The Calling Card Script

by Paul Ashton

  journey and development. But in Being John Malkovich, once Craig

  Schwartz has stepped into the strange new world of LesterCorp on floor

  7½ of an office building and discovered a portal into the mind of John

  Malkovich, he embraces this new world in the confused belief that it will

  impress Maxine and in the confused desire to live someone else’s life for

  ever (like Dr Lester’s clandestine band who have been priming this portal

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  for their journey into eternity). Yes, it is very, very weird. But the character

  journey isn’t without logic, desire, need and a complex state of becoming.

  I’m not sure what the ending says and what the anagnorisis is, but the

  character middle isn’t remotely as random as it might seem.

  Twin Peaks, David Lynch’s seminal TV series, is also very weird. But

  for the characters, it is always ultimately about who killed Laura Palmer –

  or put another way, what killed her. The opening discovery of her dead body

  and the arrival of Special Agent Dale Cooper is the opening of a Pandora’s

  box for everyone in the town, and the whole show goes on that journey until

  the revelation (of sorts) in the dark finale.

  Your world and your version of the characters’ journeys and states of

  becoming can be as weird, skewed and unconventional as you want them to

  be. But they should not be without logic, purpose, meaning, vulnerability,

  change, complexity, wants, needs, actions, relationships or consequences.

  Put another way, they should not be without an arc.

  SURPRISE

  Surprise is one of the things that keeps an audience hooked and engaged.

  Not simply plot twists and turns – though for certain genres, such as

  detective and thriller, they are a must – but where the characters’ actions,

  reactions and decisions surprise the audience, one another and themselves,

  revealing something new as the story progresses.

  Surprise is a hard thing to do well. It’s too easy to write material that

  doesn’t surprise the audience. It’s too easy to write a script that plays out

  predictably, goes exactly where we expect it to go in a way that we have

  seen before a dozen times, and therefore says nothing new.

  Surprise is a particular problem in the middle and many scripts fail

  to keep the attention because nothing (or not enough) that is surprising

  happens along the way. Surprise is all about change – if things stay the

  same or do not develop interestingly, then predictability and tedium will

  never be far away.

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  REVELATION

  Many writers assume surprise means throwing shocks at the characters

  that seem to come from nowhere – from somewhere that isn’t really gener -

  ated by the actions. Affecting surprise does not come out of the blue – it

  comes from character.

  A big mistake writers can make is to panic about the middle being

  exciting and interesting, and therefore to launch sudden revelations about

  who the character is or what their backstory is. You must be careful about

  what you reveal and about whom. If you suddenly reveal something essen -

  tial and life-changing (i.e., story-changing) that the character knew but was

  holding back from us then you run the risk of making the audience feel

  cheated and lied to by a character they have connected and engaged with

  thus far. Central characters withholding information from the audience is

  a dangerous game to play, and is most likely a problem of clarity about who

  the central character is and who is making the revelation.

  In The Crying Game there comes an infamous revelation in the plot

  about the gender of a character we have always assumed to be female. Fergus

  is the central character of this story and if the revelation had been by him

  and about something so fundamental as his own gender then the audience

  would be alienated by the surprise. But the revelation is about a secondary

  character, and as such the revelation is a powerful surprise, and one that

  has a massive impact on the ‘hero’ Fergus. And from this revelation Fergus

  surprises himself – not by his initial, instinctive response, which is revul -

  sion and violence, but by his subsequent response, which is reconciliation

  and a realisation that he is still attracted to Dil despite knowing the un -

  comfortable truth and despite his position in a paramilitary organisation.

  Getting character surprise the right way round like this is crucial – because

  getting it wrong means confusing, tricking, losing the audience.

  There is a pivotal moment in A Room for Romeo Brass when Knocks,

  who has had nagging doubts about the peculiar Morell, is taken by sur -

  prise. Morell has spotted these nagging doubts and suddenly turns on

  Knocks, threatening him to keep quiet. It is a horrible moment for Knocks

  because it is a jolt, it is an augur of things to come, he feels in danger but

  has to keep his fear to himself not only for his own sake but also for his

  friend Romeo. It is the moment the wedge between the two young friends

  begins to push them apart. And it is a surprise to the audience. We think

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  Morell is strange but also funny, off his head but probably harmless – yet

  at this moment we realise he isn’t harmless and he isn’t as oblivious to

  what’s going on around him as everyone might think. This isn’t so much a

  revelation of hidden information or unknown backstory, but of character, of

  personality and of conflict.

  Occasionally a concluding character revelation works in the most

  twisting, turning thriller – such as No Way Out – but this is extremely rare

  and the hero keeping a major secret from the audience is simply cheating

  on them. Surprise is where the audience realises new things and gains

  understanding alongside the characters as they develop and grow. This is

  empathy and synchronicity. It is connection. And it is satisfaction. Make the

  audience and character connect by revealing new things to both as the

  journey progresses. Don’t hurl random plot-grenades at them in the hope

  that it will be surprising; they won’t resonate meaningfully and the audi -

  ence won’t thank or respect you for it.

  DEUS EX MACHINA

  Another version of this random hurling of plot is the ‘deus ex machina’ from

  classical theatre, which very loosely translates as ‘the gods intervening

  from outside the action of the play ’. At the end of Euripides’ Medea, a

  chariot descends from the heavens and removes Medea from the scene of

  her murderous, vengeful actions. She does not face the immediate conse -

  quences of her revenge against her unfaithful husband – that is, the

  murder of her own sons. The ending is of the gods. But in contemporary

  drama, this is akin to aliens landing and preventing Carter from being got

  at the end of Get Carter. Chances are, the audience will feel cheated – and

  with just cause.

  SHOCK TACTICS

  I have already mentioned The Crying Game, where the major surprise comes

  as a real jolt but becomes the real story. One of the most effective story

  shocks I have seen is in the film Hidden. The tension in
the story about a

  middle-class couple seemingly being blackmailed slowly creeps up on the

  central character right from the opening shot. The pace is generally

  measured and unsensational. And then there comes a moment when the

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  suspected blackmailer invites the central character Georges into his apart -

  ment and suddenly, shockingly, irrevocably changes the course of the story

  by slitting his own throat. This instantaneously stuns both central char -

  acter and audience. It seems entirely out of the blue – but only because we

  haven’t had a chance to get to know this subsidiary character and under -

  stand why he would do something so extreme. We subsequently come to

  understand the reasons why he does so, but in the moment we are thrown,

  winded – stunned.

  I don’t know exactly why the director chose to do this quite as he

  does – but it perfectly compliments the sense that this is a middle-class

  character, secure in his life and sense of self, but suddenly jolted out of that

  security. And that’s what the story in Hidden is perhaps all about. It’s not

  a thriller, or a twisting, turning detective story – even though detection is

  exactly what Georges does to seek out his blackmailer. Rather it is the

  upturning of a secure POV into one that begins to see the world as the more

  complex and far less comfortable place that exists for all those people who

  lack that security. It is about what happens to people when something pre -

  viously hidden suddenly opens their eyes and doesn’t allow them to settle

  back into the safety they have always known.

  There are other kinds of shock. The audiences who first witnessed

  (and still do when they are revived) young men stoning a baby in its pram

  in Edward Bond’s play Saved, or the entirety of Sarah Kane’s Blasted, came away shocked. In the former it was a seemingly inexplicable moment; in the

  latter it was the whole damn thing. But shock was the instinctive response,

  not necessarily the lasting one. Both plays were written as they were for a

  reason – to say something, to express something, to show something. These

  shocks are not the same as the kind of gratuitous movie violence that means

  nothing and makes me despair for humanity. Gratuitous violence is only

  about the unreal technicoloured red of movie blood and guts. Saved and

  Blasted are plays exploring the real worst that the real world can bring out

  in real people. They are not a comfortable experience but the shock actually

  means something and says something.

  SECRETS

  Surprise is essential; secrets are a way of generating surprise as an integ -

  ral, organic part of the story. Shakespeare used secrets all the time to drive

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  the story and plot forward. Iago tells quiet, secret lies to Othello. Hamlet

  secretly promises the ghost he will take revenge; Titus Andronicus makes

  a similar promise to himself. Romeo and Juliet marry secretly. Hermione is

  secretly still alive when most believe she is dead in The Winter’s Tale – as

  is Hero in Much Ado About Nothing. Shakespeare’s comedies are full of

  them and each works to unravel the world until it teeters on the precipice

  of disaster, before being pulled back to comedic resolution and safety.

  The point about secrets is not that they are there or even that they are

  revealed, but that they make characters choose to do certain things in order

  to either keep them or expose them, whatever the consequence might be.

  From secrets can come power and fear – power being a knowledge a char -

  acter has about another character, and fear being the possibility that a

  secret about a character will be revealed.

  Secrets are a fundamental driver for long-term story arcs in TV soaps.

  For example in EastEnders – Angie pretending she only has months to live,

  Arthur Fowler stealing the Christmas Club money, the identity of the

  father of Michelle Fowler’s baby, or the multiple secrets that culminated in

  the climactic live episode on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the show.

  The power of secrets obviously isn’t just in the middle. But planting a

  secret at the beginning and revealing it (or not) at the end of a story or

  strand is probably the simplest part – it’s the journey between the two that

  is harder to manage. If the secret is not just a bit of plot trickery but

  character driven and essential to who they are in the story, then it will help

  drive the story through the muddle in the middle that is a necessary out -

  come of keeping a secret or exposing it.

  DRAMATIC IRONY

  Dramatic irony is when the audience can see or knows what the character

  cannot see or know. It’s a staple of pantomime – ‘He’s behind you!’ And of

  the horror genre – we can see he / she / it is behind the character, but in the

  cinema we are powerless to tell them, however much we scream. Dramatic

  irony is when the audience feels the tension and suspense that the

  character perhaps does not, because we are thinking ahead to the possible

  outcomes of what we know (and the character does not). Hitchcock framed

  suspense as the audience seeing a bomb ticking away beneath a table as

  two characters sit at the table talk ing, oblivious to the danger.

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  Effective dramatic irony, though, is when the character is surprised

  and we see it and anticipate it – but do not necessarily predict it exactly. At

  its best it isn’t simply a surprise for the character, it is a surprise for the

  audience because it defies or exceeds or upturns what we expect, even with

  the benefit of foresight.

  In the brilliantly unique film Let the Right One In, we know long before

  Oskar does that Eli is not just a curious girl he meets outside his apart -

  ment block but something much more sinister and complex. The moment

  when he realises what she is slowly sidles up to him, but when it does come

  his reaction is not quite what we might expect – he isn’t scared exactly

  (except perhaps for her), he isn’t stunned exactly (he must have sensed

  something all along). It is like a dawning realisation about what she is that

  brings a moment of clarity and anagnorisis for himself: before he was a

  bullied loner, but now there is someone who understands him and whom he

  understands, because she is a loner too.

  It is a deeply affecting journey through dramatic irony towards the

  start of something much bigger – a young love that will inextricably bind

  them together, no matter what the cost. Here the surprise that comes from

  dramatic irony is not about shock, it is about empathy and journey and love.

  UNEXPECTED OUTCOMES

  Great dramatic irony is all about unexpected outcomes. But unexpected

  outcomes can come at any time without either audience or character anti -

  cipating it so long as you have characters that are proactively seeking

  something. The surprise of unexpected outcomes is when a character acts

  but what they consequently get is different from what they expected. Again,

  it is back to trying and trying and failing better. If the outcomes are simply

  as expected then there will be no tension a
nd suspense in the actions

  because the consequences are simply predictable.

  In stories where characters have truly stepped beyond their comfort

  zones and are pursuing desires and needs through the middle, the consequ -

  ences will not be controlled precisely because the experience is new to

  them. For Oskar, although his burgeoning relationship with Eli gives him

  strength and confidence to act in new and surprising ways with his bullies,

  the consequences of that empowerment goes way beyond what he expected

  and builds ultimately to a dangerous climax where Eli must save him from

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  a danger he did not foresee (in the extraordinary swimming-pool sequence

  at the climax). Oskar is not in control of the consequences of his actions.

  What saves him is not the confidence Eli has inspired in him but the

  strength of feeling he has inspired in Eli that she should come back for him

  even though it looked like their relationship was over. This is what makes

  it such a poignant story.

  PREDICTABILITY

  The opposite of all this is predictability. Knowing what is coming, seeing

  what is coming – the audience being one step ahead of the writing rather

  than the writing being one step ahead of the audience. Entirely predictable

  storytelling is lazy. But predictability is not easy to avoid, far from it.

  Remember that it is not the same thing as inevitability. Your story should

  have a sense of inevitability about where it ends up – but the surprise in

  how we get there is what will make it work rather than fail. We know that

  in love stories the couple either stays together or separates – we can call

  Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind a kind of romantic comedy even

  though just about everything about it is unlike any other romcom ever

  made, and it is never predictable. We know that in revenge tragedies the

  hero will take revenge but lose some humanity along the way – Dead Man’s

  Shoes is revenge tragedy through and through but there are things about

  it that are not like any other, and step by step right up to the ending it is

  not predictable.

  The journey towards those endings is why the middle is so important