The Calling Card Script

by Paul Ashton

  FILM CHARACTER

  A great film character need never actually speak words, as in the greatest

  silent movies. So too in theatre or TV – but in film, the cinematic canvas

  speaks character action from the minutiae of extreme close-up to the pano -

  rama of the long, wide shot. Walkabout has very little script and dialogue –

  it is primarily visual storytelling, and powerfully so. Film need only have

  one character – as in Moon (though that one-ness is strange and complex).

  So too theatre, radio and TV – but film has the ability to follow a character,

  observe them, detail them without them explaining anything to us. In radio,

  theatre and TV, a single character almost certainly means a monologue –

  in film, it means visual storytelling. Not many films do this in such an

  extreme way, but it’s worth remembering that it’s something that films can

  do uniquely.

  TV CHARACTER

  On the smaller screen, in the corner of the room, characters need to be big.

  We don’t have physical presence, visual scope and breadth, or (usually) a

  short cut into their mind /voice. Instead, they need to stand out, be writ

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  large, bully their way into our living rooms and our attention. Soaps can be

  quite Dickensian, upfront, immediately appreciable. Extreme subtlety does

  not necessarily play as well or as successfully on TV, though this of course

  depends on the genre, format and what an audience demands from a par -

  ticular slot and channel at a particular time. But being ‘big’ is always

  essential.

  HITTING THE GROUND RUNNING

  PAGE ONE

  So you have developed your characters, explored the form, world, idea,

  story, theme, genre, focus, POV, and you know where you are trying to go by

  the end of the story. If you have set about this work well, and by virtue of

  knowing the ending, you should have a sense deep in your gut or brain

  about where to begin. But the writing process is never so logical and simple

  – beginnings are notoriously difficult to get right and a great many scripts

  don’t manage to hit the ground running on page one, scene one, line one.

  When I say ‘hit the ground running’, I do not mean an action chase or

  a literal interpretation of speed – unless of course your story is in the action

  or thriller genre. I mean that the story should be under way straightaway.

  Page one, scene one, line one, is where the audience touches down. The last

  thing you want them to do is then collapse in a heap of confusion, tedium

  or emotional disconnection. It is extremely easy to lose an audience. In TV

  and radio, this can literally mean them turning off, turning over or surfing

  back and forth in prevarication. In film and theatre, it’s unlikely they will

  actually leave unless they believe it is truly awful – but you can still lose

  your hold on their attention, engagement and enjoyment. And once you have

  lost the audience, you face a hard climb up a sheer rock face to get them back.

  KNOW YOUR STORY

  As I have already said, it’s hard to tell a story well and to know where a

  story is going if you don’t know what you think it is about. It is even harder

  to know how, where and when to set a story rolling if you don’t really know

  what it is and you don’t really know it thoroughly. You can’t ultimately fake

  THE BEGINNING 95

  this thoroughness and you can waste a lot of time doing, undoing and

  redoing your script because you have leapt into it before you know what

  kind of story it is, what kind of effect you hope to have, what is original

  about it, who the characters are and why we would go on their journey with

  them. I’m not talking about knowledge of plot details and narrative minu -

  tiae; I’m talking about what the story fundamentally is at its heart. With

  this knowledge should come the instinct and the clarity to clear the decks of

  clutter and find the right beginning for the story, characters and audience.

  HOOK THE ATTENTION

  Reel the audience in straight away – don’t wait. The kind and genre of story

  you are telling will greatly influence the style and manner in which you do

  this – Bond movies always start with a bang, whereas My Summer of Love

  started with a teenage girl freewheeling an engineless moped through

  remote roads and fields – but you still need to identify what is the intrigue,

  or mystery, the conflict or tension, the sense of captivation and compulsion

  that will exist and develop throughout.

  Jack Thorne’s play When You Cure Me begins with a teenage boy and

  girl in a bedroom. The girl is bedridden, though it is unclear why. The boy

  appears to be her boyfriend but their close proximity is very awkward. He

  is trying very hard (too hard) to help and care for her; she is finding this

  uncomfortable but it quickly becomes clear that she doesn’t want her

  mother to take over, she wants him to be there with and for her. In the

  opening moments, we see him awkwardly help her use a toilet in a bedpan

  and this simple action effectively allows the themes and emotional relation -

  ships to come immediately into play.

  But it isn’t just miserable or depressing – the scene has a tender,

  gently comic awkwardness as well. In the play, we will never leave this

  girl’s bedroom and she will never leave her bed, even though it isn’t evident

  on medical grounds why she is incapable of doing so. The boy will try to stay

  with her as much as possible and their relationship – which has only really

  just begun but has instantly been turned upside down by a stranger raping

  her – will be put through the kind of pressure that no teenage relation ship

  should have to endure.

  Shane Meadows’ film A Room for Romeo Brass begins with an un -

  assuming but lovely sequence in which Romeo is taking home bags of chips

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  for his family’s tea. His friend Knocks tags along. But Romeo can’t resist

  starting to eat his chips on the way. He then decides to ‘balance out’ the

  three bags by eating from the other two bags, until all three bags are

  depleted. All the while, he refuses to let his pleading friend have a single chip.

  This is a film about a simple but strong relationship between neigh bouring

  teenage boys that is turned inside out when an older man appears on the

  scene and events look like they will take a sinister turn for the worse.

  The opening doesn’t give away this change and turn, but it does hook

  us straight away into the relationship between the two boys and does hint

  that the bond is vulnerable in Romeo’s insistence on not giving his friend a

  single chip while he gobbles them up himself. And it does show that Romeo

  has the capacity to make very wrong decisions about the consequences of

  his actions (when he gets home, Romeo gets a deserving bollocking from his

  mum and sister). The moment is both endearing and revealing. This sequ -

  ence sets the central characters, relationship, world and theme of the film

  from the start.

  In Matthew Graham’s opening episode in series one of Life on Mars,

  we begin with the turning wheels of a police car on the way
to apprehend a

  murder suspect. It is immediately clear that this is a cop show. Sam Tyler,

  a young, clean-cut, besuited copper knocks on the door of Colin Raimes and

  gives chase when Raimes takes to his heels. Sam catches up with him and,

  in a back alley of a Manchester red-brick estate, it seems for a split second

  that Sam is perhaps out of his depth and not cut out for a hand-to-hand

  fight. That is until he floors Raimes using a textbook manoeuvre with his

  retractable baton, and without breaking a sweat or scuffing his suit.

  Then we cut to the interview room where it looks as if Sam has the

  evidence neatly stacked up against Raimes. That is until a very big hole

  that Sam had missed in the evidence is pointed out and Raimes is set free.

  So our expectations are neatly upturned twice in quick succession – as we

  would hope in a crime show. The twenty-first century police practices that

  will soon disappear as we travel back to 1973, along with Sam’s personality

  and his reliance upon those practices, are set out at once in brilliantly

  economic television scriptwriting.

  In Dennis Kelly’s radio drama The Colony, we are drawn into the

  apparently curious place of Paul Henry’s inner world and a moment in time

  after which nothing will ever be the same again. He tells us in monologue

  the tale of how as a boy in 1975 he came to call John Noakes from Blue

  THE BEGINNING 97

  Peter a ‘prick’ live on television. The tale is in a sense a complete diversion

  from the magnitude of what we will come to see in this story. But it’s one

  that tells us a huge amount about the character, and not simply because the

  character is ‘telling’ us – but because he is telling us in the middle of a

  moment, in his flat, with the noise of a loud party in a flat opposite (he

  occasionally breaks off from his monologue to scream at them to turn the

  music down), moments before a tragic accident changes the lives of every -

  one who witnesses it or is close by. Clearly a tragic death is in a sense not

  comparable to a youthful moment of indiscretion on live TV; but to Paul

  Henry, it is on the same life-changing scale from his POV.

  THE MIDST OF A MOMENT

  Cut straight into the action. Open in the middle of an event, conflict or

  moment. In the above four examples, we begin mid-moment – using a bed -

  pan, failing to deliver supper, apprehending a suspect and screaming at the

  neighbours to turn the noise down.

  The best way to do this is to show characters in action. Again, not an

  action sequence – rather characters actively being themselves, making

  decisions, doing things. These things can be monumental. In the first scene

  of King Lear, the hero divides up his kingdom between his least favourite

  daughters, falls out spectacularly with his once-favoured daughter, displays

  his vanity and sets in motion events that will lead to terrible tragedy for

  himself, his family and his kingdom. But doing very small things is ‘action’

  so long as they are things that express the character and feed into the story

  that follows. Making a cock-up of buying chips is a very, very small action,

  but one that tells us a huge amount about the wilfulness and naivety of

  Romeo Brass that will get him into such trouble later.

  A FOCUSED WAY IN

  Multi-stranded stories do pose a particular problem for the writer, and the

  larger the cast of characters the harder it will be to hook the audience. The

  temptation can be to give the audience a snapshot of all major aspects of

  the world at the start. Five Days is a good example, where a TV serial opens

  very quietly but surely and deliberately draws you in through seemingly

  insignificant but in fact very precisely chosen and important moments that

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  glimpse at most of the main players in the drama to come. But in episode

  one of Shameless, a gang show about a wild family squashed into a small

  house (or ‘the Waltons on acid’, as the creator Paul Abbott pitched it), we

  are given a neatly focused way into the world and series.

  After the opening credits, episode one could have spent the first ten

  minutes giving us various glimpses of the whole family in action, or even a

  chaotic breakfast table tableau that would throw us into the melee of their

  world. However, the episode is focused through Fiona’s POV (the lynchpin,

  elder-sister, substitute-mother in that first series) and is filtered through

  her meeting Steve for the first time at a nightclub in Manchester, away from

  the Chatsworth estate – where Steve spots his ideal girl across the dance

  floor, gives chase to the thief who steals her handbag, and punches the

  bouncer who refuses to let them back into the club afterwards. Then they go

  back to the Gallagher house, where they find Frank comatose on the floor –

  an auspicious first meeting if ever there was one. Then they spend the night

  together. And then, next morning, we meet the rest of the family . . .

  ‘GETTING TO KNOW’ THE CHARACTERS

  Try not to consciously preface, set up or introduce the characters and world.

  If you are showing your characters in engaging action then we are getting

  to know them and the world they inhabit in the best way possible. But if

  you are trying to ‘ease’ us into the characters and world before or outside

  the action of the main story, you just won’t hook our attention anything like

  so well. We get to know the characters by seeing them doing meaningful

  things, not by seeing them go through meaningless routines. If they are

  going to do an everyday thing (the son buying chips for the family), show

  them doing something meaningful or unusual with it (eating half of every -

  one’s chips before even making it back through the front door in the know -

  ledge, surely, that it will get him into trouble).

  EXPOSITION

  Beware the obvious exposition of backstory at the start. This is, of course,

  easier said than done. The opening scene of King Lear might set rolling all

  the main events of the play, but Shakespeare isn’t averse to crowbarring us

  in with an expository exchange between Kent and Gloucester (although in

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  truth he wrote worse dialogue than this in his time). Audiences are much

  more capable of piecing together information and going with the flow than

  we usually think – what they struggle to do is stick with a story if they are

  immediately laden with static information and explanation in undramatic

  scenes.

  If you have chosen to start the story in a particular place for a mean -

  ingful dramatic reason, then do you need to throw in lots of detail about

  how the characters got there? If information is important in the story, then

  it should come out in the story. Don’t shoehorn information in at the start

  – find an action, conflict or incident that shows it. Ask yourself how much

  an audi ence really needs to know to orient themselves and be interested

  enough to want to find out more. The more your genre relies on intrigue and

  withholding information – as in detective, mystery, psychological thriller –

  the more manipulative and playful you will need to be with
information.

  But blunt opening exposition which is there purely for the benefit of ‘set -

  ting up’ the story for the audience, as opposed to being there for a dramatic

  story-driven reason, is never good writing.

  THE CAPTIVE AUDIENCE

  Some say that in theatre in particular, but also in film, once the audience

  has bought their ticket and taken their seat, you have them captive and you

  can do what you want. I agree that in these mediums you are afforded some

  space with the audience. It would have to be pretty bad for you to get up

  and leave before the end, surely? That’s true. But audiences can also form

  quick and lasting impressions at the beginning and, as I’ve said, once you

  have lost them and they have lost faith in your story, you face an uphill

  struggle to get them back on side.

  The other thing is – the reader of your script can put it down, can

  choose not to bother reading to the end, can make an instant judgement and

  decide that’s enough for them to make a decision. The reader is not a cap -

  tive audience. If they are busy, even less so. And if they have a steady

  stream of other scripts to plough through, less so again.

  So if you think you can get away with not hooking the attention in

  your stage play or art-house film, think again.

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  STRUCTURE AND THE BEGINNING

  Structure is not an add-on to story. It is not something you ‘apply’ to story.

  It is intrinsic, essential, fundamental – indivisible from story, inseparable

  from storytelling. Much of what I have discussed regarding medium, form,

  format, archetypes, genre, idea, premise, beginnings and endings, direction,

  focus, POV and character is another way of exploring structure – the kind

  of story you choose to tell, the way in which you choose to tell it. Without an

  engagement with these other elements, all you will have is plot – a route

  that you take. But with them, what you will have is meaningful story struc -

  ture – a journey that we make.

  ‘ACT ONE’

  This term was filched from theatre quite some time ago and has become the

  standard language of Hollywood movie-speak. I’m using the term loosely to