by Linda Seger
FIRST TURNING POINT—“It thrummed in my hand. It was thrumming so hard that it was like gripping a bundle of deadly metallic snakes … .”
ACT TWO—Develops the fear, shows the boys running, trying to escape the oncoming train. “I’ve been scared since, badly scared, but I’ve never been as scared as I was in that moment, holding that hot live rail … . I shot to my feet. I screamed, ‘TRAIN.’ … Now it was right behind Vern. We were past the halfway point and for the first time I heard the train … . ‘Awwww, shit!’ Vern screamed. ‘Run, you pussy!’ I yelled … . ‘I can’t. I’ll fall.’ ‘Run faster … .’”
SECOND TURNING POINT—“The train was very loud now.”
ACT THREE—Builds the excitement and the stakes. “The freight’s electric horn suddenly spanked the air … with one long loud blast … . And then Chris was below us and to the right, and they were both mouthing a single word and the word was ‘Jump!’ … The trestle began to shake as the train charged across it.”
CLIMAX—“We jumped.”
RESOLUTION—“When it was gone—when I was sure it was gone—I raised my head like a soldier coming out of his foxhole at the end of a day-long artillery barrage. Vern was still plastered into the dirt, shivering. Chris was sitting cross-legged between us, one hand on Vern’s sweaty neck, the other still on mine. When Vern finally sat up, shaking all over and licking his lips compulsively, Chris said, ‘What you guys think we drink those Cokes? Could anybody use one besides me?’ We all thought we could use one.”
When you read this sequence you may think that it is frightening, exciting, perhaps even makes your heart beat faster. If you have this response to something in a story, you will probably want to include it in the film.
You can also find implied scene sequences that can be built up and expanded for the script. For instance, there are several descriptions in Out of Africa that could be played out to create a scene sequence if desired.
“The grasshoppers came again; for two or three months we had continued attacks of them on the farm.” You could create an exciting short or long sequence of the “attack by the grasshoppers,” particularly if you wanted to focus more on the problems of the plantation. Here you would probably condense the time of two or three months to one grasshopper attack. The beginning of the scene sequence could include the news or sighting of the grasshoppers, the middle could be the attack, and the end could be the final battle with them or the action taken to overcome their destruction. You would probably need six to seven pages of script to play this out.
Here’s another description, one that was made into a scene sequence in the film: “To Denys Finch-Hatton, I owe what was, I think, the greatest, the most transporting pleasure of my life on the farm: I flew with him over Africa.” This was turned into the airplane flight sequence, one of my favorite scenes from the film. The airplane sequence does not have the strong structure of the Stand by Me sequence, although it does have a clear beginning and end and a rising sense of wonder.
You can create scene sequences out of courtship scenes, battle scenes, chase scenes, or any kind of scenes that contain dramatic development that builds to a climactic moment.
BUILDING UP THE CLIMAX
Earlier I discussed finding the climax of the story. If it’s a dramatic climax, use it. But you may need to change a climax in a story to make it work.
The climax in a novel or play does not need to have the same dramatic buildup as in a film. Sometimes the adaptor has to reorder events or add to the actions in a book in order to create a dramatic build. In Stand by Me, events were slightly reordered, so the climax of the confrontation between Gordy and the older boys was toward the end of the sequence. Compare the differences between the sequence of events of the book and the film as illustrated in the chart here.
Notice that Gordy, the main character, is carrying most of the action in the film that was originally given to Chris in the story. In the film Gordy cries, not Chris, Gordy fires the gun, not Chris. Notice also that the scene in the film builds to the confrontation between Gordy and the boys by placing the crying and discussion before the climax, rather than after.
The film ends with a resolution phrase that sums up much of the experience: “I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, did you?” This phrase is actually in the middle of the story.
You want your climax to come at the end of the screenplay. That sometimes means reordering events. After the climax occurs, it’s time to end the film, to wrap up loose ends, to go home. A resolution needs to be short, preferably not longer than five minutes and not more than two or perhaps three scenes.
Look at the endings of the films A Passage to India and The Color Purple. Both had very long resolutions that dissipated the action. As a creative exercise, see what you could cut from these resolutions to tighten them. In The Color Purple I would define the climax as the point when Celie leaves Mr. All that really needs to occur in the resolution is to get Nettie back home. I think it could be done in a much shorter resolution—but this would take some drastic rethinking.
BOOK FILM
Lightning Some rain
Vern sees body Vern sees body
Rain Gordy cries
Ace comes Gordy discusses Dad, death
Gordy says, “Suck my fat one” Ace and Billy come
Ace threatens the four boys Ace pulls knife on Chris
Chris fires pistol Gordy shoots gun
Chris fires as they get closer Gordy says, “Suck my fat one”
Hail They leave body
Vern and Teddy run Adult narrator talks and writes about Chris
Chris and Gordy stay
Chris cries He plays with sons
They argue about taking body
They leave for home
Gordy talks to father
Big boys beat up on kids
Adult narrator tells that Chris, Teddy, Vern, all are dead
LOOK FOR THE IMPLIED SCENE
Sometimes a book contains so many scenes that all you need to do is pick and choose the ones to carry the story cinematically.
At other times, scenes need to be created. You can always make them up, just as you would in an original screenplay. But books and plays are always implying scenes that are not shown. Since these scenes are naturally part of a story, they are clues you can use in your writing.
Sometimes scenes are implied when a character briefly mentions a friend, or some incident from childhood, or simply says she or he had a bad day at work. All of these mentions can be made into scenes.
Scarlett gets married three times, which means three weddings of one sort or another. She mentions one of them (it is shown in the film), but not the other two. But they did happen. A writer might decide to show them.
In the play The Little Foxes, Zan is told to go to Baltimore to bring her father home from the hospital. In the film, this scene is played out.
In Out of Africa, there’s a line that implies a dramatic scene: “My old cook, Esa, was murdered.” If the plantation subplot had been expanded in this story line, this scene could have been played out for additional conflict.
In A Room with a View, Miss Bartlett confronts George about his insult (the kiss) to her cousin, Lucy. “At the critical moment Miss Bartlett opened her own door, and her voice said: ‘I wish one word with you in the drawing-room, Mr. Emerson, please.’
“Soon their footsteps returned, and Miss Bartlett said: ‘Goodnight, Mr. Emerson.’”
If the point of view had been expanded to accommodate scenes about George or Miss Bartlett (without Lucy in the scene), the scene these lines imply could have been shown.
INTEGRATING PLOT AND SUBPLOT
In My Left Foot, we see a story about a man with cerebral palsy struggling for identity and love. That is the major focus of both the book and the movie. Christy Brown had another important story in his life—the story of meeting Mary, falling in love, and getting married. Unfortunately for dramatic purposes, the subplot
happened after Christy had achieved a certain measure of success and had resolved some of his earlier struggles.
Ordinarily the threading together of plot and subplot would be happening throughout the story line. But occasionally a true-life story will have two important plot lines that did not happen at the same time in the subject’s life.
The writers of the film My Left Foot, Shane Connaughton and Jim Sheridan, must have recognized this problem. In order to resolve it, they began the film in the present, establishing Christy and Mary, and then played his struggles in flashback. Throughout the film we continue to go back to short scenes between Christy and Mary as their relationship develops, finally leading up to him asking her to cancel her plans in order to go out with him. In the last scene they’re together, joyous, drinking champagne, and an epilogue at the end tells us that they did get married.
Although I personally believe that flashbacks are often misused and overused, they can provide a solution to many of these particular true-life story problems. Sometimes flashbacks can be used as a frame to start and end the movie.
Sometimes, too, flashbacks can be used all the way through, actually structuring two plot lines, where one plays itself out in the flashbacks and another plays itself out in present time. In The Woman He Loved, about the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, the duchess tells the story of her relationship with the Duke of Windsor in present time while flashbacks show the story. In Lucy and Desi: Before the Laughter, a similar problem was encountered. How do you tell the story of Desi and Lucy? The success of the television series was clearly a high point of their lives and would need to be dealt with, but the series came after a great many struggles and a long journey toward success that took place over many years.
Flashback solved this problem: in the present tense Lucy and Desi prepared for the filming of their first show, a story with its own structure and development. Flashbacks were used to go back to key events in their lives, which also had their own structure. The present-tense scenes helped structure and frame the flashback scenes, which were somewhat episodic. Without some kind of frame or structuring, they would have seemed like random scenes from two lives, instead of forming a cohesive narrative line.
CHANGING PLOT TO SUBPLOT
Many novels and even plays are about relationships or about the characters’ inner psychological state. The story is not as important as the understanding of the characters. Many of these works will still contain some story thread that weaves throughout the work, but it might be small and seemingly inconsequential.
When adapting such material, this thread is where you begin your work on the story. Although, as I’ve said earlier, generally the A story is the story line that gives movement and direction to a film and the subplots give dimensionality, occasionally a small subplot in a book can become the important A story that makes the film work.
If you aren’t getting enough movement from the focus of the novel or play, see if there’s some small subplot that can be built up, perhaps even making it your plot line for the film. This will work best if the subplot revolves around, or can be changed to revolve around, your main character.
In Stand by Me, the movement of the film comes from the story line about searching for a dead body. In terms of the meaning, this is the least important part of both the novella and the film. But from a story viewpoint, the structuring of this story thread made the film work. We never lost sight of this story line. It had a strong three-act structure, beginning about five minutes into the film and ending about five minutes before the film ended. Although it didn’t take a great deal of screen time, I would still analyze this as the A story of the film, because it provided movement and direction.
Most of the film, and the book, dealt with more thematic issues. There’s a subplot about Gordy as a burgeoning writer. Another subplot concerns the boys’ relationships with their fathers. These subplots were probably the reason why the film touched us and involved us. And they were the core of the book and the film. But without the story thread, the film wouldn’t have worked.
This A story line does not need to take up the most screen time, but it does need to be present throughout the script. It needs to be well structured, and it needs to give the required movement to the story. If the story seems to lag or seems slow-moving, chances are that the story thread isn’t yet in balance.
Some films where the story thread did not seem strong enough were Out of Africa, Hope and Glory, and Avalon. Although I think the films are in many ways brilliant, there seemed to be problems with their movement and balance. The reviews mentioned these problems, and when I teach the films, I receive the same responses from people in my classes.
I have often thought that the subplot about the plantation needed to be stronger in Out of Africa. Certainly it was an important part of the book. It had the potential to give structure, shape, and movement to the film, particularly since the plantation fire is a strong climax to this plot line. It would not have meant eliminating the rich relationship stories within the film, but it would have meant some rethinking of the relationship of plot and subplot.
Sometimes a film gets almost all of its movement from the subplot lines, even though the subplot doesn’t revolve around the main characters. If you look at Hope and Glory, you’ll notice that most of the movement is coming from the relationship subplot about Dawn and Bruce—their meeting, courtship, her pregnancy, and their marriage. In Avalon there’s movement from the business-relationship subplot of Izzy and Jules. But these are not the main characters, and the relationship plot line ended twenty minutes before the end of the film.
You may want to watch these three films again in order to check your reaction to them. When did they seem to lag, if they did for you? When were you most attentive to them? When were you least attentive?
The relationship scenes in all these films are very captivating, and they will probably hold you for most of the extended scenes. Be aware of when you stop being carried through the film. From my experience of other thematic films, I have found that strengthening and balancing the story line is one of the best ways to keep these lags from occurring.
The key word throughout this discussion is balance. How much movement do you need to involve the audience and carry them throughout the film? How much thematic weight do you need in the film in order to say what you have to say? Where is the balance between story movement and theme and character focus? If the story lags or is unclear, the balance has not yet been found.
RAISING THE STAKES
Many novels and some plays are “soft”—they lack a strong dramatic story line or big stakes. You can get more drama out of a story by raising the stakes.
In many adaptations, such as High Noon, The Most Dangerous Game, and Rear Window, the stakes are raised by adding a love interest. But there are other ways to raise the stakes.
In It’s a Wonderful Life the dramatic subplot was intensified by raising the stakes for George. In the short story, George was “sick of everything. I’m stuck here in this mudhole for life, doing the same dull work day after day.” The film raised these stakes by showing George’s desire to see the world. In the short story, George is a clerk at the bank. In the film, he owns the bank. And it raised the stakes by putting George’s reputation on the line, as well as the success of the bank. The film made the brother more important by making him a war hero. And the emotional pitch of the entire story was raised in the film—George is more despairing, the uncle more incompetent, Mary more concerned, the parents more despondent, the town in a more desperate situation.
KEEP THE STORY SIMPLE
Novels can handle complex stories and themes. A novel has more time to explain, to give information, to clarify, even to repeat, if necessary, so the reader can follow the story. Plays, too, can deal with more complex themes, since the ideas are expressed, to a great extent, through dialogue.
For a film, it’s often necessary to simplify the story. If you have a story line that takes a great deal of explanation, or a n
umber of characters to communicate the story, consider simplifying. I believe an audience should be able to understand much of a film by looking at the moving pictures. Certainly the dialogue will round things out, give nuances, add other thematic weight, but a story that is communicated mainly through words will not be cinematic, and usually will not be understood.
Although in 1991 the complex film Godfather III was nominated for the Directors Guild Award as well as for several Academy Awards, in my classes almost everyone mentioned how confusing the story was. They could not follow the Immobilare plot line. They were confused about the Pope’s part in the Vatican bank scandal. They didn’t understand why the archbishop seemed to switch sides, at the beginning working with Michael, later working against him. They couldn’t keep all the dons straight, and they were confused about who really instituted the helicopter attack. Simplifying the story would have made this film more accessible and understandable.
PINPOINT TIME CHANGES AND CHRONOLOGY PROBLEMS
All of the concepts mentioned in this chapter apply to true-life stories. You still look for beginnings, middles, and ends as you focus the material. You look for the story arcs. You look for sequences. You look for any subplots that you can make stronger. Such subplots might be relationships that grow and change throughout the period of a person’s life being portrayed. They might include themes that could be reinforced by a story line. Perhaps a theme about the person looking for success over many years could be crafted into a story line. Perhaps there’s a theme about the person gaining acceptance, or becoming famous. These themes also imply story lines.