The Calling Card Script

by Paul Ashton

  have backstory that is dramatic. But you need to make sure that there is

  this crucial action within the story, visible to the audience.

  You might say that the incitement for Hamlet is the murder of the

  king before the play starts. But then what incited that action? And the one

  before? The instigating incident of the events of the play that we see is that

  first appearance of the ghost at night in scene one. When Hamlet is told of

  this haunting, it is a call to him. But it is the second appearance of the ghost

  that Hamlet witnesses, during which he is told of his father’s murder, that

  becomes the true call to arms – the call to revenge – that sets in motion the

  subsequent events of the play. Of course, Hamlet famously does not set

  straight on this course of revenge like many avengers before and after him.

  His journey is much less direct, and this is what makes it distinct.

  In Billy Elliot the instigating incident is Billy watching the ballet

  dancers after the boxing class his father forces him to take and which he so

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  despises. The inciting action is his decision to take part in a subsequent

  ballet class. The true call to adventure is when, despite his clumsy attempts

  to join in, he is told that he should keep going, that he does have the poten -

  tial, that he could be a dancer.

  The incidents, actions and calls are not necessarily external and visible.

  They may be from within, a kind of growing consciousness of what a char -

  acter wants and /or needs. They may even remain immediately unaware

  and unwitting of the extent and meaning of that call.

  THE COMPLEX CALL

  The call should be the root of complexity rather than just some scenes to

  tick off on a checklist of what you are supposed to do in order to have some -

  thing that resembles a story structure. This is the point. Don’t just throw

  in an incident, an action, a ‘call’. They need to derive from your characters.

  Just as Othello returns to Cyprus a military hero, Desdemona’s father

  accuses him of stealing (eloping with) his daughter. The instigating incident

  is the accusation, Othello’s assured and honourable response to it, and

  society’s apparent but perhaps tenuous acceptance of this. This feeds into

  the complexity that follows. For it is not simply his ability to retain his

  status and respect while also being a black man in a white world (which he

  does for a while), but his ability to retain his honour in the face of insinu -

  ations that Desdemona has cheated on him. These insinuations of infidelity

  are not public like the first accusation but private, planted in his head by

  the scheming, plotting Iago.

  This is the real story of the play and the opening scene is the start of

  that story, but what follows is more complex than was suggested at the

  start. It is not just about the difficulty of him being black or of being a

  soldier in polite society, it is also about his inner strength of character, his

  strength of mind, his faith in Desdemona, his trust in his own instincts and

  emotions, and the decisions he takes that eventually unravel both. His ‘call’

  is to be the man Desdemona believed him to be (and he believed himself to

  be) when she married him. In the beginning, nobody (except perhaps Iago)

  realises that this is the journey he is being called upon to make.

  THE BEGINNING 109

  THE UNCERTAINTY

  When a three-dimensional character is called upon to undertake a journey,

  take up a cause and step outside their ordinary world of safety and security,

  if they have any depth in their character then there will inevitably be some

  form of uncertainty about what they do: a reluctance to take up the call, a

  fear of that change, uncertainty over their ability to handle change, a desire

  to return to the security of ignorance or insignificance – otherwise known

  as ‘the refusal’. Again, this isn’t a ‘refusal’-shaped scene or block that you

  insert here. It is character-shaped, personality-shaped, story-shaped.

  Hamlet spends much of his tragedy veering back to the uncertainty

  and refusal of the point before which he made a pact with his father from

  beyond the grave to avenge murder. Perhaps this is because there was

  simply no time to think in between the call to revenge and the promise to

  pursue it? Hamlet only has the opportunity to question his decision once he

  has already made his promise – hence his dilemma.

  In Life on Mars Sam spends a full two series’ worth of episodes solving

  crimes and trying to get back ‘home’ before finally and truly taking up the

  call in the penultimate scene of the final episode to leap off a building and

  back to the 1970s and the ‘real’ him – a call that is entirely different to what

  he thought it was in the beginning.

  In Criminal Justice II, Juliette takes up the call of defending in court

  her action to kill her abusive husband. But it is a complex response because

  it is only in the final stages of the fifth episode of the serial (and a number

  of months later) that she is finally pushed to acknowledge why she did it –

  and in a sense this is the call she refused to take up from the beginning

  because she is ashamed of the admission that her husband buggered her,

  because she doesn’t want the world to know it, and most of all because she

  doesn’t want her daughter to know.

  For some characters, often the more subsidiary ones, this uncertainty

  or this status of reluctant hero is core and is present throughout. Han Solo

  in Star Wars is a classic reluctant hero, never willing until the final heroic

  moment to take up the cause of the rebels against the Empire. In Han’s

  journey as a character, the reluctance and refusal is the story.

  Hearing the call, taking up the call and then succeeding or failing in

  the journey are not things you ‘come up with’. They are essential to the

  story, fundamental to the characters, integral to the reason for watching

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  the play or series or film, and as such they should not be simplistic and a

  box to tick, but complex – and a question to keep asking your characters

  throughout.

  THE POINT OF NO RETURN

  The end of the beginning (and also the beginning of the end, ultimately) is

  when events reach such a point of no return that change in the world of the

  play and character’s life is inevitable. This is the point at which there is

  some form of cementing of the situation or turn of events that confirms the

  direction in which the story is heading. As such, it is normally climactic

  (a crisis) or at least pivotal (a definite shift of direction), and can mean

  identifying the opposition to (or the consequences of ) not taking up the call.

  At the point of no return too much has already happened in the story,

  too much has already changed in the world and for the character. At the

  point of no return the events have already gained a momentum that cannot

  simply be stopped or ignored, though they can still be influenced – other -

  wise taking up the call would be the equivalent of a certain suicide mission.

  In many action thrillers, a seeming suicide
mission is exactly what

  things might appear to be at this point. Does it really seem likely that John

  can foil the terrorists and save his wife in Die Hard? Well, not until we see

  him being heroic and invincible in action and slowly come to believe it

  might just be possible – that’s the hook, that’s our connection with him,

  that’s the tension. The terrorists won’t go away just because he’s been down

  on his luck and doesn’t feel prepared for this battle. Yet there’s a chance,

  however slim, that he can find a way at least to do something.

  Billy Elliot could stop taking the ballet lessons and give up his ‘secret’.

  But the point of no return is less that events are unstoppable than that his

  desire and passion beyond a certain point is unquenchable – therefore

  events are unstoppable. His desire to dance is clear from scene one, where

  he fails to babysit his senile grandmother, but it isn’t until he chooses to

  keep the ballet shoes, promises to return to the class and begins hiding his

  secret from his father that the unquenchable desire becomes fully clear to

  him.

  In every good story there is a moment, whether climactic and world-

  changing or quiet and unnoticed by everyone but the central character, in

  which the threshold between hearing the call at the beginning and taking

  THE BEGINNING 111

  up the call in the middle is crossed. Wherever it falls in the design and

  shape of your story, this more than anything is likely to be the end of the

  beginning.

  TENSION

  For the beginning to have a causal relationship with the end, a tension bet -

  ween the two must exist. The tension from the beginning onwards is in the

  possible outcomes of the events and actions of the opening on the spectrum

  between comedy and tragedy – between either managing to resolve or fail -

  ing to avert the danger or problem that exists for the characters. What

  could be the ultimate effect of change?

  Tension also exists in the shortfall between what a character wants and

  what they get. What they need and what they get. What they realise and do

  not realise, understand and do not understand, believe and do not believe.

  The distinct possibility of the ending is in the beginning, otherwise

  there would be no tension to carry us from the one to the other across the

  story. What is the causal, necessary and inevitable ending of your story?

  Hamlet is called upon to avenge his father’s murder. He calls upon

  himself to do so, at the start and throughout. Yet he struggles throughout

  to attain the confidence, surety and conviction that it is the right thing to

  do. This is the tension – can he bring himself to do it? And if he does, what

  will be the consequences?

  EPISODE AND SERIES BEGINNINGS

  Beginnings (and middles and ends) are all well and good when you are

  writing a single, one-off, finite story. But when you are writing a continuing

  series, returning series or serial drama, the episode must have not only a

  beginning, middle and ending of its own, but also be the beginning of the

  longer or ongoing format.

  If your calling card is for a series then you will need both to tell a full

  episode story and begin the series as a whole in your episode; if the series

  is in seasons (i.e., returning) then you will also need a beginning, middle

  and end to the season.

  If it is for a finite serial then you will almost certainly not have a

  defined ‘story of the week’ episode narrative that comes to a strong sense of

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  closure; however, you will still need a shape to the opening instalment, a

  sense of building towards an episode climax, even though we know there is

  more to come.

  Striking the right balance between internal episode structure and the

  way the episode sits within the larger series and serial arc is always diffi -

  cult. You need to be sure and clear about what kind of show you are writing.

  But whatever kind of show it is, you need to tell an episode story that does

  have a beginning, middle and ending shape to it.

  Episode one of Life on Mars is a very smart example of when a return -

  ing series strikes that balance perfectly – although it did take nearly forty

  drafts of the script over a number of years from an experienced writer

  (Matthew Graham) collaborating with other very experienced writers

  (Ashley Pharaoh and Tony Jordan) on the series as a whole. In the opening

  fifteen minutes, Sam Tyler goes from his 2007 pursuit of suspect Colin

  Raimes, to failing to keep that suspect, to Maya being kidnapped, to being

  sent back in time to the 1970s and finding himself amidst an unrecon -

  structed police squad immediately supervised by Gene Hunt, the über-

  seventies copper.

  By the end of the episode he has solved the crime, prob ably prevented

  Colin Raimes from turning into a future criminal, racked his brain trying

  to work out why he has gone back in time, and nearly leapt off the top of a

  building in desperation because he doesn’t know what to do next. The

  tension that is created in the opening fifteen minutes feeds both the episode

  story of solving a crime and the series arc of Sam working out why he is

  there, how to get home, and whether home is what he believes it to be. It is

  a fantastic beginning to a fantastic show.

  THE PLAN OF ACTION

  WHEN TO START WRITING?

  At the very beginning, I said not to start writing your actual script straight

  away. If you have been developing and working through all the questions

  raised thus far, then everything you have done is ‘writing’. There is no magic

  scheduled moment when you start filling a blank page with words in a

  scriptwriting program. But many people do start committing words to page

  THE BEGINNING 113

  in a scriptwriting program before they have really taken stock, worked out

  where they are going and given their idea the time and space to breath,

  gestate and take a form of its own in their head out of the preparatory

  material they have collected.

  TREATMENTS

  Detailed prose treatments are tricky things, often on the one hand grudg -

  ingly accepted or on the other despised and rejected. I’ve never met a script -

  writer who genuinely enjoys writing treatments. They might value them,

  need them, believe in them, but they never seem to love them. Because they

  are not drama – they are a way of organising the story in non-dramatic

  form and therefore in a way counter-intuitive to the dramatic writer.

  A detailed treatment is often now a requirement in the script com -

  missioning process in TV and film. So if you are serious, you may well have

  to get to grips with them, like it or not. But when you are writing your

  calling card script, I would advise against using a detailed prose treatment

  unless you feel or already know that it’s the kind of preparation that will

  work for you. Even so, I would question how useful it would be. They can be

  deadening to the not-yet-hardened professional.

  In practice, treatments give all interested parties – writer, script

  editor, producer, commissioner – an opp
ortunity to clarify the story before

  they are carried along on the wave of a script. If the commission is for a

  proven scriptwriter, the danger of getting swept away is even greater and

  it can be easier for all involved to remain on more equal terms in dull prose

  at the earliest stage. But with a calling card script, you are the writer, script

  editor and commissioner of sorts all in one. I would stick instead with a road

  map that feels malleable to you, and worry about treatments later.

  CLARITY

  At this point a useful thing to do is to test clarity to see if you can boil it

  down into three things:

  A one-sentence logline.

  A one-paragraph pitch.

  A one-page outline.

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  They might not read beautifully and elegantly but they don’t have to

  (and nobody else need ever see them) so long as they tell a coherent, abbre -

  viated version of your story as you see it at this stage. This is a test. It can

  show you whether all the great stuff running through your head actually

  coheres into meaningful, story-shaped wholes that are small, very small

  and miniscule. (It may also be that you aren’t very good at them – yet – but

  you don’t know until you try.)

  Don’t write out the plot or list events in narrative order. Don’t try to

  get out every detail. Don’t try to explain every element and idea. And don’t

  act like you are hawking your idea to a Hollywood mogul. Just get down the

  story – the idea, the kind, the form, the characters, the beating heart of it,

  the reason to tell the story, the things you think you are trying to say, what

  it is that’s distinct about it, what it is that makes it yours. In the logline you

  won’t have the space to express much more than the heart of the idea.

  Gather together everything you have gestated thus far and set it down in

  a heartfelt expression to yourself.

  Now put them away in a drawer for a week. Do the other stuff you have

  neglected in your writerly preoccupation. Ignore it as best you can.

  COHERENCE

  Now go back to them as objectively as you can and see whether they are a