Story

by Robert McKee

  “BENNY, in his thirties, is a small, muscular Englishman with an air of mania that suggests that, at least once in his life, he’s bitten the head off a chicken.” And, “You guessed it. Here comes the sex scene. I’d write it, but my mother reads these things.” Amusing, but that’s what these writers want us to think so we don’t notice that they can’t or won’t write. They’ve resorted to bald telling masked by sarcasm because they haven’t the craft, talent, or pride to create a scene that acts out the simplest of ideas.

  Eliminate “we see” and “we hear.” “We” doesn’t exist. Once into the story ritual, the theatre could be empty for all we care. Instead, “We see” injects an image of the crew looking through the lens and shatters the script reader’s vision of the film.

  Eliminate all camera and editing notations. In the same way actors ignore behavioral description, directors laugh at RACK FOCUS TO, PAN TO, TIGHT TWO SHOT ON, and all other efforts to direct the film from the page. If you write TRACK ON, does the reader see a film flowing through his imagination? No. He now sees a film being made. Delete CUT TO, SMASH CUT TO, LAP DISSOLVE TO, and other transitions. The reader assumes that all changes of angle are done on a cut.

  The contemporary screenplay is a Master Scene work that includes only those angles absolutely necessary to the telling of the story and no more. For example:

  INT. DINING ROOM—DAY

  Jack enters, dropping his briefcase on the antique chair next to the door. He notices a note propped up on the dining room table. Strolling over, he picks up the note, tears it open, and reads. Then crumpling the note, he drops into a chair, head in hands.

  If the audience knows the contents of the note from a previous scene, then the description stays on Jack reading and slumping into a chair. If, however, it’s vital that the audience read the note with Jack or it wouldn’t be able follow the story, then:

  INT. DINING ROOM—DAY

  Jack enters, dropping his briefcase on the antique chair next to the door. He notices a note propped up on the dining room table. Strolling over, he picks it up and tears it open.

  INSERT NOTE:

  Calligraphic handwriting reads: Jack, I’ve packed and left. Do not try to contact me. I have a lawyer. She will be in touch. Barbara

  ON SCENE

  Jack crumples the note and drops into a chair, head in hands.

  Another example: If, as Jack sits, head in hands, he were to hear a car pull outside and hurry to a window, and it’s critical to audience comprehension that they see what Jack sees at that moment, then continuing from above:

  ON SCENE

  Jack crumples the note and drops into a chair, head in hands.

  Suddenly, a car PULLS UP outside. He hurries to the window.

  JACK’S POV

  through the curtains to the curb. Barbara gets out of her station wagon, opens the hatch and takes out suitcases.

  ON JACK

  turning from the window, hurling Barbara’s note across the room.

  If, however, the audience would assume that car pulling up is Barbara coming back to Jack because she’s done it twice before and Jack’s angry reaction says it all, then the description would stay on the Master Shot of Jack in the dining room.

  Beyond the essential storytelling angles, however, the Master Scene screenplay gives the writer a strong influence on the film’s direction. Instead of labeling angles, the writer suggests them by breaking single-spaced paragraphs into units of description with images and language subtly indicating camera distance and composition. For example:

  INT. DINING ROOM—DAY

  Jack enters and looks around the empty room. Lifting his briefcase above his head, he drops it with a THUMP on the fragile, antique chair next to the door. He listens. Silence.

  Pleased with himself, he ambles for the kitchen, when suddenly he’s brought up short.

  A note with his name on it sits propped against the rose-filled vase on the dinning table.

  Nervously he twists his wedding ring.

  Taking a breath, he strolls over, picks up the note, tears it open, and reads.

  Rather than writing the above into a thick block of single spaced prose, lines of white split it into five units that suggest in order: A wide angle covering most of the room, a moving shot through the room, a close-up on the note, an even tighter close-up on Jack’s ring finger, and a medium follow-shot to the table.

  The briefcase insult to Barbara’s antique chair and Jack’s nervous gesture with his wedding ring express his shifts of feeling. Actor and director are always free to improvise new business of their own, but the miniparagraphs lead the reader’s inner eye through a pattern of action/reaction between Jack and the room, Jack and his emotions, Jack and his wife as represented in her note. That’s the life of the scene. Now director and actor must capture it under the influence of this pattern. How exactly will be their creative tasks. In the meantime, the effect of the Master Scene technique is a readability that translates into the sensation of watching a film.

  IMAGE SYSTEMS

  The Screenwriter As Poet

  “Pity the poor screenwriter, for he cannot be a poet” is not in fact true. Film is a magnificent medium for the poet’s soul, once the screenwriter understands the nature of story poetics and its workings within a film.

  Poetic does not mean pretty. Decorative images of the kind that send audiences out of disappointing films muttering “but it’s beautifully photographed” are not poetic. THE SHELTERING SKY: Its human content is aridity, a desperate meaninglessness—what was once called an existential crisis, and the novel’s desert setting was metaphor for the barrenness of the protagonists’ lives. The film, however, glowed with the postcard glamour of a tourist agency travelogue, and little or nothing of the suffering at its heart could be felt. Pretty pictures are appropriate if the subject is pretty: THE SOUND OF MUSIC.

  Rather, poetic means an enhanced expressivity. Whether a story’s content is beautiful or grotesque, spiritual or profane, quietistic or violent, pastoral or urban, epic or intimate, it wants full expression. A good story well told, well directed and acted, and perhaps a good film. All that plus an enrichment and deepening of the work’s expressivity through its poetics, and perhaps a great film.

  To begin with, as audience in the ritual of story, we react to every image, visual or auditory, symbolically. We instinctively sense that each object has been selected to mean more than itself and so we add a connotation to every denotation. When an automobile pulls into a shot, our reaction is not a neutral thought such as “vehicle”; we give it a connotation. We think, “Huh. Mercedes… rich. Or, “Lamborghini… foolishly rich.” “Rusted-out Volkswagen… artist.” “Harley-Davidson… dangerous.” “Red Trans-Am… problems with sexual identity.” The storyteller then builds on this natural inclination in the audience.

  The first step in turning a well-told story into a poetic work is to exclude 90 percent of reality. The vast majority of objects in the world have the wrong connotations for any specific film. So the spectrum of possible imagery must be sharply narrowed to those objects with appropriate implications.

  In production, for example, if a director wants a vase added to a shot, this prompts an hour’s discussion, and a critical one. What kind of vase? What period? What shape? Color? Ceramic, metal, wood? Are there flowers in it? What kind? Where located? Foreground? Mid-ground? Background? Upper left of the shot? Lower right? In or out of focus? Is it lit? Is it touched as a prop? Because this isn’t just a vase, it’s a highly charged, symbolic object resonating meaning to every other object in the shot and forward and backward through the film. Like all works of art, a film is a unity in which every object relates to every other image or object.

  Limited to what’s appropriate, the writer then empowers the film with an Image System, or systems, for there are often more than one.

  An IMAGE SYSTEM is a strategy of motifs, a category of imagery embedded in the film that repeats in sight and sound from beginning to end with persist
ence and great variation, but with equally great subtlety, as a subliminal communication to increase the depth and complexity of aesthetic emotion.

  “Category” means a subject drawn from the physical world that’s broad enough to contain sufficient variety. For example, a dimension of nature—animals, the seasons, light and dark—or a dimension of human culture—buildings, machines, art. This category must repeat because one or two isolated symbols have little effect. But the power of an organized return of images is immense, as variety and repetition drive the Image System to the seat of the audience’s unconscious. Yet, and most important, a film’s poetics must be handled with virtual invisibility and go consciously unrecognized.

  An Image System is created one of two ways, via External or Internal Imagery. External Imagery takes a category that outside the film already has a symbolic meaning and brings it in to mean the same thing in the film it means outside the film: for example, to use the national flag—a symbol of patriotism and love of country—to mean patriotism, love of country. In ROCKY IV, for example, after Rocky defeats the Russian boxer, he wraps himself in a massive American flag. Or to use a crucifix, a symbol of love of God and religious feelings, to mean love of God, religious feelings; a spider’s web to mean entrapment; a teardrop to mean sadness. External Imagery, I must point out, is the hallmark of the student film.

  Internal Imagery takes a category that outside the film may or may not have a symbolic meaning attached but brings it into the film to give it an entirely new meaning appropriate to this film and this film alone.

  LES DIABOLIQUE: In 1955 director/screenwriter Henri-Georges Clouzot adapted Pierre Boileau’s novel, Celle Qui N’etait Pas to the screen. In it Christina (Vera Clouzot) is an attractive young woman but very shy, quiet, and sensitive. She has suffered from a heart condition since childhood and is never in the best of health. Years before she inherited an impressive estate in the suburbs of Paris that has been turned into an exclusive boarding school. She runs this school with her husband, Michel (Paul Meurisse), a sadistic, abusive, malignant bastard who delights in treating his wife like dirt. He’s having an affair with one of the school’s teachers, Nicole (Simone Signoret), and he’s as vicious and cruel to his mistress as he is to his wife.

  Everybody knows about this affair. In fact, the two women have become best friends, both suffering under the heel of this brute. Early in the film they decide that the only way out of their problem is to kill him.

  One night they lure Michel to an apartment in a village well away from the school where they’ve secretly filled a bathtub full of water. He comes in, dressed in his three-piece suit, and arrogantly taunts and insults his two women while they get him as drunk as they possibly can, then try to drown him in the bathtub. But he’s not that drunk and it’s a hell of a struggle. The terror nearly kills the poor wife, but Nicole rushes into the living room and grabs a ceramic statue of a panther from the coffee table. She loads this heavy thing on the man’s chest. Between the weight of the statue and her own strength she manages to hold him down under the water long enough to drown him.

  The women wrap the body in a tarp, hide it in the back of a pickup truck, and sneak back to the campus in the middle of the night. The school’s swimming pool hasn’t been used all winter; an inch of algae covers the water. The women dump the body in and it submerges out of sight. They quickly retire and wait for the next day when the body will float up and be discovered. But the next day comes and goes and the body does not float up. Days go by and the body will not float up.

  Finally, Nicole accidentally on purpose drops her car keys in the pool and asks one of the older students to retrieve them. The kid dives down under the scum and searches and searches and searches. He comes up, gulps some air, then goes down again and searches and searches and searches. He comes up to gulp air, then goes down a third time and searches and searches and searches. At last he surfaces… with the car keys.

  The women then decide it’s time to clean the swimming pool. They order the pool drained and stand at its edge, watching as the scum goes down and down and down and down… to the drain. But there is no body. That afternoon a dry cleaner’s van drives out from Paris to deliver the cleaned and pressed suit that the man died in. The women rush into Paris to the cleaners where they find a receipt, and on it is the address of a boardinghouse. They head there and talk to a concierge who says, “Yes, yes, there was a man living here but… he moved this morning.”

  They go back to the school and even more bizarre things happen: Michel appears and disappears in the windows of the school. When they look at the senior class graduation photo, there he is standing behind the students, slightly out of focus. They can’t imagine what’s going on. Is he a ghost? Did he somehow survive the drowning and he’s doing this to us? Did someone else find the body? Are they doing this?

  Summer vacation comes and all the students and teachers leave. Then Nicole herself departs. She packs her bags, saying she can’t take this anymore, abandoning the poor wife alone.

  That evening Christina can’t sleep; she sits up in bed, wide awake, her heart pounding. Suddenly in the dead of night she hears the sound of typing coming from her husband’s office. She slowly gets up and edges down a long corridor, hand on her heart, but just as she touches the office doorknob, the typing stops.

  She eases open the door and there, alongside the typewriter, are her husband’s gloves… like two huge hands. Then she hears the most terrifying sound imaginable: dripping water. Now she heads toward the bathroom off the office, her heart raging. She creaks open the bathroom door and there he is—still in his three-piece suit, submerged in a bathtub full of water, the faucet dripping.

  The body sits up, water cascades off. Its eyes open but there are no eyeballs. Hands reach out for her, she grabs her chest, has a fatal heart attack, and drops dead on the floor. Michel reaches under his eyelids and removes white plastic inserts. Nicole jumps out of a closet. They embrace and whisper, “We did it!”

  The opening titles of LES DIABOLIQUE look as if they’re over an abstract painting of grays and blacks. But suddenly, as titles end, a truck tire splashes from bottom to top of the screen and we realize we’ve been looking at the top angle view of a mud puddle. The camera comes up on a rainy landscape. From this first moment on, Image System “water” is continually and subliminally repeated. It’s always drizzly and foggy. Condensation on windows runs in little drops to the sills. At dinner they eat fish. Characters drink wine and tea while Christina sips her heart medicine. When the teachers discuss summer vacation, they talk of going to the South of France to “take the waters.” Swimming pool, bathtubs… it’s one of the dampest films ever made.

  Outside this film water is a universal symbol of all things positive: sanctification, purification, the feminine—archetype for life itself. But Clouzot reverses these values until water takes on the power of death, terror, and evil, and the sound of a dripping faucet brings the audience up out of its seats.

  CASABLANCA weaves three Image Systems. Its primary motifs create a sense of imprisonment as the city of Casablanca becomes a virtual penitentiary. Characters whisper their “escape” plans as if the police were prison guards. The beacon on the airport tower moves through the streets like a searchlight scanning a prison compound, while window blinds, room dividers, stair railings, even the leaves of potted palms create shadows like the bars of prison cells.

  The second system builds a progression from the particular to the archetypal. Casablanca starts as a refugee center but becomes a mini-United Nations filled with not only Arab and European faces but Asian and African ones as well. Rick and his friend Sam are the only Americans we meet. Repeated images, including dialogue in which characters speak to Rick as if he were a country, associate Rick to America until he comes to symbolize America itself and Casablanca the world. Like the United States in 1941 Rick is steadfastly neutral, wanting no part in yet another World War. His conversion to the fight subliminally congratulates America for final
ly taking sides against tyranny.

  The third system is one of linking and separating. A number of images and compositions within the frame are used to link Rick and Ilsa, making the subliminal point that although these two are apart, they belong together. The counterpoint to this is a series of images and compositional designs that separate Ilsa from Laszlo, giving the opposite impression that although these two are together, they belong apart.

  THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY is a multiplot film with six story lines—three positive climaxes devoted to the father, three negative endings to his daughter—in a point/counterpoint design that interweaves no fewer than four Image Systems. The father’s stories are marked by open spaces, light, intellect, and verbal communication; the daughter’s conflicts are expressed in closed spaces, darkness, animal images, and sexuality.

  CHINATOWN also employs four systems, two of External Imagery, two of Internal Imagery. The primary internalized system is motifs of “blind seeing” or seeing falsely: Windows; rearview mirrors; eyeglasses, and particularly broken spectacles; cameras; binoculars; eyes themselves, and even the open, unseeing eyes of the dead, all gather tremendous forces to suggest that if we are looking for evil out in the world, we’re looking in the wrong direction. It is in here. In us. As Mao Tse-tung once said, “History is the symptom, we are the disease.”

  The second internalized system takes political corruption and turns it into social cement. False contracts, subverted laws, and acts of corruption become that which hold society together and create “progress.” Two systems of External Imagery, water versus drought and sexual cruelty versus sexual love have conventional connotations but are used with a sharp-edged effectiveness.

  When ALIEN was released Time magazine ran a ten-page article with stills and drawings asking the question: Has Hollywood gone too far? For this film incorporates a highly erotic Image System and contains three vivid “rape” scenes.