CHAPTER 14: VERBATIM AD NAUSEUM
AND THE CURSE OF ADVERBS
Does size matter?
If your script is in the hands of an independent producer or studio script reader, you bet it does! In fact, their practice of flipping to the back page before they ever start reading can impact whether your script gets read at all. While a story that clocks in at less than 90 minutes can possibly be fluffed out or salvaged as a short, anything over two hours is automatically suspect as “too wordy.”
If you’re lucky enough to get feedback on where particular cuts can be made, take advantage of it. The majority of the time, however, you’ll only be advised that the script is too long and be left to your own devices to figure out how to trim it down.
In my own experience as a script consultant, the “page-gobblers” tend to fall into five categories, all of which are easily remedied:
Extraneous conversation (addressed in the previous chapter)
Explicit character description
Excessive scene description
Calling too many shots
Counting every step.
CHARACTER DEFINING MOMENTS
A lot of writers — myself included — find it useful to have real life individuals in mind as models for the fictional characters who will people their screenplays. It can be a specific person, a facet of the author’s own persona, or a composite of multiple personalities rolled into one. Maybe during the creative process they even go so far as to envision the celebrity “dream cast” they’d like to see act in it and, accordingly, write lines and actions that would be the most suitable to those actors’ talents and ages.
The plus side of this practice is that it helps keep characters and their speech patterns distinct from one another, especially if there are quite a few to keep track of. There’s no mixing up which one is Jerry and which one is Clyde, for instance, if Jerry and Clyde are actual people whose respective looks, accents, and habits are firmly locked in the writer’s memory banks and/or reinforced through regular interaction.
The minus side is that you can write yourself into a box from which you can’t be rescued.
Back in the days when I ran an acting company, this method of casting reversal in my playwriting was the product of concurrently teaching acting classes and having a steady pool of new talent crossing the threshold. Each time I began penning scripts for the next season, I would not only have decided in advance which newcomers were ready for a debut but also which members of past shows would work well with them. As a result, I’d find myself purposely writing roles for players pre-cast in my head as opposed to the more traditional approach of holding structured auditions and making decisions based on who showed up.
Could other thespians have played those scenes with an equal amount of panache and credibility? Possibly. Unbeknownst to me at the time, however, I was limiting the chances of finding that out by so narrowly tailoring the roles to specific actors in my immediate company. To no great surprise, the only remaining theatrical scripts from those years which remain unsold to this day are the very same ones I had written for a young man named Billy whose proficiency with impersonations ranging from Kermit the Frog to Darth Vader went unmatched for 8+ years of production. It’s not that the scripts were bad; they just needed a succession of leads like Billy to show them at their best.
Therein lies a common problem faced by new screenwriters who, in wanting to be exacting and precise in defining character traits, unwittingly jeopardize the discovery of whether a different spin might have brought something richer to the table. While Hollywood history is replete with memorable parts that we simply can’t imagine anyone other than the original actor playing, it will diminish your first script’s chances of a sale if you can’t write parts with a broad degree of latitude.
In each of the following examples, certain characteristics have been ascribed to each of the characters in their first appearances on screen. See if you can identify which ones are essential in terms of projecting a certain type, as well as which ones lend themselves to substitution and/or omission.
ANN, an exceptionally homely woman of 37, wears her dark brown hair in a bun and reading glasses on a bright red chain around her neck. She has on a flower print polyester dress from Target and a granny square sweater that her favorite aunt made for her.
Two THIEVES run past an alley where a homeless man named LARRY is passed out in front of a green dented dumpster. Larry, a former state worker, is 55 and has scraggly grey hair in a ponytail, hazel eyes, a British accent, and a mole on the left side of his bulbous nose. MARTY just turned 33 last month but is still living his life as an extension of high school. His jet black hair is spiked and heavily gelled. He wears a pair of John Lennon wireframes, not because his apple green eyes are bad but because he thinks they make him look cool. He wears jeans with the knees ripped out, a Grateful Dead tee-shirt, and a pair of brand new Nike tennis shoes.
GWEN is a 5’9” career executive in her mid-40s with a Princess Diana hairstyle, piercing blue eyes, and a size 6 figure. Her only imperfection is a slight gap between her sparkling front teeth.
How did you do? Let’s take a look.
AGE
Keep your references to age as generic as possible. Given the fact that a lot of actors and actresses pride themselves on the wide age-range they can physically play, the specificity of labeling someone as a “19-year-old coed” or “a 37-year-old drunk” could preclude those performers who fall on either side of those numbers from being called to audition. More importantly, providing a precise age may throw off a prospective producer or director whose vision of that particular character is different from yours. Use, instead, the terms “toddler,” “teen,” “young adult,” “middle aged,” etc. or refer to characters by the decade in which they would most comfortably fall for the sake of the plot; i.e., “twenties,” “forties,” “eighties,” and so forth.
HAIR COLOR AND STYLE
Unless there is a familial relationship, an identity/fashion statement being made, or a dialogue reference to what is atop someone’s head (i.e., “From the red of it, I’m guessing you’re Irish” or “Did you grab the eggbeater instead of a hairbrush this morning?”), hair color and styling have nothing to do with the actual role. A bimbo, for instance, could just as easily be played by a brunette as a stereotypical blond. Whether a banker parts his hair on the left, the right, or is completely bald has no bearing on his ability to handle money. Apply that same logic to describing your characters’ follicles.
In the examples given, the color of Ann’s hair isn’t as important as the unflattering style that she has chosen for it. Likewise, Marty’s gel and spike look bespeaks an attachment to his wild-side youth but the exact hue is irrelevant. In addition, identifying a style in terms of a persona who popularized it only works if that style stayed the same for long enough to become a tag that will be easily understood by whoever reads the script. A reference to Princess Diana, for instance, conjures a universally consistent image; Jennifer Aniston and Cher, on the other hand, do not.
EYES
Unless the part calls for a specific eye color, don’t bother to assign one… especially to characters like the homeless Larry whose eyes aren’t even open!
CLOTHING AND ACCESSORIES
Minimize the use of specifics (i.e., colors, patterns, textures) and name brands in outfitting your players on paper. (I have actually had clients who itemized every single item of clothing in spite of the fact that none of it had anything to do with the plot or the persona wearing it!)
There are three exceptions to this guideline where a certain level of costuming detail is important:
TRADEMARK. In Legally Blond, the heroine’s affinity for Barbie-style designer ensembles is used as an extension of how her personality is perceived by those around her. A narrowly defined wardrobe, thus, can be a tool to either validate an audience’s assumptions regarding “type” or to mislead them with an external image that runs contrary to internal values.
CLARITY. What would Indiana Jones be without that manly and well-traveled fedora? To just say, “Indy is wearing a hat” invites multiple interpretations. Would he have cut the same swath in a snappy white boater? A sombrero? A bowler? In those instances where your intent could be misconstrued to the disadvantage of the character, spell out exactly what you want.
METAMORPHASIS. Cher’s dowdy duds and matronly hair in the first-half scenes of her Academy Award winning Moonstruck role provide a startling contrast to the glamorous, second-half makeover she undergoes for her date at the opera with Nicholas Cage. In this case, the transformation in appearance symbolically coincides with the character’s liberation from a previously dull and unsatisfying existence.
Is it significant that Marty is sporting a Grateful Dead tee-shirt instead of one for Smashing Pumpkins? What about the expensive Nikes which look out of place against his otherwise impoverished appearance? Is Marty an aspiring athlete who spends whatever extra cash he gets on the best sports footwear that money can buy? Did he steal those shoes from someone else and is flaunting them? Is he the only son in a wealthy family who likes to look radical just to freak out his parents? If you’re going to introduce incongruities in your character’s outward trappings, make sure you have a reason for it.
How about Ann? Two items in her ensemble are cause for curiosity. Is that granny square sweater a testament to bad taste or sentimentality? Unless the rest of Ann’s closet is exposed to us over the course of the movie, we don’t really know. And what about that bright red chain that holds her glasses, its color almost a show of defiance in the midst of drabness? Now that we’ve noticed it, what’s it doing there? Further, the details of the dress she is wearing (“flower print polyester”) are unnecessary; to simply say that it is “plain” or “cheap” is all that a reader—or costume coordinator—needs to know.
OTHER ITEMS TO OMIT
MONIKERS R US
If a role is written in as simply part of the scene’s general ambiance, he or she doesn’t need to be assigned a name (i.e., the homeless gentleman has no lines, nor is he addressed by the other characters in conversation). At the same time, don’t confuse a script reader by initially identifying characters by gender or occupation (in this case, THIEVES) and then attach names to them later on in the script. For example: “Enter JOE and MIKE, whom we recognize as the pair of thieves from page 5.”
ACCENTS
In my work as a script coverage consultant, I’m always amused by references to characters who are described as “fussy Brits, articulate Germans, and suave Frenchmen”…and yet don’t say a peep for the entire scene. If you’re not going to allow them to open their mouths, assigning a specific dialect to them just doesn’t make any sense.
ATTRACTIVENESS QUOTIENT
“Ann, an exceptionally homely woman…” Are there actually gradations of homeliness that we’re not aware of? Stick to tags such as “plain,” “handsome,” “diamond in the rough,” “drop dead gorgeous.” And is it really essential that Gwen is a size 6 or that she has a Lauren Hutton smile? Not really. A size 9 with imperfect eyebrows could probably play the part just as well.
EXTRANEOUS EXPLANATIONS
Avoid background data that we don’t need to know. The origin of Ann’s dress, for instance, or Larry’s former occupation. If it’s not going to be revealed via dialogue or action, it doesn’t need to be explained in the description.
THOUGHT BUBBLES
Finally, don’t embed inner thoughts within character profiles. If Marty wears John Lennon glasses because he associates John Lennon with coolness, let this come out in the context of the story itself. If this isn’t a crucial facet of Marty’s psyche, any pair of glasses — or lack thereof — would suffice.
WHEN LESS IS MORE
Back in grade school, we were all taught that adverbs and adjectives were our new best friends, enabling us to enrich our descriptions of people, places, and things. Certainly in novels and short stories, modifiers that lock down a specific hue or express a relation to time, manner, or degree help paint a vivid picture in the mind’s eye.
In screenwriting, however, the opposite is true. The more you try to tell actors how to deliver their lines, set designers what color the furniture should be, or cinematographers how to point their cameras, the less they are going to like you… or your script.
FADE IN: EXT. /ROCKY MOUNTAIN MEADOW/DAY
The sound of a reddish-brown hawk pierces the tranquility of a lovely spring afternoon in the American Rockies. The flawless azure sky has been lovingly caressed by the painter’s brush with wisps and swirls of cotton-candy clouds that look down on a crescent of sturdy verdant trees from which the forest’s wildlife cautiously emerges, wary of Man’s presence in what was once their exclusive paradise. An unseasonably warm breeze of 5 miles an hour sensually ripples through the amber grasses, gently parting them as if they were fluid gold and abruptly disturbing a family of bees which angrily spirals upward like a miniature, bee-colored cyclone. Just then, the camera gracefully pans leftward to two riders on horseback who leisurely emerge upon the scene, their faces bronzed and ruddy as a result of long months in the wilderness. The animals pick up their manly scent and, with noses twitching, quickly recede into the welcome protection of the shadows. The first man, JEB KIMBRO, is in his late 20s, blond and very handsome. The other man, CLAY ADAMS, is about 40 with a hook-shaped nose and dark hair parted roguishly on the side.
JEB
(very grimly)
It’s quiet here.
CLAY
(nods solemnly, slowly scratching his chin)
Too quiet.
“But you keep telling me that film is visual,” my client protested when I reduced his opening scene to the following:
FADE IN: ext. - rocky mountain meadow - day
SFX: Hawk
SFX: Hoofbeats
Two frontiersmen, JEB KIMBRO and CLAY ADAMS, ride into view.
Clearly his interpretation that movies need to be visually compelling was taken to mean that it’s the writer’s job on paper to leave no angstrom of detail to chance. Further, that by building as much narrative glitz (and all that bee-colored imagery) into the script as possible will increase its chances of sale.
On both counts, the answer is “no.”
Why? Because a common mistake that new screenwriters make when crafting their stories is in forgetting who is actually going to be reading it and judging its merits. No, it’s not the “target audience” for whom the film is intended, as their approval won’t even come into play until the finished product reaches the box office. Instead, it’s the “target director/producer” whose heart and imagination have to be won in the initial review, a quest which will be instantly defeated as soon as The Writer implies that The Reader has no sense of creativity.
SELF-TEST
In the scene with Jeb and Clay, go through the text and circle every adverb and every adjective that you can find. Quite a few, hmm? Now go back and identify which ones are necessary to the scene. Of the original total you came up with, what percentage of these were actually relevant?
Now take a page from your own script and do the same thing. The lesson to be learned here is to use adverbs and adjectives sparingly. A good rule to follow is that if you have more than six per page, you are probably going into more detail that you need.
While there are obvious occasions where a certain level of definition is required to address ambiguity (i.e., a Martha Stewart cabin versus a crude cabin), it’s important to ask yourself just how wedded you are to a particular likeness, representation, or camera shot before you commit it to paper. Unlike a novel or short story, in which you are illustrating a character, location, or action sequence as accurately as possible for a passive audience, the words of a film or television script are simply the framework on which the directing, acting, and technical talent will build outward and embellish with their own signature styles.
In fairness to my student, of course, I should point out th
at his justification for being “visually wordy” came from an assignment I had given him to download some scripts from www.scriptdude.com and familiarize himself with both the formatting and “cinema shorthand” which separates amateurs from professionals. One of the examples he cited in his defense was excerpted from the award-winning Braveheart by Randall Wallace:
Could It Be a Movie Page 18