, Woody Allen, and Aaron Sorkin, favor ambitious, challenging, and, often, long scenes. Of course, screenwriters become enamored with these scenes, perhaps because they do break the rules. When aspiring writers first attempt to tackle unwieldy scenes, they discover that the scenes have static lulls or begin to meander and lose focus.
I don’t want to rein in your screenwriting ambition, but rather give you some additional tools to use when approaching a longer scene. Let’s start with a method that assesses the length of your scene.
Story Density
A general principle that allows you to evaluate the appropriate length for a scene (as well as a sequence, a line of dialogue or action description, or your entire script) is what I call story density. It is the ratio of how much story there is relative to how much space it takes up in lines, pages, or word count.
My mathematical-sounding description is meant to be ironic. Have fun with this and use it as a creative tool. Call on your intuition to answer this question: Is there enough “story” jammed into this moment to warrant its length? Consider “story” to include anything and everything that elicits emotion from the reader or viewer: humor, emotion, theme, insight, clever action description, suspense.