by Jim Mercurio
Aim higher than you should, but also balance your expectations. Don’t obsess over trying to write a masterpiece right out of the gate. For instance, Woody Allen wrote for television for more than a decade and wrote screenplays for ten produced feature films before he cowrote and directed Annie Hall in his early forties.
Assumption: The protagonist is male in “male” genres such as thriller and action.
In The Silence of the Lambs, casting the protagonist as a woman might initially appear to be merely a superficial tweak to a genre expectation. However, it’s such a novel disruption of the status quo and so integrated and exploited in the film’s themes, that it helps the film transcend its genres of horror and thriller.
It’s the only horror film that has won the Academy Award for Best Picture, and one of only three films (along with One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and It Happened One Night) to win the five major Oscar categories: film, director, actor, actress, and screenplay (adapted, in this case). It is one of the all-time great genre movies.
The film contains dozens of thematic references to seeing and sight. The West Virginia state troopers stare down Clarice (Jodie Foster). The reason the antagonist Buffalo Bill/J Gumb (Ted Levine) murders women is that he desires to become a woman and look like one. Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) reframes Gumb’s action for Clarice and the audience in a way that resonates with her personally:
DR. LECTER
We begin by coveting what we see every day. Don’t you feel eyes moving over your body, Clarice? I hardly see how you couldn’t. And don’t your eyes move over the things you want?
In the film’s showdown, in which Gumb stalks Clarice in a pitch-dark basement, he uses night-vision goggles. The motif of seeing now invokes the predatory act of hunting. If the sense of sight is considered to be a bit more male than female, then it’s meaningful that she defeats him with her sense of hearing. It works viscerally and intellectually.
Assumption: We’re stuck with Manic Pixie Dream Girls.
Consider the concept of “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” (MPDG). Film critic Nathan Rabin coined the term to describe Claire (Kirsten Dunst) in Elizabethtown. It refers to the trope of a static female character who functions as a muse or catalyst to inspire passion in a male character so that he may achieve his goals and dreams. She doesn’t have needs or desires of her own. She exists only to service the needs and growth of the male protagonist.
If a writer takes this prevalent mainstream cinema assumption for granted, then he has little ability to manage it as an expectation. However, an awareness of this lazy narrative gimmick might lead you to contest it directly in a way similar to how 500 Days of Summer did.
500 Days of Summer challenged the notion of MPDG with some precocious self-awareness. Tom worships his love interest, Summer, as his source of personal growth, salvation, and overall happiness. At first the relationship is so romantic that we, the audience, don’t question it and fall for the cliché, too.
The film uses that expectation to pull the rug out from under us. Ironically, it is Summer who grows and pursues her own goals that are independent of Tom. When she says goodbye to Tom near the end of the film, a moment we looked at in Chapter 7, “Exploiting Concept,” we sense the emotional loss, but we also realize that we are complicit in the same mistake. We’ve seen Summer as a muse to fulfill his needs, but her growth and character arc takes her beyond Tom and the audience.
This process of defying assumptions is ever evolving and adaptable. It’s also personal. The assumptions, clichés, and conventions that you find outrageous might not even matter to another writer. Here, we picked the MPDG trope, but your ability to identify and frame any issue or trope allows you to target it.
Assumption: Reality is the status quo.
Some filmmakers directly address emotionally charged political and societal issues such as the representation of women, people of color, the LGBT community, and other marginalized groups. Modern-day filmmakers such as Spike Lee and Ava DuVernay are the successors of overtly political filmmakers who have been around since the infancy of cinema, including Sergei Eisenstein, Oscar Micheaux, Luis Buñuel, and, later Dušan Makavejev, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Oliver Stone. Lee wrote and directed Do the Right Thing and X (a biopic of Malcolm X). DuVernay directed A Wrinkle in Time and cowrote and directed 13th (a documentary that drew parallels between the United States’ modern prison system and the institution of slavery). Both filmmakers obviously wear their politics on their sleeves.
You don’t have to directly deal with politics to tell a powerful story. Sometimes, the personal can trump the political. Or become it. Answer this question for yourself: which films resonate more profoundly politically—proficient mainstream fare such as Philadelphia and Milk, or more personal indies such as Weekend and Moonlight? For a film that flourished in the mainstream, Moonlight explored some radical territory with effortless grace.
During World War II and in its aftermath, Italian neorealist filmmakers such as De Sica, Zavattini, and Rossellini reacted to Italy’s collective trauma and loss by rejecting the artifice of Hollywood and many of Italy’s escapist and tone-deaf movies. They each turned the cameras toward the struggle and suffering of everyday, common people, but there was no common style or form. Some of the films had clear-cut agendas, and some just seemed to “be.” However, because the latter shared the same setting of the war-ravaged streets of Italy, even if the filmmakers weren’t aiming at them, thematic strands of the nature of society, politics, and class always crept in. Some of the modern-day heirs to neorealism, to name only a few—I, Daniel Blake; Wendy and Lucy; and Precious—smoothly blend their politics into the story and setting.
Your script can’t remedy every flaw in narrative cinema and society, nor does it need to. But you do have to attack the one(s) that prevent you from telling your story. Even by simply targeting an assumption of the medium or the nature of modern movies, as we did above, you will often be surprised where you end up. Contesting the status quo of movies often inevitably amplifies to addressing important societal issues—such as race, sexual politics, gender issues, and class—that challenge the status quo of the real world.
Why?
Because even the most subtle and systemic constructs of unfairness—in the form of prejudice and inequality—embedded in the dominant ideology translate to symptomatic and specific images on the screen and then become codified rules themselves. All you have to do is “pick your poison”—the trope that drives you crazy—and commit to telling your story without it. Your new rule(s) will organically lead you from personal to political.
Here are some status-quo assumptions and a few films that benefited from defying them, sometimes in a deceptively simple way:
• Women must be underrepresented in films: Thelma & Louise, Julie & Julia, Juliet of the Spirits, Sweetie
• People of color must be underrepresented: Mi Vida Loca, To Sleep with Anger, Fruitvale Station, City of God
• Romantic relationships must be between…
• Heterosexual love interests: Carol, Kissing Jessica Stein, Brokeback Mountain, Moonlight, Happy Together, Call Me by Your Name
• Individuals of the same race: Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?, The Wedding Banquet, Pinky, Far from Heaven
• Lovers who are cisgender: Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Boys Don’t Cry, The Crying Game, Ma Vie en Rose, Dog Day Afternoon
• Humans and humans: Her, Lars and the Real Girl, King Kong
• Sex must be…
• Implicit, offscreen: Romance, Baise Moi, Intimacy
• Tidy: Last Tango in Paris, Kids, Cruising, Weekend
Here are a handful of mainstream films with varying degrees of complexity and layers of subtle meaning. This mishmash is meant to encourage you to be creative and bold and inventive in finding ways to tell meaningful stories regardless of the genre.
• Conspiracy thrillers of the seventies such as Parallax View, Three Days of the Condor, and All the President’s Men all promoted
paranoia, distrust of government.
• A League of Their Own is a female-centric sports movie.
• District 9 confronted apartheid.
• Toy Story 3—well, Google the title along with “holocaust.”
• High Noon criticized McCarthyism.
• The X-Men series implicitly argued for gay rights.
• Even the commercial success The Crying Game addressed political violence, race, and gender in a subversive and tender love story.
If you are a filmmaker who makes overtly political films with an in-your-face immediacy, you don’t need me to provide you with any of your content. Even if you think that your voice doesn’t relate to social issues, you can still challenge yourself to be more inclusive of cultures and worldviews other than your own. This can expand your understanding of the storytelling medium, of your “home field” film conventions, and of the stories you want to tell.
Either way, your “personal voice” stems from the core components you work with that diverge from the status quo.
Case Study:
Do the Right Thing
Do the Right Thing, written and directed by Spike Lee, breaks a few rules and bends some conventions. It’s sometimes didactic. It breaks the fourth wall. And many of the characters are set up as overly simplistic cultural stereotypes. Let’s look at these one at a time:
Forget seamless theme. From the opening sequence and the rap song “Fight the Power,” the film bombards the audience with its clear ideological message. Despite its sporadic moments of preachiness, it never feels like “eating your vegetables.” It’s funny, satirical, fast, and rabble-rousing. It’s actually fun.
Even the juxtaposition of the two quotes at the end, one from Martin Luther King Jr., and the other from Malcolm X, that advocate peace and violence, respectively, feels earned, not tacked on, because the film itself explores the issues as conflict, action, and character.
It breaks the fourth wall. A sequence of shots features members of different ethnic groups staring straight into the camera while rattling off a string of racial slurs/epithets that apply to other ethnic groups. They are not integrated into the narrative as in a typical scene. They act more as pure montage, in which their juxtaposition evokes a set of ideas and emotions rather than necessarily driving the story forward.
It uses stereotypes. Many characters are based on familiar archetypes that border on cliché as evident from their names alone—Mother Sister, Da Mayor, Buggin’Out. However, the film constantly imbues the characters with just enough humanity and a surprising sense of opposite that they never devolve into complete cardboard depictions or mere mouthpieces for the message.
The film is unapologetic about its politics. However, its strength is that it is empathetic and evenhanded. It doesn’t propose any easy answers or take a side, and it allows that ambiguity to sit as an unresolved question for the audience to wrestle with after they leave the theater.
Audiences come to every story with expectations, so put them to good use. Don’t be afraid to manipulate expectations for suspense, humor, irony, and subversion—storytelling.
Do the Right Thing shows how a filmmaker managing a few expectations—without blowing up the entire rule book—can tell his story his way without sacrificing its ability to reach a mainstream audience.
In fact, sometimes the most powerful statement of nonconformity and individualism comes from utter mastery, in which you are a ninja who crushes the competition at its own game.
Imagine how the closing line of Some Like It Hot must have shocked 1950s audiences. In the final shot, after Sugar (Marilyn Monroe) has run off with Joe (Tony Curtis), Jerry (Jack Lemmon), still dressed in drag as Daphne, is stuck alone on a boat with his would-be suitor, Osgood Fielding III (Joe E. Brown). After Osgood dismisses every possible excuse Daphne/Jerry gives as to why they can’t be a couple, Jerry tears off his wig and pronounces, “I’m a man.” Without missing a beat, Fielding responds:
FIELDING
Well, nobody’s perfect.
Midnight Cowboy, the only X-rated (at the time) movie to win an Academy Award for Best Picture, has audaciously dark, subversive, and sophisticated humor. The second shot of the film is a close-up of a bar of soap that is dropped in the shower by the protagonist, Joe Buck (Jon Voight). Is it a tongue-in-cheek raunchy joke? Or a surprisingly sharp summation of the character’s deepest fears and doubts about his identity and masculinity? The answer is yes. And yes.
Whether it’s subversive or just surprising, it can be exhilarating when you can slip in startling expression where it’s least expected: within the system.
Does a relatively classical form prevent movies such as Network, Dr. Strangelove, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, or Brazil from expressing their outrage?
Shut Up and Deal
As you know by now, here are what I consider to be some key universal truths about screenwriting:
• Specificity breeds specificity and will conquer cliché.
• Your opening image should augur your entire story’s theme.
• The introduction to your protagonist hints at both sides of his dilemma: where he is now, and his shadow side, where his potential lies.
• Each character wrestles with a variation of the same thematic issue.
• Conflict resonates with importance throughout every scene, even in comedies.
• The challenge of writing to concept pays off.
• There is storytelling magic in all of scene writing.
• Everything is storytelling. Storytelling is everything.
At the beginning of this book, I promised I would honor and appreciate your individual talents and your intangible, not-so-easily-quantified skills.
Well, here you are. All that’s left is you and the page.
Remember that the subtext of “Shut Up and Deal” from The Apartment was, “I love you, too.” It’s with similar affection, I say it to you. No more talking about it. Get writing.
Let the above list and the following examples be a reminder of what you are aiming for.
Visuals and Images
Do your scenes have striking images? Are the descriptions memorable? Will they cause a cinematographer to drool?
Shadows in Nosferatu or The Night of the Hunter. Expressionistic, distorted images such as in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari or Repulsion. What about freeze-frames? How many final images are caught in our collective memory? Freeze-frames became the final haunting image in 400 Blows, Gallipoli, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and Thelma and Louise.
You have the complete language and history of film from which to draw. The difference between theft and homage is whether you can somehow make an image your own.
In Vittorio De Sica’s neorealist fable Miracle in Milan, homeless people on broomsticks flew away across the sky, escaping their plight forever. It was a satirical solution to a problem that in real life had no simple answer. They don’t ever land. Steven Spielberg co-opted the image without the irony for E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. However, the images are stunningly effective in both films, given their context and purpose.
In Citizen Kane, a worker throws Charles Foster Kane’s childhood sled, a prop with some significance, into the giant flaming cauldron:
… The laborer drops his shovel, takes the sled in his hand and throws it into the furnace. The flames start to devour it.
EXT. XANADU - NIGHT
No lights are to be seen. Smoke is coming from a chimney.
All of the possessions that belonged to Kane go up in smoke. This image is practical as summation of the story, character, and theme. But it’s also emotionally devastating, evoking a lifetime’s longing for love.
For a lighter example, in the climax of Ghostbusters (1984), the ghostbusters are given the choice of their destruction, i.e., the form of the physical manifestation of the Sumerian deity Gozer. Here’s the setup that zigs before the final zag: despite his own warning to “Empty our heads,” something slips into Stantz’s (Dan Aykroyd) thou
ghts:
STANTZ
I tried to think of the most harmless thing. Something I loved from my childhood. Something that could never ever possibly destroy us.
Heavy thumping precedes the ultimate reveal of the perpetual smile and childish sailor suit worn by a 100-foot-tall Stay Puft Marshmallow Man.
Actions
In Moonlight, the thirteen-year-old Little (Alex R. Hibbert) takes a leap of faith into the literal arms of his enigmatic and complex mentor Juan (Mahershala Ali) when he lets him hold him while floating in the ocean. The iconic image from the film illustrates the safety and trust in their relationship. Words on the page always struggle to match the power of images, but the script keeps up with magic of its own.
INTO THE OCEAN
…
Juan steadying himself, buttresses himself against the current as he reels Little in. The boy clings to him, gasping for air, spitting out salt water.
JUAN
Hey hey hey, I got you lil’ man, I got you, calmate, calmate.
It’s movie magic but they’re a good ways out now, thirty, forty yards from shore.
The water’s not so deep out here, Juan standing. Little is far out beyond his height however, Juan supporting him, holding him out at arm’s length.
JUAN
You alright?
A nod from Little as he wipes saltwater from his eyes.
Juan playfully laughs at Little’s flailing attempt to swim. “Not like a chicken,” Juan chides before he shows him how to do it. Little earnestly listens and begins to tread water successfully. Juan’s response escalates from encouragement to utter grace:
JUAN
Bet you ain’t know you could float, huh?
Juan taking a hand and placing it under Little’s legs, gently gesturing him onto his back:
JUAN
Trust me, I got you.
Little laid flat atop the surface now, bobbing with the waves.
JUAN
Now just relax, alright, relax.
Little complying -- Little floating, the look on his face pure joy. For once, a kid.
In The Godfather II, although the images used to describe it might be less important than the innate treachery of the act itself, here is the moment when Fredo is murdered on the request of his brother.