The Calling Card Script

by Paul Ashton

  mean the overall beginning – the movement from the opening to the middle.

  Even if you are writing a ‘one-act’ short play for the stage, it should still

  have an ‘act one’ – a beginning – within it.

  STRUCTURAL DIAGRAMS

  Many screenwriting books propose diagrams and formulae – some elabo -

  rate, some bewildering – setting out how good and /or popular film stories

  have been and should be structured. They are invariably American, and

  invariably refer to American movies (though they do by extension apply to

  British films and a great many films across the world).

  Some are an inter esting read and can be useful. But I am not going to

  stipulate a complex, precise and prescriptive template, not simply because

  I am working across various mediums, but because I think that if you start

  applying complex structural blueprints to ideas you are still struggling to

  formulate (especially at an early stage of your mastery of the craft), then

  it’s easy to get distracted by plotting the detail of events rather than con -

  centrating on structuring the fundamentals of the story. The best of these

  books and writers argue that their templates are not necessarily prescrip -

  tive, and they are absolutely right – but unfortunately aspiring writers will

  THE BEGINNING 101

  use them in prescriptive ways, as a kind of crutch or exam crib rather than

  as a way of feeding and flexing their writer’s mind and muscle about how

  best to tell the stories they have to tell.

  I read far too many scripts that have clearly followed a template and

  are utterly forgettable because the slavish application of that template

  won’t make up for a lack of great character writing and a structure that

  develops from it. Inserting a piece of formula won’t make your script work

  better. I also think that it’s easy, with a template, to start editing and

  developing out the things that are unusual, distinctive and original about

  what you are doing with your story, the things that instinct tells you to do.

  Treading the line between acknowledging structures that work and making

  a structure your own is always difficult to do, full stop, at any point in your

  career – never mind do with elegant and sophisticated success.

  THE UNIVERSAL FORMULA

  I will, however, give you one universal formula (and yes this is an entirely pre-

  scriptive template) that is absolutely, one-hundred-per-cent indispensable:

  BEGINNING + MIDDLE + END

  (not necessarily in that order)

  = STORY

  Yes, I am stating the obvious – and doing so a little facetiously. But I do

  really mean it. Many writers forget this fundamental principle of engaging

  character and story, and instead lose themselves and their stories in the

  intricacies and trickeries of plot design and narrative complication.

  The middle is a consequence of the beginning and the ending is a con -

  sequence of the beginning and the middle combined. Not necessarily in that

  linear order as it is shown in the story (as in reversed and fragmented forms)

  but in that dramatic order in terms of causal relationship between the

  actions and events of the story. Only in the most surreal, absurd, experi -

  mental and downright strange stories does this not necessarily happen –

  and only in the writers that show mastery of craft and form (as opposed to

  wilfully maverick behaviour) does challenging the idea of dramatic caus -

  ality actually work, as in Samuel Beckett, David Lynch, Charlie Kaufman.

  If you re-plotted the fragmented events of 21 Grams into a linear

  telling, you would see a story of actions, reactions and consequences. It

  102 THE CALLING CARD SCRIPT

  wouldn’t be the same film and it wouldn’t be half so powerful, but the

  dramatic core of beginning, middle and ending would be there. A drunken

  man from the wrong side of the tracks runs down and kills a respectable

  father and his children on the street. The father’s donated heart saves

  another man who has barely bothered to keep going while he awaits a

  suitable heart for transplant. The saved man seeks out the bereaved wife/

  mother and their growing relationship in turn leads them to seek out and

  confront the killer, who is now a reformed and zealously godfearing man

  following his time in prison. And this journey leads to an ending where

  reform, remorse, forgiveness, anger and revenge meet in a true climax of

  fundamental human dilemma and conflict for all three characters. The film

  succeeds in its fragmented non-linear form because the linear dramatic

  story that underlies the form works.

  THREE IS THE MAGIC NUMBER

  BEGINNING MIDDLE END

  DESIRE OBSTACLE FULFILMENT

  NEED RESISTANCE RESOLUTION

  PROBLEM CONFLICT SOLUTION

  ACTION REACTION OUTCOME

  QUESTION ARGUMENT ANSWER

  I think story magic has always come in threes. So in terms of genres and

  kinds of stories, you get this:

  HEROIC JOURNEY: Call to adventure journey elixir (Star Wars)

  LOVE STORY: Desire test of love marriage (Four Weddings)

  THWARTED LOVE: Desire test of love parting (Breaking the Waves)

  TRAGEDY: Misunderstanding failure to understand death (Othello)

  CRIME: Misdemeanour detection capture (Inspector Morse)

  MYSTERY: Intrigue investigation clarity (Jonathan Creek)

  REVENGE: A ‘wrong’ pursuit payback (Dead Man’s Shoes)

  EPIC: Old world struggle new world (Elizabeth)

  COMING-OF-AGE: Youth maturation awareness (Kes)

  ACTION HERO: Challenge battle victory (James Bond)

  TRAGIC ACTION HERO: Challenge battle defeat (Coriolanus)

  AGAINST-THE-ODDS: Goal plan achievement (Billy Elliot)

  THE BEGINNING 103

  CIRCULAR: Beginning middle ending/beginning (Fawlty Towers)

  REPETITIVE: Beginning replayed beginning ending (Groundhog Day)

  REVERSED: End middle beginning (Betrayal)

  If you have fewer than three parts then you have one of three things:

  Only a beginning and ending where a need/desire is fulfilled or

  frustrated with no meaningful conflict or journey in between (lots

  of scripts get lost or grind to a halt in the middle).

  Only a beginning and middle, or a story with no ending (lots of

  scripts fail to deliver the right ending or any ending at all).

  Only a middle and ending, with a sweep of events but without the

  motivation, instigation or logic for them (lots of scripts don’t give us

  a meaningful reason to engage in the first place).

  If you get this fundamental triangulation of structural meaning wrong in

  the first place, I think you just don’t have a story that can satisfy – and

  therefore no real story at all.

  BUT THREE IS NOT A SIMPLE NUMBER

  The problem with three being the magic number is that beginnings,

  middles and endings are not necessarily of equivalent lengths. The journey

  of the middle normally comprises the larger part of the story as a whole.

  The ending can be a brief affair, though of course it depends where you ‘draw

  the line’ between act two and act three. Sometimes trying to draw definitive

  lines between acts is a fruitless and pointless exercise because differentr />
  strands will effect their separate changes at different points in the overall

  story. Or because people disagree about what the story (and therefore struc -

  ture) really is. Or because there is enough complexity in the story to mean

  that the structural blueprint that marked out the foundations have been

  absorbed into the form you have gone on to build above and beyond them.

  And the audience doesn’t necessarily want to have the architecture still on

  show in the finished story; most audiences want a story in which they can

  lose themselves.

  The point is that while theories are interesting, they won’t necessarily

  help you write well. Theory naturally requires all elements to fit, otherwise

  it has no value – and this is where people tie themselves in knots trying to

  104 THE CALLING CARD SCRIPT

  make their story correspond to a blueprint exactly and at all costs. You need

  to take a flexible approach to where the act divisions fall and where the

  lines are drawn according to what story you are trying to tell, and not

  stretch and bend your story to fit a template that seems to have worked for

  some other box-office-busting film that made billions of dollars across the

  ocean. If you are writing television episodes for a commercial broadcaster

  with exactly demarcated ad breaks then you do ultimately have to conform

  – but that’s what a script editor is there to help you do. You don’t write ad

  breaks into your calling card script. You tell the story.

  THE BEGINNING

  So taking in the first part of the three-part sequences above, you need to

  work out what at the beginning of your story is the fundamental desire,

  need, problem, tension, question, mystery, call, goal, challenge or action that

  takes your characters from the ordinary world that precedes it to the new

  one that will unfold within it. There are some fundamental elements that

  story tends to use and expect, but they won’t necessarily come in a set order.

  And for some forms and genres, longer will be spent on certain parts than

  with other forms and genres. But without them, the audience and story will

  struggle to orient themselves.

  DISORIENTATION VERSUS CONFUSION

  Disorientation may be your intention, and if you want to be radical and

  maverick then be so – but don’t mistake chopping out story functions for

  setting up an engaging intrigue, mystery or disorientation. You success fully

  create a disorienting effect through decisions about order and juxta position

  rather than through reinventing or ignoring structure and replacing it with

  confusion, chaos, ambiguity and gaping holes in the story.

  Many crime and murder mysteries open with the crime /murder and

  then go on to establish the context in which the crime has occurred because

  the intrigue and disorientation created by this juxtaposition in the opening

  is part and parcel of the genre and tone. This did not happen in Criminal

  Justice I (or II) because it is not in the crime or murder mystery genre – it is a state-of-the-nation TV serial about the criminal justice system as inves -

  tigated through a crime and a miscarriage of justice. The tension is in our

  THE BEGINNING 105

  relationship with the accused young man who does not remember the mur -

  der but does not believe he can be guilty (rather than in ‘working out’ the

  crime like a thrilling crossword); he does not remember the crime even

  though he knows he was present; therefore we do not see who commits it

  until the evidence finally comes to light and the truth is made known to the

  world (and not because we want to see how clever the detective, criminal or

  writer are). What distinguishes the two kinds of ‘crime’ story in these terms

  is the juxtaposition of events, not the disregard of structure.

  ESTABLISH THE WORLD

  This does not mean set up the story, preface the story or deliver story

  exposition and backstory. It means establish the principles of the world you

  are presenting. For the majority of naturalistic, realistic worlds, this may

  take very little time because the rules do not fundamentally differ from the

  real world we inhabit, and therefore the conceptual leap is small. For high-

  concept, supernatural, sci-fi, futuristic, surreal worlds it will almost inevit -

  ably take longer because they do differ from the world we inhabit. But the

  key thing still is to not do it through static, undramatic exposition, but

  through action, in the moment, in the story – and to do it as simply and

  clearly as possible.

  In Hamlet, scene one immediately presents a world where the per -

  turbed ghost of the dead king walks the ramparts of Elsinore and terrifies

  the guards. Then we see the seat of power where his brother Claudius has

  taken the place of the dead king by marrying his widow – and where the

  bereaved son is still in deep mourning and anguish. We see this world in

  action – the ghost appears before our eyes, the new king directs the ‘court’

  as to the new-found (and short-lived) security he has apparently brought to

  the state of Denmark. It is clearly, quickly established that a world of both

  state power and private grief are so out of joint that a ghost is haunting the

  living.

  DELAYED ESTABLISHMENT

  Sometimes the central characters do not realise the world is something

  very different from what they have experienced every day so far, in which

  case the full establishment of this hidden world may not come until rather

  106 THE CALLING CARD SCRIPT

  later. But in these cases of delayed clarity, the establishment performs

  other and rather different story functions: the call to adventure ( Shaun of

  the Dead) or the climax and turning point of the beginning ( Being John

  Malkovich) or both (episode one of Life on Mars). In Shaun, there is a comic-dramatic irony in us realising that zombies have taken over when Shaun

  in his daily morning stupor does not. In Malkovich, the world is already

  pretty strange and heightened, so the discovery of a portal into a famous

  actor’s brain comes as a weird surprise rather than an entirely random

  shock. And the change of world in Life on Mars is a smart shift from clinical

  twenty-first century policing to the unreconstructed world of 1970s coppers,

  this tension being the central hook of the show.

  DESIRE, NEED, PROBLEM

  Structurally, we need to see in action what the characters desire, what they

  need, and what is the fundamental problem in both. Hamlet wants for his

  father to not be dead; he needs to get over his father’s death; he also needs

  to right a wrong; but his father is dead, he can’t get over it because he can’t

  ignore the wrong that he must set right. He wants for his mother not to

  have married her brother-in-law so quickly (or at all); he needs his mother

  to continue grieving with him and acknowledge that nobody could ever replace

  his father; he also needs to accept that she must move on for the sake of

  Denmark; but his mother has remarried, his father has been replaced, and he cannot accept that her grief appears less than his own or that she could

  conceivably move on. He wants to escape Elsinore and return to his studies

  in Wittenberg; he
needs to find peace rather than to run away; he is pres -

  surised into staying to fulfil his duty and function as Prince of Denmark.

  He wants to die; he needs to stay alive; suicide is a mortal sin. In the first

  scene and soliloquy we spend with Hamlet, all these wants, needs and

  problems are established.

  You won’t necessarily need to stack all the needs into one scene like

  this. But they need to be there in the beginning as a whole. In Life on Mars,

  Sam’s initial desire is to catch the criminal. When the suspect walks free,

  he thinks he needs to draw a line between work and his personal relation -

  ship with Maya in order to focus and resolve the error made in gathering

  evidence. But the real problem is that he needs to stop relying on his clinical

  take on evidence alone and listen to her appeal to go with his gut instinct.

  THE BEGINNING 107

  When Maya goes missing as a consequence of standing her down from the

  case, he wants her safely back. He needs to use his instinct and his forensic

  brain to find her. But his emotions take over and he hits a metaphorical

  wall. And, after about ten minutes of story, a real car hits him and somehow

  sends him back to the 1970s. At which point, a whole new set of wants and

  needs and problems join his initial ones.

  CALL TO CHANGE/ACTION

  There are various ways of characterising this fundamental storytelling

  function and you may get a number of them in your script:

  The instigating incident – the event that shows/tells the characters

  that change is afoot (even if they don’t realise as much).

  The inciting action – the cause through which change is brought

  about and begins to emerge.

  The call to arms or adventure – the literal rallying cry or another

  kind of appeal to the characters to take up arms and /or take to their

  heels in pursuit of change

  What can throw writers is when they confuse instigating or inciting action

  that brings about the events of the story before we begin watching – the

  backstory – with what we experience within the story. All good stories will