by Blake Snyder
Don't believe me? Go and look at any Farrelly Brothers movie.
"HI HOW ARE YOU I'M FINE"
Flat dialogue even happens to good movies. But your script will never be a movie if you have dull, lifeless repartee. And when you find yourself reading page after page of this "place-holder" talk, you know you're in trouble.
You're bored!
And that is...(Wait for it)... bad. Absolutely.
"Hi how are you I'm fine" tells us just how boring flat dialogue can be and what a waste of space it is. Flat dialogue is the kind that anyone can say. And odds are that if your script is full of lines that are right out of real life, that ring true but ring dull, you're not working hard enough to make the characters come to life. Because odds are that if your dialogue is flat, so are the people speaking it.
Engaging characters talk differently than you and I. They have a way of saying things, even the most mundane things, which raise them above the norm. A character's dialogue is your opportunity to reveal character and tell us who this person is as much as what he is saying. How someone talks is character and can highlight all manner of that character's past, inner demons, and outlook on life.
Every time a character speaks is your chance to show that.
If you don't think you have flat dialogue, try a simple trick I learned from Mike Cheda. After reading one of my early scripts, he broke the news to me: "Your characters all talk the same." Well, naturally I was insulted; I was ticked. And young bullhead that I was, I did not believe Mike Cheda. What did he know?!
Then Mike showed me this simple Bad Dialogue Test: Take a page of your script and cover up the names of the people speaking. Now read the repartee as it goes back and forth between two or more characters. Can you tell who is speaking without seeing the name above the dialogue? The first time I tried it, there in Mike's office at Barry & Enright, I was stunned. Damn it, he was right. I couldn't tell one of my characters from the others, and then and there I figured out something else too: All the characters had MY voice!! In a good script, every character must speak differently. Every character must have a unique way of saying even the most mundane "Hi How are you I'm fine" kind of chat.
My best learning experience in this regard was an early draft of a script called Big, Ugly Baby!, an alien-switched-at-birth comedy. I gave every character a verbal tic. One stuttered, one did malapropisms,
one was an Okie versed in Sartre, and the Alien parents (my favorite characters) always yelled, a point I reinforced by having at least one word in every sentence they spoke CAPITALIZED! While you don't have to be this drastic in your script, that exercise showed me how I could make characters richer. (And more fun to read out loud, btw.) I had learned that amping up even the most "Hi how are you I'm fine" kind of dialogue revealed everything about each of my characters and made the read lOO% better.
TAKE A STEP BACK
I have just been involved in IO months of rewrites. My partner Sheldon and I were working on our Golden Fleece and it took seven — count 'em seven — drafts to get it right. One of the reasons it took so long is that we had made a basic mistake. We had broken the rule of "Take a Step Back." Just so you know, it happens to everybody — even the pros.
As mentioned in Chapter Four, our story is about a kid who is kicked out of military school and sent home only to find that his parents have moved away without telling him. So our kid hero goes on the road and has lots of fun adventures where he interacts with people and helps them, because he's a good kid who causes flowers to bloom and changes the lives of strangers wherever he goes. Our mistake was that the way we had created the character — a nice kid who helps others — didn't give him anywhere to go. Our hero had already changed. He didn't need this journey. He was the same person he was at the beginning that he was at the end. And the fixing of that problem, draft by draft, took forever. Each draft was about taking him back a step emotionally so the journey means something. Okay, a little bit further, okay let's take him all the way back! It seems easy now, but in the middle of it, we couldn't figure it out. We couldn't see that what we needed to do was take our hero back as far as possible, so that the story would be about his growth. And believe it or not, this kind of mistake happens all the time.
A lot of us know where our heroes end up and don't want to put them through the torment of growth, so we avoid the pain for them. And just like raising a child, you can't do that. These characters have to grow by getting bumped on the nose, and whether we like it or not, we have to let them. In our case, Sheldon and I liked our hero so much and wanted him to come out in the end being upbeat, positive, and special — but we didn't want to see his struggle to become that. It was like reading the answers at the back of the book without doing the work on the test questions. We wanted to get there so badly, we didn't see that getting there was the story. And showing the bumps along the way made the pay-off greater.
Take a Step Back applies to all your characters. In order to show how everyone grows and changes in the course of your story, you must take them all back to the starting point. Don't get caught up in the end result and deny us the fun of how they get there. We want to see it happen. To everyone.
This is just one more example of how movies must show the audience everything: all the change, all the growth, all the action of a hero's journey. By taking it all back as far as possible, by drawing the bow back to its very quivering end point, the flight of the arrow is its strongest, longest, and best. The Take a Step Back rule double-checks this.
If you feel like your story or any of its characters isn't showing us the entire flight, the entire journey... Take a Step Back and show it all to us. We want to see it.
A LIMP AND AN EYE PATCH
Sometimes in a screenplay, the basics are done, your hero and bad guy are great, the plot explodes and intensifies after the midpoint, and everybody's got snappy dialogue. Everything's great except for
one small problem: There seem to be too many minor characters. It's hard to tell one from another. Readers will confuse that guy with this other guy. And it bugs you! Isn't it obvious?!
What has happened is that you have not given us a hook to hang our hats on for each of the characters that are vital to your story. And while we often rationalize this by saying "Oh well, they'll handle that in casting!" I've got one word for you: Ha! You won't see casting if your reader can't see characters. But there's an easy way to solve this:
Make sure every character has "A Limp and an Eyepatch."
Every character has to have a unique way of speaking, but also something memorable that will stick him in the reader's mind. The reader has to have a visual clue, often a running visual reminder, which makes remembering a character easier. A Limp and an Eyepatch may seem like a silly way to think about how to attach traits to characters to make sure we remember them, but it works — if you remember to do it.
Often the realization that you need something like this comes from a reader. A great example of A Limp and an Eyepatch happened to me and shows just how amazing this simple device can be. Sheldon and I were writing our ill-fated Really Mean Girls. We had one character, the lead boy, who has a crush on our lead girl and acts as the "Speaker of Truth" whenever he is around, keeping the lead girl on the straight and narrow with his moral compass. He's a funny kid, mature beyond his years, the type who will be a sterling adult but right now is "too smart for his own good. " He was vital to the plot, but somehow unmemorable on the page. Our manager, Andy Cohen, read draft after draft and kept getting stuck on the boy. Who was he? Yes, he had an important function, but why was he interesting? We tried changing dialogue, making him funnier, smarter, but still got the same note.
Finally, Sheldon came up with a brilliant fix. When we meet the boy for the first time, we described him as wearing a black t-shirt and sporting a wispy soul-patch on his chin. Emblematically it fit, showing his yearning to be hip and older on the inside and not quite cutting it in his appearance. And every time he appeared we referenced this. We gave the scri
pt back to Andy, and he called us to say he didn't know what we'd done but the character of the boy really popped for him now. The boy jumped off the page and registered in his mind. We had done very little overall, he was the same kid, we just gave him A Limp and an Eyepatch.
And it made all the difference.
Is this technique "fake" or "artifice"? No, it's screenwriting. It's the job. So when you find yourself with one or several unidentifiable characters who are getting lost in the shuffle, try saying what I say now all the time:
I think this guy needs A Limp and an Eyepatch.
IS IT PRIMAL?
I have used the term "primal" throughout this book. To me it is my touchstone both in creating a script and fixing it once it's done. "Is it primal?" is a question I ask from the beginning to the end of a project, and making it more primal is the name of the game. To ask "Is It Primal?" or "Would a Caveman Understand?" is to ask if you are connecting with the audience at a basic level. Does your plot hinge on primal drives like survival, hunger, sex, protection of loved ones, or fear of death? At the root of anyone's goal in a movie must be something that basic, even if on its surface it seems to be about something else. By making what drives your characters more primal, you'll not only ground everything that happens in principles that connect in a visceral way, you also make it easier to sell your story all over the world.
Think about it.
Everyone in China "gets" a love story. Everyone in South America understands a Jaws or an Alien because "Don't Get Eaten" is primal — even without snappy dialogue.
But this can also go for little fixes of minor characters or subplots in a script that's not working. Are these characters motivated by primal drives? It 's another way of saying: Are these characters acting like recognizable human beings? At their core, they must be. Or else you are not addressing primal issues.
Let's say you have a high-falutin' concept: stockbrokers rigging the international bond market. Fine. All very interesting. But at its core, no matter what the plot is, by making each character's desire more primal, that plot is grounded in a reality that everyone can understand — suddenly it's not about stockbrokers, it's about human beings trying to survive.
Here are primal drives in the storylines of a few hit films:
> The desire to save one's family (Die Hard)
> The desire to protect one's home (Home Alone)
> The desire to find a mate (Sleepless in Seattle) > The desire to exact revenge (Gladiator)
> The desire to survive (Titanic)
Each of these is about a primal need that might be better seen as a biological need, the prime directive. The desire to win the lottery is, in fact, the desire to have more food, more wives, make more children, to be able to reproduce at will. The desire for revenge is, in fact, the desire to knock off a competing DNA carrier and propel your own DNA forward. The desire to find one's parent or child is the desire to shore up and defend existing DNA and survive.
You may think your story is about something more "sophisticated" than this; it's not. At its core it must be about something that resonates at a caveman level.
All together now: When in doubt ask, "Is It Primal?"
SUMMARY
So now you've seen how you can double-check your work using simple rules of the road. If your script feels flat or if you get back comments from readers who can't quite put their finger on it, but know something's wrong, here are seven easy thought-starters to help you find the weak spot.
And fix it.
Ask yourself these questions, the "Is It Broken?" Test:
1. Does my hero lead the action? Is he proactive at every stage of the game and fired up by a desire or a goal?
2. Do my characters "talk the plot"? Am I saying things a novelist would say through my characters instead of letting it be seen in the action of my screenplay?
3. Is the bad guy bad enough? Does he offer my hero the right kind of challenge? Do they both belong in this movie?
4. Does my plot move faster and grow more intense after the midpoint? Is more revealed about the hero and the bad guy as we come in to the Act Three finale?
5. Is my script one-note emotionally? Is it all drama? All comedy? All sadness? All frustration? Does it feel like it needs, but does not offer, emotion breaks?
6. Is my dialogue flat? After doing the Bad Dialogue Test does it seem like everyone talks the same? Can I tell one character from another just by how he or she speaks?
7. Do my minor characters stand out from each other, and are they easy to differentiate by how they look in the mind's eye? Is each unique in speech, look, and manner?
8. Does the hero's journey start as far back as it can go? Am I seeing the entire length of the emotional growth of the hero in this story?
9. Is it primal? Are my characters, at their core, reaching out for a primal desire — to be loved, to survive, to protect family, to exact revenge?
If you are having any nagging doubts about any of the above, you now know what to do. You have the tools to go back in and fix it. But will you? That's the rub. Here's a tip: When in doubt, do it. Odds are that if you, or your initial batch of readers, have found problems with your screenplay, everyone else will too. Don't be lazy! Don't say "Oh well, no one will notice" because... they will. It is better to be brilliant now and have the guts to fix your mistakes before your script's sitting on Steven Spielberg's desk.
You only get the one shot at a first impression. Try to get over the love affair you have with yourself and your work (God knows I've been in love with my own a thousand times!!) and do what needs to be done. This is what separates the pros from the wannabes — that nagging voice that says: "It sucks!" And the mature, adult, professional voice that quickly chimes in: "And I know how to fix it!"
EXERCISES
1. Go back over your list of movies in your favorite genre, pick one that feels weak, and use the Is It Broken? Test to see if it can be improved.
2. Take another of your favorite movies from your genre and examine the hero/bad guy relationship. Imagine torquing this relationship out of whack by making the bad guy less powerful or ordinary. Does this simple change make the hero less interesting too?
3. Try "talking the plot" in real life. Seriously. Go to a party or meet with a group of friends and say: "I sure am glad I'm a screenwriter who was born in Chicago! " or "Gosh, you've been my friend for 20 years ever since we met in High School!" See what reaction you get to this kind of dialogue.
And so we come to the end of our screenwriting confab.
We've discussed many relevant topics and while I've been writing this book, and working on screenplays of my own thank you very much, a lot has happened out here in Hollywoodland:
> Sequels have met with mixed success.
> Many pre-sold franchises did well but some died miserable deaths.
> The open-huge-in—the-first-week strategy (3,000 + theaters) even-if-you-drop-70%-80%-in-the-second-week of a film's release still recouped a majority of most films' budgets, assuring this tactic will continue.
> And family films outperformed every other type of movie, a truism that was met with the resounding sound of... crickets... by the Zegna-suited slicksters. (It's hard to be cool at the cocktail party when you make — ugh! -PG flicks.)
In short, it's more than interesting; it's a boom time, a gold rush. And the most important thing for you to know is that it's still a highly profitable business with lots of reason to invest in new talent. So here is the good news and bad news as it relates to your spec screenplay.
The good news is: The studios have money to buy your script. And the lack of stellar success in the pre-sold franchise arena should indicate they need you. More than ever they must have original ideas. So buying your spec makes sense.
The bad news is: They attribute all their success to themselves. Shrewder marketing, better accounting, more control over how ideas get turned into movies — that's how they did it, ladies and gentlemen! God love 'em! Studio executives keep
praying for the sun to rise and each dawn assume it was their prayers that made it happen.
But this should not deter you. If you have gotten anything out of this book, it's that selling a script has a lot more to do with thinking of your screenplay as a "business plan" than ever before. If you have a creative approach, you too can sell to Hollywood. And if you do, you have a bright future. A catchy logline and a killer title will get you noticed. A well-structured screenplay will keep you in the game, and knowing how to fix your script — and any other script you may be presented with — will get you a career. If you have mastered the demands of the job as outlined in this book, you will win at this game.
But we are getting ahead of ourselves?
How, you may ask, do you even get in the door?!
AMBITION VS. FATE
Before the first class is over, invariably I will be asked the one burning question on every screenwriter's mind:
"How do I get an agent?"
Would you believe me if I told you that it's all luck? Would you call me crazy if I advised you not to worry about it, that it will happen when it happens? Probably not. But that may be because I am very comfortable with the subject of how to sell myself. I personally love the business of marketing my scripts and me. I am not afraid to pick up the phone, meet someone at a party, and actually call them the next day (if they give me their card) or finagle friends to get me introductions to people I think would like to meet me.
I think I have something to offer. I like the business and I like meeting the people in it. And the worst thing that can happen, I figure, is that someone will say "no."
So here are two stories about how I got my first agents. One is a demonstration of ambition, one an example of fate.
I got my first agent by sheer pluck. My friends and I had written and produced a TV pilot called The Blank Show. A funny parody of what was then the brand-new phenomenon of cable TV, we had made it on a shoestring and once we were done with it, we didn't know what to do. I volunteered to market it myself. I came to Los Angeles, submitted it to Public Access TV, and got a commitment for a day and time it would air. Then for weeks I plastered the westside (where I assumed producers lived) with fliers telling the day and time our show would be on. It finally ran one Sunday night and, sure enough, the next day, Monday morning, I got a call from the producing partner of Budd Friedman, owner of the