The Calling Card Script

by Paul Ashton

  THE DEVIL IN THE DETAIL

  You may be inspired to explore ‘the contemporary human condition’, and

  that is a noble objective. But without detail, specifics, concrete material,

  this theme will remain for ever universal and never really a story about

  people in the world.

  Try to let real, identifiable, tangible detail and material stick to your

  idea as soon as possible. It may be images or pictures. A character’s way of

  walking, combing their hair, tying their shoes. A sound. A voice. A turn of

  phrase. A piece of music. Even a smell. Or a scene. A scenario. A situ ation.

  An opening sequence or closing image.

  Start collecting all relevant material as soon as possible and keep

  collecting it. This will prove crucial not just in the exploratory stage, but

  later on too. It will be the detail, the minutiae, the quirks that make your

  THE BEGINNING 51

  characters, world and story stand out from the crowd and come into their

  own. A basic idea remains just that until you have flesh, skin and clothes

  to put on its bones.

  A HEAD FOR IDEAS

  To write scripts that actors can play and an audience will watch, you obvi -

  ously need powerful material. Some writers constantly bubble and simmer

  with ideas. Others are infrequently inspired, but once it comes they drive

  forward thoroughly and doggedly. Ideally you will be endowed with both

  qualities. But few things in life are ideal and you’re likely to do one these

  two things:

  Struggle to cohere, focus and select from numerous ideas.

  Struggle to generate enough ideas that will withstand development

  and scrutiny.

  Either way, what you need to do is develop a harsh, critical faculty that can

  as objectively as possible look an idea in the eye and decide whether it’s

  worth the time and energy of development. For experienced writers, this

  faculty might become second nature and instinctive. For the greater, less

  experienced number amongst you, it may need to be a self-conscious act

  that feels uncomfortable and unnatural. The myriad questions you should

  ask ‘in the beginning’ form the bulk of this section of the book.

  YOU

  You are without doubt the best source and database for material – but you

  come with glitches, and data means nothing without the judgement to

  interpret it meaningfully. The things you have seen, done, felt – been happy,

  sad, angry, annoyed, confused about – are crucial. It’s not so much writing

  what you know, as using what you understand about what you know and

  feel in order to write well about your chosen subject. You may never have

  been an international jewel thief, but if you remember a moment when you

  sneaked a piece of chocolate as a child and got away with it, then you know

  what that vicarious thrill feels like at least to a small degree.

  However, if you find yourself trying to write ‘your story’ or writing

  yourself wholesale into a story, you need to ask yourself a harsh and

  52 THE CALLING CARD SCRIPT

  searching question – will an audience find it as interesting as you do? I was

  developing a script with a writer-director who drew very much on his own

  teenage experience. There was a real story in there – but sadly it was not

  the one where he as a teenager was the hero of the story. Needless to say,

  this was a difficult note for me to give – and for him to take. Charlie Kauf -

  man was extraordinarily brave to write himself into Adaptation – but at

  least he invented an alter-twin brother character to turn that inside out

  and upside down.

  YOUR FEELINGS

  More important than what you have done in your life is what you have felt

  in your life. It never fails to hit me just how much a passionately told and

  heartfelt story will always engage and impress and affect so much more

  than one that is just expediently, efficiently told. No one can tell you what

  you should and should not care about, what should and should not keep you

  awake at night, get under your skin, get its teeth into you and not let go.

  But if you don’t feel this powerful drive to want and need to tell a story,

  your script will only be competent at best. You can’t apply tactics to what

  you feel. And even if a reader of your script down the line doesn’t neces -

  sarily share your passion for a particular idea or story, if it’s passionately

  delivered there’s still a stronger chance your script will stick in their

  memory – and this is precisely what you want your script to do.

  Your feelings may be politically driven, a response to society around

  you, inspired by an observed moment or idea that you can’t shake, an

  expression of a deeply personal perspective or deeply held conviction. None

  of these things by themselves will make your script great. But they will

  give you the purpose, drive and emotional authenticity potentially to make

  it great. And without them, the most it can be is an exercise in craft, tech -

  nique, form, style.

  ‘Your best script will touch on something you care deeply about.

  Something that you probably find hard to talk about easily. So

  writing it is the only way to get it out – you have to write or you’ll go

  insane. But it’s a bit like being a doctor. If you don’t care enough

  you’re a bad doctor. If you care too much you just go insane and

  you’re no good to anybody. You need to filter your subjectivity

  THE BEGINNING 53

  through a skin of objectivity, i.e write what matters to you – but keep

  it as uninflected and as universal as possible.’

  Joe Penhall

  YOUR VOICE

  Voice is the non-quantifiable thing that commissioners, producers, devel -

  opers always look for in writers. They can’t usually explain it or break it

  down, but somehow they know when they do (or don’t) see it, hear it, read

  it. Are great writers born with a ‘voice’? Or can you make a great voice

  through effort and exercise of craft alone? I’ve already stated my case on

  this. I believe ‘great’ writers have something in them – insight, instinct,

  talent, whatever you want to call it – that effort and exercise will never

  fully generate or account for; but I believe that great writers only become

  or remain great by dint of effort and exercise as well, regardless of how

  talented they intrinsically might be.

  THE X FACTOR

  I generally think that mass-audience talent shows are a gloriously hollow

  distraction through which certain kinds of brilliant singers could never be

  found. But what’s interesting is how we define the ‘X Factor’. When a singer

  auditions, the judges and audience ask themselves questions. Can they sing?

  Can they hold a note and carry a tune? Do they have rhythm and phrasing?

  Is the sound they make pleasing? Is the sound they make interesting and

  unique? Is the sound they make irritating yet compelling? Is the sound they

  make nice but dull?

  Can they really sing? Can you have the X Factor but not really be able

  to ‘sing’? What about Leonard Cohen, The Pogues, Tom Waits, Bob Dylan?

  Why do we disagree about who does and does not have it? Is it purely sub - />
  jective? Do you just somehow ‘feel’ that a singer is great, regardless of the

  various constituent factors that go into their voice? Or do we just like

  watch ing them sing, which is using another sense entirely?

  Is there a ‘something’ in them or about them that can’t be defined,

  explained, broken down, replicated, reconstituted, that is at the heart of

  why people love to hear them sing?

  54 THE CALLING CARD SCRIPT

  WHAT IS A VOICE?

  A voice is a physical instrument. It is the sound made by the vibration of

  the vocal chords projecting into air, modified by the mouth, tongue and

  breath. All human voices are necessarily physically different because no

  two human bodies can be physiologically exactly the same. When we talk

  about a writer’s voice, it’s worth remembering that voice is physical, real

  and distinct – not obviously visible, but audible, perceptible.

  A voice has ‘condition’. It is a quality and, perhaps, a technique, that

  must be kept in condition, practised, trained, flexed like a muscle. A voice

  also has a natural condition defined by the greater physical personality of

  the being it expresses – softly spoken, kindly, melodious, aggressive, acer -

  bic, grating. Can you change the natural condition of a voice? How much

  range can a voice have through conditioning and craft?

  A voice has distinctive tone. It is physically unique, individual, unlike

  any other. Is vocal tone equivalent to a writer’s distinctive, individual style,

  such as that of Pinter, Beckett, Brecht, Potter, Kaufman?

  A voice is an expression of feeling and opinion. A voice can have pas -

  sion, force, purpose, drive, desire, wish, need. A voice is the expression of

  theme – the central message of your desire to tell a story, your attitude,

  your passion, the thing you are trying to say and the things you have to say

  for yourself.

  Voice is the human right to express an opinion and a feeling – a will.

  In politics, the vote is (ideally) the elector’s voice. Is the right of an indivi -

  dual to articulate their voice equivalent to the right to be heard by many?

  Or is the right to a platform earned by the quality of voice more than

  simply the effort that goes into using it?

  ‘Certainly as a writer, all you need is a pen and paper and a chair.

  The one thing you don’t need is permission.’

  Toby Whithouse

  CAN YOU HEAR YOUR OWN VOICE?

  Voice is crucial to great writing. But can you ever objectively hear your own

  voice yourself? Do you know what it is you have to say or want to say? Are

  your opinions, attitudes, purposes and desires ever fully clear and coher ent?

  THE BEGINNING 55

  Can you apply your own voice consciously? Or is it something that you must

  allow to shine through of its own accord?

  There are no right or wrong answers to any of these questions. And

  sitting around thinking too self-consciously about what your voice is could

  well be counter-productive. But in there somewhere along with the choices

  you make, the instincts you follow, the ideas you generate, the way you tell

  stories, the things you get right and the things you get wrong, the things

  that are universal and the things that are utterly you, is your voice. And it

  must be yours and yours alone – because that is what producer and audi -

  ence alike are looking for. Remember, everyone else is an audience – we

  need to hear your voice.

  ‘All I’ve ever wanted to be was a writer. It’s more like an addiction

  now. I don’t write to change things, I don’t write because I’m angry.

  The opposite, perhaps: I write because I love this life and I love us all

  for trying to survive it, for trying to make meaning and love out of

  chaos. That’s almost the definition of a writer, isn’t it? Making story

  and meaning out of chaos.’

  Ashley Pharaoh

  KINDS OF STORIES

  ARCHETYPES

  There are probably a finite number of story archetypes. Opinion will always

  differ about exactly how many there are and what we should call them. In

  Western culture there are, for example, tragedy, comedy, satire, romance,

  rite-of-passage, epic, revenge. Such essentials form the basis of what stories

  tend ultimately to be.

  Archetype is not genre; it is not a kind, classification or sort of story,

  but an original, originating model. You will never find the original, of course.

  Stories have been spinning off from archetypes since long before they were

  ever committed to paper. But there are some originals in terms of the first

  versions recorded for posterity: Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad, Aeschylus’

  Oresteia, Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex, Virgil’s Aeneid, Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

  And there are modern archetypes that come around through the ages –

  56 THE CALLING CARD SCRIPT

  Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, Potter’s Pennies from Heaven, Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

  From there, the big question is – what do you do with an archetype?

  What is your particular setting/context? What is your fresh take on it? What

  is your unique perspective? What is your original touch that will set this

  apart, even though the archetype still sits at the heart of it?

  A favourite example of mine is the film O Brother, Where Art Thou?

  by the Coen brothers. On one level, it is a relatively straightforward version

  of Homer’s Odyssey, an archetypal journey in Western epic storytelling – it

  has an Odysseus figure, it has his wife Penelope and her new suitor, it has

  the physical journey, the seductive sirens, the one-eyed monster Cyclops

  and so on. On another level, it places them within the specific context of the

  American deep south in the early twentieth century, with Blue Grass music

  and an expanse of land to traverse rather than an ocean of sea (though

  there is a deluge of water at the end). On another, crazier level, it turns

  Odysseus into the Three Stooges, and makes them comic petty criminals

  and prison escapees who become unlikely pop stars rather than victorious

  warrior heroes. And all because the Coen brothers thought the original

  story was ‘funny’. Nobody but them could possibly have read, understood

  and reimagined the archetype in this way. It drips with their idiosyncratic

  and unique take on the world.

  Shakespeare was especially brilliant at drawing on a range of arche -

  types and source materials to weave new stories that show their influences

  but create something new. Titus Andronicus is at a formative stage in his

  writing career and inspired by Kyd’s massively popular Elizabethan

  revenge tragedy, influenced by Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, and a kind of

  prototype of his own later play King Lear. But it is fundamentally inspired

  by the transformative Roman poetic tale of Procne and Philomel from Ovid’s

  Metamorphoses. The resulting play is pure Shakespeare – yet he wears his

  influences, inspirations and source materials proudly on his sleeve. To

  greater and lesser degrees all his plays come in this form – and this from

  the most famous, the most revered, the most brilliant playwrigh
t in history.

  So. Have you seen your basic idea before? What’s different and sur -

  prising about your version? What will you do to make the archetype your

  own? Surprising an audience (and reader) is crucial at this fundamental

  level.

  THE BEGINNING 57

  LINEAR

  Linear stories are in the majority by a long way because, I suppose, many

  a storyteller’s instinct is to start at the beginning and end at the end. And

  this in turn, I suppose, is because forwards is the direction in which life

  runs; in linear stories consequence and causality has a forward momentum

  that corresponds to the recognisable reality in which, in all our lives, the

  clocks tick on and on. In these stories the reason for everything that hap -

  pens is an accumulation of everything before it. What happens in the story,

  therefore, must follow on from what has already happened. If you throw in

  a narrative hand grenade – an alien visitation or some other trick that

  appears only once, comes out of nowhere and has no seeding or logic or

  relevant context (sometimes known as a deus ex machina) – then you cor -

  rupt the fundamental form of the story.

  If you decide your story is not linear, you need to consider and justify

  why that need be the case – why the deep structure should not correspond

  to the dominant archetypal structure.

  EPIC

  Epic stories tend to be linear in form. But what distinguishes epics is the

  sheer scale and size of the reach and vision in their seeming presentation

  of a whole world /universe – one in which the events of the story seemingly

  have an effect on that whole world . What also distinguishes them is the

  scale of heroism /villainy in the characters’ actions. In most linear stories,

  the events will not necessarily change lives beyond those of the core central

  characters; in epic, they will necessarily do so – thus the Star Wars saga,

  Lord of the Rings and tales from the Bible and other religious texts and

  traditions, such as the Ramayana or Mahabharata.

  Theatre has been epic since the biblical medieval mystery plays and

  Shakespeare’s histories. In Hamlet and King Lear, the end of the play marks a point at which nothing will be the same for world it presents. More recently,