by Blake Snyder
Audiences can only stand so much "pipe. "
What is pipe? And what is the risk of laying too much of it?
Well, let's take a look at Minority Report, the big-budget movie based on yet another work by sci-fi writer Philip K. Dick. In death, Dick has become the "go-to guy" for source material that has resulted in such hits as Blade Runner and Total Recall. In Minority Report the hook is typically Dickian, but in this case, setting up the premise almost kills the story. Minority Report is about future crime. And we see exactly how this works in the opening scene of the film. A homicide is about to take place, and since Tom Cruise is in charge of the task force that monitors these future crimes, we see him spring into action and stop the murder. In the next scene, we jump to the politics involved in how this operation works. Tom, we learn, is under investigation by Colin Farrell. We even meet the three "pre-cognitives" who lie in a tub of water and predict the future. We also see that in his personal life, Tom lost his child and has some kind of drug problem. We also meet Tom's mentor (Max Von Sydow) whom we don't totally trust. Okay. All well and good. But by the time the writers lay out the pipe required to set up this story, I am personally exhausted! It's interesting, but what's the point? Where is this going?
The story finally gets under way when Tom receives the latest future news and lo! the criminal pegged is himself. Knowing that the pre-cogs are never wrong, Tom must find out how and why this mistake has been made — and stop the murder that he supposedly will commit. The clock is running; and so are we. There's only one small problem: By the time this plot point happens, we are 40 MINUTES INTO THE MOVIE! It took 40 minutes to set up this story and explain to the audience what it's about. It took 40 minutes to get to the hook, which is: A detective discovers he is the criminal.
Say it with me now, fellow students: That's a lot of pipe!!
In Along Came Polly, we find the same problem. In order to get to risk-averse divorcee Ben Stiller falling in love with crazy girl Jennifer Anniston, the writer also has a lot of pipe to lay. We have to see Ben marry his first wife, follow them on their honeymoon, and watch as Ben catches her in the arms of their scuba instructor. Sure it's funny. And we'll put up with a lot when it comes to any movie that Ben is in. We love Mr. S! But the screenwriter and director (same guy — the funny and talented John Hamburg) risks our attention by laying a ton of story points to get to the reason we came to see this movie: Ben Stiller dating Jennifer Anniston.
In both Along Came Polly and Minority Report, the laying of all that pipe — a necessary thing to set up the story — risks our attention and, I believe, contributes to a lesser movie-going experience. By needing so much backstory to set up the movie, the whole story has been torqued out of shape.
To be honest, laying pipe is something about which I am hyper-aware, and in many cases I have stopped writing stories due to the pipe required to set them up. Blank Check has a little bit more pipe up front that I am comfortable with. There is way too much "splainin' to do to get us to the point where our hero, Preston, walks into the bank with his blank check for a million bucks. A lot of back and forth. A lot of pipe. It's not quite fatal, but almost. There's about a half a beat more movie in Act One than I like. And it risks the audience's patience. Get to it!! I hear them screaming. And as screenwriters, we need to be aware of risking the attention spans of our audience. The point is if you find yourself with a set-up that takes more than 25 pages to introduce, you've got problems. We call it "laying pipe"; the audience calls it "I want my money back!"
BLACK VET A.K.A. TOO MUCH MARZIPAN
When dealing with conceptual creativity, an offshoot of the Double Mumbo Jumbo rule is a rule I call Black Vet.
You often fall in love with certain elements of a movie idea and cling to them. You can't let go. You're Lenny in Of Mice and Men and you're going to squeeze that little rodent to death. And usually when you find yourself in this situation, you must stop. This is when the Black Vet rule allows you to step back from the concept.
What is Black Vet?
Better to tell you where it came from. In the 1970s. comedian and now actor/writer/director, Albert Brooks, made several film parodies for Saturday Night Live. In one of his best, a piece that tweaked the nose of NBC and the silliness of network programming, Brooks did a hilarious fake promo for several upcoming shows that would be seen that fall on NBC.
One of these was called Black Vet. In unctuous "NBC — Be There! " style, it showed a black actor who played a veterinarian cavorting with animals at his clinic. But this guy also has a past in the military. The punchline came when the narrator announced the name of the show and its fake promo line: "Black Vet: He's a veteran and a veterinarian!" Hilarious! But it is also so close to a real show on real TV, so much about the desperation of Hollywood types trying to squeeze 10 pounds of shit into a five-pound bag, that I found it to be brilliant. And I personally never forgot it. "Black Vet" is a joke, and yet you'd be surprised how often we creative folks get caught piling on our great concepts. Like eating too much marzipan, a little goes a long way where ideas are concerned. And more does not always mean better.
In my career, my favorite example of this came when I was working with my first writing partner, the quick-witted and entrepreneurial Howard Burkons. We were young and energetic writers with a lot of great ideas — and a lot of bad ones. But Howard and I achieved early success and even earned our WGA cards while
working together, a huge step forward for us both. Because we were working in TV, we had a TV series idea, and a good one I thought. Set in the 1950s, it followed the adventures of a blacklisted private eye. We called the show Lefty. Get it? Lefty referred to his political affiliation, but sounded tough and very '5°s- Okay. But Howard and I killed the idea when Howard insisted we also make our hero left-handed. And maybe, Howard suggested, he could also be an ex-boxer, a left-handed ex-boxer! So he's a Communist and an ex-boxer and he's left-handed? I kept asking. And Howard thought that was great. Well... to my mind it was "pick one." To Howard it was a matter of milking the idea for all it was worth. And while I usually trusted Howard's instinct on this stuff— Howard is brilliant when it comes to conceptualizing and a much smarter marketer than I — I just didn't get it.
It was Too Much Marzipan.
It was Black Vet.
What we had succumbed to was getting stuck on a good idea. And it's easy to do. You like that? Well, hell you'll like it even more if I just add a couple of more scoops of the same thing on top, right? Well, no. To this day, whenever I talk with my pal Howard, he insists he was right about Lefty. Me? It's a whistle I don't hear. Still! But it makes a great rule of screenwriting and creativity: Simple is better. One concept at a time, please. You cannot digest too much information or pile on more to make it better. If you do, you get confused. If you do... stop.
WATCH OUT FOR THAT GLACIER!
Very often when bad guys are involved, they will be way off screen somewhere, far away from our hero, and "closing in." Sometimes they close in so slowly, the noose tightens so lackadaisically, you want to yell at the screen:
Watch Out for That Glacier! Well, I do anyway.
That's how the "danger" is coming toward your hero: s-l-o-w-l-y! One inch per year. That's how unthreatening your supposedly threatening horror is. And if you think this doesn't happen to the big boys as well as you and me, you're wrong. Slow danger happens to good movies all the time.
Just check out Pierce Brosnan in Dante's Peak, one of two volcano movies that came out in 1997, presumably to cash in on all that Mt. St. Helen's buzz. And here's what Dante's Peak is about: See that volcano? It's gonna blow any minute!! That's it! And that's all it is. A volcano is about to erupt and no one believes the handsome scientist (Pierce Brosnan), so we sit there and wait for him to be right (we saw the trailer). Well, while we're waiting at least we can look at Brosnan and think: Yeah, Sean Connery was better.
And check out Dustin Hoffman in Outbreak. Now there's a dull movie! Basically, it's about a super Ebola viru
s that comes to the U.S. and Hoffman's attempt to find the cure. But while we're waiting, that virus is slowly, slowly, really slowly headed our way. It's a Monster in the House movie basically, but in Outbreak, they have to create the "house" by quarantining a small town and introducing us, in thumbnail sketches, to the people who live there so we'll care if they die. Of course, we don't meet them until like page 75!! But so what?! We gotta do something while we're waiting for this Butterball to baste and for Dustin to catch an infected monkey, which, if I remember correctly, is the D or E plot of Outbreak and... Man! How did these guys get talked into this?
It even happens in Westerns. In Open Range, Kevin Costner's and Robert Duvall's cowboy buddy gets killed by the bad guys on about page
20, at which point Kevin and Robert sit there on their horses and talk about the bad guys and how they're gonna go get em, yup they sure should go get 'em. . . for about an hour and a half! If you ever wondered how the West was won, apparently it happened very slowly.
See, even bright people think the slow encroaching danger of hot lava headed your way, oh about by Thursday or so, will get our emotions stirring. But lo! it does not.
Danger must he present danger. Stakes must be stakes for people we care about. And what might happen to them must be shown from the get-go so we know the consequences of the imminent threat. If not, you are violating the Watch Out for That Glacier rule. Here is a list of other "glaciers" that approach slowly or are too remote, unthreatening, or dull:
> An evil Slinky
> Snails armed with AK-47s
> A foreclosure letter sent from Siberia
> A homicidal one-legged Grandmother
> A herd of angry turtles
> Locusts
Even if you have a catchy title, do not write movies with these "bad guys." Okay, well, unless the locusts are biologically-altered locusts that like to eat human flesh!!
Then we'll talk.
THE COVENANT OF THE ARC
The Covenant of the Arc is the screenwriting law that says: Every single character in your movie must change in the course of your story. The only characters who don't change are the bad guys. But the hero and his friends change a lot.
And it's true.
Although I hate the term "arc" because it's gotten so overused by development executives and How to Write a Screenplay authors, I do like what it stands for. Arc is a term that means "the change that occurs to any character from the beginning, through the middle, and to the end of each character's 'journey'" (another est-y kind of term). But when it's done well, when we can chart the growth and change each character undergoes in the course of a movie, it s a poem. What you are saying in essence is: This story, this experience, is so important, so life-changing for all involved — even you, the audience — it affects every single person that is in its orbit. From time immemorial, all good stories show growth and track change in all its characters.
Why is this?
I think the reason that characters must change in the course of a movie is because if your story is worth telling, it must be vitally important to everyone involved. This is why set-ups and payoffs for each character have to be crafted carefully and tracked throughout. I don't know why, but Pretty Woman comes to mind as a good example of this. Everybody arcs in Pretty Woman. Richard Gere, Julia Roberts, Laura San Giacomo — even the mentor figure, Hector Elizondo — are touched by the experience of this love story and transformed because of it. Everyone but the bad guy, Jason Alexander, who learns exactly zero.
Pretty Woman is one of hundreds of carefully crafted, successful movies in which this rule applies. All the really good movies do this, ones that you remember, that make you laugh and cry — the ones that you want to see a second time.
In a sense, stories are about change. And the measuring stick that tells us who succeeds and who doesn't is seen in the ability to change. Good guys are those who willingly accept change and see it as a positive force. Bad guys are those who refuse to change, who will curl up and die in their own juices, unable to move out of the rut their lives represent. To succeed in life is to be able to transform. That's why it's the basis not only of good storytelling but also the world's best-known religions. Change is good because it represents re-birth, the promise of a fresh start.
The Covenant of the Arc.
And don't we all want to believe that?
Don't we all want to jump into the swim of life after seeing a good movie? Don't we want to get out of our ruts, try something new, and be open to the healing power of change after experiencing a movie in which everybody arcs?
Yes, we do.
"Everybody arcs." That's one of the slogans I have written on a yellow Post-it note and have stuck to the top of my iMac computer whenever I am writing a screenplay. And before I sit down to write, I make notes on how all my characters are going to arc by charting their stories as they are laid out on The Board, with the milestones of change noted as each character progresses through the story.
It is a must that you do the same.
If your script feels flat, if you are getting the sense that something's not happening in the story, do a quick Covenant of the Arc check and see if you need to do more work on making everybody change and grow and transform.
Everyone, that is, except the bad guy.
KEEP THE PRESS OUTS
Here's where I get to show off. Big time! You see, I learned this next lesson from Steven Spielberg. Personally. Oh yeah... We worked together. And it was one of the most educational experiences of my career. But in terms of the Immutable Laws of Screenwriting, that's the guy who really should write the book. I can only paraphrase.
To wit:
Keep the Press Out, the rule I learned from Steven Spielberg, was taught to me while we were developing a screenplay Jim Haggin and I had sold to Amblin called Nuclear Family. The premise of this movie is: A family camps out one night on a nuclear dumpsite and wakes up the next day with super powers. Nuclear Family is a wish-fulfillment comedy. Each family member has a need that their super-power quenches: Dad, an ad exec, gets the power to read minds and thus leaps ahead of his ratfink nemesis at work; Mom, a housewife, gets the power of telekinesis and becomes a super Mom who can move objects with her mind; Teen Son becomes The Flash and is suddenly his high school's star halfback; and Teen Daughter, forever behind in her schoolwork, gets a super brain and is now able to ace her SATs. It's a fun, special effects-laden fantasy — but it has a message, too. In the end, each of them gives up their powers. Being "successful" they find is not as important as being a family.
And yet, in the development process, we wanted to explore every option. When one of us, me I think, foolishly pitched that maybe we should have these powers discovered by the media, and to have the family swarmed by the news networks, Steven Spielberg said no, and he told us why.
You'll notice that there are no news crews in E.T., the story of an extra-terrestrial creature who comes to Earth and into the lives of a similar cul de sac-dwelling family. Sure, you've got a really good reason for a news crew. They've caught one — a real live alien! And it's right there for everyone to see. But in rewrites with the screenwriter, Melissa Mathison, Spielberg discovered that it blew the reality of the premise to invite the press in. By keeping it contained among the family and on the block, by essentially keeping this secret between them and us, the audience, the magic stayed real. When you think about it, to bring the press into E. T. would indeed have ruined it. The term breaking the fourth wall springs to mind. That is the phrase that means violating the gossamer beneath the proscenium arch that separates the play from the audience. To bring the press into our little drama would have done the same.
Of course this is what separates the Spielbergs from the rest of us — including the Shyamalans. Keep the Press Out is a rule you won't see violated in any DreamWorks film, but in M. Night Shyamalan's Signs (there's that darn movie again) the rule is violated and, I think, suffers because of it.
Holed up in their Pennsylvani
a farmhouse, Mel Gibson's family is besieged by aliens. First the crop circles, then aliens arrive and try to break into Mel's house (and do what? We're not sure) Night Of the Living Dead-like. So while we're waiting for the attack, Mel and his family put on their tin-foil hats (Gad! What a movie!) and watch TV. There on CNN, news of other aliens landing all over the world is reported. There's even some spooky footage of one such alien invading a children's birthday party in South America.
And all that's interesting, but so what? What does it have to do with the drama of Mel trying to protect his family from the aliens that are swarming his house? I think it even makes their situation less desperate: They're no longer alone with this problem, everyone's dealing with it. Like in the E.T. example, bringing the press into
"our secret" wrecks it. And it took me, as an audience member, out of the story.
The point is, bring the press in with care. Unless it's about the press, unless your movie involves a worldwide problem and we follow stories with characters all over the world, and it's important for them all to know about each other, take a tip from me... and Steven Spielberg:
Keep the Press Out.
SUMMARY
So now you know some basics and if you' re like me, you want to know more and make up others as you go on. These are little Eurekas! that one experiences after watching a truckload of movies over the years. Suddenly you realize why things are done, what that scene really was for, and it makes you feel like a genius. Suddenly you're in on the tricks of screenwriting and have the experience of actually opening up the back of the Swiss watch, and seeing how the gears are put together. So THAT'S how that works! you suddenly think.
You feel like you're learning the magician's secrets.
Once you see these little tricks, the urge to put a label to them can't be far behind. This is why Save the Cat, the Pope in the Pool, Black Vet, and Keep the Press Out are memorable — to me anyway — and vital to be so. Yes, it's good, slangy fun. It's also a way not to forget what you've learned. And when you catch yourself drifting into a mistake, or pushing up against a rule you'd like to break, these pithy little lessons give you an instant assessment on the pros and cons of minding or breaking... The Law. How many times have I caught myself drifting into one or more of these errors during the course of creating and writing a screenplay? Well, many. But the point of all this is to learn shortcuts to save time.