by Robert McKee
If you can thoroughly dramatize exposition and make it invisible, if you can control its disclosure, parsing it out only when and if the audience needs and wants to know it, saving the best for last, you’re learning your craft. But what’s a problem for beginning writers becomes an invaluable asset to those who know the craft. Rather than avoiding exposition by giving their characters an anonymous past, they go out of their way to salt their biographies with significant events. Because what is the challenge that the storyteller faces dozens of times over in the telling? How to turn the scene. How to create Turning Points.
THE USE OF BACKSTORY
We can turn scenes only one of two ways: on action or on revelation. There are no other means. If, for example, we have a couple in a positive relationship, in love and together, and want to turn it to the negative, in hate and apart, we could do it on action: She slaps him across the face and says, “I’m not taking this anymore. It’s over.” Or on revelation: He looks at her and says, “I’ve been having an affair with your sister for the last three years. What are you going to do about it?”
Powerful revelations come from the BACKSTORY—previous significant events in the lives of the characters that the writer can reveal at critical moments to create Turning Points.
CHINATOWN: “She’s my sister and my daughter” is exposition, saved to create a stunning revelation that turns the second act Climax and sets up a spiraling Act Three. THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK: “You can’t kill me, Luke, I’m your father” is exposition from the Backstory of STAR WARS saved to create the greatest possible effect, to turn the Climax and set up an entire new film, RETURN OF THE JEDI.
Robert Towne could have exposed the Cross family incest early in CHINATOWN by having Gittes unearth this fact from a disloyal servant. George Lucas could have exposed Luke’s paternity by having C3PO warn R2D2, “Don’t tell Luke, he’d really be upset to hear this, but Darth’s his dad.” Rather, they used Backstory exposition to create explosive Turning Points that open the gap between expectation and result, and deliver a rush of insight. With few exceptions, scenes cannot be turned on nothing but action, action, action. Inevitably we need a mix of action and revelation. Revelations, in fact, tend to have more impact, and so we often reserve them for the major Turning Points, act climaxes.
FLASHBACKS
The flashback is simply another form of exposition. Like all else, it’s done either well or ill. In other words, rather than boring the audience with long, unmotivated, exposition-filled dialogue passages, we could bore it with unwanted, dull, fact-filled flashbacks. Or we do it well. A flashback can work wonders if we follow the fine principles of conventional exposition.
First, dramatize flashbacks.
Rather than flashing back to flat scenes in the past, interpolate a minidrama into the story with its own Inciting Incident, progressions, and Turning Point. Although producers often claim that flashbacks slow a film’s pace, and indeed badly done they do, a well-done flashback actually accelerates pace.
CASABLANCA: The Paris Flashback comes at the opening of Act Two. Rick is crying in his whiskey, drunk and depressed, the film’s rhythm deliberately retarding to relieve the tension of the Act One Climax. But as Rick remembers his affair with Ilsa, the flashback to the tale of their love affair while the Nazis invade Paris sweeps the film into an ever swifter pace that peaks around a sequence Climax as Ilsa runs out on Rick.
RESERVOIR DOGS: The Inciting Incident of a Murder Mystery combines two events: A murder is committed; the protagonist discovers the crime. Agatha Christie, however, opens her stories with only the second half—a closet door opens and a body falls out. By starting with the discovery of the crime, she arouses curiosity in two directions: Into the past, how and why was the murder committed? Into the future, which of the many suspects did it?
Tarantino’s design simply reworks Agatha Christie. After introducing his characters, Tarantino launched the film by skipping over the first half of the Inciting Incident—the botched heist—and cut immediately to the second half—the getaway. With one of the thieves wounded in the backseat of the getaway car we instantly realize the robbery has gone bad and our curiosity runs into the past and future. What went wrong? How will it turn out? Having created the need and desire to know both answers, whenever pace in the warehouse scenes flagged, Tarantino flashed back to the high-speed action of the heist. A simple idea, but no one had ever done it with such daring, and what could have been a less than energetic film had solid pace.
Second, do not bring in a flashback until you have created in the audience the need and desire to know.
CASABLANCA: The Act One Climax is also the Central Plot’s Inciting Incident as Ilsa suddenly reappears in Rick’s life and they share a powerful exchange of looks over Sam’s piano. There follows a scene of cocktail chat, double entendres, and subtext that hint at a past relationship and a passion still very much alive. As Act Two opens, the audience is burning with curiosity, wondering what went on between these two in Paris. Then and only then, when the audience needs and wants to know, do the writers flash back.
We must realize that a screenplay is not a novel. Novelists can directly invade the thoughts and feelings of characters. We cannot. Novelists, therefore, can indulge the luxury of free association. We cannot. The prose writer can, if he wishes, walk a character past a shop window, have him look inside and remember his entire childhood: “He was walking through his hometown that afternoon when he glanced over at the barbershop and remembered the days when his father would take him there as a boy and he’d sit among the old-timers as they smoked cigars and talked about baseball. It was there that he first heard the word ‘sex’ and ever since he’s unable to sleep with a woman without thinking he was hitting a home run.”
Exposition in prose is relatively easy, but the camera is an X-ray machine for all things false. If we try to force exposition into a film through novel-like free associative editing or semisubliminal flutter cuts that “glimpse” a character’s thoughts, it strikes us as contrived.
DREAM SEQUENCES
The Dream Sequence is exposition in a ball gown. Everything said above applies doubly to these usually feeble efforts to disguise information in Freudian clichés. One of the few effective uses of a dream opens Ingmar Bergman’s WILD STRAWBERRIES.
MONTAGE
In the American use of this term, a montage is a series of rapidly cut images that radically condenses or expands time and often employs optical effects such as wipes, irises, split screens, dissolves, or other multiple images. The high energy of such sequences is used to mask their purpose: the rather mundane task of conveying information. Like the Dream Sequence, the montage is an effort to make undramatized exposition less boring by keeping the audience’s eye busy. With few exceptions, montages are a lazy attempt to substitute decorative photography and editing for dramatization and are, therefore, to be avoided.
VOICE-OVER NARRATION
Voice-over narration is yet another way to divulge exposition. Like the Flashback, it’s done well or ill. The test of narration is this: Ask yourself, “If I were to strip the voice-over out of my screenplay, would the story still be well told?” If the answer is yes… keep it in. Generally, the principle “Less is more” applies: the more economical the technique, the more impact it has. Therefore, anything that can be cut should be cut. There are, however, exceptions. If narration can be removed and the story still stands on its feet well told, then you’ve probably used narration for the only good reason—as counterpoint.
Counterpoint narration is Woody Allen’s great gift. If we were to cut the voice-over from HANNAH AND HER SISTERS or HUSBANDS AND WIVES his stories would still be lucid and effective. But why would we? His narration offers wit, ironies, and insights that can’t be done any other way. Voice-over to add nonnarrative counterpoint can be delightful.
Occasionally, brief telling narration, especially at the opening or during transitions between acts, such as in BARRY LYNDON, is inoffensive, but the trend to
ward using telling narration throughout a film threatens the future of our art. More and more films by some of the finest directors from Hollywood and Europe indulge in this indolent practice. They saturate the screen with lush photography and lavish production values, then tie images together with a voice droning on the soundtrack, turning the cinema into what was once known as Classic Comic Books.
Many of us were first exposed to the works of major writers by reading Classic Comics, novels in cartoon images with captions that told the story. That’s fine for children, but it’s not cinema. The art of cinema connects Image A via editing, camera, or lens movement with Image B, and the effect is meanings C, D, and E, expressed without explanation. Recently, film after film slides a steady-cam through rooms and corridors, up and down streets, panning sets and cast while a narrator talks, talks, talks voice-over, telling us about a character’s upbringing, or his dreams and fears, or explaining the politics of the story’s society—until the film becomes little more than multimillion-dollar books-on-tape, illustrated.
It takes little talent and less effort to fill a soundtrack with explanation. “Show, don’t tell” is a call for artistry and discipline, a warning to us not to give in to laziness but to set creative limitations that demand the fullest use of imagination and sweat. Dramatizing every turn into a natural, seamless flow of scenes is hard work, but when we allow ourselves the comfort of “on the nose” narration we gut our creativity, eliminate the audience’s curiosity, and destroy narrative drive.
More importantly, “Show, don’t tell” means respect the intelligence and sensitivity of your audience. Invite them to bring their best selves to the ritual, to watch, think, feel, and draw their own conclusions. Do not put them on your knee as if they were children and “explain” life, for the misuse and overuse of narration is not only slack, it’s patronizing. And if the trend toward it continues, cinema will degrade into adulterated novels and our art will shrivel.
To study the skillful design of exposition, I suggest a close analysis of JFK. Obtain Oliver Stone’s screenplay and/or the video and break the film down, scene by scene, listing all the facts, indisputable or alleged, it contains. Then note how Stone splintered this Mount Everest of information into its vital pieces, dramatized each bit, pacing the progression of revelations. It is a masterpiece of craftsmanship.
16
PROBLEMS AND SOLUTIONS
This chapter examines eight enduring problems, from how to hold interest, to how to adapt from other media, to how to cope with holes in logic. For each problem the craft provides solutions.
THE PROBLEM OF INTEREST
Marketing may entice an audience into the theatre, but once the ritual begins, it needs compelling reasons to stay involved. A story must capture interest, hold it unswervingly through time, then reward it at Climax. This task is next to impossible unless the design attracts both sides of human nature—intellect and emotion.
Curiosity is the intellectual need to answer questions and close open patterns. Story plays to this universal desire by doing the opposite, posing questions and opening situations. Each Turning Point hooks curiosity. As the protagonist is put at increasingly greater risk, the audience wonders, “What’s going to happen next? And after that?” And above all, “How will it turn out?” The answer to this will not arrive until the last act Climax, and so the audience, held by curiosity, stays put. Think of all the bad films you’ve sat through for no other reason than to get the answer to that nagging question. We may make the audience cry or laugh, but above all, as Charles Reade noted, we make it wait.
Concern, on the other hand, is the emotional need for the positive values of life: justice, strength, survival, love, truth, courage. Human nature is instinctively repelled by what it perceives as negative, while drawn powerfully toward positive.
As a story opens, the audience, consciously or instinctively, inspects the value-charged landscape of world and characters, trying to separate good from evil, right from wrong, things of value from things of no value. It seeks the Center of Good. Once finding this core, emotions flow to it.
The reason we search for the Center of Good is that each of us believes that we are good or right and want to identify with the positive. Deep inside we know we’re flawed, perhaps seriously so, even criminal, but somehow we feel that despite that, our heart is in the right place. The worst of people believe themselves good. Hitler thought he was the savior of Europe.
I once joined a gym in Manhattan not knowing it was a mafia hangout and met an amusing, likable guy whose nickname was Mr. Coney Island, a title he’d won as a bodybuilder in his teens. Now, however, he was a “button man.” “To button up” means to shut up. A button man “puts the button on” or shuts people up… forever. One day in the steam room he sat down and said, “Hey, Bob, tell me something. Are you one of the ‘good’ people?” In other words, did I belong to the mob?
Mafia logic runs like this: “People want prostitution, narcotics, and illicit gambling. When they’re in trouble, they want to bribe police and judges. They want to taste the fruits of crime, but they’re lying hypocrites and won’t admit it. We provide these services but we’re not hypocrites. We deal in realities. We are the ‘good’ people.” Mr. Coney Island was a conscienceless assassin, but inside he was convinced he was good.
No matter who’s in the audience, each seeks the Center of Good, the positive focus for empathy and emotional interest.
At the very least the Center of Good must be located in the protagonist. Others may share it, for we can empathize with any number of characters, but we must empathize with the protagonist. On the other hand, the Center of Good doesn’t imply “niceness.” “Good” is defined as much by what it’s not as by what it is. From the audience’s point of view, “good” is a judgment made in relationship to or against a background of negativity, a universe that’s thought or felt to be “not good.”
THE GODFATHER: Not only is the Corleone family corrupt, but so too are the other mafia families, even the police and judges. Everyone in this film is a criminal or related to one. But the Corleones have one positive quality—loyalty. In other mob clans gangsters stab one another in the back. That makes them the bad bad guys. The loyalty of the Godfather’s family makes them the good bad guys. When we spot this positive quality, our emotions move toward it and we find ourselves in empathy with gangsters.
How far can we take the Center of Good? With what kind of monsters will an audience empathize?
WHITE HEAT: Cody Jarrett (James Cagney), the film’s Center of Good, is a psychopathic killer. But the writers design a masterful balancing act of negative/positive energies by first giving Jarrett attractive qualities, then landscaping around him a grim, fatalistic world: His is a gang of weak-willed yes-men, but he has leadership capacities. He’s pursued by an FBI squad of lackluster dullards, whereas he’s witty and imaginative. His “best friend” is an FBI informant, while Cody’s friendship is genuine. No one shows affection for anyone in this film, except Cody, who adores his mother. This moral management draws the audience into empathy, feeling, “If I had to lead a life of crime, I’d want to be like Cody Jarrett.”
THE NIGHT PORTER: In a Backstory of dramatized flashbacks, protagonists and lovers (Dirk Bogarde and Charlotte Rampling) met in this fashion: He was the sadistic commandant of a Nazi death camp, she a teenage prisoner of masochistic nature. Their passionate affair lasted for years inside the death camp. With the war’s end, they went their separate ways. The film opens in 1957 as they eye each other in the lobby of a Viennese hotel. He’s now a hotel porter, she a guest traveling with her concert pianist husband. Once up in their room she tells her husband she’s ill, sends him on ahead to his concert, then stays behind to resume her affair with her former lover. This couple is the Center of Good.
Writer/director Liliana Cavani manages this feat by encircling the lovers with a depraved society of malevolent SS officers in hiding. Then she lights one little candle to blaze at the heart of this cold,
dark world: Despite how the lovers met and the nature of their passion, in the deepest and truest sense, their love is real. What’s more, it’s tested to the limit. When SS officers tell their friend he must kill the woman because she may expose them, he replies, “No, she’s my baby, she’s my baby.” He’d sacrifice his life for his lover and she for him. We feel a tragic loss when at Climax they choose to die together.
SILENCE OF THE LAMBS: The writers of novel and screenplay place Clarice (Jodie Foster) at the positive focal point, but also shape a second Center of Good around Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) and draw empathy to both. First, they assign Dr. Lecter admirable and desirable qualities: massive intelligence, a sharp wit and sense of irony, gentlemanly charm, and most importantly, calmness. How, we wondered, could someone who lives in such a hellish world remain so poised and polite?
Next, to counterpoint these qualities the writers surround Lecter with a brutish, cynical society. His prison psychiatrist is a sadist and publicity hound. His guards are dimwits. Even the FBI, which wants Lecter’s help on a baffling case, lies to him, trying to manipulate him with false promises of an open-air prison on a Carolina island. Soon we’re rationalizing: “So he eats people. There are worse things. Offhand I can’t think what, but….” We fall into empathy, musing, “If I were a cannibalistic psychopath, I’d want to be just like Lecter.”