by Robert McKee
Jack Donaghy blithely obsesses on an aristocratic lifestyle more suited to the 1920s than today. “Made love on a beach surrounded by a privacy circle of English-trained butlers” sounds like a diary entry by Wallis Simpson before she became Duchess of Windsor. Vacationing on yachts recalls scenes from F. Scott Fitzgerald novels. The love of his life, a fellow aristocrat named Avery, graduated from Choate and Yale. Jack, like the Princeton alumnus he is, disdains jeans and only reads nonfiction.
His syntactically balanced sentences roll out rounded with relative clauses: “In order for our merger to stay attractive to our friends at Kabletown, we have to seem like a sexy, profitable company, and we’re almost pulling it off,” and “If I say ‘No,’ then I will be required to say ‘Yes’ to something else in the future, and the stakes in the future might be higher.” His dialogue sounds like a tuxedoed businessman talking shop in a penthouse cocktail party. The tuxedo, in fact, is Jack’s eveningwear of choice. In Season 1, Liz asks him why he’s wearing a tux in his office and he explains, “It’s after six. What am I, a farmer?”
Like the clothes they wear, vocabulary and syntax dress characters inside and out.
SIDEWAYS
Rex Pickett writes both novels and films. In addition to his first novel Sideways, and a second novel, La Purisima, he wrote the screenplay for the 2000 Oscar-winning short film MY MOTHER DREAMS THE SATAN’S DISCIPLES IN NEW YORK.
Screenwriters Jim Taylor and Alexander Payne earned writers’ credit on the best-written episode of the Jurassic Park franchise, JURASSIC PARK III. In addition, they have collaborated with great success on CITIZEN RUTH, ELECTION, ABOUT SCHMIDT, and SIDEWAYS. More recently, Payne wrote and directed THE DESCENDANTS (2011) and directed NEBRASKA (2013).
SIDEWAYS, which Payne directed from their adaptation of Pickett’s novel, has won a long list of international nominations and awards, including an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. As their choice of subject matter suggests, these writers are attracted to life’s losers and their futile, often comic struggles to win.
SIDEWAYS is, by genre, an education plot. Four simple conventions define this very difficult genre:
1. The protagonist begins the story with a life-denying mindset. He finds no meaning in the world around him or himself in it.
2. The story will arc the protagonist’s downbeat point of view to a positive, life-affirming stance.
3. A “teacher” character will help guide the protagonist’s revolution in attitude.
4. The story’s greatest source of conflict will come from the protagonist’s beliefs, emotions, habits, and attitudes—in other words, from an inner conflict with his own self-destructive nature.
The education plot is a natural genre for a novel because prose allows the writer to directly invade a character’s deepest thoughts and feelings. In Pickett’s first-person novel, for example, his protagonist whispers his secret fears and doubts directly into the reader’s ear. Onscreen, however, this literary form becomes extremely difficult, requiring superb dialogue to imply within a character what the novelist can explicitly state on page.
The screenplay’s protagonist, Miles, is a pudgy, divorced, failed novelist who teaches junior high school English. Although no one makes the accusation onscreen, he’s clearly an alcoholic who hides his dependency behind the mask of (in Miles’s words from the novel) a wine cognoscente. The title SIDEWAYS is never explained in the film, but in the novel “sideways” is slang for drunk. To “go sideways” means to get very, very drunk.
The “teacher” role is filled by the intelligent and beautiful Maya, who’s also divorced, also a wine lover. Midway through the film, Miles and Maya spend an evening with Miles’s pal, Jack, and Maya’s friend, Stephanie. They all end up at Stephanie’s house. When Jack and Stephanie retire to the bedroom, Miles and Maya sit in the living room sipping a wine from Stephanie’s excellent collection. At first they chat about how they met (he was a customer in a restaurant where she waits tables), then the subject turns first to Miles (his novel), then to Maya (her MA in agrology), and, finally, to their mutual love of wine.
MAYA
Why are you so obsessed with Pinot? That’s all you ever order.
Miles smiles wistfully at the question. He searches for the answer in his glass and begins slowly.
MILES
I don’t know. It’s a hard grape to grow. As you know. It’s thin-skinned, temperamental. It’s not a survivor like Cabernet that can grow and thrive anywhere… and withstand neglect. Pinot’s only happy in specific little corners of the world, and it needs a lot of doting. Only the patient and faithful and caring growers can do it, can access Pinot’s fragile, achingly beautiful qualities. It doesn’t come to you. You have to come to it, see? It takes the right combination of soil and sun… and love to coax it into its fullest expression. Then, and only then, its flavors are the most thrilling and brilliant and haunting on the planet.
Maya has found this answer revealing and moving.
MILES
(CONT’D)
I mean, Cabernets can be powerful and exalting, but they seem prosaic to me for some reason. By comparison. How about you, why do you like wine so much?
MAYA
I suppose I got really into wine originally through my ex-husband. He had a big, kind of show-off cellar. But then I found out that I have a really sharp palate, and the more I drank, the more I liked what it made me think about.
MILES
Yeah? Like what?
MAYA
I started to appreciate the life of wine, that it’s a living thing, that it connects you more to life. I like to think about what was going on the year the grapes were growing. I like to think about how the sun was shining that summer and what the weather was like. I think about all those people who tended and picked the grapes. And if it’s an old wine, how many of them must be dead by now. I love how wine continues to evolve, how every time I open a bottle the wine will taste different than if I had uncorked it on any other day, or at any other moment. A bottle of wine is like life itself—it grows up, evolves and gains complexity. Then it peaks—like your ’61—and begins its steady, inexorable decline. And it tastes so fucking good.
Now it’s Miles’s turn to be swept away. Maya’s face tells us the moment is right, but Miles remains frozen. He needs another sign, and Maya is bold enough to offer it: she reaches out and places one hand atop his.
MILES
But I like a lot of wines besides Pinot too. Lately I’ve really been into Rieslings. Do you like Rieslings?
She nods, a Mona Lisa smile on her lips.
MILES
(pointing)
Bathroom over there?
MAYA
Yeah.
Miles gets up and walks out. Maya sighs and gets an American Spirit out of her purse.
Like the scene from Leonard’s Out of Sight, this is a seduction, but in this case between two very sensitive people—the sage earth mother, Maya, and the emotional wallflower, Miles. Like the scene from LOST IN TRANSLATION below, it’s an exchange of revelations. But they are not confessing personal failures; rather, the underlying actions of both characters are bragging and promising. Miles and Maya try hard to sell their virtues to each other.
In the subtext of Miles’s big speech, he invites Maya to come to him, and in the subtext of her reply she does, and brilliantly. So that she leaves no doubt about her desire for him, she even touches his hand and smiles a “Mona Lisa” come-on. But Miles chickens out, bolts for the toilet, and leaves her in frustration.
Once again, note how the scene is designed around a trialogue. Wine becomes the third thing under which the subtext pulses.
Now I’ll rewrite their speeches on-the-nose, pulling the bragging and promising from the subtext and putting it directly into the text by eliminating the third thing.
MILES
I’m a hard guy to get to know. I’m thin-skinned and temperamental. I’m not tough, not a hard-hearted survivor. I need a cozy, safe little wor
ld and a woman who will dote on me. But if you are patient and faithful and caring, you will bring out my beautiful qualities. I cannot come to you. You must come to me. Do you understand? With the right kind of coaxing love I will turn into the most thrilling and brilliant man you could ever have the luck to know.
MAYA
I am a woman with a passion for life. Hour after hour, day after day, season after season, I thrive in the golden light of time, savoring its every precious spell. I am in my prime—old enough to have learned from mistakes, young enough to grow and evolve, so that with every passing day I will become ever more complex, ever more amazing. When I peak, and believe me, I am peaking at this very moment with you, I will taste good, oh so very, very good. Please fuck me.
A person might feel such feelings, might even think such thoughts in some vague way, but no one would ever say these embarrassingly painful things aloud. This bald language becomes impossibly corny when put directly into a living room chat about ideas and yearnings. Fine actors would choke on it.
Yet these are exactly the actions that Taylor and Payne want their characters to take: To put themselves in the very best light and to promise the moon in an effort to win the love of the other with seductive boasts and promises. So, how to write these beats of action into dialogue? Let them converse.
How do people converse? By using what they know as a third thing. And what do these characters know? Miles and Maya are experts on two subjects: wine and themselves. They have extensive, practical knowledge of the former and romanticized, idealized knowledge of the latter. So using the nature of wine and its cultivation as metaphor for their own natures, they each campaign to win the esteem of the other.
As I laid out in the beginning of this section, the key is vocabulary. Character-specific dialogue originates in a character’s unspoken desires and the actions he takes to satisfy those desires. Actions become talk that translates the character’s implicit thoughts and feelings into explicit words—the precise words that only that specific character would use at that specific moment taking that specific action.
Drawing on Pickett’s novel, Payne and Taylor have added their knowledge and insight to Miles and Maya and given each a character-specific voice and vocabulary. In order to seduce, Miles and Maya describe themselves in the language of wine. Compare, for example, Miles’s modal language, his sensitive adjectives and adverbs, to Maya’s bold naming, her nouns and verbs.
Miles: “Thin-skinned,” “temperamental,” “doting,” “faithful,” “caring,” “fragile,” “have to come to,” “achingly beautiful,” “thrilling,” “brilliant,” “haunting,” “really been into…”
Maya: “Life,” “living thing,” “connects to life,” “life itself,” “sun,” “shining,” “summer,” “evolves,” “gains,” “peaks,” “tastes so fucking good…”
These writers have an ear for their characters.
PART 4
DIALOGUE DESIGN
12
STORY/SCENE/DIALOGUE
Now and then, we experience a flawed story that squandered surprisingly good dialogue. We have all waded through badly told stories with dreadful dialogue, but we rarely encounter a superbly told story ruined by lousy dialogue. And the reason is simple: Quality storytelling inspires quality dialogue.
Like a hectic fever, bad dialogue warns of a festering infection deep within a story. But because struggling writers often mistake the symptom for the disease, they try to bandage scenes by obsessively rewriting their dialogue, thinking that once the talk is right, the telling will heal. But maladies of character and event cannot be cured by scratching dialogue raw with draft after draft of paraphrases.
To put it as clearly as I can: Until you know what you are talking about, you cannot know how your characters go about talking. The order in which you create your story’s components and how you bring all these pieces together is unique to you. But no matter how helter-skelter the process, an author ultimately gathers godlike knowledge of form (event and cast design) and content (cultural, historical, and psychological substance) to support the telling from the bottom up, to create dialogue from the inside out. Dialogue is the final step, the frosting of text atop layers and layers of subtext.
So, before we examine dialogue design, let’s review the basic components of story design.
INCITING INCIDENT
At the opening of a story, the central character’s life rests in a state of relative balance. She has her ups and downs. Who doesn’t? Nonetheless, the protagonist holds reasonable sovereignty over her existence—until something happens that radically upsets that equilibrium. We call this event the inciting incident.
To incite means to start; “incident” means “event.” This first major event starts the story by throwing the protagonist’s life out of kilter. The inciting incident could happen by decision (she decides to quit her job and open her own business) or by coincidence (lightning strikes her store and she loses her business). The inciting incident could move her life powerfully to the positive (she invents a brilliant new product) or to the negative (a business rival steals her invention). The inciting incident could be a massive social event (her corporation goes bankrupt) or a quiet inner event (she comes to realize in her heart of hearts that she hates her career).1
STORY VALUES
The impact of the inciting incident decisively changes the charge of the value at stake in the character’s life. Story values are binaries of positive/negative charge such as life/death, courage/cowardice, truth/lie, meaningfulness/meaninglessness, maturity/immaturity, hope/despair, justice/injustice, to name but a few. A story may incorporate any number, variety, and possible combinations of story values, but it anchors its content in an irreplaceable core value.
A core value is irreplaceable because it determines the story’s fundamental nature. Change core value, change the genre. For example, if a writer were to extract love/hate from her characters’ lives and substitute morality/immorality, this switch in core values would pivot her genre from love story to redemption plot.
The values in scenes can be very complex, but at minimum, every scene contains at least one story value at stake in the character’s life. This value either relates to or matches the story’s core value. Scenes dramatize change in the charge of this value. A scene may begin with its value(s) at either a purely positive charge, purely negative charge, or an admixture of both. Through conflicts and/or revelations, the opening charge of value(s) changes. It could reverse (positive to negative, negative to positive), intensify (positive to doubly positive, negative to doubly negative), or wane (purely positive to a weaker positive, purely negative to a weaker negative). The precise moment in which the charge of one or more values changes is a scene’s turning point. Therefore, a story event occurs the instant a value at stake in a scene changes charge.2
THE COMPLEX OF DESIRE
Everyone wants reasonable sovereignty over existence. By throwing life out of balance, the inciting incident arouses the natural human desire to restore balance. Essentially, therefore, all stories dramatize the human struggle to move life from chaos to order, from imbalance to equilibrium.
Characters act because needs demand deeds, but the complexity of life swirls through a labyrinth of desires. Ultimately the art of storytelling merges and organizes many streams of desire into a flow of events. The storyteller picks and chooses only those desires he wishes to express in the specific scenes that progress his story from beginning to end. To understand this process, we need to examine the components of desire and how they propel storytelling.
Desire is a figure in five dimensions:
1. Object of desire
2. Super-intention
3. Motivation
4. Scene intention
5. Background desires
1. Object of Desire
In the wake of the inciting incident, the protagonist conceives of an object of desire, that which he feels he must have in order to put his life back on an even keel. This o
bject could be something physical, like a stash of money; or situational, like revenge for an injustice; or ideational, like a faith to live by. Example: A humiliation on the job (inciting incident) has damaged the protagonist’s reputation, radically upsetting the balance of his life, so he seeks a victory in the workplace (object of desire) to restore balance.
2. Super-Intention
The super-intention motivates a character to pursue the object of desire. This phrase restates the protagonist’s conscious desire in terms of his deepest need. For example, the object of desire above (victory in the workplace) rephrased as the super-intention becomes: to gain inner peace through a public triumph.
In other words, the object of desire is objective, whereas the super-intention is subjective: what the protagonist wants versus the emotional hunger that drives him. The former term gives the writer a clear view of the crisis scene that waits at the end of the story when the protagonist will get or fail to get his object of desire. The latter term connects the writer to the feelings within the protagonist, the inner need that drives the telling.
In every story, the protagonist’s super-intention is somewhat generic (for example, to win justice through revenge, to find happiness in intimate love, to live a meaningful life), but the exact object of desire (for example, a dead villain, the ideal mate, a reason not to commit suicide) gives a story originality. Whatever the object of desire may be, the protagonist wants it because he must satisfy his super-intention, his profound longing for a life in balance.