John Truby's Screenwriting Take

The Tree of Life

2011-12-26T10:08:00.000-08:00

Want to solve the mystery of Tree of Life? This is one of the most original films to come along in some time, but most people don’t know what to make of it. They suspect something important is going on, but they don’t have the experience to know what it is. The secret is in the genre and the story structure.

One of the best techniques for standing above the crowd in professional screenwriting is combining two genres that don’t normally go together. Writer-director Terrence Malick has done just that, connecting the Masterpiece form with the Memoir-True Story.

To really see how and why Malick creates this bizarre hybrid, you really need to go back to his 1978 masterpiece, Days of Heaven. The story is so primal it seems Biblical: a man pushes his girlfriend to marry a dying farmer to get a piece of his fortune. This moral tale takes place in a magnificent but incredibly harsh natural world, in the turn-of-the-century American West, complete with betrayals, revenge, fire and locusts. Sections of the film are connected by fast-motion photography of plants growing and the earth moving through its daily cycle, like a nature documentary. And the whole story is told through the memory of a 13-year-old narrator.

Notice that Malick’s basic technique in Days of Heaven is to set up a very top down Biblical story while also setting up a very bottom up view of man deeply embedded in the natural world. This combination of Biblical with naturalistic is unique in modern film, but it was a hallmark of late 19^th century authors like Thomas Hardy. The combination seems like it shouldn’t work because the Biblical and the natural feel like opposites. But in fact Malick shows that they are both grand systems that try to explain how human life works.

This background from Days of Heaven points up the key story technique Malick uses to combine Masterpiece with Memoir-True-Story in Tree of Life: he sets up an extreme contrast between vast story frames and incredibly short scenes.

A mainstream Hollywood movie usually focuses on a few characters in some generic present, and tells its story through 50-70 scenes that average 2 minutes apiece. Tree of Life places the characters within massive frames of nature and history, but tells its story in 200-300 scenes that are often without dialogue and no more than a few seconds long.

These frames include the creation of the universe, the evolution of life on earth, including dinosaurs, the Oedipal battle between fathers and sons, 1950s suburban America and ultra-modern, present-day city America.

Malick’s use of huge story frames isn’t without precedent. Most famously, in James Joyce’s story of a boy growing up in Catholic Ireland, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, hero Stephen Dedalus writes in his geography book: “Stephen Dedalus, Class of Elements, Clongowes Wood College, Sallins, County Kildare, Ireland, Europe, The World, The Universe.”

As in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, these story frames are not just categories by which Malick defines his characters. They are also systems, and they quietly but inexorably lock the hero of Tree of Life, along with his family, within a powerful slavery.

Of all the many frames in this story, the main one is the “storyteller,” oldest brother Jack as an adult, played by Sean Penn, who remembers his childhood upon hearing of his younger brother’s death. If we recall the discussion of genres and story shapes in the Anatomy of Story Masterclass, we can see why this storyteller technique is the second key to combining the Masterpiece genre with the Memoir-True Story in Tree of Life.

The desire line, the spine, in a Masterpiece story is always some version of “finding a deeper reality, contrasting time, perspective and system.” For Memoir-True Story, it’s “to find the meaning in one’s own life.” Using his brother’s death as a trigger, Jack recalls his boyhood and in the process tries to make some sense of the meaning of his own life. Because this is a memory story, Malick is free to play with the past in any order he chooses, and show time frames that vary from the evolution of the universe to a memory only a second long.

After setting up all these massive frames of time, space and character in the early part of the film, Malick then goes in the opposite direction, the sensual, to tell the main story. One effect of the 200-300 short scenes is that the viewer gains a sense of flow, process, and becoming at every level of life. Just as Van Gogh’s paintings of objects are simply packages of lines of force, the objects here, from bursting stars to desert rocks, have energy literally flowing through them.

The combination of sensual images with short scenes becomes a different kind of story language, a visual poem, and much of the film plays like a silent movie. This is Malick’s cinematic version of stream of consciousness, far more believable and emotionally real than most voice-over narrations that play over standard-length scenes of dialogue.

No matter how short most of these moments are, each is an event, an action which, when strung together in sequence, gives us the story of a boy growing up in America. The father is a harsh, sometimes physical disciplinarian while the mother is a gentle ethereal woman with infinite love for her three boys. Our hero is the oldest of the three, and he does some things to the middle brother, now dead, that show a jealousy, a nastiness, and make him feel guilt now that he remembers those actions as an adult.

Over the course of the story, the outside world, the killer systems, invade the boy’s life. The father loses his job in the factory, along with his belief in the American ethic of working hard to rise to the top. And the boy has to leave the house that he grew up in.

Unlike his father, Jack has grown up to be a successful man in business. But the modern skyscraper environment he lives in seems a major loss compared to that house of his childhood. That’s why he remembers. And that’s why he mourns, not just for his dead brother but for a community, a fleeting moment in the span of a human life when he was free and loved and full of potential.

As this naturalistic story plays out, the second strain, the Biblical, the spiritual, comes through in the scenes as well. First by the fact that these aren’t just brothers in their actions. Our hero is Cain to his brother’s Abel, even if he didn’t finally kill him. Then there are the voices of the heavenly choir that play throughout. There’s the use of voice-over where we hear the beliefs of Mother and Father. And of course there’s the communal ending.

In Jack’s mind, they are all together again at the seashore, walking through the water as requiem music plays and the ethereal choir sings. Father carries the dead son. And Mother says, to death, to the universe, to God, to something, “I give him to you. I give you my son.”

I wish I could say I loved this incredibly ambitious film. But I didn’t. My response to it was similar to what I’ve discovered about Citizen Kane: everyone respects it as one of the great films of all time, but I don’t know a single soul who loves it.

If you want to take a shot at writing a masterpiece of your own, it’s instructive to see why this occurs. Story frames, whether of time, point of view, or system, are fundamental to advanced storytelling. They are what allow the audience to see deeper and to see bigger than they can with their own eyes.

But there is a great danger. The more frames you place on a story, the more you literally back the audience away and drain emotion from the experience. It’s like placing a window frame around a window frame around a window frame around a character. You can see intellectually what the person is doing, but finally you just can’t feel it.

John Truby Interview Part 2

2011-11-26T10:03:00.000-08:00

Question: How do you know a story you want to turn into a screenplay or novel can carry an entire movie or book?

There are many factors that determine a good story. When you are first considering whether a story idea will work as a novel or screenplay, look especially at two structural elements, which you can see right in the premise line: the desire line and the opposition. The hero’s goal provides the spine of the story, and it must extend all the way to the end of the story. So make sure the goal is difficult to achieve and will require the hero to take a lot of complex actions to reach it.

When considering the probable opposition in the story, make sure you can identify one character as the main opponent who wants to prevent the hero from reaching his or her goal. Then see if you can think of other characters who also oppose the hero’s desire, but for different reasons, and use different strategies than the main opponent.

Question: Does character come from plot, or plot from character?

This question represents the Catch-22 of storytelling. Plot is the sequence of what your hero does while going after a goal. Character is not some separate entity from plot, automatically full grown at the start of the story. Character is defined by what your hero does over the course of the story. In other words, plot and character define one another. You can’t have a great plot without a strong, complex main character to generate those actions. And you can’t have a great main character without an intricate plot to test him to the depths of his being.

Think of the relationship of plot and character as a feedback loop; when you improve one you automatically improve the other. The most important thing to remember is that character and plot must be organically and intricately linked for the story to be great.

Question: What defines a good story?

So many things. But fundamentally a good story is, once again, plot coming from character and character coming from plot. Most writers think plot and story are identical. They aren’t. Story is the perfect union of character and plot.

A good storyteller actually tracks two lines: the character’s success in the action line and the character’s internal change. The audience wants to see the hero succeed in both lines. The writer makes those two lines one by connecting plot and character under the surface, through the story structure.

There are many techniques for connecting plot to character. I explain these techniques in my Anatomy of Story Masterclass when I go through the 22 building blocks of every great story. Think of the 22 building blocks as the specific beats where plot is connected to character, from beginning to end. They’re especially useful for giving writers a precise map to the middle of the script, where 90% of scripts fail.

Question: The universe someone creates in their screenplay can be as big as a universe, or as small as an apartment. What factors determine what the size of your story world should be?

Story world has become one of the three or four most important elements in a good script. Much of the incredible success of the Harry Potter stories, for example, comes from the amazing details of the story world. I talk a lot about this in my Anatomy of Story class, because so few writers understand how to create and detail the story world. They think the story world is wherever the story happens to take place. In fact the story world holds an incredible amount of meaning for the audience.

The first step in creating the story world is figuring out the arena. The arena is some kind of wall that surrounds the world. Everything inside that wall is part of the story. Everything outside it is not. Once within the arena you then link the world to the main character. In other words, the world of the story is an expression of who your hero is. Then set up the major pillars of the story world, and these are often in some kind of opposition to each other. For example, within the vast world of Middle Earth in Lord of the Rings, plants and water represent the forces of love and life while mountains and metal represent the forces of absolute power and death.

Question: Writing good, crisp dialogue is one of the toughest things to do. How do you give each of your characters an original voice when they speak?

This is another of the misunderstood elements of good writing. Certainly a character’s personality plays a role in how each speaks in a unique way. But the real trick to this technique has to do with two crucial structural elements: the character’s need and desire, the first two of the seven major story structure steps. Knowing the great weakness that each of the characters must overcome in their lives and being clear what each character wants in the story give you the fundamental “character” of the character. It’s who they are deep down. These two elements are the most important determinants of how each character talks. You then add on top of that each person’s unique personality, background and values so that every character has a distinctive voice.

Question: What is the biggest misconception about learning and understanding story structure?

Most writers never move past 3-act structure, which is deadly because 3-act is a mechanical, arbitrary way of dividing story. You can divide anything into three parts, but that won’t help you figure out a story that is complex enough to work at the professional level.

Real story structure, also known as deep structure, is organic. Instead of being imposed from the outside, it comes from inside the hero. Or to put it another way, it’s how the hero develops as a human being by working through a plot, a sequence of actions that tests that hero to the fullest.

Shifting from 3-act to organic story structure is not easy. Three-act is a magic bullet we all desperately want to work. But it won’t work. So let it go. Organic story structure requires knowing your hero with tremendous depth and being able to come up with story events that will inexorably lead that character to fundamental character change. If you can make the shift from 3-act to organic story, the payoff is huge. It’s what makes you a professional.

Question: Could you name 3 non-screenwriting sources writers should be learning from to sharpen their craft?

I’ll give you two. These are sleeper books that every serious writer should know and study carefully. They’re not easy to read, but they hold within them profound knowledge of the craft of story.

1. The Poetics of Space, by Gaston Bachelard, the best book ever written on story world

2. Anatomy of Criticism, by Northrup Frye, especially the first essay on the theory of the hero

Question: There seems to be a lot of “re-booting” in Hollywood these days. They just wrapped the redo of “Total Recall,” they rebooted the “Batman” franchise, etc. What’s the best advice you can give when it comes to redoing, rebooting or re-visualizing a previous screenplay?

The key to the best reboots of the past ten years - Casino Royale (The Bond series), The Bourne Identity, Batman Begins, Star Trek and most recently, Rise of the Planet of the Apes - is that the writers have given their hero a weakness and need. Weakness-need is the first of the seven major story structure steps. Until about ten years ago, action and myth heroes were rarely given a deep character flaw because the conventional wisdom said that the superhero had to be upstanding and “heroic” the entire story. The conventional wisdom was wrong, because it gave writers a boring character and meant the plot was just a repetitive series of action stunts.

Giving the hero a weakness and need in a reboot not only makes the character more complex and engaging to the audience, it grounds the plot in character and makes it personal. That both delights the audience and makes them care.

Question: When you’re reading a screenplay, what are the danger signs you see in the first few pages that you just know will mean trouble in the script?

The biggest red flag: the writer doesn’t know how to catch the reader in the first 5-10 pages. And that means they don’t know story structure. Most writers have heard you want to catch the reader quickly, they just have never been taught how. Once again it has to do with understanding how story structure really works. When I go through the 22 building blocks of every great story in the Anatomy of Story Masterclass, I explain all the key structural elements that you must include in the opening 5-10 pages to catch the reader. And I guarantee that if you do those things you will not only catch the reader you will take him or her on a story journey they will never forget.

The craft of story is not easy. But it can be learned and mastered. Don’t be intimidated by it. Take it step by step, and one day you will say with pride to anyone who asks you who you are: I am a writer.

John Truby Interview Part 1

2011-10-26T09:59:00.000-07:00

Question: What’s the best advice you can give writers to help them develop their own unique voice and style?

Voice and style are among the most misunderstood of all elements in storytelling. Voice and style aren’t simply a unique way of talking and writing. Voice and style come from content. Successful content comes from having an original story idea that is structurally well told. And this combination is extremely rare.

This question is really about the writing process. Telling your story with a unique voice and style comes near the end of the process. The beginning of the process has to do with coming up with an original story idea, and that involves digging into your premise and using story techniques that show you the elements of the idea that are totally unique to you.

The next part of the process is a story structurally well told. This involves all the techniques that go into character, plot and story world. If you master all of these techniques, you are 90% of the way to writing with a voice and style that is unmistakably yours.

Question: Could you describe the conventions of the key genres in Hollywood?

Most writers believe that genre writing is a matter of learning certain conventions. But genre conventions are relatively superficial story elements that have little to do with writing a terrific genre script that stands above the crowd.

I refer to genres as the first rule of Hollywood: they’re what Hollywood is really in the business of selling, because they’re what a worldwide audience wants to buy. So as writers we must give them what they’re looking for if we want to win the screenwriting game.

As I point out in all my genre classes, the key to genres is going beyond conventions and learning how they really work under the surface. Each genre is a unique and highly detailed story form with anywhere from 8-15 special story beats (story events). You must not only hit these beats, you must transcend them. In other words, you have to twist the beats in an original way so the audience gets to have their cake and eat it too.

In the third day of my Anatomy of Story Masterclass, I explain how the 12 key genres – from which 99% of films are made – really work, and where possible how to transcend each form. These 12 genres are: Horror, Fantasy, Science Fiction, Myth, Action, Detective, Crime, Thriller, Memoir-True Story (including the biopic), Love, Masterpiece, and Comedy. I also explain how to write the all-important Mixed Genre story, because the main story strategy in Hollywood is to combine two, three or even four genres together.

Question: What are common myths about being a successful screenwriter in Hollywood?

1. It’s all about who you know.

Yes, Hollywood is based on relationships and of course you have an advantage if you are a close friend of George Clooney. But surprisingly, it’s not much of an advantage. The fact is, very few writers have the skills required to write a professional-level script Hollywood wants to buy. When you get the rare opportunity to make a high-level relationship, you have to walk through that door with one helluva good script. You won’t get a second chance. The big shots need to know that you are a professional, a master of the craft. One of the few advantages that we have as writers is that it just has to be there on the page. It’s hard, but with commitment you can do it.

2. If I could just pitch my idea to the right person, I could get a script deal and be on my way.

Pitching is a joke. Unless you have the credits of an Aaron Sorkin or a Steve Zaillian, you are not going to be able to pitch to anyone but the assistant to the guy who makes copies. And if you did somehow get in to pitch to people with real weight at a studio, this is what they will always say to you: “That’s a really good idea. Now go write the script and I want to be the first person to read it. Bye.”

Ideas are a dime a dozen. What’s rare is a professionally written script. And since the recession of 2008, even the top writers in Hollywood are having trouble getting a deal from a pitch. So forget pitching and go write a good script.

3. Every screenplay has three acts and 2-3 plot points.

This one-line summation of what’s known as “3-act structure” is the big lie that every beginning screenwriter is taught, and it kills the career of 99.9% of them. Three-act scripts are mechanical writing at its worst, and the 3-act approach produces a simplistic way of thinking and writing that guarantees you will be an amateur forever.

Just to give you one example, the average film that comes out of Hollywood has anywhere from 7-10 plot points, and if you are working in the detective, crime, or thriller genres, you will need even more. In plot hungry Hollywood, who is going to win the competition between your 3 plot-point script and a script with 7-10?

Three-act writing is for beginners only. You’ve got to learn the techniques the professionals use to be successful.

Question: When a writer has an idea for a screenplay, what questions should they be asking themselves before writing?

The idea stage is the single most dangerous moment for a writer. Why? Because you have almost nothing to go on. Yet you have to somehow dig deep into the idea and determine right now if it can work as a 110-120 page script. This is where craft and technique come to the rescue.

When you apply the techniques for breaking down a story idea, you find out a fact that might amaze you: 9 out of 10 ideas should never be written as screenplays. They are simply too full of structural problems you can never fix, no matter how good you are at story.

One of the biggest mistakes amateurs make is that when they come up with a story idea they get so excited they immediately start writing script pages. They get 15-25 pages in and then hit a dead end from which they cannot escape.

Instead, start by looking for the structural problems that are embedded within the idea. Focus on the probable main character and whether the idea can sustain a plot that is complex enough to generate up to 120 pages of story.

Story in Television

2011-09-30T10:19:00.000-07:00

The best writing coming out of the American entertainment industry is in TV drama. The competition from film isn’t even close. For decades, TV has been film’s little brother, patronized by the “real” talent as the place where you go when you can’t make it in the big leagues.

But in the last ten to fifteen years, TV has shot past film and become the home of the best and the brightest. While the big studios have competed over which new superhero will give them the next tent pole, the cable channels, and to a lesser extent the networks, have nurtured writers who have given the world an extraordinary number of original, deep, and compelling stories whose high quality extends, in many cases, over many years.

There are many reasons for this phenomenon. First and foremost, writers, not directors, control the TV medium.
The auteur theory, one of the worst ideas to come out of the 20th century, put the director in charge of American, and world, cinema. What the auteur theory misunderstood is that the quality of film and television is not based on them being visual mediums as being incredible story mediums. Because writers control TV, they make story, not spectacle, the key element in the production, and audiences have shown again and again that story is what they crave.

The multiple episodes that constitute a TV season, and the fact that these episodes must be written by writers on staff, means that TV writers go through a training regimen experienced by no other writer in the world. To get onto a writing staff you have to be highly skilled. But your training has only just begun. Until a writer has worked on a TV staff, he or she has no clue how intense the pressure is to produce great writing in a fraction of the time. With the non-stop deadlines of a TV season, it is not uncommon for a staffer to write a high-quality, shootable script – approximately one half of a feature film – in one week!

The result of this crucible of storytelling is that TV writers learn the craft fast and they practice that craft week after week, on the run. Plus, unlike their screenwriting brethren, TV writers get to see what they write up on screen, often within weeks of writing it. This feedback is invaluable, and found in no other story form.

All of this leads to a key point: if you want to be a working writer, and the very best writer you can be, turn your sights to television. TV, like film, is tough to break into, even more so since the Great Recession of 2008. But the fact that TV is run by writers means that if you learn the craft of story, especially as it is practiced in TV, you have a much better chance of being hired by people who ply, and appreciate, the same craft.

The crucial element here is: story as practiced in TV. TV has surpassed film in American entertainment not just because writers control the medium, but also because only in the last ten years have writers learned to take advantage of the unique powers of the TV medium itself. For years each episode in a TV season was a complete story, known as a “stand alone.” The episode problem was introduced in the opening scene – a crime, a law case, a disease – and it was solved at the end of the hour. Notice this limits the TV medium to being a mini- movie, repeated 24 times a season.

But once TV writers, and cable and network executives, realized that the true canvas of the TV medium is the season, not the episode, TV finally came into its own as a story medium that could dwarf the power of film. (The pioneer here was Steven Bochco with Hill Street Blues, but this process really kicked into high gear with The Sopranos.) The 90-120 minute unit of length in film suddenly jumped ten to fifteen times. And the storytelling model shifted from the two-hour commercial film to the 19th century novels of Dickens, Balzac and Stendahl, where complexity of plot hit its apex in the history of storytelling.

Instead of a single hero completing a single plotline in a two-hour film, you had a huge cast of characters working through multiple storylines, known as a serial, over a 13-24 episode season. You also had the possibility of creating a story world that had so much detail the show could believably stand for an entire society. The result was masterpieces like The Sopranos, The Wire, Lost and Mad Men.

To master story as it is practiced in television, and have the best chance of breaking into this medium, you have to study the top TV dramas and tease out the story problems that writers of these shows solve day in and day out. Ability to solve story problems quickly, and with originality, is the single most important quality of a professional television writer. Let’s take a look at some of today’s best dramas.

AMC’s The Killing is a Crime-Detective story, and Crime-Detective is the most popular genre, not only in American television but throughout the world. When you are trying to break down the story beats in a particular show, it is always a good idea to start with the show’s genre. The unique story beats of a particular show are usually an outgrowth of the inner workings, and the inherent restrictions, of its genre.

The Killing is based on the Danish series, Forbrydelsen, and the tag line for its first season was, “Who killed Rosie Larsen?” That tag line, and the show’s setting in the gray and rainy Northwest, recalls the one-season wonder, Twin Peaks, whose tag line was, “Who shot Laura Palmer?” The tag line tells you the primary desire line of the show, what the hero(es) want, and desire is one of the three or four most important story elements of a show. In 99% of all crime stories, “Who killed X” is the desire in a particular episode. In The Killing (and in Twin Peaks), this is the desire of the entire season. In other words, The Killing is a serial, not a stand-alone crime show, and that makes all the difference.

This means the writers must create, and service, a huge web of characters, many of whom had the motive, and opportunity, to kill Rosie. Since the killer will not be caught at the end of each episode, the show will necessarily have a slower pace and will deprive the audience of a satisfying solution at the end of each hour. This episode-ending solution is the primary draw of the stand-alone show. So the writers have a huge story challenge: how do we work through the vast array of suspects in a way that both gives some shape to each episode while also sequencing us to the real killer at the end of the season?

Some of the solutions the writers use include cross-cutting among many story lines, not just the main investigation line, greatly increasing the number of false clues (also known as red herrings), and focusing suspicion on a new wrong suspect every one or two episodes.

The failure of the writers to definitively name the killer at the end of the first season raised howls of protest, since the show’s story structure makes the final revelation of “who done it” even more important than usual. Of all the explanations I’ve heard for this “mistake,” the one that makes the most sense to me has to do with the biggest story flaw of a serial detective show whose desire line extends over the entire season. Once you tell the audience who killed the lone victim, what makes them tune in at the beginning of season 2? This is precisely what killed Twin Peaks.

Boardwalk Empire, an historical epic combined with the Gangster genre, is designed to take advantage of the big-canvas story complexity of the TV medium, as seen in The Sopranos and The Wire. An epic is a story in which the fate of a nation is determined, or illustrated, by the actions of a single person. And there’s the main story problem: how do you connect the huge cast and multiple story strands of an entire society to the desires of a single man?

By choosing gangster Nucky Thompson, head of the Boardwalk Empire at the beginning of Prohibition in 1920, to be the fulcrum character, creator and show runner Terence Winter has a natural hub for the story wheel. Nucky is a king in a democracy, and his desire to sell illegal booze to a thirsty nation unifies all the smaller desire lines in each episode and over the course of the season.

With Mad Men taking the year off, The Good Wife is the best-written show on television. This accomplishment is remarkable given that it is a network show, which typically means more interference from executives and the need to please a broader audience base. The Good Wife, a legal drama, uses the primary story strategy found in most American dramas today: combine the crowd-pleasing simplicity of the stand-alone with the critic-pleasing complexity of the serial. Alicia Florrick, the lead character, tries (and usually wins) a case each week. But she must also navigate the political and personal currents that come with being in a cutthroat law firm and having a husband who cheated on her and recently won the race for District Attorney.

This means that The Good Wife is really about situational ethics, about whether a good person can balance conflicting moral challenges and remain clean in the real world. The story challenge for the writers then is two-fold: come up with an ingenious way Alicia can win the weekly legal case for her firm while also slowly tightening the vice of her moral jeopardy as the season progresses.

Over the first two seasons, the writers have met these challenges with flying colors, primarily by weaving multiple conflicts from opponents both within and outside the firm. But it’s the emphasis on moral conundrums that really sets the storytelling of this show apart.

Mad Men has been the best-written show on television since its debut (with four straight Emmy wins for Best Drama). Like Boardwalk Empire, Mad Men is an epic historical drama, with multiple characters and story lines, all focused around an emblematic main character, in this case ad man Don Draper. Once again the central story challenge for the writers turns on the desire line of the show, or lack thereof. The reason the vast majority of shows in the history of television involve cops, lawyers and doctors is that these characters all have a clean, quantifiable desire line – solve the crime, win the case, save the patient. But Mad Men is set in a business. So what’s the desire for the episode, or, for that matter, the season? The goals in the ad business are ever changing, and all the major characters have their own personal, often hidden, agendas.

Without a unifying desire line, the show’s creator, Matthew Weiner, has created a totally new TV story structure, one based on the contrast between American ideals and reality. Don and his fellow mad men (and they are almost all men) are in the business of creating and selling the American Dream. But when they go home to their suburban families, we see an actual life not filled with freedom and promise but defined by limits and lies.

The story challenge for the writers is, first, to set recognizable frames for each season, based not a clean desire line but on how each of the major characters moves between slavery and freedom in modern America. Within each episode, the trick is to come up with a story sequence that highlights the contrast between the Dream these characters sell and the harsh reality they live.

These are just a few of the myriad story challenges writers must solve when working on a writing staff today. Make no mistake: for show runners, it’s all about the story. TV drama is the most exciting game in entertainment right now because the medium has finally found itself as an art form. If you want to play in this high-speed, high-stakes game, you have to show that you have mastered the craft of the TV story. Then everyone will be begging you to play for their team.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes

2011-08-30T09:52:00.000-07:00

Spoiler alert: this breakdown contains information about the plot of the film.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes is one of the best reboots of a franchise in the last ten years, and it’s mostly because of the fine work by the screenwriters, Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver. Their story strategy is similar to that used by the writers of some of the other top reboots, like Casino Royale (The Bond series), The Bourne Identity, Batman Begins and Star Trek. In each case the writers went with the origin story, and they placed primary emphasis on character.

The origin story is almost always the most popular in a franchise, first because it allows the audience to share in the creation of the mythology, and second because it has a shape that later sequels often lack. Origin stories also give the author the chance to execute what may be the single most important element of good storytelling, to make plot come from character. This gives the audience a double pleasure. They get to see the hero succeed in the plot. And they get to see the hero undergo character change, to grow as a human being.

There are many ways that you make plot come from character. Perhaps the most important, and the main technique used in the successful reboots listed above, is to give the hero a weakness and need. To those of you who are familiar with my Anatomy of StoryMasterclass, this may seem obvious, since weakness-need is the first of the seven major story structure steps that are present in every great story. But until the last ten years, you simply didn’t give the main character of an action or myth movie a weakness-need of his own. Conventional wisdom said that for maximum box office the hero had to be completely heroic, without flaws of any kind. Of course, conventional wisdom was wrong.

It is precisely because Batman is the most seriously flawed of all superheroes that he is the best and most popular character. In Rise of the Planet of the Apes, the initial hero, scientific researcher Will Rodman, has a unique weakness, in that it comes from a strength. Because he cannot kill the baby ape, he brings the genetically altered animal home with him, and from that good intention he takes all of humanity with him on the road to hell. This good-heartedness, combined with an arrogance that is common in the master scientist, is a weakness-need the audience can easily relate to, and is the wellspring from which the entire plot flows.

Another key to the success of the script for Rise of the Planet of the Apes comes from how the writers played with their genre. Unlike the original Planet of the Apes, Rise of the Planet of the Apes is not a science fiction story, though it has some important science fiction beats. It is a horror story, and it relies on techniques used in the first and greatest horror story of all time, Frankenstein.

In the Horror, Fantasy andScience Fiction Class, I talk a lot about how you transcend your genre form, since this is the single biggest factor in making your script stand above the crowd. One of these techniques in horror is to flip the hero and the opponent. Put another way, at some point in the story the monster becomes the hero. The ape, Caesar, in Rise of the Planet of the Apes is not the typical monster we see in the average horror story. But he is the Other, and horror stories are really about the inhuman, or non-human, entering the human world.

Frankenstein is a misunderstood masterpiece, primarily because of the powerful but highly simplified 1931 film version. Frankenstein is not about creating life. It is about creating a human being. Mary Shelley was writing “natural philosophy” in fictional form, and that meant among other things tracking in great detail the steps of a living but clean slate body becoming a fully feeling and thinking human being.

This is precisely what writers Jaffa and Silver do in the best section of the film. When Caesar is incarcerated in the ape refuge (prison), we watch as he moves up the ladder of understanding and uses his human-like knowledge and insight to become the ape leader and free himself and his fellow apes from human captivity.

The second major story element of Frankenstein is the betrayal by and rebellion against the father. This too is a key step in Caesar’s development. For a boy to become a man, and a unique individual, he must rebel against his father. Will pays the owner of the refuge so that Caesar can come home. But Caesar refuses; he already is home. This is not only the key step in the hero’s character change, it is the first step in the apes’ rebellion against humans.

One last technique that is crucial to the success of this script is a technique that James Cameron used in Titanic. The loss of over fifteen hundred people meant that Titanic would likely be a disaster film, a sub-form of the action genre. But disaster films are notorious for lack of character definition. Characters are simply fuel for the fire. And that means the audience doesn’t feel for the characters when they die. So Cameron made the first two thirds of the film a love story, the most intimate of all genres. Then when the disaster hit, the loss of the characters, and the love between them, was truly painful.

Similarly, most of Rise of the Planet of the Apes is an intimate story of fathers and sons. Will uses the drug to save his father from the terrible decay of Alzheimer’s. He loves Caesar as a son, and will do anything to protect him. With these powerful personal bonds as a foundation, the final action sequence on the Golden Gate Bridge isn’t just one of a number of set pieces but the emotional climax of the story.

Few writers get to reboot a major Hollywood franchise. But everyone must face the daunting challenge of turning a winning premise into a well-executed script. If you focus on the seven major structure steps and master your genre form so well that you transcend it, you have the best chance of writing a script that has popular and critical success.

10 Story Techniques You Must Use to Sell Your Script

2011-07-26T13:52:00.000-07:00

The key question that all screenwriters should ask themselves is: how do I write a script that Hollywood wants to buy? Most writers mistakenly think that success is all about connections and star power. Not so. The real trick to writing a script that will sell is to know and use Hollywood’s central marketing strategy. And that can be summed up in one word: genres.

Over approximately the last ten years, Hollywood has been undergoing a revolutionary change from selling movie stars to selling genres. According to former Universal Pictures chairman Marc Shmuger, “There’s a significant shift [from] star power to the premium that is being put on concept and genre.”

Shmuger is telling any screenwriter who is smart enough to listen the first rule of the entertainment business worldwide: it buys and sells genres. Genres are story forms and each has from 8-15 special story beats (story events) that make up the form. The reason Hollywood marketing is based on genre is that executives are selling to a worldwide audience. And people the world over love particular types of stories that speak to their deepest desires.

I’d like to tell you 10 story techniques that must be in your script if you want the best chance of selling it in a genre-dominated business.

1. Know the 11 most popular genres.

Step 1 in writing a script Hollywood wants to buy is knowing the 11 most popular story forms. If you write a script that is not based on one or more of these genres, your chances of a sale plummet. They are Action, Comedy, Crime, Detective, Horror, Fantasy, Love, Memoir-True Story, Myth, Science Fiction and Thriller.

2. Combine 2 or 3 genres.

In the genre-focused entertainment business, the most important story strategy today is to mix genres. 99% of films made, not just in Hollywood but worldwide, are some combination of the 11 most popular genres. Why? It all goes back to that old rule of selling: give the customer 2 or 3 for the price of 1. This, in a nutshell, is how Hollywood works.

Let me give you some examples. The Hangover films are comedy + detective. Inception is action + caper (crime) + science fiction. Titanic, the most popular movie of all time, is love + disaster film (action) + myth. The Dark Knight is crime + myth + fantasy. The Harry Potter stories, the most popular books of all time, are fantasy + myth + horror + coming of age drama. The Twilight films are horror + fantasy. The Pirates of the Caribbean movies are fantasy + action + horror + myth.

3. Find the right genre for the story idea.

The single biggest decision you make in the entire writing process occurs right at the beginning, when you are developing your premise, or story idea. The decision is: which genres should I use for this idea? Here’s a shocking but eye-opening fact: 99% of scripts fail at the premise. And why? It’s not because their original story ideas weren’t good. They fail because the writers didn’t know the best genres to use to go from a 1-line idea to 2-hour, 120-page script.

Each genre will take a story idea in radically different directions. So when writers choose the wrong genres to develop their idea, the result is not only a lot of bad scripts but also the waste of thousands of great story ideas. Given that you can use many genres to develop the same idea, the key question is: what are the right ones?

The secret to choosing the right genres is buried in the story idea itself. You need to dig into the premise and find the genres inherent to that idea. Instead of trying to copy a popular movie from the past, you need to find what is original, what is organic to your story. One of the powers of genre is that the right genres highlight the inherent strengths of the idea and hide the inherent weaknesses.

In my genre classes, I talk a lot about techniques for digging into your premise and finding the best genres for you. One of them is to focus on the desire line, one of the seven major story structure steps. It turns out that each genre has a unique, pre-determined desire line. For example, the Crime desire is to catch a criminal. Detective is to find the truth. Horror is to defeat a monster. For Love, it’s to find love. Myth is to go on a journey, ultimately leading to oneself. Figure out the goal of your hero and see if it matches the desire of any of the main genres.

4. Use myth as one of your genres.

Because Hollywood only wants scripts with blockbuster potential, your story must be popular in over 100 different cultures and nationalities.

That’s a lot of communication barriers to cross. Unfortunately, most writers don’t know which genres travel well and which don’t. For example, comedies based mostly on funny dialogue DON’T travel. Myth, on the other hand, loves to travel. That’s why myth is found in more blockbusters by far than any other form.

Myth is the oldest of the 11 most popular film genres, and is surprisingly complex, with 15 special story beats. But boy is it popular. Try adding up the box office of these myth-based films: Avatar, Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Shrek and Star Wars.

5. Combine myth with one or two other genres.

While myth is the foundation of more blockbusters than any other genre, it almost never stands alone. That’s not just because Hollywood wants to give people 2 or 3 genres for the price of one. It has to do with the deep weaknesses found in the form itself.

The myth form is thousands of years old. And it has a very episodic structure, so it can grow tiresome and decline in power through the middle of the story. Top professional screenwriters know this, which is why they always add 1 or 2 other genres to modernize the myth form and overcome its episodic quality.

6. Make one genre primary.

Screenwriters who are smart enough to study Hollywood as a business know that it’s all about combining genres. Where they sometimes go wrong is in execution. It’s one thing to say, “Take 2 or 3 story forms and put them together into a seamless whole.” It’s another thing to do it well.

Combining genres is more difficult than it looks, because of what it does to the story structure under the surface. Each genre has a pre-determined hero, opponent, desire line, thematic focus, and so on. Which is why most writers combining genres end up with a structural mess. They have too many heroes, desire lines, opponents, themes and story beats. Any one of these structural mistakes will kill a script, so imagine what happens if you make them all.

When mixing genres, the key is to make one form the primary one. This will give you your hero, a single desire line, a single story line and the most important unique story beats. Then put in other genre elements where they fit, so they amplify the primary form.

7. If you’re writing a screenplay for an indie film, write horror, thriller, or love.

One of the best ways to break in and separate yourself from the thousands of other screenwriters in the world is to write and make your own film. Of course, that requires keeping costs to a bare minimum. And the cheapest genres to shoot are horror, thriller and love. These genres require the fewest actors, sets and special effects. Of these, horror is the most popular worldwide. But the most important determinants of which genres you use for your indie film are which genres are best for your story idea and which genres are you best at writing.

8. Hit all the genre beats.

Writers of blockbuster movies always know their genres so well that they hit every one of the story beats unique to their form. In genre writing, this is known as “paying the dues.” And it’s absolutely essential or the audience feels cheated. Remember, they are there to see the story forms they love, so you have to know your genres better than anyone else and give the audience what they crave. And that means, knowing how your genres work under the surface, in the structure, where the real story work is done.

9. Be original, transcend the genre.

It may surprise you that the biggest reason a reader turns down a script is because it’s “derivative.” That’s a fancy way of saying that the writer hit all the beats of the genre, but nothing more. Readers have read scripts from every genre hundreds of times. So you can’t stand out from the crowd just by “paying the dues.”

That’s why professional screenwriters not only hit all the genre beats, they do the beats in an original way. This is known as transcending the genre. And you simply cannot succeed if you fail to transcend the genres you’re working in.

Unfortunately, there are no simple rules for how to do this for all genres. Transcending genre is different for each form. In the 1-day class I teach in each genre, I spend a great deal of time on exactly how to do this. Transcending depends on the story beats that are unique to your form. It also requires that you study the best films in your form so you know what has already been done.

10. Be honest with yourself, and specialize in the forms that are right for you.

Genres are extremely powerful structural tools for a screenwriter, and they are the key to your success in the entertainment business. But they are complex story systems. I don’t know a single professional screenwriter who has mastered more than 2 or 3 of them. That’s why it’s so important that you look honestly at yourself and assess your strengths and weaknesses as a writer. Determine which genres highlight your strengths and express the themes you believe in. Then apply yourself with laser-like focus to mastering those forms.

When you let genres do the hard story work, and concentrate on writing them in an original way, you will be amazed at how good, and how successful, your scripts will be.

For structure breakdowns of films in all the major genres, go to www.truby.com/reviewarc.html.

5 Keys to Summer Blockbusters

2011-06-29T20:50:00.000-07:00

It used to be that summer was the season for blockbuster movies. Now it's a year-round phenomenon. Hollywood is in the business of selling films to a worldwide audience, which means they are always looking for a script with blockbuster potential.

Most screenwriters think a blockbuster is simply a film that does really well at the box office. Technically speaking, that's true. But the reality is that a script with blockbuster potential is a very special kind of script, with a number of story elements that studio executives are looking for.

I'd like to point out five of the most important blockbuster script elements, out of about forty that we consistently see in the top money-making films.

Technique 1: The Myth Genre

The first blockbuster story element has to do with the genre you use to tell your story. A genre is a particular kind of story, like detective, action or comedy. When Hollywood was selling primarily to an American audience, executives thought that movie stars were the key to a hit film. But in the last ten to fifteen years, the vast majority of blockbuster films have had no movie stars.

Instead the emphasis has changed to genre films with great stories. For a film to reach a worldwide audience, it must be popular in over 100 different cultures and nationalities. Story forms are instantly recognizable anywhere in the world.

But you can't just choose any genre if you want to write a script with blockbuster potential. Most writers don't know that some genres travel well while others don't. For example, comedies based mostly on funny dialogue don't travel.

Ironically, the story that travels best is the oldest genre of all, the myth form. Myth is found in more blockbusters than any other genre by far. Add up the box office for the following myth-based movies: Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, Lord of the Rings, Shrek, Star Wars and Avatar.

The reason myth transcends national and cultural boundaries so well is that the form tracks archetypal characters and archetypal life situations. These are fundamental character types that everyone knows, and life experiences everyone passes through from birth to death.

Like any genre, myth has a number of unique story beats you must learn, and include, if you want to tell the form well. And remember: in blockbusters, myth is almost always combined with one or two other genres, such as action, fantasy and science fiction, that serve to update and unify the myth story for a young audience.

Technique 2: The Hero's Goal

The single most important element in an international blockbuster is narrative drive, the ability of the story to propel forward at an increasing rate. Narrative drive comes primarily from the hero's desire line. Desire is one of the seven major story structure steps, and provides you with the all-important spine on which you hang all characters, plot, symbol, theme and dialogue.

Average writers tend to make at least one of the following mistakes when coming up with the desire line: their hero has no clear goal, he/she accomplishes the goal too quickly, or the hero reaches the goal by taking only a few action steps.

There are three keys to a good desire line. First, make it specific; the more specific the better. Second, extend the goal as close to the end as possible. Third, make sure the hero is obsessed with it. Above all, intensify the desire.

Technique 3: The Opponent

As screenwriters, we are taught to focus on the hero, since this character drives the story. That's sound advice. But in blockbuster films, the opponent may be even more important. One of the great principles in all storytelling is that the hero is only as good as the person he fights. Also, the opponent is the key to plot. And in the last ten years, blockbusters have become more plot heavy.

When writing your script, first make sure you have one main opponent to focus and build the conflict. Then look for ways to intensify the central opposition. Make your main opponent bigger, smarter, more aggressive, more passionate. In writing Batman Begins, Christopher Nolan said, "What was important to me in creating an incredible frightening villain is that everything he says is true and at some level reasonable and also makes sense." Nolan then used this same approach in The Dark Knight when he created The Joker, one of the all-time great opponents and probably the key element in that film's huge success.

Once you're clear about the main opponent, try to come up with one or two secondary opponents, with at least one of them hidden from the hero and the audience.

Technique 4: The Scam

The emphasis blockbuster films place on plot leads to another story technique. And it's designed to solve a problem that plagues almost all screenwriters: how do you create maximum plot in the middle, where 90% of scripts fail? In blockbuster movies, the hero's plan is often a scam, or a plan that involves deception.

The trick here is to make the plan more deceptive for both hero and main opponent. When the hero scams, he becomes a trickster character, which audiences love. When the opponent scams, it gives you more plot and makes him/her a more challenging foe.

Technique 5: The Story World

The rise of the videogame along with the ability of special effects artists to realize wholly imaginary worlds has made the story world one of the three or four crucial elements in a blockbuster film. As little as a decade ago, Hollywood didn't care about story world, because it slows down narrative drive. Special effects were designed primarily to heighten heroic action.

But videogames showed Hollywood the power that comes from having viewers immerse themselves and explore a world in all its facets. And there's no medium that can do that better than the big screen film medium.

Many screenwriters believe that this aspect of the film is the responsibility of the director and the special effects artists. Wrong. A good story world is written into the script, and it is intimately organic to the story. That's why you must make sure that every visual element contributes to the story. In other words every element should have story meaning embedded within it.

How you do that is a major story skill right up there with character, plot, dialogue and rewrite. All of the major techniques for creating a rich story world are found in my Blockbuster story development software. The first step is to define a distinct and recognizable arena. Then create a map of the world, with as much detail as you can provide, especially when depicting the central community within which the story takes place. Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter and Avatar were all written by masters of the story world.

If you are serious about succeeding as a professional screenwriter, start with these five techniques and you will be well on the path to writing a script that Hollywood is eager to buy.

Midnight in Paris

2011-05-31T20:46:00.000-07:00

Spoiler alert: this breakdown contains crucial information about the plot of the film.

With Midnight in Paris, Woody Allen has returned to writing from strength. The film is founded on one of the great cinematic story techniques, the utopian world. Here the moment is 1920s' Paris, where some of the best writers and artists of the 20th century lived in close quarters. The film is also based on the concept of The Golden Age. Every society has some version of the belief that an earlier time was not only better than the present, but nearly perfect.

This idea of a golden age isn't just intellectually appealing. It has personal impact on the audience as well. An older audience especially understands the feeling that there was a time in their life that was best, but it's long over now. For many, the desire to get back to that age is intense. Some experience it every Christmas when they remember how magical that morning was for them when they were young. But no more.

Let's put ourselves in Woody Allen's position to see how he might have solved this story problem. He might ask: how do you structure this utopia so that it gains the added impact of a story?

Midnight in Paris looks like a fairy tale romantic comedy. But Allen isn't very good at the love story form. Yes, he wrote one of the great romantic comedies in Annie Hall. But when you look at that film in light of all the films he has made since, you realize that Annie Hall was a one-time home run based primarily on his creation of the amazing title character, Annie.

The love interest in Midnight in Paris has nowhere near the character definition or quirky uniqueness of Annie Hall. She is simply a gentle, beautiful Frenchwoman who wants to live in an earlier time, just like the hero. As a result, there is little chance for the romance of these characters to build in a way that is satisfying to the audience.

The love story structure is really just an excuse for Allen to provide a storyline on which to hang the real gold of the idea, the fantasy comedy elements. With the woman as a desire line, the hero can take a number of trips into the utopian moment. And there he can meet a succession of famous artists the audience knows.

In the Anatomy of Story Masterclass, I talk about the crucial technique of digging out the gold in your premise - finding what is original to you - and then presenting that gold again and again to the audience over the course of the story. The gold here is Allen's comical take on each of the famous writers and artists of the time. Once he was clear about that, the question for Allen, the writer, then became: how do I create a storyline that can allow me to play as many of these comic bits as possible without the story becoming episodic and collapsing?

The solution Allen chose is the same one used in Crocodile Dundee. In that film the romantic line between Dundee and the reporter allowed for the maximum number of encounters between animal man Dundee and the denizens of New York. Here the hero's encounter with Hemingway is the equivalent of Dundee saying to the mugger, "That's not a knife. This is a knife."

This structure also allowed Allen to write to his strength, rather than what he has been doing for the last twenty years, which is writing from his weakness. Allen has never been very good at the craft of story. In spite of the complexity of some of his story structures over the years (Annie Hall, Hannah and Her Sisters), Allen has usually been unable to create a complex plot where the opposing characters play out their differences through building conflict.

The normal Woody Allen movie consists of a story gag that should take about thirty minutes to play out. He stretches it to ninety minutes and finally has the lead character directly explain his self-revelation, which is exactly what Allen wants his audience to learn from the film.

What Woody Allen is great at is writing comic bits and gags. And he is probably the second greatest American writer of intellectual comedy, behind Mark Twain. Unfortunately, Allen is not satisfied with that gift as a writer, and indeed he has looked down on it since at least the early 70s.

In this film Allen has found a story structure that allows him to feel he is a writer's writer, but also gives him permission to enjoy his guilty pleasure of writing brilliant intellectual comedy. The first time the hero meets Hemingway we hear drop dead perfect Hemingway prose coming out of his mouth. The scene is hilarious, especially if you know your American literature.

And that's another pleasure of the film. Allen's relatively small audience is composed of the educated and the sophisticated. So when they get the literary and visual jokes, they also get to feel how smart they are.

The story is really just an intellectual candy store, with the love story bringing us back to the store again and again. Of course while we are enjoying the pleasures of a utopian moment in this film, we also learn, in a great visual gag, the opposite lesson that you can't live in the past.

I don't know if this film signals a possible return to good Woody Allen, as some have suggested. I do know it provides a clear lesson to the screenwriter in how to find the right structure and genre embedded in your story idea.

African Cats

2011-04-26T11:40:00.000-07:00

I had the pleasure of co-writing a wonderful film that’s just come out, called African Cats. This is Disney Nature’s third release, after Earth and Oceans. These films were all made by the highly talented nature documentarians at the BBC, who work together not unlike the writers and directors of Pixar. African Cats was led by Keith Scholey, co-writer and co-director, and the world’s premiere expert in filming big cat behavior. So this was a really fun project for me.

Ironically, one of the reasons I loved it was for the unique story challenges it posed. You have to identify these challenges right at the beginning of the writing process, or your script will have severe problems. First, we had to make this an epic event, worthy of a feature length film. That meant we had to avoid the typical nature documentary, which is predictable and familiar, and way too informational and dry.

We also had to write a story that was dictated by the animals. Obviously, you can’t script animals; you have to find the best story in what they actually do. That can be very difficult, especially when you want to avoid anthropomorphizing them. So the main challenge of the plot was how to overcome the episodic quality inherent in all nature films, especially when the animal depicted must go on an annual migration.

Animal stories are also constrained by the main characters. The more the animal is limited by what he can learn, the more the story is guided by predictable instinct. One solution, but also a problem, was to have two main characters, a lion and a cheetah. This makes the film feel like the story about the world’s big cats. But it also breaks the single narrative story line into two tracks, and the tracks may never cross.

So what did we do? I always say in my genre classes that the main trick is to transcend the genre. How you do that is different for every form. Nature films are a sub-genre of the True Story (which also includes memoir). True stories are at their best when they are deeply personal, when they focus on the family. For us, that meant focusing on the two mothers.

Motherhood is the greatest challenge in the animal world, both emotionally and strategically. These mothers, whether lion or cheetah, are ferocious fighters for their cubs. They despair at losing one. They rejoice when a cub comes home. When you see the intense feelings of the two mothers, you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that you have no need, or even possibility, of anthropomorphizing these animals. Call them what you will, these animals love.

Unlike all other animal activities, which are single bursts in the present, motherhood requires a strategic campaign that can cover years. So we knew that tracking the cub-raising process would give us most of our plot.

Motherhood also unifies our story line. It gives the audience a sense that, below the surface, these two main characters are really one. Ironically we united them further by using extreme contrast. Luckily for us storytellers, these two feline mothers are complete opposites: the lioness raises her cubs within the strong society of the pride while the cheetah raises her cubs alone. Each way of living and mothering produces different terrors, mothering techniques and plot beats.

While the two moms should give us enough plot (we wouldn’t know for sure until all the footage came back!), it wouldn’t necessarily overcome the story’s episodic nature. We began to solve that problem by first admitting that this story will always have episodic qualities. That’s life. That’s a journey. And to this day, it’s a major form of plot.

But we also knew a great technique in writing, which is to turn a negative into a positive. Make your weakness a strength. If we’ve got two major characters and a journey, let’s get all the benefits of the crosscut we can.

The crosscut was one of the keys to this plot, because it allowed us to cut on the cliffhanger. The cliffhanger has been used in storytelling forever. But this technique was refined for the film medium in recent years through television, in shows like ER. Multi-strand stories on film allow you to sequence scenes based on the most dramatic moments of each story.

The crosscut in turn affected how we wrote the narration. Most narrations in nature films are too wordy and informational. They often step on big reveals and smother drama. The crosscut allowed us to convey lots of information through juxtaposition of scenes rather than by voiceover. For every step of the cub-raising process, we could show, by quick comparison, how the two mothers must use opposite techniques, with opposite costs.

That in turn allowed us to keep the narration lean and emphasize the dramatic. Our discipline was to give only enough information to tell the big cats apart and highlight the underlying strategies the cats use for each challenge they face. We let the “greatest hit” drama beats tell themselves, and that brought the audience into the action, instead of dryly backing them away.

You cannot transcend a film’s genre unless you also transcend the form’s basic theme. Animal films are about survival. About life. It goes on, but the process is brutal. It’s a war out there. One of the ways we punched the epic quality of the film was to frame it as a fight for the entire lion kingdom, which arguably is the most dangerous place on earth. So we were playing that theme hard (and yes, it really happened).

But to transcend our theme, we knew we would have to show that within this world of brutal survival, where there is no justice, there are moments of courage, sacrifice and love. Once again the mothers were the answer. Because when you see what these mothers do for their cubs, these big, beautiful cats become the Shakespearean characters of the animal world. Rest assured, if you see this movie the tears will come. Don’t fight it. Your secret is safe with me.

John Truby answers your story questions

2011-03-30T09:56:00.000-07:00

Question: What questions should a writer ask him or herself prior to crafting their story?

Most writers can't tell at the premise stage whether they've got a good story because they don't have the training to see the deep structural problems in the idea before writing it as a script.

The extraordinary fact is 99% of writers fail at the premise. This is the great unknown gatekeeper that keeps most writers from being successful. If you screw up the premise, nothing you do later in the writing process will make any difference. The game's already over.

The biggest mistakes writers make at the premise:

The idea is not original.

The idea doesn't have a clear desire line for the hero that extends throughout the story.

The idea doesn't have a strong main opponent.

Question: How much time and effort should a writer put into outlining their script and fleshing out their characters before actually writing the script?

Much more time and effort than most writers think.

For every hour you put into prep work on your story, you save ten when it comes to writing, and rewriting, it. Don't make the mistake so many writers make of thinking, "I'll fix it in the rewrite." They never do.

A good story is linked under the surface so it builds steadily from beginning to end. But amateurs don't know that, so when they get an idea, they immediately start writing script pages, and they inevitably write themselves into a dead-end 20-30 pages in. Also, writer's block is almost always caused by not knowing where the story is going. That's why, before writing script pages, you always want to start by figuring out the seven steps of your story. The seven steps are in your story right now. It's your job to find them, dig them out and make them say what you want them to say.

Question: You've consulted on over 1,000 movie and TV scripts. What are the typical weaknesses you find in scripts?

I'll give you five.

The story idea the writer comes up with is not original. Biggest mistake writers make.

Writers often use the wrong genre to develop the idea, or they impose a bunch of pre-determined genre beats onto the idea instead of finding the story events that are original to the idea.

They think a script is all about finding the "high concept" premise, but they don't realize that high concept only gives you two or three big scenes. So they don't know how to extend the high concept into a 100-page script.

They don't know how to build the story on the seven major story structure steps, so the plot fails to come out of character and the main character doesn't change.

They think of the hero as a separate individual with a list of superficial character traits. Instead they should think of the hero as part of a web of characters, all connected in some way but with each character being structurally different from the others.

Question: Why is it so important to master genres?

It goes back to the 1st rule of the entertainment business: it doesn't buy stars, directors or writers. It buys and sells genres. If you don't know what Hollywood is really buying, you have no chance of selling them your script.

Genres are different kinds of stories. More importantly, genres are really good stories. They are the all-stars of the story world. That's why Hollywood buys and sells them. That's why you have to know these genres cold. The game is won by mastering story structure and genres. And mastering genres comes from specializing in 2 or 3 forms that highlight your strengths as a writer and express your philosophy of life.

Question: How do you determine what genre or genres your story is?

This can be very tricky, and most writers end up choosing the wrong genre for their story idea. Each genre takes the basic steps of story structure and twists them in unique ways. Also, each genre has its own set of unique story beats - anywhere from 8-15 - that must be included in your script if you are to tell the story right.

Because genre is the single most important decision you make in developing a story idea, I spend a great deal of time in my Masterclass talking about how you tell which are the right genres for your unique idea. Some of the elements that determine the right genres for your story are the hero, the opponent, the key thematic question, the hero's goal in the story, and the unique story strategy inherent to each form.

Question: You've said writers often underestimate the importance of plot. Why is it so important to learn, and how do you approach teaching it?

Plot is the most underestimated of the major writing skills. Most writers know the value of a strong main character and lean, hard-hitting dialogue. But when it comes to plot, they think they'll just figure it out as they go, which never happens.

The bad news: Plot has more techniques you need to know than all the other major skills combined.

The good news: Every one of them can be learned as long as you are willing to put in the work.

Plot is what makes the character's internal development pleasing to the audience. It's the artistry that sets you apart, that tells the audience you are a real storyteller. Plot is the sequence of events by which the hero tries to defeat the opponent and reach the goal. The two biggest mistakes writers make in plot is 1) Their story is episodic, meaning events stand on their own but don't connect and build under the surface and 2) They hit the same beat, which means the events are superficially different but really all the same.

Question: Why do some writers react negatively to the idea of structure?

They wrongly believe that it hurts creativity. It goes all the way back to the old romantic notion that art comes from divine intervention. The fact is: art comes from craft. And the most important element of craft is structure. When you have the right story structure for your script then each scene you write is moving you along the right path for your particular main character. The results are not comparable. The first way you write yourself into a dead-end about 20-30 pages in. It is practically inevitable and is one of the marks of an amateur. The second way you figure out the story structure so your creative bursts are linked to the right path.

Ironically, structuring your story first is much more creative than just winging it, because you have a strong foundation on which to take creative chances. You know your structure is there to tell you if the creative jump you want to make is going to work.

Question: You say character must drive the plot instead of being pushed around by the plot. But don't you think everyday life pushes us around most of the time? In order for the audience to recognize itself in the story, shouldn't the story talk about that too?

This phrase is often misunderstood. Driving the plot doesn't mean a hero who takes all the action steps to succeed. Only the most action-oriented character does that. And it makes for a poor story because it means the opposition is doing very little to knock the hero off course. Result: no conflict and bad drama.

Making the hero drive the plot means that the plot comes out of the weakness and need of the hero. This way, the hero's surface actions while going after some kind of goal lead ultimately to character change within the hero. If the writer doesn't make this connection between character and plot, and come up with plot beats that will ultimately force that character change, the story has no personal meaning for the audience. In a good story the opponent will push the hero around a great deal, in fact, the more the better. This builds conflict and forces the hero to dig deeper to fix the great weakness that's ruining the hero's life.

Question: You write that dialogue isn't real talk, rather it's highly selective language that could be real. Could you please explain that?

If dialogue were real talk, all you would need to do is follow your friends around with a recording device and your dialogue would be guaranteed authentic. It would also be boring. Why? Because it lacks content.

Just as a story is a highly selective sequence of events, dialogue is selective, heightened talk. It is packed content. And here's where it gets tricky. Dialogue with lots of content doesn't usually sound like real talk. It sounds written, and that will kill your story. So you need to learn the techniques for making highly selective language sound like it could be real.

Question: How important is the process of rewriting?

For most writers, the second draft is worse than the first.

This is one of the dirty little secrets of screenwriting, and it's one of the biggest reasons many writers give up. Writers always think they are the only person to experience this, while in fact it's the norm. Part of the problem comes from writers following the conventional wisdom that "writing is rewriting." It's true you have to rewrite your script many times. But many writers think that they should write their first draft quickly - just get it down on paper - and they'll fix it in the rewrite. This is a disaster because once a script is written it's like cement. It hardens in your mind and it's much harder to fix the problems. That's why it's so important to figure out the story structure before you write the first draft.

The other big reason why the second draft is often worse than the first comes from the fact that most writers don't realize that rewriting is a set of skills, just like crafting character, plot and dialogue. You have to know how to rewrite. And that means, among other things, knowing the right order to rewrite. For example, the first thing most writers fix in the rewrite is the dialogue. That should be the last thing you fix. First are the structural problems, and even here there is a definite order for how to rewrite to make certain that every draft is an improvement over the one that came before.

Question: What is the most important thing to know when you are adapting a book into a screenplay?

Entire books have been written on the subject of adapting a book into a screenplay. Always the question arises: how do you remain true to the original material and still have the freedom to take advantage of the cinematic medium?

The trick to adaptation is: find the bones. First determine the deep structure of the novel. Mark every scene where a key structure step occurs. Those are the events that must be in the script. Study those beats and figure out if the novel's original structure needs to be fixed or changed in some way. Then go back to the novel and see if you want to include any of the non-structural events. These may be in the script, so long as they contribute to the script's basic structure.

Question: How do writers unearth stories that want to be told?

Stories that want to be told are not "out there." They're in you. In my class, I talk about a number of key writing exercises that help you find what is totally original to you. Incredibly, most writers don't know, and it's a fatal mistake. Then we go through the techniques you must know to turn that original seed into a professionally told story. An original idea professionally told is an unbeatable combination. It's not easy, but it can be done and it's the only recipe I know that works.

Question: Your 3-day masterclass on story is legendary. Can you give us a detailed rundown of what you cover and why people keep coming back over and over?

The morning of the first day is where we set the foundation for a great script. We cover the 7 steps of deep structure and the story beats of the 3 major variations of deep structure. Once this foundation is set, the class covers all the professional techniques in the same order that you would write your script.

In the afternoon, we start with the techniques for developing a winning premise, because 99% of scripts fail right there. Then we go through the five steps to creating powerful characters, the key to every good script.

The morning of the second day is devoted to plot, where many writers have tremendous difficulty. This is where we learn the 22 steps of every great story, the single most powerful set of tools in all of storytelling. Afternoon of day two starts with a discussion of story shapes, which are one of the secrets to crafting a surprising and unique plot. Then we dive into the techniques for constructing scenes and writing sharp dialogue.

In day three, we go through the 12 major genres on which 99% of movies are based. These include Action, Comedy, Crime, Detective, Fantasy, Horror, Love, Masterpiece, Memoir-True Story, Myth, Science Fiction, Thriller and Mixed Genre. Here we get into what each genre really means under the surface, some key structure techniques for writing each one, and how to transcend your genre so you stand above the crowd.

When the three days are over, students have a precise set of tools that they can apply to any story they write. And I believe at the end of the class, they are substantially better writers than they were before the class, whether they started as a beginner or as a professional.

Why do people keep coming back? Because for many writers it's the only thing they've found that works. My class is all about being practical. It's about taking the most complex craft in the world - which shows people solving life problems - and breaking it down into specific techniques that affect an audience. Every time. Every script, no matter what genre.

Part of what makes the class so powerful and useful to writers is that the techniques don't produce cookie cutter scripts that no one wants to read. That's because the techniques are all focused on how your unique main character drives an intriguing plot. So each script is original and surprising at the same time.

Genres: The Secret to Your Success

2011-02-24T11:02:00.000-08:00

Here’s a fact that should catch your attention: 99% of screenwriters fail at the premise line. You may come up with a terrific one-line idea for a movie, but if you don't develop it the right way, the best scene writing in the world won't make a difference.

The single most important decision you make when developing your premise is: what genre should I use? Genre is a particular type of story, like detective, comedy, thriller or action. The reason genre is so important is that the entire entertainment business is based on it.

That sounds like a pretty extreme statement until you look at how Hollywood has set itself apart from the rest of the world. The rest of the world has always emphasized the original artistic vision in their filmmaking. Which is great for art, but bad for commerce, because for each film, the audience has to re-invent the wheel. They have to guess whether they want to enter the theater. And they have to work hard to figure out the unique story patterns that make that film work.

Hollywood realized a long time ago that it is not in the business of selling original artistic vision (though it sometimes happens anyway). It is in the business of buying and selling story forms. Genres tell the audience up front what to expect from the product they are buying. If they like a particular kind of story, chances are they will like this particular film, especially if the writer and director give the expectations a little twist.

For years, Hollywood films were only one genre apiece; say western, detective or family comedy. Then someone had the brilliant idea: hey, let's give them two for the price of one. That's why virtually every film made now is a combination of two, three or even four genres.

The implications for you as a writer in Hollywood are huge. First, you have to figure out what genres are best for your idea. Second, you have to know those genres better than everyone else writing in those forms. Third, you have to know how to transcend the forms so you can give the audience a sense of originality and surprise.

The problem with genre is that each one is a complex system of story, with its own unique hero, opponent, story beats, structures and themes. Fortunately, this information, though complex, is knowable. You just have to put in the time and effort to learn it.

When I first start developing a story, I look at a number of elements to help me choose which genres would get the most out of the idea. The first element is the hero's role in the story. When you look at your premise, you can usually imagine a basic action that the hero would take throughout the story. For example, is the hero essentially a fighter (Action), a lover (Love), an enforcer or criminal (Crime), an endangered investigator (Thriller) or a victim (Horror)?

A second element to look at is your hero's desire line. The desire, one of the seven basic story structure steps, is your hero's particular goal. It provides the spine of the story, so every hero should have one. It just so happens that each of the major genres is associated with a desire line. One way to get a sense of the best genre for your idea is to match the probable desire line of your hero to the key desire line of each genre. For example, the goal in a fantasy is to explore an imaginary world. In myth, it's to go on a journey, ultimately leading to one's self. In sitcoms, the hero wants to escape from an impossible predicament. In thrillers, the hero's desire is to escape attack.

An opponent who fights the hero and tries to prevent him or her from reaching the goal is another important element that helps determine your genre. The relationship between hero and opponent is the most important relationship in your story. A good opponent must be a unique individual but also fulfill a crucial story function. For example, in television drama, the main opponents are usually other family members. In comedy, the opponents tend to be various expressions of society at large. In the masterpiece, the opponent is some kind of system in which the hero is trapped. In love stories, the main opponent is the lover.

Another way that the various genres set themselves apart from one another is that they each ask a different central question or force the hero to make a crucial decision. The key question in thrillers: Is your suspicion justified? In comedy: do you lie or show your true self? In action: do you choose freedom or life? In fantasy: how do you live with style and freedom?

Part of exploring your premise line has to do with discovering the deepest thematic question your hero must confront in playing out the drama. How your hero answers this deep question is the real stakes of the story; it's what makes the audience want to watch this character all the way to the end. One of the benefits of genre is that a framework for these deep questions has already been worked out. You provide the details and the variations.

Keep in mind that when you explore your premise, you are at the very beginning of the writing process. So you may not know the key question your story will ask. The important thing is to make a guess now. It will help you extend and focus your idea, as well as lead you to the best genre for carrying the story.

Genres aren't just systems for expressing certain themes. They are also strategies for storytelling. Action stories set up a kind of heavyweight fight with an intense punch/counter-punch between hero and opponent. Science fiction sends the hero to a unique technological future that highlights strengths and weaknesses in the present world. Thriller places a weakened hero in a tight box and shows him or her struggling to escape. Crime pits a criminal who thinks he is above society against a defender of society's rules and values.

The above elements, though helpful, only tell you which genres are probably best for your idea. They don't tell you how to write them. That’s where the story beats come in. Each genre has anywhere from 8-15 unique beats, which are key events that must be in your story or you are not doing the form. For example, if you write a love story without a first kiss the audience will want to have you shot.

One of the great advantages of genres is that they help you with plot. Plot is the most underestimated of all the major writing skills, with a lot of specific techniques you must learn to work as a pro. Most writers know the value of a strong main character and tight, witty dialogue. But they think they’ll just figure out the plot as they go. Which never happens, and it’s a big mistake. The ability to pack more plot in your script is the single most distinguishing feature in a script and film that hits big.

Once you know the key genre beats of your story, you have a detailed map of the plot. But that only puts you in the ballpark of a winning script. The final key is to learn these beats so well you not only hit them but also twist them. Twisting the beats is what makes your genre story original and separates it from all the other scripts in your form. This year, a number of films that are getting Oscar attention are transcendent genre films, such as Toy Story 3, Inception, The Social Network, Kick Ass, and A Prophet.

How you transcend your genre is quite varied and depends on the genre. But certain elements always apply. First, you have to make your archetypal main character – such as fighter, lover, enforcer, searcher – real and unique. In short, you must turn a type into an individual.

Transcending your genre also involves changing the hero from what I call a “traveling angel” – a perfect person who goes around solving other people’s problems – and placing him or her at the center of the drama. That means giving your hero a strong weakness and need that he or she must overcome by the end of the story.

This is one of the main techniques Hollywood’s best screenwriters use to transcend their form. For example, Tony Gilroy used this technique in transcending the thriller with Michael Clayton and in transcending the action story with the Bourne films. Said Gilroy, “I had been running around for years trying to get somebody to get interested in scaling down action. To make it more intimate. My contention was that if you brought action down to the ground level, it could mean a lot more with a lot less.” Translated into screenwriting techniques, that meant turning Jason Bourne into a real person haunted by guilt and the need for revenge.

Another technique for transcending your genre is to combine the basic genre beats with elements of the family drama. One of the best comedies of the last few years was Little Miss Sunshine, a combination of myth and comedy, which is a hybrid form as old as Don Quixote. In a myth the hero goes on a long journey. Myth is a very popular genre, but it can become episodic as the hero meets and defeats a succession of opponents who are strangers to the hero and the audience.

The writers of Little Miss Sunshine solved this inherent problem of the myth form by bringing the family along for the ride. This way the hero had ongoing opponents the audience knows – mainly the dad – as well as episodic opponents. Instead of a succession of unconnected events, the story has a steadily building conflict. The jokes are funnier and it lets the writers build to the funniest gag of all when the family gets to the beauty pageant at the end of the journey.

One final point you need to know to have the best chance to succeed as a professional screenwriter has to do with mixing genres. Hollywood’s key story strategy today is that every film they make must combine at least two genres, and often three or four. It’s the old marketing technique of give the audience two or three for the price of one. For example, Inception combines science fiction and caper. Avatar is action + love. The Bourne films are action + thriller. The Other Guys is a buddy picture, which is really comedy + action + love. Little Miss Sunshine is comedy + myth. And The Social Network is true story + thriller.

Mixing genres is a great strategy, and you must use it. But it’s more difficult than it looks. Most writers end up with a mess, with too many heroes, desire lines, opponents, and themes. The first technique for mixing genres is to make one genre the primary one. This will give you your hero, a single desire, and a single story line. Then put in other genre beats where they fit, so they amplify the primary form.

Don’t let the complexity of transcending a multiple genre story scare you. It’s actually great news. The techniques are there for you, and everyone reading this article can master them if you commit yourself to study and practice. That’s what the craft of writing is all about.

But the complexity also means you have to focus. I know a lot of talented writers, but I know no one who has mastered more than two or three genres. If you concentrate on the two or three forms that express your life philosophy and highlight your strengths as a writer, you’ll go a long way toward being the screenwriter that Hollywood calls when that next assignment comes along.

True Grit

2011-01-28T13:12:00.000-08:00

The Coen brothers are the moral philosophers of American film. They have one subject: moral accounting. That’s why no matter what genre they seem to work in, they’re always doing crime stories.

The classic crime story is a heavyweight fight between a master criminal and a master cop. The middle of the story has an intense punch/counter-punch as each takes his best shots. When one wins at the end, usually the cop, we get the pleasure of a good heavyweight fight.

That’s fine for a lot of screenwriters. But the Coens have always known that you have to transcend your genre, because then your script or film is not only more popular, it has a chance to be great.

A transcendent crime story isn’t just about catching a criminal. It’s about tallying up what is owed over the course of a lifetime, with life and death consequences. The Coen’s Blood Simple, Miller’s Crossing, Fargo, No Country for Old Men and True Grit all play out this brutal accounting system.

True Grit is set in the old west, but it’s not a Western. The classic Western is all about nation building, transforming wilderness into civilization. Shane is a classic Western.

True Grit is crime in western clothes. Tom Chaney has murdered a girl’s father and he must pay with his life. The law is supposed to handle the moral accounting in society. But this time the law fails. So it falls to headstrong, 14-year-old Mattie to make sure the job is done. This gives the film a clear, strong desire line. And that is a crucial benefit when the hero and her allies, Marshall Rooster Cogburn and Agent LaBoeuf, go on a journey to track the killer down.

Accounting is also central to Mattie’s plan. This film is filled with bargaining. She’s a ferocious bargainer for her father’s horses. And she refuses to let Rooster shirk his responsibility. This is the deal we made, she insists, and you must keep your word.

Though essentially a crime story, True Grit uses the myth structure, with its series of tests on the road, to unfold the story and play out the accounting. As in the best myth stories, the hero brings her “family” – Rooster and LaBoeuf – along for the ride. The dramatic opposition comes from the series of bad guys they must fight on the road.

But the most important opposition thematically is within the family. Each conflict with the bad guys allows the family members to tally up his or her proper payment to the others. The true endpoint of the story is not whether they bring Tom Chaney to justice. It is whether these three main characters – Mattie, Rooster and LaBoeuf – will come to understand the true worth of each of the others.

In the final scene, Mattie has one last payment she must make to old Rooster. She can’t make it, and for someone with such a strong moral code this is tragic. It’s not the ending we want in this movie. But it’s the ending the movie has to have.

The Coens never sermonize. Their knowledge of the screenwriting craft is too great for that. Study True Grit and the rest of the Coen canon to learn how to convert your moral vision into characters and plot. Those techniques are one of the main ways you tell the world that you are a master of the craft.

Black Swan

2010-12-31T10:13:00.000-08:00

Spoiler alert: this breakdown contains crucial information about the plot of the film.

Black Swan is a movie that makes you pay a lot more than the admission price. But the payoff is huge.

To be honest with you, I found most of the film annoying. Yes, the dancing is lovely. But the scenes of self-flagellation and abuse made my skin crawl. And I don’t like stories about madness or addiction. Besides shoving an unlikable character down our throats, these films have no plot. They keep hitting the same story beat. Sure enough, Black Swan keeps showing us and telling us that Natalie Portman’s character, Nina, is terribly insecure about performing the role of the Black Swan and is too repressed to express the role’s dangerous sexuality.

All of this overshadows two excellent decisions the writers make early on that pay off big at the end. Their first choice happens in the opening scene. In my Great Screenwriting Class I spend a lot of time talking about how to open your story, because it’s the foundation upon which every other story beat depends.

Ironically, the opening in Black Swan is not a story beat at all. It’s just Natalie Portman, as Nina, dancing. In effect the writers are saying, let’s get the big question out of the way right up front: can Natalie Portman dance?. This isn’t Gary Cooper, playing Lou Gehrig, barely able to throw a baseball (Useless Tip: if you ever have to pick sides in softball, just watch how everybody throws). This movie star is a first class ballet dancer. Establishing that fact is crucial to the film’s success because the story is about the sacrifice needed to be the best in the world at your craft, whether it’s a sport, an art form or a combination of the two.

The second crucial choice the writers make concerns the key structural technique necessary to make a madness or addiction story work. Don’t make the prime opponent the affliction. If you do, the hero is just punching herself, and the drama dies. Instead, create outside character opposition that challenges and exacerbates the hero’s personal flaw. That way you create plot and build the drama.

In Black Swan the outside opposition comes from the womanizing director, Thomas, and the competing dancer, Lily, played by Mila Kunis. Lily is especially valuable because she pulls the story out of Nina’s head and introduces the possibility that a very real conspiracy is underway that will destroy the hero. Sometimes paranoid people are justified in their paranoia.

Finally we get to the “battle” scene, the performance. Everything in the film has been one long foreplay for the battle, and it’s a killer. Like all great battle scenes, it’s based on the principle of convergence. The climactic moment of Swan Lake is also the climax of the film story and the climax of Natalie Portman’s performance. Nina overcomes initial failure and not only defeats her demons, she dazzles as the Black Swan. She is sexy and dangerous in the dance, and she passionately kisses the director offstage, after having had to fend him off up until then.

For this to be the same moment when Natalie Portman’s performance crosses into greatness is an incredible thrill that only film can give us. It’s not that she can get into the pain of the White Swan; this we’ve seen for the whole film. It’s not that she can suddenly act the passion and dominance the Black Swan requires and translate that into first class dance. The white heat of Portman’s brilliance comes in how she can shift back and forth between vulnerability and dominance at lightning speed, and be each emotion at the moment she hits it.

The end of the dance and the film shows screenwriting as the height of dramatic art. Nina, as the White Swan, runs up the platform to commit suicide and we think she will do it for real since the real has by now melded so completely with art. She jumps. But wait, there’s the mattress. We feel release, victory; she has defeated her demons. And then we’re flipped again. She’s already done the deed, given herself the fatal wound. It’s the act she had to take to get the performance of her life. We plummet. But she knows; “it was perfect.” She’s the perfectionist taken to her logical extreme, given a self-revelation that is at once brimming with truth and utterly without understanding.

The Social Network - Memoir/True Story

2010-10-10T12:07:00.000-07:00

Whenever I break down a film script to see how it works, I always start by identifying the central problems and challenges the writer faced in cracking the story code. In adapting the true story of the creation of Facebook, master screenwriter Aaron Sorkin faced at least three major challenges.

First he had to make a true story dramatic. The Memoir-True Story genre must hit the seven major story structure steps just like any other genre. But the writer doesn’t have the freedom to make up the basic story events. And events in real life rarely have the dramatic density and punch of fiction.

Sorkin’s second major challenge was that the main character is a nasty person who is guilty of massive theft and betrayal. It is a common misconception that the main character must be likable in a story. But if he is not likable, the writer’s job immediately becomes much more difficult. No one in the audience wants to identify with someone this unpleasant (though they may want this much success), or see such a person accomplish his goal. So the writer is left with a character who is at most clinically interesting to the audience, much like a strange beast in the zoo. Sorkin’s third big challenge had to do with plot. The real events of Mark Zuckerberg’s creation of Facebook form a structure that is fairly similar to the rise and fall of a rock star, a story shape that is notorious for lacking plot and for being deadly dull as a result.

To meet these challenges, Sorkin relied on the nine genre beats of the Memoir- True Story form. One of these is the Story Frame. The frame is found in a vast number of true stories because it allows the writer to solve the form’s biggest restriction, which is the anti-dramatic sequence of true events. You can’t change what happened in a true story, but with a frame you can change the order of how you tell what happened.

The frame in The Social Network is provided by the depositions in which Zuckerberg has to answer to the Winklevoss brothers and Mark’s business partner, Eduardo Saverin, for his theft. Like most frames, the depositions are the chronological endpoint of the story. They are the story equivalent of a trial, or battle, which allows Sorkin a natural funnel point toward which all events build. The frame also lets Sorkin cut out all the boring moments that are part of real life, along with the mundane but necessary steps of building a business.

With the frame, Sorkin largely overcomes the second challenge of the repellant hero, using a structural technique that is both rare and risky: Sorkin turns the hero into the opponent, and the ally, Eduardo, into the hero. Instead of trying to create sympathy for a bad guy, Sorkin changes the focus of the story to the question: will the bad guy lose the deposition and have to pay the people he cheated? Eduardo literally tells the second half of the story, making him the hero, and he gains the audience’s sympathy because he has so clearly been wronged.

I say that Sorkin largely overcomes the challenge of the repellant hero because this guy is unsalvageable. Turning him into the opponent helps, but this story frame comes with a high cost. The crosscut between the deposition and the real events has a cold, distancing effect on the audience. Sorkin might have been able to warm things up by delving deeper into Zuckerberg’s motives, which are nothing more than the schematic ones of being a nerd and wanting to climb the social class ladder. But my sense is that this was a dead end, because Zuckerberg comes across as an idiot savant whose brilliance is extreme but narrow. From the very first scene, we know this guy is hopeless.

It’s in facing the challenge of plot that Sorkin had the most difficulty and where his success was most dependent on craft. The rise-and-fall story is a very old plot form, and has the benefit of a clean line on which to hang the particular events of the story. But it makes for a lousy plot because there are almost no surprises. You really have only two story beats: the rise and the fall. Once you establish the rising line, the audience gets it. And when the hero starts to fall, everyone knows immediately where this is all headed.

Strictly speaking the real events of the creation of Facebook only give Sorkin a rise. Using the deposition frame at least gives him a fall to go with the rise, in that Zuckerberg was forced to pay quite a sum to those he cheated and he has obviously suffered a moral decline.

But Sorkin clearly knew that this structure still left him with a thin plot. In my Memoir-True Story class I talk about how to combine fiction genres with a true story to juice the plot. Sorkin’s choice was the thriller form. The thriller is a type of story in which the hero is placed under constant attack and increasing pressure as he goes after his goal. Like the story frame, this genre combination creates a vortex in which events assault the viewer at a faster and faster pace. To see how much this helps the plot, imagine telling the story of the creation of a business, even one that grew this fast, in a strictly non-fiction, chronological style.

Still the frame and the thriller genre can only go so far. Ultimately the facts of this true story and the unpleasant main character mean that The Social Network has one big flaw: there’s no way to end the story. The hero’s moral decline is indisputable early in the second half of the film. And a series of deposition scenes is a far cry from a big courtroom trial where the fight is decided in one last blaze of glory.

Of course Sorkin knows this. He tries to finesse it with his great skill at dialogue. In an attempt to partly redeem Zuckerberg and put final closure to the moral argument of the story, Sorkin has a female lawyer tell Zuckerberg, “You're not an asshole, Mark. You're just trying so hard to be.” But it’s a false distinction and it fools no one. The Zuckerberg character portrayed in this film really is an asshole. And no matter how much the real Zuckerberg was forced to pay, I couldn’t help leaving the theater thinking it wasn’t nearly enough.

John Truby Answers

2010-09-15T11:49:00.000-07:00

"Hi, John. I've been studying your Love Genre CD and with Titanic in mind, I got confused when I held it up to your Love Story beats. It's pretty much Rose's story, her need, her problem, her ghost, and her self-revelation... but the gaze belonged to Jack.

The inciting incident, if I'm correct, was his, as well, when he won the ticket to board Titanic. But Jack has no need, doesn't seem to have a weakness, he has no problem, has no ghost and no change of character. And yet he's the one that drives the desire line, and most of the action is taken by him.

Who's the main hero? And who's the first opponent?"

- Roy Saringo

Roy, thanks for the questions. Your analysis is quite correct. You can see why the love story is the hardest genre to structure, since it is the only one with two main characters. Also why a love story with the woman as the more primary of the two characters is even tougher to construct. Plus this story adds the framing device of the old Rose.

Rose does have the weakness, problem, need, ghost and self-revelation. She also has the inciting event, but it is the old Rose who sees the news account of the Titanic excavators. You're also right that Jack appears to drive the 1911 story. But that's because social custom dictates that, as the man, he must take the active courtship role. Plus, she is engaged to someone else and it's 1911.

Jack has no weakness or need, which I believe is a flaw in the script. I think that's because James Cameron wanted Jack to be a rogue-charmer-trickster character, the most popular of all character types. Tricksters typically have a weakness, which is that they lie, steal and cheat to get what they want. But this seldom comes across as a weakness to the audience because the trickster is always fooling unjust authority figures. Of course that is precisely what is happening here, as Jack outsmarts all the stuffy snobs who are oppressing Rose.

In a curious way, Jack is almost a traveling angel character in the story. Rose has a problem in her community and Jack shows up, with no real flaws, and teaches her how to live. He also falls in love with her. This is not unlike the structure of The Music Man. By the way, traveling angel stories are famous for having dual main characters: one character has the weakness, need, etc. while the perfect traveling angel character drives the action.

As for opponents, in love stories the first opponent is the lover. That's certainly true in Titanic, though the conflict between Rose and Jack is not the knock down, drag out variety, and in love stories it seldom is. After all the two are falling in love. The secondary opponents are the family members, like fiancé Cal and Rose's mother, Ruth, along with Cal's security man, Lovejoy. Of course when the story switches from love to action, the main opposition becomes the iceberg, the icy water and the lack of lifeboats.

That brings up one last tip about identifying the genre beats in your story. In today's Hollywood, almost every successful script is a combination of at least two, and sometimes three or four genres. This causes writers all kinds of problems, among them determining which beats to use from each of the different genres that are present. There is no easy answer for this. But first you have to know your genres really well, so you can make informed choices. And second, you have to stay true to your unique story idea. Make the beats work for your story, which means change whatever you have to change. It's not about getting an A in genres. It's about using the genres as powerful tools to tell your story well.

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World - Love

2010-08-03T11:39:00.000-07:00

A lot has been made of the video game elements in Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. Video games are an important influence on current screenwriting. But you won't find it here. Sure, there's lots of flash, and some of it's amusing and inventive. But it's really video game tactics, played out on the scene level. The story strategy of this film is actually quite old fashioned. Unfortunately in this area, the writers were missing a few of the basic craft elements like plot and genre.

Video game story structure has nothing to do with flashy fights or self-reflexive, cultural in-jokes. Video game story structure is all about exploring a highly detailed story world, moving through deeper and deeper levels and giving the viewer a number of alternative plot lines. None of that happens in Scott Pilgrim. In fact, its structure borrows from the oldest form in storytelling, the myth journey.

Like Hercules with his twelve trials, Scott must defeat a succession of opponents, in this case the seven evil exes in order to win the hand of the damsel, who remains completely passive throughout the film. It's similar to the structure you get in a tournament. But the problem with a tournament story structure - 7 fights in succession - is it creates the ultimate episodic story. That's the first reason this movie died at the box office: there is no plot. The fights with the 7 exes are all the same story beat. Making matters worse is there is no reason for the fights, other than the movie says Scott must fight each ex. But if each is an ex, why does Scott need to fight them? That's the best part about an ex; he's already lost.

Notice that instead of the fights being the height of drama, they are the ultimate dead zone. And because they are purposely so stylized, we don't even get the pleasure of seeing the hero in physical jeopardy, along with the suspense of wondering if he will win or not. Obviously we're supposed to know these are fantasy fights. But when there is clearly no chance the hero can lose, a fight is nothing but story padding.

Lack of plot is a serious flaw, but in a quirky film like this it's not fatal. A far bigger disappointment is how this film missed the potential to do something special with its genre. Believe it or not, Scott Pilgrim is a romantic comedy. And it could have been the first truly original romantic comedy for the teen and 20s crowd. No doubt there is some original stuff here. But it's in the dialogue, not the story.

Ironically, to write an original script at the story level, you have to first hit the story beats (events) that have determined the romantic comedy genre for hundreds of years. Those beats aren't there by happenstance. They are the way the creation of love between two people is communicated to an audience. It's part of the human brain. For the writer, hitting those beats gets you in the door; it makes the emotion of the story possible. Then you have to twist the beats to give the audience the delight of the new.

Maybe the writers thought the romantic part of their comedy wasn't important. Or they were too busy thinking up hip lines. All I know is they forgot the 1st rule of the love story: there has to be an immediate attraction between the two leads, even if they start with a fight. In Scott Pilgrim, there is no reason for her to like him. Or for him to be awed by her. And we don't get those reasons at any time during the course of the film.

I always tell romantic comedy and love story screenwriters that you can't montage love. The power of film allows you to tell an audience intellectually that two people have fallen in love in a matter of seconds. But that's not important. Even in a romantic comedy, everything rests on the emotion of love, the breathtaking, mind-blowing feeling the audience shares with the two characters that: WE'RE IN LOVE! That life-changing feeling between two complex human beings represents the stakes in a love story. If you don't set that up, and make it believable, the audience will not care.

Inception

2010-07-30T15:04:00.000-07:00

Inception takes off like a rocket and then slowly runs out of fuel. I loved the mind teaser of a plot, but found the longer the movie went on the less I cared. How a film can generate two such different responses has to do with the most important relationship in a story, the one between plot and character.

In the past with Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan, along with his co-writers Jonathan Nolan and David Goyer, has shown himself to be one of the masters of movie plotting. Once again, Nolan gives screenwriters a masterclass in how to build plot. Plot is the most underestimated major skill in storytelling, with a lot of specific techniques you must learn to work as a pro. And make no mistake, the ability to pack more plot in your script is the single most distinguishing feature in a script and film that hits big.

Most writers don’t realize that many of the plot techniques they will use for a particular story are determined by one of the first choices they make in the writing process: what genres will I use to tell this story? Indeed, Nolan’s most brilliant move in writing this script was in combining two genres that are almost never together: science fiction and caper.

Science fiction is the biggest of all genres, as huge as the universe and beyond. That’s why it’s so notoriously difficult to write well. It has a broad, loose structure that covers vast scales of space and time. The caper, also known as the heist film, is among the tightest and most focused of forms, built on a specific and high-speed desire line. That’s why caper stories are almost always very popular.

By combining these virtually opposite forms, Nolan allows the audience to have their cake and eat it too. They get the epic power of science fiction with the driving speed of the caper.

Using the caper gives Nolan one other big advantage. The caper is one of the most plot-heavy of all genres, right up there with detective stories and thrillers, and is designed to fool not only the opponent in the story but also the audience. The prime technique of the caper writer is trickery. Like a magician, you point the audience’s attention in one direction while the real action is happening somewhere else.

The rich plot provided by the caper is magnified many times when the mission takes us into the dream world where the rules of logic change. This is where the power of science fiction kicks in. Science fiction is the most creative genre, because you can take nothing for granted. The writer must literally create everything, including the space-time rules by which human life itself operates.

To get maximum plot and puzzle, Nolan smartly creates three levels of the dream world, using the technique of “revelation plot.” Plot in this kind of story comes from digging deeper and deeper into the same world, with each new level providing a whole new batch of reveals, and thus plot, for the audience.

In combining the caper story structure with a three-level dream world, Nolan takes the audience on a high-speed but mind-bending journey down three levels and back out. In yet another level, the hero’s guilt-filled sub-conscious acts as the story frame and provides even more reveals. Like I say, this guy is a master of plot.

Spoiler alert!

Creating a multiple-level plot is a real blast, especially when it’s connected to such dazzling visual elements as the attacking freight train, the fold-up city and the ghost-town like land of limbo. But there’s a catch. All this plot can kill character and emotion if you are not extremely careful with the story set-up.

The character/emotion problem for Inception starts right at the desire line, the second of the seven major structure steps and one of the strengths of the caper genre. Desire is the hero’s goal. It provides the spine of the story, along with the stakes, or why this story matters. In Inception, the goal is a concept, specifically planting an idea in someone’s head. Not only is this a cold abstraction, it means the stakes are ultimately meaningless. We are told this idea will prevent ecological catastrophe. But that’s just a line of dialogue. We don’t see it, and none of the story is at all related to it.

Another source of an emotionless story has to do with the hero’s relationship to those most important to him, or lack thereof. No, I’m not talking about the other members of the team, which is where most caper stories gain their emotional juice. Think of the buddy camaraderie among the Ocean’s Eleven team. I’m talking about the hero’s wife and children. From the beginning of the film, the wife is already dead so there is no chance to get to know her or see her interact in the present with the hero. What interaction they do have is tainted by the fact that she is morose, deadly and generally a real drag. Supposedly the hero is doing all this to get back with his kids, but again he has no personal interaction with them, except to see them as an unreachable image.

With such a weak goal – which propels a story forward - and such a strong ghost – which pulls a story back, the narrative drive of Inception must inevitably grind to a halt. And that’s just what it does. We get some beautiful, haunting imagery, but the final part of the film feels like a slow trek through a dream museum.

And that’s the negative side of making your story world the land of dreams. Stories about dreams are almost always less than meets the eye. They seem highly intelligent at first glance, because we are entering the realm of pure mind. But they are also as evanescent as a dream, made of elaborately detailed walls that are just fronts to the nothingness behind.

There is one final structure element that causes this visually stunning film to slow down and become less involving as it goes on. In the 22 Step Great Screenwriting Class, I talk a lot about the moral argument found in all great storytelling. Knowing how to execute this crucial element is one of the marks of a professional writer. It’s the sequence under the surface that made the plot of The Dark Knight build in intensity and was the real key to the film becoming a cinematic masterpiece and blockbuster hit. The plot of The Dark Knight is built on a series of moral tests that The Joker throws at Batman. Each test is progressively bigger and more difficult than the one before, ending with the classic Prisoner’s Dilemma where the passengers of two ships must decide whether to blow up the other ship first.

Don’t think for a moment that moral argument is primarily designed to increase the intellectual quality of a film. It increases the emotional power of a story many times over, because the stakes now involve lots of other people and not simply the psychology of the hero.

In Inception, Nolan again infuses moral philosophy into the plot. In this case we’re dealing with Kierkegaard’s “leap of faith,” literally applied to love (a technique normally used in the thriller genre). But Nolan’s understanding of this moral principle is much weaker than his thoughts about the savior in Dark Knight, and it’s not applied to the plot in as seamless or sequenced a way. Viewers come out of the film confused and think it’s their fault. They believe that this philosophical complexity is the mark of a brilliant filmmaker and far above their meager powers to understand, at least on one viewing. Wrong. Moral argument in story is very complex. Sometimes you nail it, and sometimes you just don’t.

Inception is well worth breaking down structurally to see a master of the screenplay form try something new and challenging. But don’t get caught on the dazzling surface. Look at how the writer’s original choices in combining genres and setting up the story gave him both strengths and weaknesses. The more you learn about the all-important connection between plot and character, intellect and emotion, the better writer you will be.

Un Prophète

2010-06-29T15:37:00.000-07:00

Un Prophète (A Prophet), the French nominee for the best foreign film Oscar in 2010, is a revolutionary step in French cinema and the world entertainment business. It’s an epic crime story, but it’s not told from the top down, giving us the “big picture,” like most epics. This story is told from the bottom up, so its power builds and feels intensely real. Not only does this make for a great film, it marks the move in French film from art house cinema to competitor with the U.S. in worldwide genre filmmaking.

France has produced many genre films in the past. For example, before directing Un Prophète, Jacques Audiard made Read My Lips, a solid if unexceptional crime-thriller. But French film for decades has been trapped by the auteur theory and the art films that inevitably result from the belief that movies are all about the director’s vision. What you get is quirky, navel-gazing dramas that no one but the director’s family wants to see. What you don’t get is a good story. And that’s what the audience, not just French but worldwide, demands.

The key to telling a story with worldwide appeal is genre. But with the stranglehold of the auteur theory and art house film, most French writers and writer-directors disdained genre storytelling as predictable American fare appealing to the lowest common denominator. Not wanting to make American films in French, they worked around the edges of genre, so the films were neither good genre films nor good art films.

With Un Prophète, writers Thomas Bidegain, Audiard, Abdel Raouf Dafri, and Nicolas Peufaillit have found a way to overcome the false distinction between genre film and art film and instead make a genre film that is a work of art. They’ve found a strategy that allows them to borrow from the best of French film tradition and at the same time punch the elements of genre that make it the worldwide standard for popular storytelling.

That strategy is what I call in my 22 Step Great Screenwriting and Genre classes “transcending the genre,” which involves twisting all the beats of the particular form and adding drama elements to make the story stand out from all the other films of its kind.

To understand how this advanced script works, we need to focus on the genres on which this story is founded. Genres aren’t a formula for writing. Each genre is a contained story world expressed through a contained story form.

Though set within a prison, Un Prophète is a gangster story, which is a sub-form of the crime genre. Like all gangster stories, it is about success in the modern world, shorthanded as “the American Dream,” and how that Dream has been corrupted from its original idea of success as spiritual attainment to success as material gain.

These writers know their gangster form cold, borrowing from such classics as The Godfather (one of the mafia prisoners is even named Corleoni), Goodfellas and even the gangster-Western Yojimbo/A Fistful of Dollars. Knowing the beats of your genre is the first step in writing a successful screenplay, because the entire worldwide entertainment business is based on repeating popular story forms.

Just as in those classic gangster films, Malik, the hero in Un Prophète, must climb up the organization and use illegal and immoral methods to succeed. He begins as an illiterate 19-year-old with no family. So he starts as close to the bottom as you can get. The writers then track his climb up the ladder, and they excel at placing him in one impossible predicament after another. This technique of the impossible predicament works well in any genre, because it keeps maximum pressure on the hero during the difficult middle section where 90% of scripts fail.

The second step in writing a successful script for the international market is to twist the beats of the form and add drama elements. As Audiard has said, “I like the stylization of a genre film. It’s a way to accelerate the connection with the spectator. Here is the good guy, here is the bad guy. But once the spectator has agreed to get on board, then it’s up the filmmaker to become more subtle and break from the confines of the genre.”

To break the confines of crime, the writers of Un Prophète have borrowed a number of techniques from the advanced screenwriting/Masterpiece form. As in all masterpiece films, Malik is trapped in a system. But by starting with the naïve young hero first entering prison, he and the audience have only fleeting glimpses of what that enslaving system might be. Like Buonasera in the opening of The Godfather, Malik has to piece together the hierarchy of the system on the run, under extreme pressure, and figure out how to play the system before it kills him.

Un Prophète also twists the beats of the gangster and masterpiece forms in the way the hero grows. Starting Malik as an innocent 19-year-old makes him a clean slate. In prison, he not only learns the ways of crime, he takes classes in reading and economics. By the end of the story he hasn’t just experienced the simple character change we see in most stories. He has gone on a complex journey of learning on many levels of the story: in business, in religion, in character, crime and family.

The storytelling weave in this script is quite complex and advanced. The main technique the writers use to create such an intricate plot has to do with one of the seven major structure steps, the desire line (see the 22 Step Great Screenwriting Class). Stated simply, Malik goes from being a reactive hero with a weak desire line to being an active hero with a strong desire.

It may surprise you to know that this is the same fundamental strategy that writers Laurent Cantet, Robin Campillo, and Francois Bégaudeau used in the true story-drama, Entre Les Murs (read my structure breakdown of Entre Les Murs.) It’s a strategy that can work in any of the major genres, but it’s very hard to pull off.

Starting with a weak desire line is usually a bad idea, because the story quickly collapses without narrative drive. But the weak opening desire in Un Prophète and Entre Les Murs doesn’t come from writers who don’t know how to give the hero a strong goal. They purposely deprive the hero of a strong desire at the beginning so they can intensify the reality of the hero’s situation. Malik begins as a loser, a 19-year-old illiterate entering prison for a six-year term. This guy’s only goal is to survive and he doesn’t even know how to do that. The early scenes are raw and brutal, and the drama comes from forcing the audience, along with the hero, to wallow in the horror of the experience.

Once that’s been established, as only film can, the second part of the strategy is to give the hero a stronger and more specific desire line as the story progresses. Notice that this technique allows the writers to express the deeper theme of the film not just in the content – Malik becoming more successful and powerful – but also through the form and structure of the storytelling – a character who is more conscious, focused and driven. This has a more powerful effect on the audience because it is working on them below the surface.

Again I want to caution writers that this strategy is very risky. If you deprive the hero of a goal for too long, you lose the audience, and they are very hard to win back. But if you weave and pace the story right, the audience gets to have their cake and eat it too. They get the gritty feel of harsh reality that only film can bring, and they get the pleasure of great storytelling that comes from a main character gaining a progressively stronger desire.

This building desire line makes the intricacy of the plot possible because it literally becomes the spine on which the complexity hangs. As the hero’s goal becomes stronger, the writers add more plot lines, both outside and inside the prison. From this innocent clean slate of a character, for whom plotting seems impossible, the branches of plot spread out until everything connects and the system is laid bare in all its terrible logic.

The script for Un Prophète is worth careful study by anyone wishing to write screenplays in the current worldwide entertainment business, and especially by French writers and directors. I believe this is a landmark film for French cinema, because it represents a liberation, a breaking free of the shackles of auteur theory and the art house film that has ghettoized French cinema for decades. The writers of Un Prophète have planted a flag that says, “We French screenwriters and filmmakers have finally entered the arena of international genre filmmaking, and we are here to win.”

The Good Wife

2010-05-27T15:03:00.000-07:00

American television is as good as it’s ever been right now, which means it has the best writing in the entertainment industry. American film isn’t even close. This week we saw the end of one of the greatest shows in TV history, with the finale of Lost. If you love great writing like I do, that’s a big loss. But there’s a lot of talent in TV right now. So while we’ve been reluctantly bidding farewell to Lost, The Good Wife has quietly moved up the ranks until it is now one of the five best dramas on TV.

When you watch a terrific single episode of television, you naturally want to praise the author of that episode. But a huge amount of the credit for any episode must go to the original construction of the show itself. In fact, creating a great series on TV is almost totally dependent on the show’s structural conception.

In my TV Drama class, I talk extensively about the seven key structural elements that determine a successful show and how to write them. One of those is the character web. Character web is crucial in any work of fiction, but especially in TV drama where the audience returns to the same family of characters week after week, hopefully for years to come.

Character web has to do with how all the characters in a story hang together as a single fabric. Notice we’re not just talking about the main character here. We’re talking about how all the characters relate to one another, both connecting and contrasting. If you come up with a unique character web, in which each character is set in opposition to the others in the right structural way, you will have a successful series that can run forever. Of course, that’s easier said than done.

If you study the character web on The Good Wife, you see one of the reasons this is the best legal drama to come along in some time. There are many elements that go in to creating a tight character web, including character hierarchy, role, and archetype. But the element that most distinguishes the character web on The Good Wife is the moral relationship of all the characters.

Legal dramas have been shading the line between good and bad, guilt and innocence, for a long time. The days of the righteous defender against the oppressive prosecutor are long gone. David Kelly has done a number of legal dramas that highlight the moral complexity of being a lawyer. But The Good Wife has taken the moral conundrum to a new level.

The key technique for constructing a moral character web is to start with the central moral problem of the hero. Then make all other characters some variation of that moral problem. In The Good Wife, Alicia Florrick, the main character of the title, begins as a “good person.” In fact she is perceived as a paragon of virtue because her husband, the state prosecutor, has been caught cheating on her and is in jail for corruption. Alicia must go back to work as an attorney to support her family while under the harsh glare of publicity.

As the first season progresses, however, Alicia finds herself in a number of morally difficult situations that call into question just how good she really is. Most prominently, she feels a strong attraction to her boss and has to use her husband’s possibly corrupt connections to defeat a colleague who is competing for her job. From her initial elevated position, Alicia can only decline when forced to succeed in a morally impure world. As Sartre said, we all have dirty hands.

Creating this interesting main character is the first step in building a strong show. But what sets The Good Wife apart is the way the show’s creators, Michelle and Robert King, have constructed a web where all the characters must traverse morally dangerous ground. And each character, like Alicia, must find some balance between love and business success without becoming morally corrupt.

Having set up a character web where each character is caught between guilt and innocence, the Kings can play out a story structure in each episode that combines stand alone and serial elements and is dense with reversals and betrayals. Each episode tackles a legal case that serves as the fulcrum for all the characters to have to confront tough moral decisions. With so many characters conniving and choosing, each episode feels like a moral cyclone where everyone is simultaneously jockeying for success without losing their soul.

This story structure gives the show two major strengths. First, even the minor characters have complexity, so each is compelling and together they are a knockout. Second, each episode is packed with plot: the writers tease the audience with a moral challenge in the opening and then relentlessly turn the screws until the final scene.

Because this show was constructed so well from the start, I expect it will only get better as it goes on. Whether you are interested in writing for television or not – and you should be – study The Good Wife to see how master storytellers work the craft. Goodbye Lost, hello The Good Wife.

Date Night

2010-05-07T09:33:00.000-07:00

Date Night is a so-so comedy thriller. For those wishing to master the screenwriting craft that’s a good thing, because you can often learn the most from a movie that isn’t too good or too bad. Its strengths and its flaws are easier to see.

With stars Steve Carrel and Tina Fey it’s hard to avoid comparing the film to The Office and 30 Rock. That just gives us another instance of the truism that the best writing in comedy is in television, not film. But the brilliance of those shows is actually more difficult to explain. With Date Night, techniques and choices, successes and failures, are clear.

The biggest challenge when you write a comedy screenplay is setting up the comic structure, what I call the “clothesline,” on which you will hang the jokes. This clothesline is essential in sitcoms too, but it is much harder to create in a movie because it has to stretch for at least 90 minutes, not 22.

You create the clothesline using two major structural elements, the comedy sub-genre and your hero’s desire line. This is where most comedy writers go wrong. They don’t realize that there are seven major comedy sub-genres, including romantic comedy and farce, and each has a completely different set of story beats you have to hit to tell the story well (see the Comedy Class for the beats in all 7 sub-genres).

In Date Night, writer Josh Klausner uses the comedy thriller form (a kind of action comedy), which goes back at least to the early Hitchcock films. Here we have the innocent couple on the run, forced to battle criminals or spies. This form is not used much nowadays because combining comedy with thriller creates real problems of tone. If the opponent is too deadly the jokes aren’t funny. There’s also a number of contrivances you have to explain away, most notably how two average shmos could possibly compete with, much less defeat, hardened criminals, and why don’t they just go to the police.

The Date Night script gets barely passing grades in these basic areas of storytelling. The unbelievability of Steve and Tina going up against professional killers is always present. But this isn’t a fatal problem because the audience just falls back on the fact that this is a comedy.

The advantage of using the comedy thriller sub-genre is that it gives the script a strong desire line that extends to the end of the story. Much like the detective line in The Hangover, this couple’s desire to escape attack and find the incriminating flash drive creates a strong narrative drive on which the writer can hang any number of funny but episodic scenes. It also allows him to save the funniest scene for last, which is one of the gold standards in a comedy movie and almost never happens.

As a comedy writer, your goal is always to make the comedy build. The laughs should stand on the waves of the laughs that come before until the audience is gasping for breath. That rarely happens in a movie comedy because you have to extend the story for 90+ minutes and because you have to tie up all the story business as you get to the end of the line.

Klausner solves this problem in Date Night, first by setting up the thriller line and second by keeping the final battle simple. Without a last complex action scene to divert the audience from the jokes, Klausner can keep the focus on two top comic performers doing an incompetent pole dancing routine that brings the house down.

With the strong if hokey clothesline, the strength of the movie can come through, which are the funny bits that pop up throughout the story. Lines like “He turned the gun sideways; it’s a kill shot,” gags like the painfully slow motor boat and scenes like the marital spat between the Tripplehorns are laugh-out-loud funny. In Hollywood, the rule is if you have three laugh-out-loud moments in the film you have a hit. That’s a low bar for movies as opposed to television, but the important thing for writers to focus on is how you get those laughs. And that comes from the comic structure that supports the gags.

If setting up the clothesline is one of the big strengths of Date Night, the attempt to make the comedy come from character is one of the big weaknesses. Most writers have heard how valuable it is for the comedy to come from character, but few really know what it means, or how to do it. I discuss this a lot in the Comedy Class, because if you can master this set of techniques you immediately become one of the top comedy writers in the business. Let me focus on one technique in this area.

You must begin the story by establishing a deep weakness/need in the main character – in this case a couple – which then will be solved by the story line. In other words, the hero’s weakness must be embedded and solved all the way back at the premise line. The premise is your story stated in a single sentence. The Date Night premise might be described like this: a couple whose marriage has become predictable defeats criminals and renews their love.

The premise is like the hypothesis in a science experiment. It’s the fundamental truth about the world you are trying to establish. In an experiment you may determine that your hypothesis is wrong. But in a story you have to prove the premise. The sequence of story events must display in detail the truth about life you describe in one line. This is also called fulfilling the “promise of the premise,” the promise you make to the audience when they agree to come to the theater to see this story.

Klausner clearly wants to tell a story that proves the premise because he spends a great deal of time at the beginning showing that this couple’s marriage has grown stale from the demands of work and children. Even their date night hits the same old routine. The thriller structure is supposed to be the vehicle of renewal. It’s the same technique used, correctly, in Rear Window, where the Jimmy Stewart character learns to respect and commit to the Grace Kelly character by solving a crime with her.

But while this process is given lip service here, it never actually happens. Sure, escaping killers and bringing them to justice makes for an exciting night and a fun makeout session on the lawn the next morning. But it has nothing to do with changing what’s wrong between these two and how they will act differently toward one another for a 1001 nights in the future.

Klausner is definitely doing some things right here that most comedy screenwriters, even those with films under their belts, are not doing. He’s not reaching the level of the sitcoms in which these stars normally appear, but those sitcoms don’t have to tell a funny story over 90 minutes. Still, I can’t help feeling disappointed with this film. When a writer knows how to create comedy from character, you get great thematic comedies like Groundhog Day that express recognizable truths at the same time they make you laugh. Date Night is simply not in that league.

Alice in Wonderland

2010-03-30T12:02:00.000-07:00

Alice in Wonderland is one of the greatest stories of all time, with arguably the best story world ever invented. It is also notoriously difficult to turn into a film. And the reasons all have to do with the script. The most recent version of Alice, written by Linda Woolverton, is the latest disappointment, and a close look at the choices she made are very instructive to those of us who love the craft of screenwriting.

Alice is a classic fantasy story, and in many ways it set the form. A little girl, living in a highly organized, mundane world, travels to an upside-down fantasy world of illogic and returns to the real world freer and a little more grown up as a result. The overall structure of the original story is very tight. The problem comes in the middle, because the middle is structured according to the myth form, not fantasy.

Alice is on a journey in Wonderland, which means that the story is highly episodic. Each scene is a new encounter with strange new characters. While these individual scenes are invariably fun and extremely creative, they do not build. This is the great challenge of any writer using what I call “journey plot” (see “The Anatomy of Story”). It has stumped writers from Cervantes (Don Quixote) to Dickens (Oliver Twist) to Twain (Huckleberry Finn). The main reason the episodic element doesn’t hurt the original Alice in Wonderland is that the book is so short. But that won’t work for a feature-length film.

If we look at what Woolverton did in adapting the original story, we can see that almost all her choices were designed to overcome this episodic quality. The problem is that while her choices decrease the episodic quality, they also represent paint-by-number storytelling that gets increasingly boring as the story goes on.

It’s ten years later. The new Alice is a young woman trapped in the same stifling world and facing the prospect of a stultifying marriage to a rich fool. The trip to the fantasy world is supposed to force the heroine to confront her personal weakness. But notice in this set up, the craziness of Wonderland won’t force Alice to change because she’s a rebel from the beginning. The single greatest feature of the original Alice in Wonderland is that the fantasy world is based on illogic. So it attacks the very way that logical Alice and the audience think, the way we construct the world. Because this new Alice is never shown to be part of the “normal” worldview, fantastical Wonderland is just a series of strange landscapes.

To focus the story, Woolverton suggests the ending by showing a scroll in which Alice kills the Jabberwocky in the final battle. This sets up the vortex of the story that is supposed to sequence events at increasing speed. Now Alice’s journey has an endpoint, so each stop is not a stand-alone moment but a step on the path to her final destiny where she will save the kingdom.

But by turning Alice into an action hero, Woolverton has made a pact with the story devil. Action stories typically have even less plot than myth stories, not just because big action set pieces stop plot but also because the audience knows that nothing big is going to happen until the final showdown. And in this film nothing does. Woolverton is still stuck with the journey plot, which makes it extremely difficult to add plot through reveals. Without surprises, the plot must die.

The other major technique Woolverton adds to overcome the episodic quality of the original story is to bring some of the major characters along for the ride. So, for example, instead of leaving the Mad Hatter after the tea party, he comes along as an important ally to help Alice kill the Jabberwocky and defeat the Red Queen. Bringing characters along on the journey and having a single ongoing opponent is always a good idea when you’re writing a myth story. It allows the audience to care about the characters more intensely and increases the power of the opposition. But the value of these two techniques is largely removed when the heroine’s goal is so predictable and mundane as fighting a dragon in a big final battle.

Many people have expressed disappointment with director Tim Burton for this visually stunning but boring film. But visuals have always been what Burton is good at, not story. I find it fascinating to compare how a visual artist like Burton (Batman and Batman Returns) and master screenwriter-storytellers like Christopher Nolan, Jonathan Nolan and David Goyer (Batman Begins and The Dark Knight) handled the same Batman story material. Frankly, there is no comparison, and it’s one more proof that movies aren’t a “visual” medium, they are a story medium.

Ironically, screenwriter Woolverton’s efforts to unify and build the story stripped the film of the great strength of the original story, which are the breathtakingly original characters and scenes. And Burton’s vaunted ability to create strong visual worlds totally misfired when he failed to base his visuals on the defining principle of the Alice in Wonderland story world, which is the brilliant illogic and nonsense that only a professor of logic could create.

One day a screenwriter may solve the riddle of making a great Alice in Wonderland film. That will be a great accomplishment that I would love to see.

Lost - The Final Season

2010-02-26T15:32:00.000-08:00

The last season of Lost is upon us, and it gives writers of every medium an opportunity to watch masters of the craft push the television medium to places it has never gone. Lost is the first example of video game story structure transposed to TV, and the results have revolutionized the medium.

The old model of television involved the stand-alone episode, best exemplified in a crime or detective show. A murder was committed at the beginning of the episode, and then the cop uncovered the criminal and brought him to justice by the end. The next week a new crime was committed and solved. So plot was limited to what could be unraveled in 45 minutes.

With shows like Hill Street Blues and ER, the technique of the serial was added to TV. The cops, lawyers or doctors now had ongoing personal problems that extended over many episodes while retaining the stand-alone elements where a crime or medical emergency was solved by the end of the episode.

The creators of Lost had a big realization: the TV medium has not been used to its full potential, especially in the area of plot. So they shifted their focus from the single episode to the entire season. If you multiply 45 minutes per week by the 24 weeks of a network season, you have a story that is 9 times the length of a movie!

That’s Dickens’ territory. But the model the Lost creators used to construct this mega-canvas was not the 19th century novel, because that doesn’t take advantage of the crosscutting power of film and TV. Instead they cross-pollinated TV structure with video game structure, potentially the most plot intensive of all story forms. This meant three things above all:

1. the huge importance of the story world
2. an almost infinite number of characters
3. tremendous plot, because you can keep going deeper into the same world and find more reveals.

Like all multi-main character stories, the storytelling in Lost is all about juxtaposition and story weave. In the first three seasons, the writers were funneling out, adding layers and layers of plot, increasing the story’s scope by increasing the number of characters. But by the end of the third season the writers had reached the limit of plot: first, there were so many characters that they seemed like pawns and not people, and second, plot came to feel like a huge stall where further complications were just pointless.

That’s why, in the last two seasons, the writers have been funneling down, concentrating on the six “survivors” as well as John, Jack and Ben. This speeded up the plot by giving the many strands a convergent point, and switched the emphasis from the puzzle of plot to the emotional satisfaction of character.

In the first four seasons, the conflict focused on characters in space. Last season Lost shifted to conflict in time. In other words, time travel. Time travel is always a fun plot device. But what does it really mean? The ultimate thematic point of time travel is to compress into one view a character’s moral failings vs. the final moral judgment against him or her. Through the crosscut, the viewer can suddenly see in one view a single character’s life span, and the choices that make all the difference in the quality of a human life.

Sure enough, in the middle of season five, we saw a series of episodes in which each of the main characters had their own show. Instead of strictly plot reveals for a mass of characters within the world, time travel allowed the writers to create strong emotional character payoffs for each of the nine major characters. At the same time the plot reveals for the entire show continued to come over the course of the whole season, which satisfied the plot cravings of the die-hard viewer.

If last season was about time travel, this season the writers are using the story technique of alternative history, contrasting actions on the island with an alternative present for each of the major characters back in the real world. The purpose of the alternative history technique is the same as it is for time travel. Both contrast the moral choices that caused these characters to come to the island in the first place. Each episode gives a character a chance at two paths, the island that tests their great flaw and real life where each person can finally make things right.

Besides being a lot of fun to watch, Lost gives writers a chance to see some of the best storytellers in the world, in the middle of their creative process, working the craft and pushing the magnificent medium of television. I’ve been saying for years that the best writers in America are working in TV. Even if you’ve never watched this show, you owe yourself the pleasure of seeing what great writing can do before Lost is gone forever.

Avatar

2010-01-19T10:19:00.000-08:00

In all the visual splendor of James Cameron’s Avatar, it’s easy to overlook the script. In fact, the Avatar screenplay has come in for the same abuse Cameron’s Titanic script earned. You’ve heard the complaints: the story is a Pocahontas rip-off. The bad guys are just evil villains. The dialogue is stilted. In short, great visuals, bad screenwriting.

The critics aren’t so much wrong as irrelevant. What they don’t get is that Cameron is a brilliant writer of pop culture. He is one of three or four best popular storytellers, and his secret, which all current screenwriters need to know, is his mastery of genres.

Like Avatar, Titanic had fabulous visuals. But the key to its success was that it combined the disaster film – a sub-form of action – with the love story. These two forms are on opposite ends of the genre spectrum, which is why they are rarely combined, and why Cameron showed his true genius when he put them together.

The disaster film gives the audience the thrill of spectacle and scope, something no other medium can do as well. But for that same reason, disaster films have no heart. They’re about the thousands of people in the maws of slaughter. They’re not personal. That’s why Cameron spent most of that film setting up a love story, which is about the community of two, the most personal, heart-filled genre you can get. So when the disaster finally hit, the pain of loss started at the epicenter of the two lovers and spread out from there.

Jump forward to Avatar, and Cameron is using the exact same strategy. Avatar isn’t just a big, noisy war story set in an outer space future. It’s an epic romance, the grand myth combined with the intimate love story. The technical definition of the romantic epic is that the fate of the nation is determined by the love between two people. That is a very tough story weave to do right, but if you do, it has almost infinite worldwide popular appeal.

An epic is almost always built on the myth genre, by far the most common genre in worldwide blockbusters. The key question for the screenwriter, especially when you are adding fantasy and science fiction elements, is what myth to use. In the Myth Class, I talk extensively about the ten new myth forms on which a large percentage of worldwide storytelling will be based. One of these I call the eco-myth, and that is beat for beat the new myth that Cameron uses in Avatar.

Of course, the “new” eco-myth has a history. For over 160 years, it has been one of America’s two national myths. The first is the Western, and it was the dominant American myth from about 1850 to1960. The Western is the story of the building of the American nation by taming nature and “civilizing” the “savages” the Europeans encountered as they were going about their godly task.

But there was a second American myth that played underneath the Western all those years. It was the anti-Western, also known as the “Eastern,” starting with Thoreau and working its way through John Henry, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Fitzgerald’s Gatsby. It broke into the forefront of American storytelling during the Vietnam War, in films like The Wild Bunch, Butch Cassidy, and McCabe and Mrs. Miller.

The anti-Western has been described in one line as “the Machine in the Garden,” and that is the myth on which Avatar is based. It is the dark side of the American story, but more generally is the story of any technologically superior, male-god culture that wants the land of a nature-based, female-god culture.

The downside of the anti-Western myth is that it ends badly for the hero. The natives are slaughtered, and that is not going to work if you want an international blockbuster. That’s where the eco-myth puts a new twist on the anti-Western. Instead of ending with inevitable destruction, the eco-myth finds a way to rejuvenate the world by creating harmony among people and between people and nature.

The great strength of the eco-myth as a foundation for a blockbuster – besides the happy ending – is that it combines the myth story structure with a detailed story world. Story world has been a major element of blockbusters for at least the last ten years, as we vividly saw with Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings. The eco-myth, by its very nature, is a celebration of the interconnectedness of all things in the world, and the cinematic medium is unmatched in showing this.

Like Tolkien in Lord of the Rings, Cameron creates a lush story world that emphasizes trees and plants. The center and foundation of the Na’vi world is the great protective tree, a futuristic version of the Tree of Life that holds up the marriage bed in The Odyssey. The plants of Pandora are often floating and lit from within, which gives the audience a sensual and emotional understanding of what it really means to live in an interconnected world.

Floating is the essential feature of this story world, and is a major reason for the massive success of this film. Any fantasy world, if it is to be successful on a grand scale, must have the qualities of a utopia. And in the history of utopias, the single most important quality is floating or flying. Think of the floating tea party in Mary Poppins, Harry Potter playing Quidditch on his broomstick, or the floating house in Up. Cameron understands this deeply. So his jungle world of Pandora is much more like an ocean floor. Plants float, so do entire islands, and the ten-foot-tall Na’vi fly everywhere on the backs of the giant bat-like banshee, infinitely more agile than the most advanced fighter plane.

This element of flying is also crucial to the second major genre in Avatar, the love story. One of the unique beats of the love story is the first dance. Here the dance occurs while the would-be lovers fly on the backs of a banshee. It’s a beautiful orchestration of dance, love, flight, action and story world, and that scene alone is worth the price of admission.

As Avatar moves to its inevitable final battle, Cameron brings all of the story threads together. The focal point of the battle is the lit-from-within Tree of Souls, and for the techno-fascist humans, it is fit for nothing but destruction. Of course, this film is not a tragedy, so the battle does not go the way of history, with the technologically superior Europeans wiping out the natives. It’s a glorious scene where Cameron pulls out every trick in the story book, including a charge on horseback that is right out of The Charge of the Light Brigade.

If you want to understand Avatar’s phenomenal success, you have to see it as a piece of screenwriting, but without the traditional standards of “good writing.” Cameron is a genius of popular storytelling, and he knows the great popular storytelling comes from mixing genres that take maximum advantage of the film medium. True, the rest of us don’t have the advantage of $300 million to realize our screenwriting dreams. But if you think Avatar’s success comes primarily from all that money on the screen, you will miss some truly invaluable lessons in story. As Cameron himself has said, “People ask [me] about the future of filmmaking…the simple answer is that filmmaking is not going to ever fundamentally change. It’s all about storytelling.”

10 Story Techniques You Must Use to Sell Your Script

2009-10-29T12:58:00.000-07:00

Former Universal Pictures chairman Marc Shmuger recently said, “There’s no doubt the star system is in transformation. Arguably the two biggest stars in the first half of 2009 were Kevin James (Paul Blart: Mall Cop) and Liam Neeson (Taken)…That’s a significant shift in the meaning of star power and a shift to the premium that is being put on concept and genre.”

Shmuger is telling any screenwriter who is smart enough to listen the rule of the entertainment business worldwide: it buys and sells genres. Genres are story forms and each has from 8-15 special story beats (story events) that make up the form. The reason Hollywood marketing is based on genre is that executives are selling to a worldwide audience. And people the world over love particular types of stories that speak to their deepest desires. 1^st

I’d like to tell you 10 story techniques that must be in your script if you want the best chance of selling it in a genre-dominated business.

1. Know the 10 most popular genres.

Step 1 in writing a script Hollywood wants to buy is knowing the 10 most popular story forms. If you write a script that is not based on one or more of these genres, your chances of a sale plummet. They are Action, Comedy, Crime, Detective, Horror, Fantasy, Love, Myth, Science Fiction and Thriller.

2. Combine 2 or 3 genres.

In the genre-focused entertainment business, the most important story strategy today is to mix genres. 99% of films made, not just in Hollywood but worldwide, are some combination of the ten most popular genres. Why? It all goes back to that old rule of selling: give the customer 2 or 3 for the price of 1. This, in a nutshell, is how Hollywood works.

Let me give you some examples. The super-popular Bourne films are action + thriller. Knocked Up is comedy + love. Little Miss Sunshine is myth + comedy. Titanic, the most popular movie of all time, is love + disaster film + myth. The Dark Knight is crime + myth + fantasy. The Harry Potter stories, the most popular books of all time, are fantasy + myth + horror + coming of age drama. The Pirates of the Caribbean movies are fantasy + action + horror + myth.

3. Find the right genre for the story idea.

4. Use myth as one of your genres.

Because Hollywood only wants scripts with blockbuster potential, your story must be popular in over 100 different cultures and nationalities.

Myth is the oldest of the 10 most popular film genres, and is surprisingly complex, with 15 special story beats. But boy is it popular. Try adding up the box office of these myth-based films: Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Shrek, Star Wars and The Lion King.

5. Combine myth with one or two other genres.

6. Make one genre primary.

7. If you’re writing a screenplay for an indie film, write horror, thriller, or love.

8. Hit all the genre beats.

9. Be original, transcend the genre.

10. Be honest with yourself, and specialize in the forms that are right for you.

When you let genres do the hard story work, and concentrate on writing them in an original way, you will be amazed at how good, and how successful, your scripts will be.

The Hangover

2009-07-28T11:40:00.000-07:00

Comedy is the most under-estimated of all genres. Most writers think they can write a good movie comedy if they’re funny. They think all you have to do is string together a lot of jokes and gags and you’ll have a successful comedy script. How wrong they are.

It’s not just amateurs who make this mistake. Many of the top comedy screenwriters in the business write “front-loaded” scripts, meaning they try to pack as many jokes in the first ten minutes as they can. That seems like a good idea; once you get the audience laughing they’re bound to keep laughing. In reality, these scripts hit “the wall” about ten to fifteen minutes in and miraculously they’re not funny anymore. The writers don’t realize that they’ve made the classic mistake of starting with the small – the joke – and trying to go big. Instead they should have started with the big – the right comic story structure – and the jokes would have come naturally, from the character.

The Hangover is a textbook example of how to write a comedy script the right way. This is the story of four guys who go to Las Vegas for a bachelor party and end up in a nightmare. The normal approach to writing this story is to follow them throughout the night as they make one mistake after another.

To see why writers Jon Lucas & Scott Moore didn’t use this approach, take a close look at the photos of this horrible experience that play over the end credits. What you see are four drunk guys doing outrageous things. The fountain. The tiger. The baby. The wrong guy. Ha ha ha, right? Wrong. First of all, drunk people aren’t funny, at least not for longer than ten seconds. It’s similar to the old actor’s rule: if the actor cries, the audience won’t. If the actor laughs, the audience won’t. A drunk making a fool of himself may be hilarious to him, but not to the sober people watching.

But there’s a bigger reason this wouldn’t have worked…

It’s all the same story beat. Those outrageous events may seem different on the surface, but comically and structurally, they’re all the same thing: drunk guys doing stupid things. And that means that there would have been no narrative drive and no plot. The script would have hit the wall after fifteen minutes and all we would see is actors trying to top what just happened in an increasingly desperate attempt to generate laughs.

Notice also that that story strategy would have broken another key comedy rule: comedy should come from character. Once four individuals become mindlessly drunk, they turn into a single character: the drunk idiot. So not only would we have no plot, we’d have no character.

So let’s look at the comic story structure these screenwriters did use. Amazingly enough, this is a detective story told with a storyteller frame. The desire line: to find out what happened to Doug, the groom.

It’s rare for a comedy to use this structure (Fletch and Who Framed Roger Rabbit are two). But it’s a very good idea. The detective story has one of the strongest narrative drives of any genre. Which means you can hang a ton of jokes on it without being afraid of collapsing the storyline. And because the story tracks the three friends while they are sober, all of the jokes can come from character, from the unique flaws and personalities of the three guys.

The detective structure gives this script another huge advantage that most other movie comedies lack: a plot. The detective form is the most reveal-heavy of all genres, and reveals are one of the keys to plot. Where the normal approach to a raunchy comedy would have provided almost no plot, the detective form told with a storyteller frame gives the heroes, and the audience, an almost unlimited supply of surprises as they slowly piece together what really happened the night before.

In the Comedy Class, I talk extensively about the 11 key story beats for comedy, the beats for the seven major comic story structures – action comedy, traveling angel, buddy picture, romantic comedy, farce, black comedy and satire – setting up and paying off jokes, and the many ways you can make the comedy come from character. This script uses a lot of those techniques. The Hangover is not perfect. Even with the detective structure, the story and the comedy both flag for a while. But this script does show clearly how choosing the right comic structure at the beginning makes all the difference between a blockbuster comedy and the thousands of other comedy scripts that never even make it to the screen.

Secrets of Genre

2009-07-16T11:59:00.000-07:00

What’s my genre? That’s the single biggest question you should ask yourself when that great premise idea first pops into your head. Why? Because of the First Rule of Hollywood. Most writers work at a tremendous disadvantage because they don’t know this rule, which has to do with what producers and studios want to buy. Hollywood doesn’t buy and sell movie stars, directors or writers. The First Rule of Hollywood is: it buys and sells genres. If you’re not selling them what they want, you’re out of luck.

Genres are different kinds of stories, like Action, Detective, Love and Thriller. More importantly, genres are really good stories, the all-stars of the story world that have been popular with audiences for decades and sometimes centuries. That’s why Hollywood buys and sells them, and why you need to know not only which genres you’re using in your script but also how to write them well. Many writers wrongly believe that they are competing against the 100,000 scripts written every year. In fact, they are competing against the other scripts in their genre. Which is why you have to know your genres cold.

Mastering your genre seems like it should be easy, since these are forms we have all seen at the movies since we were kids. Unfortunately, each genre is a complex story system where all the crucial elements exist under the surface in the structure. Each genre has a unique hero, desire line and opponent, asks a key question, uses a specialized storytelling strategy and expresses a highly detailed set of themes. Most importantly, each genre has anywhere from 8-15 unique story beats that must be in your script or your script will fail. What’s more, you have to twist each story beat, write each in an original way so your script stands above all the others in your form.

But here’s the good news: all the techniques required for a great genre script are very precise and can be learned. There’s no reason you can’t become a master of your form and write a script that presents your genre to the Hollywood buyers in a fresh new way.

I’d like to give you a brief look at some of the most popular genres in the entertainment business, that make up, individually or in combination, 99% of Hollywood films and television. Of course this won’t begin to cover all the techniques you need to know to master your form. I teach an all-day class in each genre, and even that doesn’t cover everything. But this will give you a sense of what form you’re probably working in.

Perhaps the most popular family of genres in film and TV is Detective, Crime and Thriller. But you have to be careful when choosing one of these forms. While they all involve a crime, they are very different forms with very different structures. DetectiveStories (L.A. Confidential, Chinatown) are about searching for the truth, so you need lots of suspects who could believably have committed the crime. This form also has more reveals than any other, and many writers have trouble sequencing these reveals, since they normally occur in reverse chronological order.

Crime (The Usual Suspects, No Country for Old Men) is a genre that places less emphasis on detecting the criminal and more on the cat-and-mouse beats of catching him. This pushes Crime toward the Action genre, and means that the opponent is best when he is some form of master criminal.

Thriller (Michael Clayton, The Sixth Sense, Silence of the Lambs) is the most popular of this family of genres in movies (detective is most popular in TV). Like Detective, Thriller involves detection, but there are typically far fewer suspects, and emphasis shifts to the detective being an average person who enters extreme danger. Thrillers are surprisingly tough to structure because you have to coordinate two opposing desire lines: the hero wants to uncover the killer while also escaping intense attack.

Writers of Love Stories, and particularly Romantic Comedies, are always surprised, and a little chagrined, when I tell them that they have chosen probably the most difficult genre to write well. There are many reasons for this, among them the fact that LoveStories (Four Weddings and a Funeral, When Harry Met Sally, The 40-Year-Old Virgin) are highly choreographed, with no less than 12 unique story beats. But the biggest reason Love is so tricky is that the hero’s desire and opponent are the same person. No other genre has this peculiar structural element. The hero wants the lover, but the lover is also the first and main opponent. The result is a writer who doesn’t know if the story is coming (attraction) or going (repulsion). The good news is that the love story, when written in an original way, is extremely popular with audiences worldwide.

Myth and Action are two genres that rule in the summer months. Myth (Lord of the Rings, The Dark Knight) is the foundation genre of more blockbusters than any other form. That’s because Myth deals with archetypal characters and life moments, which are recognizable worldwide regardless of culture or nationality. The big problem with Myth is that the story, which usually involves a journey, tends to be extremely episodic. To fix that, Hollywood almost always combines myth with one or two other genres that update and unify the Myth story.

Action (Ironman, the Bourne films, the James Bond movies) is one of those genres often combined with Myth. This form was practically invented for the film medium, which is based on the split-second cut. If Love Story has the trickiest story structure, Action has the simplest. The hero has a clear goal and goes after it with great speed and relentless energy. But don’t be fooled by this. Action is much harder to execute well than it looks. Because the form has such a simple desire line, most action scripts lack plot. You can’t just string together a few big action set pieces. You need a complex opponent and as much information hidden from your hero as possible.

The second major family of genres is Horror, Fantasy and Science Fiction. Horror (28 Days Later, Jurassic Park, Nightmare on Elm Street) is about humans in decline, reduced to animals or machines by an attack of the inhuman. It’s the narrowest of all the genres, so you may be surprised to know that it has more unique story beats –15 – than any other form. Horror scripts are often very predictable, with a reactive hero and a monster who is just a killing machine. So one of the best ways to set your Horror story apart from the crowd is to make your hero active and force him or her to go up against the most intelligent monster possible.

If Horror is about man in decline and society shutting down,Fantasy (Enchanted, Big, The Truman Show) is about an individual discovering the hidden possibilities of life, of society opening up. The Harry Potter stories have shown us what an appealing form this is, worldwide, partly because the audience gets to explore an imaginary new world. But that’s also where the challenge lies. You’ve got to create a detailed world the audience has never seen, while maintaining the strong narrative drive that Hollywood requires. One way to do that is to establish a deep psychological weakness in your hero that will be severely tested when the hero enters the fantasy world. This grounds the story and makes it personally meaningful to the audience.

Science Fiction (The Matrix, Children of Men) is about human evolution on the grandest scale, literally the universal epic. Film is the perfect medium for this genre, which is why Science Fiction has become a favorite form of Hollywood. J.J. Abrams popular re-imagining of Star Trek seems effortless in its execution. But it masks the fact that Science Fiction scripts often fail, because telling a personal, emotionally satisfying story on such an epic scale is very hard.

No article on how the major screen genres work would be complete without a mention of Comedy (The Hangover, Wedding Crashers, Little Miss Sunshine). This perennial favorite is the most under-estimated genre. Whenever someone tells me they’re writing a comedy, I always ask, What kind? There are seven major movie Comedy forms – action, buddy, traveling angel, romantic, farce, black, and satire – and each has a totally unique set of story beats. Failing to know which comedy form you’re writing is the single biggest error comedy writers make.

But many writers also mistakenly believe that a Comedy screenplay is all about the jokes. They jam the gags in from page one, and don’t understand when the script hits the wall about fifteen minutes in. Why does the script suddenly stop being funny? The writer forgot the storyline. You don’t start with the jokes and tell a story. You start with a comic story structure and let the jokes emerge naturally and build from the storyline.

So what’s the recipe for success in a world that’s all about buying and selling genres? Choose the two or three genres that are right for your story idea. Learn their unique story beats so you can hit every one. Transcend your genre by giving each story beat an original twist. There are no guarantees in screenwriting. But this 3-step recipe is as close as they come.

This 3-step recipe is as close as you can get to guaranteed success as a screenwriter, but you still have to apply the recipe to your own writing. That’s why the Blockbuster story development software was created. The Genre screen in the main Blockbuster program shows you which genres are best for your original story idea. Each Genre Add-on explains the 8-15 story beats unique to your form and tells you exactly where they should happen in your story structure. There are also a number of Genre maps, which are screens specially designed to help you navigate the problem areas of your form.

The Help section in each Genre Add-on not only tells you how to transcend your genre for a truly unique script, it tells you all the story beats of the different versions of your genre, like the seven different forms of Movie Comedy. And each Add-on includes four movie examples that show you the specific techniques story masters used to write classics in your form.

Genres are a big mystery to most writers, but you can use them as a secret weapon to stand above the crowd.

Star Trek

2009-05-27T09:52:00.000-07:00

Renewing an old series is one of the most difficult challenges for a screenwriter. The audience is familiar with all of the previous stories and the series’ complete iconography. So the bar is very high. Plus, the reason you are renewing series is because the mythology has been told to death. So coming up with a new story that both pleases and surprises the die-hards is extremely difficult.

Writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman chose to go with an origin story, which seems so obvious I wondered why the Star Trek powers hadn’t done this a long time ago. Oftentimes the origin of a superhero or superhero team is the most fun part, not only because we get to see how this special magic first came into being but also because the story is, literally, original. Every other story after the origin is essentially the same tale but with a different opponent.

But origin stories are also a lot more difficult than they appear, as the writers of Watchmen discovered. Audiences love seeing the formation of the original team, but if you take too long doing it you kill narrative drive. And once you kill it it’s real hard to get it back.

Star Trek’s writers solved the problem of renewing this ancient (by Hollywood’s standards) series, and executing a good origin story, by grabbing some of the best techniques of science fiction, myth and drama. Science fiction often piggy-backs on the myth form. That’s why so many science fiction stories use Greek and Roman names, stories and history. Myth is the best genre for telling a story that covers a great deal of space and time, and science fiction is the futuristic form that typically covers huge amounts of space and time.

Like all genres, myth has certain unique story beats that must be present if you want to execute the genre properly. For example, many myth stories begin with the birth of the hero, followed immediately by the death of the father. Sure enough that beat happens in the opening scene of Star Trek. And its followed by every other major beat in the myth form.

The writers keep the story from being a predictable myth-repeat by adding some of the key beats of the science fiction form, especially the elements of time travel. Due to Gene Roddenberry’s original premise of “Wagon Train in space,” Star Trek has always emphasized the spatial aspects of science fiction, as the Enterprise visits one new world after another. As the show’s tag line states, “Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Her ongoing mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life forms and new civilizations; to boldly go where no one has gone before.”

But this Star Trek is directed by J. J. Abrams, co-creator of Lost, whose brilliant fifth season has used the element of time travel better than it’s ever been done before. In many ways, time travel is the key to rejuvenating the Star Trek franchise and making the origin story work. Time travel allows the writers to emphasize character change in a very plot-heavy genre – of many of the major characters – by jamming the characters’ beginning and ending selves close together in time. It also lets the writers keep the narrative drive going fast and furious from the very opening on. Instead of spending the abnormally long time collecting allies that origin stories usually require, the Star Trek writers can sprinkle the introduction of the various team members throughout the story.

The final genre the authors of Star Trek used was drama. Mixing in drama elements is the main way you transcend any genre, because you are essentially taking a mythic hero and adding psychological depth and individuality. This is the main technique writer Tony Gilroy used in writing the Bourne films, and what Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, and
Paul Haggis did when called on to rejuvenate and rewrite the origin story for James Bond in Casino Royale. In Star Trek the writers not only highlighted the moral and psychological needs of main characters Kirk and Spock, they also made the brilliant dramatic move of turning Kirk and Spock into lead opponents for a good part of the story.

Most of us writers never get the opportunity to rejuvenate a classic like Star Trek. But we can take on the challenge of telling a science fiction story so it has tremendous emotional impact on the audience. The choices the writers made in the new and improved Star Trek can teach us a lot about why science fiction has become one of the most popular genres in mainstream Hollywood film.

Disney's Earth

2009-04-13T13:50:00.001-07:00

Earth, the most ambitious nature documentary ever made, is coming out, appropriately, on Earth Day, and I had the great pleasure to have worked on it as story consultant. A project like this is quite rare, first because it had the potential to be an historic film, and second, because the creative team behind it was both extremely talented and open to outside ideas. Because of the role I played on Earth, I’d like to take you inside the creative process to explain how this remarkable film came about.

The nature documentary is a sub-category of the very broad genre known as True Life stories. Like the biopic and the memoir – other kinds of True Life stories – the nature doc hits all the key story structure steps but also bends them in several severe ways. The most obvious special characteristic of a nature doc is that the main character is not human. Surprisingly, the only one of the seven steps that this strongly affects is the self-revelation. Animals, especially as we move down the chain of being, don’t really have self-revelations, although they do learn.

Another restriction in nature docs is that the storyteller must work with what actually happened, and worse, with what he or she actually got on film. (While working on Earth, I was amazed to learn that no filmmaker has ever gotten footage of a black jaguar in its natural habitat.) If you don’t have film of the opponent step, for example, you’ve got a huge hole in your story and no amount of rewriting is going to fix it.

Besides these substantial restrictions common to all nature docs, Earth brought a slew of its own story challenges. The film’s title suggests one of the biggest: this film had to be the epic of all nature epics, covering the entire planet and potentially every plant and animal on the planet. A second challenge was the opposite of the first: how do you create a strong emotional bond between the audience and the animals – the main characters – with so many characters to depict?

Yet another challenge had to do with creating dramatic build: animal behavior is almost always cyclical, driven by the four seasons, with animals all over the earth undergoing physical changes at any and all times. The final major challenge (I won’t get into the hundreds of minor challenges) had to do with the inherently episodic quality of a story covering so much time and space, and so many animals.

So here’s what we did. First we realized that the epic and the personal don’t have to be mutually exclusive. We could show the massive scope of the planet more effectively by making the story more character driven. And that meant focusing on fewer characters more intensely, showing a complete seven steps drama of each main character in condensed form.

The key then was which animals to focus on. To heighten the epic scope and provide an easy-to-follow narrative line, we would track the sun from north pole to south pole. The character line would be built around three families: polar bears in the north, elephants near the equator, and whales in the waters of the south.

Choosing these three animals as the main characters and focusing on one family in each was the crucial decision in the entire story process. These three animals are among the most popular with audiences, and linking them on a path from north to south allowed us to make quick forays to other animals without losing a sense of the spine.

Showing a family instead of an individual animal gave us all the benefits of the family as the basic unit of drama. The struggle of each to survive wasn’t just the drama of predator and prey resulting inevitably in death. Instead, it became the story of a mother’s love, of teaching the babies and watching them grow, of the wonder of life rather than the horror of death. In fact, the biggest revelation I took from the film is that the most powerful and heroic being on this earth is Mom. What mothers do in this film, emblematic of what they do a billion times a day on this earth, will blow your mind.

No discussion of the story work on Earth would be complete without mention of the amazing footage these filmmakers were able to get. What strikes you first is the extraordinary beauty of this planet. And the images you see in this film are far beyond what you have ever seen before.

But you quickly get caught up in the even more unbelievable pictures of the daily drama of life. Perhaps my favorite in a long list is a sequence where elephants and lions must share a watering hole because of a drought. That’s something that neither elephant nor lion likes to do. And I dare you to watch what happens without your jaw dropping open in utter disbelief.

Most of you reading this do not write or film nature documentaries. But you do write stories. Watch Earth first because it is a joy to behold. But then study it for the problems and solutions every writer deals with in the never-ending challenge we call storytelling.

Watchmen

2009-03-24T10:59:00.000-07:00

Mixing genres is the fundamental story technique of mainstream Hollywood moviemaking. If you want to play in that league, you need to master the technique. But be warned. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you end up with a big mess.

Watchmen left me with a strong sense of missed opportunity. This movie had the potential to be another deep exploration of the role of the savior in modern American life, with a shot at reaching the heights of the best of the form, The Dark Knight.

The challenge facing the writers was huge. They had to weave at least three stories, each from a different genre. First is the fantasy superhero story about who these characters are, why they formed their team, and why they disbanded it. Second is the detective story where Rorschach tries to uncover who is assassinating his old superhero pals. Third is the action story where someone is out to destroy the world.

In putting these three genres together, the writers have created a massive Rube Goldberg mechanism that lumbers along, puffing and wheezing, pushing forward, backing up, until it finally collapses at the finish line 2 hours and 43 minutes later.

Watchmen is a textbook example of how to write, and not write, a superhero origin story. The origin of a superhero is often the most fun aspect of the character and is a complete story unto itself. So the writer has to figure out how to combine a fairly long origin story with a full-blown crime or disaster tale, and make both lines seem like one.

Batman Begins gives us a model for how to execute this job properly. There the writers begin by crosscutting Bruce Wayne’s ghost as a youth (the bats and the death of his parents) with the training he receives from Henri Ducard of the League of Shadows. Then Bruce returns to Gotham to fight crime as Batman and eventually uncovers the plot to destroy the city, concocted by none other than his teacher, Henri Ducard.

But notice one huge advantage the Batman writers have in doing their adaptation: they have to detail the ghost of only one character. This difference is the source of all of Watchmen’s structural problems. The Watchmen’s writers tried to provide detailed ghosts for all nine of the Watchmen superheroes. They realized putting all of these origin stories together at the beginning would create its own movie and have little to do with the assassination/world destruction plot.

So they tried using an advanced story structure form (which I discuss in detail in the Advanced Screenwriting Class). In this form you set up a character with an intense desire line. Then at various intervals, you halt the narrative drive and you explore some dramatic issue or delve deep into character. This technique was used in both Forrest Gump and Lord of the Rings.

This advanced storytelling form has some great strengths but also grave dangers. If you don’t set up a strong enough desire line, the side trips eventually collapse the story. Similarly, if you go too often or spend too long in the side trips, your narrative drive stops. And if these side trips are about ghost – information about the past – then your narrative drive is really in trouble because you are literally going backwards.

All of these problems occur in Watchmen. The writers use a detective story for their desire line: Rorschach wants to find out who is killing the retired superheroes. This appears to be a good choice, since the detective form has one of the cleanest and most propulsive lines of any genre. It is also a form focused on finding out what happened in the past, usually having to do with who committed a murder. So the audience is more accepting in this form of looking backwards.

But the detective form has nowhere near the narrative drive needed to support this many backward looking journeys, for this many characters. And it cannot then flip to an action story line where a team defeats a supervillain who is trying to destroy the world.

The result is a film of three stories in which none is done well. Of the three, the most interesting by far is the story of the origin of this band of superheroes. Had the writers focused on this, they could have had a terrific film.

Of course all of this implies that the writers had a choice. All kinds of forces could have dictated that they somehow make the three-in-one story work. Faced with that task, you do the best job you can.

But whatever the reality of this film, Watchmen shows screenwriters that there are limits to how much you can hang on the narrative line. When mixing genres, the main rule is the pick one genre to be the primary one. Then be very careful how many other genre elements you hang on it. Or you’ll end up with some very nasty wreckage.

I've Loved You So Long

2009-01-29T15:48:00.000-08:00

Drama is the most intimate of all fiction forms. That gives it the ability to affect an audience deeply. But that same quality creates special problems for the storyteller. I’ve Loved You So Long is one of the best dramas of the year, and writer Philippe Claudel has used some excellent strategies to surmount the special challenges of the drama form.

Good drama is always built on a moral issue. But you can’t argue the issue directly or your story will sound like a sermon or an essay. You have to explore the issue structurally, under the surface, which means tracking the hero’s slow development as she works through the plot. And that leads to another problem: drama is extremely personal and real, something the audience can immediately recognize as potentially part of their own day-to-day lives. But quotidian life doesn’t lend itself to big plot.

It’s a bit of a Catch 22. You have to hide the moral issue in the plot, but you don’t have a lot of plot to hide it with. Claudel solves this dilemma in a number of ways. First he hides the big moral issue in the story by emphasizing from the beginning the day-to-day. An attractive, refined middle-aged woman, Juliette, goes to stay for a while at the house of her younger sister, Lea. There’s little emphasis on the fact that’s she’s just come from spending 15 years in prison, or the fact that she was guilty of killing her child, which comes out quite early in conversation. No, the story is about this woman readjusting to daily life, and living with her sister’s family.

Claudel highlights the everyday by using short scenes, and by starting scenes late or ending them early. There’s little of the carefully argued scene that we normally see in drama. Instead it’s as if the audience is catching glimpses of this woman living a normal life again.

This scene technique is risky in drama – which is why it’s not normally used – because it can kill the plot and give the overall story an episodic feel. Which is why Claudel uses another technique to pop the plot: he gives the story a lot of small reversals and reveals. Reveals are one of the keys to plot (I go into great detail about how to create reveals in the 22 Step Master Class). Genres like thriller and detective have the benefit of big plot, because the reveals are big and sensational: “She’s my sister. She’s my daughter. She’s my sister. She’s my daughter.”

Drama has to rely on small reveals, which is one reason many writers avoid this form. They’re simply not good at finding the tiny, but potentially life-changing, reveals of everyday life. Claudel excels at this way of seeing and telling a story. For example, Juliette is called into the office of the head of the hospital. But instead of getting fired she gets a permanent position. One or two of these little reveals are insufficient to drive the story. But Claudel peppers them throughout the script, giving the subtle effect that this little drama of the everyday is chock full of plot.

This technique solves another common problem of the drama form: the over-dependence on the ghost. Those familiar with my Masterclass know that ghost is one of the 22 steps. It refers to the event from the past still haunting the hero in the present. To increase the plot, drama writers often give the hero a huge ghost. But they hide it until the very end when the hero finally exposes it to the audience. For the drama writer, this seems like a terrific technique, because you know you have at least one huge reveal in your back pocket that you can spring at the most dramatic moment.

But the cost is much bigger than the benefit. The audience quickly senses that the story is all about what really happened way back when. So, in the back of their minds, they simply wait for the rest of the story to play out until the big reveal. Notice this is like driving your car with the brakes on. If you want to kill narrative drive in a story, this is a great way to do it.

The hero in I’ve Loved You So Long does have a strong ghost. But the story isn’t about learning the big secret at the end. We find out right up front that this woman murdered her child. Instead of focusing the audience’s attention on the past, Claudel focuses it on the present, on the ongoing conflicts and trials of remaking a life in the real world.

One of these moments occurs during a brilliant scene where Juliette joins her family and some of their friends at a house in the country. Claudel uses a technique I talk about in the Advanced Screenwriting Class called the “buzzing household.” The buzzing household is a form of utopia, but on the micro level, the level of the house. In this technique, the house is full of people, alone or in small groups, each wonderfully involved in their own activity. Often the characters in the house are quirky, even bizarre, each one a total individual. And yet they form a community of invisible but unbreakable bonds.

We’ve seen this technique in countless movies, such as You Can’t Take It with You and Steel Magnolias, because film is a medium that excels in showing utopias and dystopias. The country house in I’ve Loved You So Long is just such a buzzing household. But for Juliette, this house is also a dystopia, because it is filled with playing children. Every moment she is reminded of what it means for your child to be dead.

Claudel then extends the nightmare at dinner. The head of the table, who’s had too much to drink, playfully questions Lea about where she’s been keeping her lovely sister all this time. Lea and her husband nervously exchange glances. They try to make the man stop, but he keeps pushing. Finally, Juliette calmly states that she’s been in prison for murder. Everyone at the table cracks up. The witty, beautiful sister has provided a sensational story to solve the mystery. Only a kindly professor figures out that she’s telling the truth.

As is fitting for a small intimate drama about a woman slowly rebuilding her life, there is no single self-revelation moment to show character change. There is instead a collection of little changes, and none is complete. By the end of the film, Juliette has begun to get close to the professor, but she hasn’t kissed him. Her brother-in-law, once frightened of leaving his children alone with her, suggests to his wife that Juliette baby-sit their kids.

Drama is a form fraught with all sorts of hidden dangers for the writer. If this is the voice by which you speak, study I’ve Loved You So Long carefully and you can learn many valuable techniques. Master them and your ability to touch the heart of an audience will be unmatched.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

2008-12-31T09:52:00.000-08:00

Spoiler alert: this breakdown divulges information about the plot of the film.

Most story failures go all the way back to the premise, even and including big budget epics like The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Sometimes the failure occurs because the writer doesn't develop the idea properly. For example, he or she may choose the wrong genre. But most often failures of premise occur because the original idea is weak, with huge structural problems lurking under the depths that don't surface until the writer tries to write the script. Indeed, many of the premise techniques that I talk about in the Great Screenwriting Class are designed to show you which ideas simply will not work, no matter how good a writer you are.

The premise of Benjamin Button is certainly intriguing. A man is born old and ages backward. He meets a girl when she is ten, they have a great love in the few years when their ages intersect, and then their biology tears them apart. But the key question is: what does this idea mean structurally? Writer Eric Roth is trying to write a tragic, epic love story. This very powerful form has become rare because it is so difficult to make the case that even a great love can affect a nation, and because it is so much easier now for lovers to get together and so much easier for them to part.

Against such obstacles, this premise immediately feels like nothing more than a gimmick to make tragic love possible. If you can't create real tragic love, just come up with a man who ages backward. Now that guy's going to have some major love problems.

Fantasy always involves creating a unique story world with its own rules. But these rules must be allegorical; they must highlight the world we really live in, including its emotional reality. But that doesn't happen here. For long stretches of the story, the two leads could be together. But one of them doesn't want to. This does not have the makings of epic or tragic love. When the two do get together as a couple, they enjoy a number of apparently blissful years. But Roth knows he has to break them apart. And because the story is based on the gimmick of the guy aging backward, he is forced to concoct one of the phoniest scenes in recent memory. Benjamin tells his wife, Daisy, that he doesn't want his new baby to miss having a real father, or his wife to see him as he grows into a child. So he just up and leaves, even though he has many years before he becomes a child.

Benjamin Button has an even larger structural problem embedded in the premise. A story that unfolds backward is extremely rare for a reason. It makes story causation virtually impossible. Or, to put it another way, you end up with the ultimate episodic story. An episodic story is one in which each event stands on its own - each scene in effect becoming a mini-story - and does not connect with the other events. The whole becomes less than the sum of the parts.

One of the only stories to unfold backwards successfully is Harold Pinter's Betrayal. But notice that Betrayal is built on a relationship between a man and a woman. It is an organic unit from first to last. With this as a foundation, the story's backward movement, instead of being episodic, induces the audience to focus on the original causal forces that ultimately drive these two people apart.

Benjamin Button is the story of one man's life. But his backward unfolding is based on the lowest form of causation, the biological. That's not what we are interested in when we see someone's life story. We want to see an unfolding based on the character's life choices. We want to see how the character's highest, most human qualities play out. It is these human elements that make plot possible, because plot is based, among other things, on the hero's ability to plot his own course. Because Benjamin Button tracks a man biologically getting young, he becomes nothing more than a freak who can't make any choice at all. He floats through life, an observer of the world who holds little interest for the audience.

Benjamin Button, like Slumdog Millionaire, is a myth story connected to a love story. But where the writer of Slumdog Millionaire created a structure that would build inevitably to a convergent point, the writer of Benjamin Button, trapped by his premise, could only string together moments. We watch myth stories because they give us a lifetime perspective, and therefore let us see a model of how to live a fulfilling life. In The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, the only life lesson we learn is: don't be born old.

Doubt

2008-12-31T09:50:00.001-08:00

Spoiler alert: this breakdown divulges information about the plot of the film.

Drama is a story structure based on exploring a difficult moral issue in depth. It puts more emphasis on moral argument – concerning the right and wrong way to live – than any other genre, which is both a blessing a curse. In the Great Screenwriting and Advanced Screenwriting Classes, I explain in detail how to express moral argument through the story structure, instead of presenting it in dialogue like a sermon. When moral argument is done through structure it has tremendous impact on the audience, not because it tells them how to live but because it shows them, in deeply personal terms, the effects that moral decisions have on our lives.

Doubt, by John Patrick Shanley, is a classic drama, and it shows clearly the strengths and limitations of the drama form. Because of the form’s emphasis on moral argument, the best drama tries to cut the particular issue as close to 51-49 as it can. And Shanley does this quite well. Sister Aloysius is a hard, bigoted, rule-bound woman who accuses another human being of a heinous crime based on no evidence but a feeling. But she is probably right. Father Flynn is a compassionate, gentle and decent man who wants to bring fun and community to the school. But he may be molesting boys. The boy whom the priest is accused of molesting is the first black child at the school. And Father Flynn is his only friend.

This balance and complexity is Doubt’s great strength and allows Shanley to create two powerful scenes between the nun and the priest that have the quality of a heavyweight fight. But Doubt’s great failure – and it is the most serious mistake a drama can make – is that the
story is nothing but moral argument. Drama must always be a story first, and that means plot and character development.

Plot and character development are the scaffolding on which moral argument must stand. Plot is based on surprise. It’s what delights us. It’s the game that seduces the audience into facing the pain the drama ultimately causes its characters and all who watch them. Character development is what makes the audience care about the people going through the struggle. It’s what makes the emotional connection.

Doubt has virtually no plot or character development. We see four characters dealing with a crisis that Sister Aloysius has brought to a head. Almost the entire story is played out in the two big scenes between the priest and the nun. Since the film has no plot or character development, it creates little emotional connection with the audience, so the argument remains intellectual and the mechanics of the drama come to the surface.

Without an emotional connection, everything in the film boils down to the quality of the moral accounting, and in this the drama fails. Sister Aloysius uses trickery to force the priest out, but this trickery is not unreasonable or extreme. And it indicates that the priest was probably guilty. So the film ends up supporting not so much her method of attack but her original certainty that he is guilty, even though it is based on nothing but a feeling. This is highly suspect.

Shanley seems to realize his moral accounting is skewed. So he has the nun experience an emotional breakdown in the final scene, in which she cries out that she has “such doubts.” But this moment is both intellectually unbelievable and emotionally phony. Try as hard as she can, Meryl Streep can’t bring it off. And if Meryl Streep can’t bring it off, there’s a good chance the problem is in the script. The result for the audience is a huge letdown. Because the nun’s final breakdown and confession of doubt is unbelievable, it doesn’t correct the imbalance of the moral argument.

Screenwriters who wish to write drama can learn much from this film, especially from its complexity and its hard-hitting dialogue. But most of all we can learn that even drama is a story first, and the old foundations of plot and character development are the keys to greatness.

Frost/Nixon

2008-12-31T09:47:00.001-08:00

Great drama is among the most advanced and challenging forms of storytelling. Sadly the glory days of drama in worldwide entertainment are long gone. Witness the highly acclaimed Frost/Nixon, the latest example of “much ado about nothing” in the drama form.

Frost/Nixon seems to have many of the elements that make up an excellent dramatic script, most especially the relationship between the hero and the main opponent. From the title itself, we can tell that writer Peter Morgan understands one of the first rules of great storytelling, which is that the hero is only as good as the person he fights. The opposition here between Frost and Nixon promises to be a heavyweight fight, between the charming, media-savvy English interviewer and the lying, bitter, anti-media American ex-President.

In fact, what we get is the most hollow, limp opposition I can remember. Sure there’s plenty of conflict. Frost has to fight not only Nixon and his chief handler, but also his own teammates who push him to be harder on the ex-President.

So why does this drama disappear into thin air when you try to engage it? The reason has to do with what’s really at stake in a drama. Good drama explores a moral issue in depth. And this moral issue has to be important, meaning that it has to affect people’s lives deeply.

At first glance, Frost/Nixon seems to deal with a huge moral issue: the most powerful man in the world abuses his power, attacks the Constitution and then creates an elaborate cover-up to hide his crimes and retain power. That would be the moral issue at stake if the film tracked Nixon and the events of the Watergate scandal.

But this film is about Nixon talking about Watergate. Which is why we get so much fake drama about how Frost has his own money on the line, how he has a reputation as a lightweight, how Nixon is a big, bad wolf, how Frost and Nixon are both trying to make a comeback and only one of them can succeed, etc. This is all puff and nonsense.

Break the film down structurally and you realize that Frost/Nixon is a film with 90 minutes of smoke-and-mirrors set-up for 5 minutes of payoff. And what is the payoff? Nixon admits he made a mistake and let down the American people. Whoa. What a revelation. Look all you want for a deep exploration of a major moral issue. You won’t find one.

The only reason this is surprising is that the actual Frost/Nixon interviews happened so long ago. Looking back at when the interviews were shown on television, I recall I watched them sporadically. And why was I not engrossed by this supposedly momentous landmark of television history? Because it was a long, crashing bore, endless hours of bloviating for the 5 minutes of payoff we get at the end of this film.

One reviewer has called this film “Ron Howard’s most mature work to date.” Please. That’s wrong on at least two counts. First, it’s another example of the sheer idiocy of the auteur theory. Ron Howard has relatively little to do with the success or failure of this drama. It’s all about the script, the play, the workings of the drama from the inside. Second, this is not good drama. It’s what is sometimes referred to, disparagingly, as the “well-made play.” Looks good on the gloss. But it’s hollow drama in the theater. And it’s hollow on film.

Which begs the question, why all the acclaim? We could blame it on the old excuse: you can fool all of the people some of the time. But the real reason for the hoopla is the virtual disappearance of the drama form in Hollywood film. Movies like Frost/Nixon, Doubt, and Revolutionary Road come out at the end of the year, at awards time, and because they have the audacity to address adult issues, reviewers, who are used to watching cartoons, are so shocked they call these films brilliant.

Sure we might all want to have the success of these dramatists. But don’t be fooled. If you want to write drama, a dying form, you can’t get away with smoke and mirrors. You have to have real substance. And you have to know how express that substance through a building conflict between two virtually equal sides. Master that and reviewers will call you brilliant too. And you’ll earn it.

Slumdog Millionaire

2008-12-08T16:10:00.000-08:00

All the praise for Slumdog Millionaire has been focused on Danny Boyle for his energetic and colorful direction. No question Boyle's direction is terrific. But the real key to the film's success is the script by Simon Beaufoy. Using a unique story structure and scene weave, Beaufoy combines the myth and love genres with some advanced screenwriting techniques to build his story to a stunning climax.

To appreciate Beaufoy's accomplishment, we first have to look at is challenge. This is the story of a "slumdog" orphan boy who grows up in Mumbai with his older brother and ends up competing for the big prize on the game show, Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? Here are just some of the difficulties inherent in the premise: a boy as main character, a story that covers ten years, a mix of myth and love story forms - two genres that are notoriously tough to put together - and keeping the hero's desire for the girl believable and strong. In the Great Screenwriting Class I spend a lot of time on specific techniques for developing the premise, since this is where 99% of writers fail. To win the premise game, you first have to identify the structural problems buried in the idea, then come up with structural solutions to solve them. And you have to be able to do this before you write the script.

Beaufoy's solution to the daunting challenges of his premise is a triple cross-cut framing device. In this advanced technique (see the Advanced Screenwriting Class and the Blockbuster story software for details), the writer cuts between the hero, Jamal, being tortured by the cops who suspect he has been cheating, his performance on the game show, and the story of his life. This is a classic example of how a non-chronological structure is often the right one for a story. But it is very risky, because this much cross-cutting can suck out all the narrative drive.

So why does it work here? One of the big problems of telling a myth story that covers many years in a character's life is that it becomes extremely episodic, meaning that individual events stand out and don't build in a single, narrative whole. A storytelling framing device literally puts brackets around these events. They are told from the mind of the hero, so they gain a unity they would not have if told chronologically from an omniscient narrator.

Using a child as the main character poses all kinds of problems. A child has limited awareness, he is usually a victim and the audience senses that the most dramatic elements will come near the end of the depicted life. That's why Beaufoy uses the other two cross-cut lines. By beginning with the boy grown-up, being tortured, then cutting quickly to his performance on the game show, Beaufoy brings the most dramatic element of this boy's life story to the front of the tale. Structurally, he has taken the battle step - one of the seven major structure steps that usually occurs at the end of the story - and cut it into pieces. The audience is constantly reminded of the most dramatic moment of the story, and it too builds slowly and steadily as the hero moves closer to winning the big prize.

This also allows Beaufoy to connect the game show questions to the key events of the boy's life, a technique that not only undercuts the episodic quality of the story but also makes the thematic point that any life is a combination of chance, freedom and necessity.

The torture and game show lines solve another problem inherent in the premise: they are the primary way Beaufoy connects the myth form to the love story. Myth usually covers vast time and space. Love is compact, driven by white-hot passion that tends to dissipate if the story travels. The torture and game show frame allows Beaufoy to establish Jamal's love desire at the very beginning of the story, even though chronologically the hero encounters the girl of his dreams when he is a little boy and then doesn't see her for long stretches of his life. This makes the love story the primary genre, which is a much more unified form than myth.

The writer was also fortunate that the writer of the original novel, Vikas Swarup, chose the picaresque tale as the basis of the original story. A picaresque tale is a kind of comic myth in which the hero is a rogue-trickster character from the lower class who succeeds by his wits and in so doing highlights the corruption of the society. This sub-genre is the basis of such classics as Tom Jones, Oliver Twist, and Huckleberry Finn. In the "greatest techniques" section of the Blockbuster software, I talk about this rogue-trickster character as possibly the single important element in blockbuster films. From the very beginning this boy is a schemer, able to succeed and even escape death through his quick mind. Faced with terrible poverty and corruption, he nonetheless survives and flourishes. There is even an Indian version of Oliver Twist when a man saves the brothers from their poverty only to force them into his society of beggars.

This film is worth careful study by any writer hoping to master advanced storytelling techniques, as well as to learn how to bring together genre forms in unique combinations.

Changeling

2008-11-26T12:48:00.000-08:00

Changeling is a harrowing story of one woman’s nightmare when she tries to find her missing son. For screenwriters it shows the benefits, but also the difficulty, of combining the thriller with the social drama.

Drama is one of the great storytelling forms, but it has become rare in a Hollywood that requires all its movies to have blockbuster potential. Most writers of classic drama have moved to television where the level of writing has never been higher. But to get a drama made in film, you have to combine it with a more sensational genre that can pull in the big audience. Enter the thriller.

At first glance, this marriage of forms looks like a good idea. Social drama lets you explore human nature and social conflict in depth, while the thriller gives the story excitement, jeopardy and narrative drive. But these same qualities dictate virtually opposite story movements. Drama wants to slow down and dig deep, find the underlying causes and explore the subtleties of human character. Thriller wants to charge ahead, to find out who is attacking the hero. No subtlety here; it’s yes or no, he did it or he didn’t.

This is the crux of the problem that Changeling writer, J. Michael Straczynski, had to solve to make this film work. The story begins with the social drama. The hero, Christine Collins, returns home from work to find her son missing. Months later the police bring her a boy they claim is her son, even though she insists he isn’t. Her desire is simple: she wants her son back. But that creates a big structural problem for the writer. She can’t act on her desire. All she can do is repeat it to the corrupt cops. And while this generates anger in the audience at the arrogant injustice of the police who treat her as an incompetent child, it doesn’t drive the story forward.

This early part of the film also highlights another flaw common to the social drama. The hero has no moral need. All immorality is located in the opposition, the corrupt cops. This creates a good vs. evil contrast that is the kiss of death for good social drama, and exacerbates the hero’s position as a victim already established by her reactive desire line.

With the social drama line slowing to a halt, Straczynski introduces the investigation line and the story takes off with a burst of energy that’s palpable. A cop in the same precinct as the corrupt captain follows up on a kid’s claim that he helped a serial killer murder boys. The resulting investigation is not complicated, but it doesn’t have to be. It gives the story a goal with clear action beats. The writer then cross-cuts this line with a thriller line that comes from the corrupt captain sending Christine to an insane asylum for claiming the police gave her the wrong boy.

Does this story have a double desire line, and therefore two spines? You bet. And it does feel like two movies that have been cobbled together. But we also see here a writer making a unique story work on its own terms. Most stories have one or more structural roadblocks built in; they are part of the animal. If, as a professional, you have to make a story work, you pull from your bag of techniques and get the job done. Straczynski knows that neither desire line will support the story on its own. But by cross-cutting them, he creates a track with enough narrative drive to take us to the end of the social drama.

But not without severe costs. The story’s structural flaws prevent this from being a great social drama. Yes, the corrupt captain and chief of police are brought low and the mother is publicly redeemed. But subtlety and an exploration of deeper causes are nowhere to be found.

So what can we learn from Changeling? I’ve already mentioned the importance of making the story work, even if you have to break a few of the rules of good drama. The lesson of never letting perfection get in the way of success is always good for writers to remember. Changeling also shows us the power, and the difficulty, of combining drama with thriller. The key structural element is desire. If possible, try to turn the two desire lines – of drama and thriller – into one. Each line should help solve the other: investigating the crime should lead to deeper layers of the social conflict while the argument about the social issue should lead the hero to new clues about the crime.

Finally, Changeling shows us one of the keys to dramatizing a real-life story: finding the right frame. A true story must hit the same seven major structure steps as a fictional story. But a true story restricts you in how you find those steps, since you can’t just create them from thin air. Instead you have to focus on the frame, where to begin and end the story, and that means you have to start by identifying your battle scene. In Changeling, everything comes to a dramatic head at the trial, actually a cross-cut between the trial of the killer and the trial of the LA police. This battle brings a convergence of the two lines that this real-life drama-thriller desperately needs.

If you are interested in how to tell any story with maximum dramatic power, regardless of genre, look at our 22 Step Great Screenwriting Class. For tips on advanced drama and structuring true stories, check out the Advanced Screenwriting Class.

Life

2008-11-26T12:46:00.001-08:00

Life is a 1-hour drama that has been trying to break through after a strike-shortened season last year. I hope it does because it adds a number of fun twists to the police procedural that is the staple of American TV drama.

In the TV Drama Class, I go into all of the structural elements that must be present to construct a successful show. One of these has to do with the genre. Like film, TV requires that you take an existing popular genre or combination of genres and give it a unique twist. Life is a mix of detective, crime and buddy picture, and that’s a pretty strong combination. Yes, we’ve seen cop shows with partners many times before (for example, Law and Order SVU), but they aren’t using the buddy picture techniques. A buddy picture is a kind of action comedy in which the buddies form some kind of odd couple. The buddies love each other in a platonic way, but they act like a married couple, with constant lighthearted bickering.

In Life, the odd couple is Charlie Crews, a cop who was framed for a multiple murder-robbery and sent to jail before gaining his freedom and returning to the force along with $50,000,000 in “We’re sorry” money. He’s gained a Zen sensibility during his twelve years behind bars. And that drives his partner nuts. She’s Dani Reese, a practical, by-the-book cop who also just happens to be drop-dead gorgeous, like any number of other drop-dead gorgeous cops in Hollywood crime shows (for example, Law and Order SVU). Just once I’d love it if a character on one of these shows would ask our investigator if she realizes she’s beautiful enough to be an actress.

The two lead characters play well off each other, and I believe one of the reasons this show hasn’t done better is that the writers have not played this element up even further. One reason might be that the Reese character lacks detail. For a buddy picture to work the buddies must be equal. The writers have given Crews tremendous detail, to such a degree that he is clearly the hero of the show. This imbalance is a big mistake. William Goldman once told me that when they were shooting the early scene in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid where Butch has to fight Harvey for leadership of the gang, director George Roy Hill kept Sundance on his horse to visually increase Sundance’s stature relative to Butch. We forget that before the movie came out, Robert Redford was a nobody and Paul Newman was Paul Newman.

This may be why Life’s writers retooled the show this season by giving Reese and Crews a new boss, Captain Tidwell, with whom Reese could get romantically involved. Donal Logue, who plays the boss, is a funny actor and a welcome addition to the show. But while the move has boosted Reese’s importance a bit, the relationship between her and the boss is completely unbelievable. Hopefully the writers will strengthen this line, while also highlighting the more important buddy relationship between Reese and Crews.

Another structural element that determines a successful TV drama is the weave of the desire line. In other words, what gets accomplished in each episode and how are the episode’s goals intercut? Life uses a technique found in most cop shows of combining two main goals, one short-term and one long-term. The short-term goal is to solve the crime of that episode. The long-term goal is Crews’s determination to find the cops who framed him for the murder-robbery. The individual investigations all have a quirky quality that sets them apart from the standard crimes we see on most procedurals. For example, in a recent episode, Crews and Reese had to solve the murder of a mall Santa they find five minutes before the department store opens for holiday rush on Black Friday. They realize too late that the horde of hungry shoppers is going to trample their crime scene, and then discover that the shoppers have apparently taken Santa’s body as well.

The long-term investigation is more problematic. The conspiracy behind the murder-robbery and Crews’ frame-up is full of juicy possibilities, including one suspect who is Reese’s father. The brilliant Zen cop who sits in his mansion trying to unravel the conspiracy that took twelve years of his life is, besides being very un-Zen, great stuff. Which is why it’s been frustrating that the writers have done relatively little with it. I suspect that’s because they realize that once Crews figures out who did it, this line is over. The show’s creator has painted himself into a bit of a corner here. This concept is central to the premise of the show, and probably a good part of the reason Life got on the air in the first place. But it’s a big dead end when it comes to the extendability of the show.

Still, the writers must deal with this line. Giving it one or two scenes a show doesn’t work. Ignoring the line only makes it seem half-baked and unrelated to the main investigation in each episode. If the writers can expand this conspiracy from a single event in the past where Crews was framed to an ongoing, present-day corruption in the LAPD, this buddy picture of a Zen mind-master and his pragmatic, beautiful partner will turn into the hottest show on TV.

Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist

2008-10-22T09:31:00.000-07:00

Every genre has unique structural elements that make it a challenge to write well. But the most difficult genre of all may be the love story, especially the romantic comedy. The love story turns on two contradictory requirements. On one hand, a love story should take only ten minutes. Two people are attracted to one another, and the rest is negotiation. On the other hand, the story must last a long time for the love to be believable to the audience. The audience can’t just see the two people fall in love. They have to feel it, and that takes a lot of screen time.

These two contradictory elements account for many of the 12 unique story beats that make up the genre. For example, when the two leads first meet, they always fight. Of course, this is completely unrealistic; next time you’re interested in someone, go start a fight with them and see what happens. But starting a love story with a fight makes a lot of structural sense. Remember, you have to create more than ten minutes of story.

If we look at Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist, by Lorene Scafaria from a novel by Rachel Cohen and David Levithan, we can see writers struggling with the special challenges of the love story. The film relies on textural details, especially music, to make it feel original and fresh. But because the writers never cracked the structural essentials of a good romance, the audience gets little story and no feeling of love.

The key structural mistake in this script has to do with Desire, one of the 7 major structure steps in any story and especially crucial in a romance. The main desire line in a romance, and the spine of the story, is the desire the two characters have for each other. This is why the classic Hollywood love story tracks the man’s quest for the woman. She opposes that desire for most of the story, and they finally get together at the end.

Notice that approach establishes a desire line and conflict for 90 plus minutes, and solves the first big difficulty of the love genre. But notice also that this is essentially the structure of an action story. And while this structure gives the audience plenty of time to feel the love developing between the two characters, most of what the characters are feeling toward each other is not love, but conflict.

The writers of Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist wanted to use a different love story structure, one not based on the guy chasing the resisting girl. That’s a great idea in theory. But in practice, they chose to change the primary desire line from a passion between the two characters to an outside desire the characters share, which is to find where an underground band is playing. True, this gave the writers a line that extends for 90 plus minutes, with plenty of time for the two leads to get to know one another and fall in love.

But at what cost? The story is extremely episodic as the leads go from one location to another in search of a band the audience doesn’t care about. Which means that while there are multiple events, there is no plot. And because the driving desire is not between the two leads, this remains a friend story, not a love story.

The screenwriter, apparently realizing the lack of urgency in the main desire line, added a secondary desire where the leads search for a drunken friend who is lost in the big city. But this just adds an unrelated story line (not a true sub-plot). And watching a young woman stumble around drunk for 90 minutes is anything but funny.

We can certainly learn some lessons here. If you want to write a love story that doesn’t rely on the old man-chases-woman schematic, by all means do it. It will set you apart and give you the opportunity to write what I call, in the Love Story Class, a “true love story.” But don’t make the mistake of substituting an outside desire line for the desire that must be the spine of any good and moving love story, which is the craving that each has for the other. Never lose sight of what is really at stake in a love story, and that’s love itself.

If you would like to learn all of the beats of a great love story, along with how to write each of the many sub-genres of love, including romantic comedy, take a look at the Love Story Class and Love Story Software. Very few writers have mastered this tricky form, but it can be done. And the payoff is huge.

The Teen Movie

2008-09-22T12:14:00.000-07:00

It’s back to school time, and for many screenwriters that means time to finish the spec script that will be your calling card to the big shots. One of the first rules of success for screenwriters is choosing a story form Hollywood wants to buy. Certainly one of those forms is the teen movie, as popular now as ever, in television as well as in film. To write any story form well, you have to study how it works under the surface, that is, structurally.

The first thing to understand about teen movies is that they aren’t actual genres. They are stories about a major kind of character change. In the Great Screenwriting Class, I talk about the five great character changes in storytelling, and this particular one is known as “coming of age.” Here someone changes from child to adult – not physically, but emotionally and morally.

All fiction asks the basic question: how do adults grow? Teen movies focus on the first stage of becoming an adult, which usually involves learning how to break free of conformity and become an individual.

What’s changed over the years is the nature of that conformity. In the original teen move, Rebel Without A Cause, it was the conformity of the parents’ world, the 9-5 job, the man in the gray flannel suit. The Graduate (essentially a teen movie even though the hero is a college grad) continued this basic contrast, with the parents’ world portrayed as even richer and more morally bankrupt (“plastics”). American Graffiti, probably the best teen movie ever made, was a turning point. Within the strict confines of small town America, the conformity changed to being primarily among the teens themselves.

This opposition of individual vs. conforming teens was then codified in The Breakfast Club, still the model for teen films today. There conformity among the students was pushed so far that even the few differences that existed within the student body were themselves stereotypes and categories: the jock, the nerd, the princess, the bad boy outcast, the bad girl outcast, etc.

Looking at the current teen movie, you might not realize that the form is as old as storytelling, going all the way back to the myth stories of the boy becoming king and the girl becoming queen. Teen movies are always connected to some genre, usually comedy (Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Porky’s, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, American Pie) or romantic comedy (Superbad, Juno, Clueless, She’s All That, Legally Blond, Risky Business), but also straight drama (Rebel Without A Cause, Romeo and Juliet) and even horror (Carrie) and fantasy (Back to the Future, Harry Potter).

But the deeper foundation of all these teen films – what connects them all – is the fairy tale form. The fairy tale is one of the major variations to organic story structure (see the Great Screenwriting Class for the 10 special story beats of the fairy tale). In the teen movie version, the kingdom is high school. The ball is the prom where the new king and queen are crowned. Because teen movies are about crossing the threshold into adulthood, the prom becomes nothing less than the archetypal rite of passage. Especially for high school girls becoming women, the prom is like a practice wedding, with the dress taking on almost magical, talismanic powers.

Normally we think of high school as that place and organization where the student must learn the intellectual tools that are supposed to prepare him/her for working in the adult world. But teen movies tell us that the real learning in high school is social, and it involves trying to reach the highest status within one’s own gender and “scoring” with the most attractive person from the other gender.

Fairy tales are about extreme success. Applied to the modern life experience of high school, teen fairy tales show that even in a democracy, all people are not created equal. Some students have great beauty, wealth or athletic ability. Most don’t. But the first lesson in teen fairy tales – the hero’s self-revelation – is that while people aren’t created equal in talent, they are equal in rights, including the right to be treated with decency and respect.

The deeper lesson of these stories is how one learns to become a unique and moral individual. This element is easiest to see when the teen movie is done as a romantic comedy. The male hero’s goal is sex, preferably with the prettiest girl in school. But his need is to learn to leave his male friends and their reptilian views of all women behind and form a new community with one woman, who will show him the power and value of intimacy and actually help him find and take pride in his true individuality.

The lead female in teen romantic comedies has usually been the beautiful object of affection for the boy. Or, in a slight variation, she appears to be a nerd but is really a beauty underneath. In true fairy tale form, the ugly duckling turns out to be a princess.

Especially in teen romances of the last ten years, the heroine has erased the classic distinction between the smart outcast and the pretty bimbo. Instead, the outcast and the pretty girl are one and the same. Most prominently in Legally Blond (a teen movie even though it’s set in law school), the lead is both smart and pretty. This girl embraces her great looks and femininity and is proud to use her unique strengths as a woman. She is often opposed by other beautiful teenage girls, but they are petty, jealous, glammed-up and lack the one trait that the lead has always had, compassion.

These teen love stories are often about the difference between true class and false class. False class comes from looks and money. True “class” comes from character. These stories say it is okay to want beauty and money in life and to try to get them, but you have to go after them in a decent way.

If you want to write a coming of age movie, focus on modernizing the fairy tale form. Connect the story to one or two genres to pay the genre dues that Hollywood demands. But above all, transcend the form. As you can see, the teen movie has a long history, so you must tell your story in a unique way to have any chance of standing out from the crowd.

The Dark Knight

2008-08-05T12:42:00.000-07:00

Spoiler alert: this breakdown divulges information about the plot of the film.

For anyone who wants to look beneath its action surface, The Dark Knight proves that a movie can be a huge hit because of theme, not in spite of it. The Dark Knight is the closest thing to a fictional exploration of moral philosophy to come out of Hollywood in a long time, and that includes No Country for Old Men. Amazingly, writers Jonathan Nolan, Christopher Nolan, and David Goyer create this complex moral expression on the foundation of superhero action crime genre.

The writers begin their elegant construction with the depiction of the main character, Batman, and here they had a tremendous advantage going in. Of all superhero characters, Batman highlights and consistently questions the very concept of the hero and the savior. He is truly a dark knight, concerned with justice but also willing to use illegal and immoral means to achieve it.

He is also deeply aware of the negative effects a savior can have on the general populace. He knows, and probably believes in, the great moral principle of “If you see the Buddha, kill the Buddha.” But he is unable to live the principle when faced with so much injustice. And when, in The Dark Knight, the bad guys escalate their evil acts, Batman is dragged into a war of tit for tat that soils everyone. Interestingly, Batman’s garbled voice has a strange resemblance to Clint Eastwood’s, especially in his Dirty Harry films.

In the Blockbuster story development software, we place a lot of emphasis on the “character web,” and The Dark Knight uses this crucial technique to perfection. The first character to be compared to Batman is the main opponent, The Joker. A lot has been written about Heath Ledger’s terrific performance. But we need to look at what he built his performance on, and that is found in the script. Non-writers might think I’m referring to the dialogue, but I’m not. The writers constructed this character to drive two major story elements, the moral argument (theme) and the plot.

The classic crime story is based on a master criminal who believes he is above the law and society itself. The Joker is just such a character, a genius psychopath whose massive intellect is shown not so much in dialogue as in his ability to plot. He accuses Dent and Batman of being schemers. But in fact he is the master schemer, a modern Moriarty, who acts, not out of greed or revenge, but for the game. And he is better at the game than anyone else, so much so that we have the rare example of a story with too much plot.

The Joker is literally the author of Gotham City, constructing criminal plots that will remake the city to express his moral vision. Many have called The Joker a nihilist, a man in love with chaos. But this is a serious misreading. If Batman is the Dark Knight, The Joker is the Dark Philosopher. The entire plot of The Dark Knight is a series of moral conundrums The Joker creates to expose what he believes is the true animal nature of mankind. Tracking the beats of the crime story that goes all the way back to its originator, Crime and Punishment, The Joker creates ever more difficult versions of the genre’s central question: What would you do if you had to choose between two bad options?

First, does Batman expose his true identity or let the Joker kill someone every day? Then does he let Dent take the risk of getting killed to pull The Joker out of hiding? Does he save Rachel, his true love, or Dent, the righteous hope of the city? Does he listen in on the entire city in order to save a few?

For the film’s final choice, the writers use the classic Prisoner’s Dilemma, central to game theory and moral philosophy. In Prisoner’s Dilemma, two prisoners suspected of a crime are placed in separate cells. Each is given the following choice: If you both remain silent, you both get only six months in jail. If you both confess, you both get 5 years. If you remain silent but your partner confesses, he goes free and you get 10 years in jail. As you can see, the only real choice each person can make is to confess, since neither can risk the harsh 10-year sentence trusting that his partner will remain silent.

In The Dark Knight, two ships filled with passengers are given the choice of pushing a button to blow up the other ship before a time deadline. If one ship fails to blow up the other, The Joker will destroy them both. This sets up a unique battle in which not only two forces but also two entire moral systems are brought into opposition. The battle is marred only by the fact that the writers don’t play true to the reality about human beings they have carefully crafted throughout the film. In other words, the people on the boats don’t make the believable choice.

Though The Dark Knight has too much plot, resulting in a movie that is at least 20 minutes too long, its plot is worth studying to see masters at work. These writers use a vast array of plot techniques, and a lot of professional writers I know, while bemoaning so many false endings, have said the plotting is what they studied the most. Ironically, one of the main techniques these writers use is character web, proving again that at the deepest level of good storytelling, plot and character are the same. I’ve already mentioned the plotting power the main opponent brings to the story. But plot also comes from the second lead, Harvey Dent, as well as a number of other characters who appear to be friends but are really enemies, or appear to be enemies but are really friends.

Screenwriters and storytellers can learn all kinds of lessons from The Dark Knight. Perhaps the most important is placing all story elements at the service of the larger moral argument, and expressing that argument primarily through the story structure. Using the crime genre as its foundation, The Dark Knight focuses on whether someone can remain a hero when the opposition becomes increasingly ruthless, a question that is central to our world. But as the cop in Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil says about how hard it is being a cop, “It's supposed to be (tough)... A policeman's job is only easy in a police state.”

Interestingly, the writers go all the way back to the classic Western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, for their ending. When it turns out the hero of a gunfight didn’t actually kill the bad guy, the newspaperman refuses to print the truth. “When the legend becomes fact,” he says, “print the legend.” Batman decides to let Harvey Dent die a hero, so the people will have hope in justice, while he accepts his role as the scapegoat. With a subtle flip on the ending of Shane, Lieutenant Gordon’s little boy doesn’t say, “Batman, come back.”

The Dark Knight is a writer’s genre movie, even a transcendent one, and screenwriters would do well to study it closely.

Mama Mia!

2008-07-28T12:09:00.000-07:00

I had no idea the entire musical oeuvre of ABBA was really about a girl looking for her true father before she gets married on a Greek Island. This is the storyline on which the writer hangs 18 ABBA songs in Mamma Mia! It gives you an idea of the immense popularity of ABBA’s music that this combination of story and song has produced a worldwide theatrical smash hit. As if 400 million records sold didn’t already tell us this.

If you have to write the book or script for a musical, the big problem you have to solve is how to use the songs to drive the story. Otherwise story and song become two separate tracks and the audience waits for the song to end so they can get back to what happens next.

But in Mamma Mia! this problem is reversed. The storyline is so lame, absurd and emotionally phony that the audience can’t wait to hear another catchy song to find relief from the awful script. I’ve never been a big ABBA fan, but during the course of this movie I came to believe that they were the greatest musical geniuses in history; such was the chasm between story and song.

And then there is the matter of the casting. Any director will tell you that 80-90% of the job is who you pick to play the roles. This has to be the worst cast movie in modern memory. Most of these actors are at least 20 years too old for their parts. Watching 60+ Meryl Streep cavorting like a 15-year-old teeny bopper was one of the five most painful moments of my life. And Pierce Brosnan will surely be nominated for best statue imitating a person trying to sing. In fact, the casting of this movie was so mind-boggling that I realized it was actually a stroke of genius in which the filmmakers were using aged movie stars to highlight the artistic absurdity of the entire decade of the 70s.

What can a screenwriter learn from this train wreck? Well, first, be sure to make friends with the most popular candy pop band in history so they will give you the rights to 18 of their songs, and then you can write a horrible script tying them all together and no one will care. Second…

Sex and the City

2008-06-25T11:42:00.001-07:00

Spoiler Alert: this breakdown divulges information about the end of the film.

Sex and the City was a revolutionary TV show. Not because it showed women having lots of sex. That part was always unbelievable. Even young hip New York women don’t have that much sex with that many different partners or they’d be dead. No, Sex and the City was a big deal because it showed women as main characters in the story of their lives, not as the supporting girlfriend to the male hero. It showed women in the day-to-day business of work and love – the very fabric of human life – and it didn’t apologize for the fact that women craft their lives differently than men. If you don’t think that’s a big deal, try traveling the world as I did during the run of the show and hearing women from every conceivable nationality rave about this show.

Over the years the show went from Sex in the City to Relationships in the City, which was more believable but less fun. Especially when two of the women got themselves into relationships that were just plain dumb. Smart lawyer Miranda with Steve the bartender was painful to watch, and hear, since Steve’s how-dumb-can-I-talk voice was like nails on a chalkboard. And Charlotte’s marriage to the impotent mama’s boy was a clear case of theme driving plot into never-never land.

Now comes the movie and it is surprisingly effective. I say surprisingly because turning a TV show into a good movie is extremely difficult, with a very low success rate. There are a number of reasons for the success of Sex (and no, the sex is not one of them). But let me focus on two. The first is the character web on which the book and the show were originally built. Character web is a crucial structural element for any work of fiction, in whatever medium, but it’s especially important in TV. In the TV Drama Class I point out that mainstream Hollywood film emphasizes a single main character going after a single goal with a one-time plot that is usually highly intricate. TV, on the other hand, emphasizes a community of characters the audience wants to visit once a week, with plot being secondary and often predictable. Plot has grown more important on TV for “24” and “Lost”, but they are still the exception.

With character community being primary, how you set up the character oppositions for the leads of the show is crucial. The four women on Sex represent four unique approaches to how modern single women craft their work-love lives. There’s the driven professional woman, the narcissistic sexaholic, and the Princess who expects life to be a fairy tale. At the center of this mix is Carrie, a combination of all three who is the only truly well-rounded character of the four.

This highly-differentiated character web sets up a second major reason for the success of the Sex movie, the story weave. In the Advanced Screenwriting Class I talk about an advanced storytelling strategy called the branching structure. In multiple character stories, each character represents a branch. The trick is how you combine these branches without destroying all narrative drive. If you crosscut equally between many characters, the story has to track too many simultaneous actions and narrative drive disappears.

But because Carrie is the first among equals in the character web, the branching story weave here is more like a single trunk with three other branches extending off. Carrie’s story provides the strong spine that a mainstream Hollywood movie requires while the stories of the other women provide sub-plots, with each being a variation on the main line. Luckily Carrie has that one big event that can provide the spine of the movie, her pending wedding to Big. This event also focuses the theme of the film so that each of the four women can present a different approach to the question: how do women deal with the deeply-ingrained fairy tale image of being married to a man?

Unfortunately this event left me quite ambivalent. I too wanted the fairy tale ending; boys watch Disney movies too. But emotionally it wasn’t right. It wasn’t earned. Here is a guy who has “jilted” Carrie for the entire TV show, then does it again at the altar, and she takes him back one more time. The writer justifies it through the Miranda subplot with Steve (also fake), with the statement that “You’ve got to forgive.” Well, no, you don’t. If the guy keeps blowing you off and humiliating you time and again in the process, at some point it’s the mark of a mature person to say, “Get the hell out of my life.”

Of course, Carrie’s marriage to Big does set up the inevitable sequel to this blockbuster film. Anyone want to place bets on Big being faithful?

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

2008-06-16T11:14:00.000-07:00

“What a drag it is getting old.” Yes, Mick, it is. Cultural icons are supposed to be immune from old age. But actors, even action heroes like Harrison Ford, are not. And that has a ripple effect through this entire movie.

Try as he might, Ford can’t convincingly do the moves of Indy in his prime. And no amount of editing or movie slight of hand can hide it. So the story mechanics, and this genre has a lot of them, show through in glaring detail.

Perhaps as a compensation, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull has gone slapstick. A lot of the action scenes look like the Keystone Cops. As a comic book action serial, the Indiana Jones movies have always walked the fine line between serious action – where death is believable – and comic action – where the audience can come along on the joyride. But when you go too far into the comical, and particularly slapstick, you run into the problem of the later Matrix films. The first Matrix was man-on-man conflict where the fights seemed real and there was some suspense about whether the hero would win. The later Matrix films were one against a hundred, so the punches looked like cartoons and there was never any doubt of victory.

Screenwriter David Koepp, a seasoned pro, tries to “take the stink off” the problem by admitting Indy’s age up front. He also tries to make the story personal, similar to the successful strategy used in the Batman series (Batman Begins) and the James Bond series (Casino Royale). Koepp brings back Marian and introduces a young sidekick whose Brando motorcycle uniform is suddenly hip again compared to 40s Indy. But it doesn’t work. Indy is the classic rogue action hero, and trying to turn him into a family man just made me cringe.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull also suffers from a major structural flaw in the script, a weak opponent. The action-fantasy form has a clear divide between those films with a comical opponent – which are usually failures – and those that have a believably deadly opponent – which are usually a success. Here we have a Soviet death mistress, played by Cate Blanchett, who looks like she’s straight out of The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. Blanchett’s voice and hair make her such a dead ringer for Natasha, I was waiting for Boris to show up and at least make the movie funny. But alas he never came.

Finally Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull dies from no plot. In the Action Class, I explain why this is always a big problem in the action form. Most screenwriters don’t know that action is not the same as plot, and that if not handled properly, action will kill your plot. This is especially true in James Bond-like action stories in which an unbeatable hero is challenged in a series of all-out attacks. The story becomes a series of stunts, of action set pieces, each the same beat with a different skin. In short, no plot.

Not that any of this has hurt the box office. But you only have to look at the second Pirates of the Caribbean to know that the script is not the only source of a film’s success, or even the major one. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull shows us once again George Lucas’s ability to create a cultural icon that can grab the imagination of the world.

John Truby

Iron Man review

2008-05-30T11:43:00.000-07:00

It’s an easy bet to say that Iron Man will be the best action picture of the ’08 summer. Some of the credit has to go to the casting and performances of Robert Downey and Gwyneth Paltrow. They’re so good it makes us realize these two actors should be in a lot more movies than they are. But most of the credit has to go to the script.

There’s a natural tendency to think of the action genre as the most director-dependent of all the forms, what with all their spectacle, staging, and special effects. But this is just another example of where conventional wisdom is wrong. Invariably when an action film goes wrong, it’s because of the script. And when it stands above the crowd, it’s definitely the script.

Comic book action films like Iron Man look deceptively easy to write. Just a fun, heroic character flying around and fighting evil villains. It’s actually a tricky form, because you are combining three genres: action, fantasy and comedy. In this script, writers Mark Fergus & Hawk Ostby, and Art Marcum & Matt Holloway avoided every pitfall of the form and made all the right structural choices.

One choice was already made for them. As the film that introduces the character to the audience, Iron Man is an origin story, and that is always the best story in a series. Think of Batman Begins vs. all the others, even the Nicholson one.

But the key choice the writers made that set this action film apart had to do with the characters. In the Action Class, I talk a lot about how to create characters that have the capability to change, a structural element that becomes even more important when you combine action with fantasy. Here in Iron Man, instead of a superhero who is super heroic, main character Tony Stark has a number of weaknesses and is in many ways an unlikable person. Instead of being a one-note fighter for good, he is a real man with a deep need that is both believable and relevant in today’s world.

The writers take this same approach to the opposition. Instead of battling a silly, over-the-top villain, Stark must go up against a deadly Afghan warlord and a corporate boss who will let nothing get in the way of profit. These opponents are not detailed or deep in any way. We’ve certainly seen them many times before. But they are believable and relevant to the audience in the real world, and that gives the contest power beyond the boundaries of the comic book world.

This grounded and real character work makes it even more surprising that this is also the funniest script of the season. The action-comedy combination has been popular for a long time (it’s one of the seven comedy sub-forms I detail in the Comedy Class). In the past this has been used most often in action-crime films, like Beverly Hills Cop, as a way to show that the action hero is so good he can make jokes in the face of death. But here the comedy is used to undercut the natural pretentiousness of the superhero character. The writers extend this technique by having the main character make fun of the comic superhero form itself. This again makes him seem more real as he performs his heroic deeds, because the comic book heroes are all those other guys.

The combination of action and fantasy is now virtually the sole genre of summer blockbuster films. It’s obviously one of the main products that Hollywood wants to buy in their never-ending quest for worldwide popularity. If you want to write an action fantasy, do not underestimate it. Going back to the deep structure techniques necessary for any great story is your only guarantee of success.

Son of Rambow

2008-05-28T15:37:00.000-07:00

When you're making an indie film, you're always looking for ways to save money. And if you're smart the first and foremost place to do that is in the script.

One great strategy is to make a virtue of having no money - the old turn-lemons-into-lemonade trick. You know you can't compete with the big budget pictures on production values. So you come up with a story that relies on amateur video. This was the main technique used by sex, lies and videotape, generally considered the beginning of the modern indie film movement in the US. And it was used in The Blair Witch Project, one of the highest grossing indie films of all time. It's also used to great effect in Son of Rambow.

Of course, this strategy won't mean a thing if your story is not well structured. Ironically, script is even more important in indie filmmaking than in big budget movies, because the script is usually all you have going for you. And it doesn't cost any more to write a good one. Son of Rambow is a love story between two young friends, and writer Garth Jennings came up with a structure that not only carries a lot of comedy, it packs a surprising amount of emotional impact.

Like most good love stories, Son of Rambow is based on the fundamental opposition of the odd couple. Here a delinquent schemer and religious straight arrow team up to make a First Blood sequel where the son of Rambo tries to save his father. Matching the concept to the personal weakness and need of the leads, both boys are missing a father at home. The odd couple sets up the main opposition, but the similar need sets up the emotional payoff at the end.

But the key structural decision the writer made in this film has to do with the desire line. The normal desire in a love story is for the characters to want each other. But using the normal structure for these characters would have meant no plot and a sticky sentimental mess. Instead, these boys want to make a movie that will win a short film contest. Notice that this external goal allows the writer to sneak up on the audience, to tell a love story where the payoff is a complete surprise.

One of the big problems a lot of love stories have is lack of plot. That's also the case here. The desire, though effective at setting up the final punch, does flag a bit since it is essentially a stall. To increase the plot in the slow middle of the story, the writer adds outside opponents from each boy's family, along with the older kids at school. This character web is not altogether successful, especially the cool French boy that all the English kids worship. But it does complicate the making of the video enough to justify waiting so long to find out who wins the award.

In the Love Story Class, I talk a lot about how to transcend the form, by twisting the beats so the story pays its dues but also gives the audience something new. Writer Garth Jennings has come up with a unique love story structure through which to express the joys of friendship and the power of the imagination.

Smart People

2008-04-18T11:43:00.000-07:00

Smart People uses one of the fundamental strategies of indie filmmaking, the witty, dialogue-driven comedy. These scripts are cheap to make and "writerly." Ironically the film is anything but well-written. It supports what is perhaps the greatest of all myths about the writer, as the person who provides the dialogue. Real writers know that the game is won or lost in the structure, which is the development of the character through the plot.

Make no mistake. There is some witty dialogue in this film. But because the script lacks character and plot, the dialogue comes across as written lines performed by actors. Let's consider the characters first. The film crosscuts among four important characters. That's already a risky strategy for a short feature like this one, because you simply don't have time for much character definition when you divide 90 minutes by 4. But the problems here go much deeper.

Smart People is first of all a love story between Dennis Quaid's Lawrence and Sarah Jessica Parker's Janet. If Lawrence were essentially a good guy with a few flaws, you wouldn't have to go too deeply into why smart doctor Janet would want to go out with him. But given that Lawrence is a pompous, self-absorbed jerk, you had better get into why in great detail. Not here. Janet is completely opaque, and her only explanation for wanting to be with this guy is that she had a crush on him when she was his student. But he was a jerk then as well.

Ellen Page plays the same overly intellectual, enunciate-every-word-slowly girl she played in Juno. But this time she is also essentially married to her dad, and has a crush on her disgusting, much older uncle even though, as a young Republican, she should know better. Fourth in this pantheon of supposedly smart people is Chuck, played by Thomas Haden Church, whose zen-like, witty one-liners indicate he is the smartest one of all, but inexplicably is no more than a homeless man at the age of 50.

You can't fall back on the notion that smart people screw up relationships just as much as anyone else. You have to provide motive. Because fiction is all about making the characters clear to the audience, even though they are not clear about themselves. Characters don't have to be likeable in a story, but they must at least be understandable. Otherwise they don't seem like real people and the audience doesn't care what happens to them.

Without a strong character foundation, the film's plot has nowhere to go. The writer tries the old indie trick of having lots of really short scenes, so it looks like real life, only wittier. But instead the plot comes across as episodic and contrived, with the mechanics of the writer's struggle becoming increasingly obvious. Somehow everyone ends up where they should be, but I have no idea how.

In the Comedy Class I talk about how important it is to start with the comic structure, not the one-liners. There are eight major sub-structures of comedy, and each plays out a very different set of story beats. If you start with the comic structure that is right for your story, you can twist the beats to make them original and hang the one-liners on a structure that make them even funnier.

If, on the other hand, you start with the one-liners, you end up with a structural mess and get a film that stops being funny after the first ten minutes. It's your choice.

Definitely, Maybe

2008-02-20T11:38:00.000-08:00

I often find that the easiest films from which to learn professional storytelling techniques are the mediocre ones, where both strengths and weaknesses are clear. Certainly that’s the case with Definitely, Maybe, a romantic comedy that offers us all kinds of lessons. This is the story of a man who tells his young daughter about the three most important women in his love life, and she in turn must guess which one is her mother.

The storyteller device is one of the most misused techniques in screenwriting. I talk extensively about proper use of the storyteller in the Advanced Screenwriting Class and in my book, The Anatomy of Story. For a couple of reasons, the storyteller device in Definitely, Maybe is often painful to watch. First, the daughter is 10 going on 30, and few things are more grating than watching phony mature dialogue coming out of the mouth of a child. Second, it is inconceivable that this girl knows nothing about the identity of her mother.

So the love story/mystery frame almost kills the film before it starts. Why then does writer Adam Brooks use it? Because the love story/mystery structure it sets up has so many benefits. The most important has to do with transcending the standard love story. In all my genre classes, I talk about how crucial it is that you not only hit the basic story beats of your form but also twist them in an original way so your script stands above the crowd.

The average Hollywood love story is structured as an action story. There is a single courtship line in which the man chases the woman and eventually wins her through sheer relentless pressure. Besides the fact that this structure is anything but romantic, it has no basis in reality, so the standard love story comes across as a contrived, phony mess.

By combining the love story with the detective form, Brooks can show the audience three women the hero has loved in his life, each in different ways and for different reasons. Instead of tracking a short courtship line, Brooks can expose the ups and downs of a person’s love life over a 10-15 year period.

The main reason most writers stick with the single courtship line is that it’s easy to create a unified story. One lover + short time period = tight script. A story with three lovers over a 15-year period could easily become hopelessly episodic. Which brings us back to the love story/mystery structure and the storyteller frame. Instead of an episodic sequence where one woman follows another, the frame allows Brooks to weave the three lines and bring each woman back over the entire story. And the precocious daughter, who almost kills the film up front, gives the ending an extra emotional payoff when the hero discovers his one best love.

Romantic comedy may be the most difficult of all genres to write well. Which makes it even more imperative that you come up with an original take and invent a unique story structure that will make your romantic comedy one of a kind.

Enchanted

2007-11-28T12:06:00.000-08:00

It's easy to underestimate the fantasy form, especially when it's a Disney family picture like Enchanted. But writer Bill Kelly knows his genre and its potential, especially when it's mixed with other forms.

Enchanted is really a combination of fantasy, fairy tale, romantic comedy, musical and the traveling angel story. That's a lot of forms, which is why this film is more complicated than it appears. Most writers trying to mix all those genres end up with a structural mess. Too many heroes, too many desire lines, too many story beats and so on. But Kelly makes it work.

One reason for the film's success is that Kelly has combined genres that work well together. Fantasy and musical have very similar thematic underpinnings. Both are about learning how to live well, which they define as forming a community. Love stories are about creating a community of two. The traveling angel story concerns a (usually) perfect person who enters a community in trouble and sets it right.

Now all of this thematic unity doesn't change the fact that mixing so many forms is tricky. Kelly starts by establishing the foundation of the story, which is the fantasy and fairy tale opening world. Though an apparent utopia, the world has a big flaw, which is the jealous queen. And the princess, though apparently perfect and about to be married, has a flaw as well. She has no emotional depth and therefore is about to marry the wrong person. One of the nice touches here is that the audience is no more aware of this at the beginning than is the princess. The viewer, having seen decades of Disney films, is as caught up in the promise of fairy tale life as the princess is. But this weakness is crucial because it creates the need in one of the lovers that is essential for a good love story.

With the foundation set, the heroine travels to the second, fantastical world. Ironically this film flips the beat and makes the second world all too real, modern day New York. But for the Princess it is a nightmare, a dystopia, and, true to the fantasy form, it is where the heroine will learn her great life lesson. It is also where the traveling angel plot kicks in. Using music and her own boundless, fairy tale optimism, she begins to help the characters who are in trouble and turns the cold New Yorkers in Central Park into a utopian community.

This is also where the love story line resumes. The man who helps her out has his own weakness and need. He's a single dad who doesn't believe in love. He needs to feel love again, for himself and his daughter. From this point on the film plays out the key beats of the fantasy, love story and traveling angel story. One of the fun aspects of modern fairy tales is seeing how the writer comes up with modern equivalents of fairly tale elements, like transformations, spells and kingdoms. For example, when the Princess finds herself in need of a fairy godmother, the daughter pulls out the greatest wish fulfiller of all time, dad's credit card.

Hollywood blockbuster films are all about mixing genres. Even pleasant little children's stories are more difficult than they appear, because they usually require a lot of forms. If you are interested in modernizing a fairy tale - which is a very successful story strategy - check out the Great Screenwriting Class. For fantasy, of course, go to the Horror, Fantasy and Science Fiction Class or the Fantasy Software. You can learn Romantic Comedy in the Love Story Class or Software, or in the Comedy Class or Software. I explain the ever-popular Traveling Angel story in the Comedy Class and Software.

Above all, try to combine forms that work well together. In Enchanted, writer Bill Kelly shows the tremendous advantage that comes from knowing your craft.

American Gangster

2007-11-09T11:57:00.000-08:00

The gangster story, like the Western, is a quintessentially American genre. And, in many ways, it is the opposite of the Western. The Western is about the taming of the frontier and the making of a nation. It values individual initiative through hard work and playing by the rules, along with material wealth and the spirit that comes from community. The gangster story bemoans the corruption of the American Dream. It shows individual initiative through illegal means, a corrupt, paranoid community and a success that is defined only through wealth.

The gangster genre is really a form of crime story, and when you write one you need to be very aware of this larger context and deeper theme. It is all about how an individual succeeds in American society. Knowing this allows you to tell a larger tale. And it prevents the audience from distancing themselves from your story by saying, "Oh, that's just a bunch of foreigners killing each other in some pocket on American soil."

Writer Steve Zaillian knows this larger context, which is why he can justifiably call this story of a black drug lord American Gangster. True to the form, he uses the story structure of the rise and fall of a king. Frank Lucas is the American businessman gone bad, and the fact that he is black is relevant only in that he represents the latest ethnic group in America to take this dark path to success.

But Zaillian isn't content to simply twist the gangster form by using a black main character. He tries to expand the scope of his story by using the larger crime genre. This is a broad category of stories - with gangster as one of the sub-genres - that focuses on the battle between cop and criminal. Ironically, Zaillian's choice only serves to diminish the scope and power of the film.

Crime stories derive much of their pleasure from two main elements: the plot machinations between the cop and the criminal and the blending of moralities by which the cop and the criminal live their lives. The first element is almost non-existent in this story. Frank's rise to power is unique only in his use of US Army personnel to bring his heroin from Southeast Asia. Cop Richie Roberts uses techniques that have been standard on TV crime shows for years.

This weakness in plot puts a serious dent in the dramatic power of the film, because it also means there is not enough mano-a-mano. There's none of the pleasure of Heat or The French Connection here. Frank and Richie, played by two powerhouse actors, have essentially one confrontation in the entire film. It's a good one, but it only highlights how much direct confrontation is missing in the rest of the movie.

The writer's choice of having two central but separate characters takes an even greater toll on the other key element of the crime story, the moral blend. We normally think of cop and criminal at two opposite extremes of the moral spectrum. A good crime story will use the battle between these two characters to show that the moral difference between them is much more ambiguous.

Zaillian shows the moral contradictions within each of these characters individually. One of the reasons the classic gangster story is fascinating is that the gangster holds two wildly different moralities within his own head. On the one hand, Frank believes in family, integrity, and professionalism. He also believes in selling dope and killing people who get in his way. The gangster's ability to compartmentalize these impossibly different ways of living is one of the great examples of the human mind's almost infinite ability to rationalize.

Cop Richie is pretty good at compartmentalizing his morality as well. He turns in a million dollars of corrupt money and goes after dirty cops, but he's also a bad husband and father. An ongoing dramatic confrontation between these two men could have produced a deeper look at what is truly moral and immoral in American society. But it never happens.

Instead, the most interesting aspects of these characters and their real moral contrast come at the end of the film, in written epilogue. Richie, the incorruptible cop who brings down kingpin Frank and three fourths of the cops in the narcotics division, switches from prosecutor to defense attorney, and his first client is Frank. He succeeds in getting Frank only fifteen years in prison. But we've already seen that Frank has not only destroyed hundreds of lives through his drug running, he is a cold-blooded killer.

When I read that my eyes popped out of my head. And I wondered, Where's that movie? This script just started getting interesting on the last page.

Dan in Real Life

2007-11-01T12:03:00.000-07:00

Romantic comedy is one of the most contrived of all genres. It's literally a complex mating dance with prescribed story beats designed to allow the audience to feel the love the characters share. Which is why it is essential that you execute the form well enough so you don't let the contrivance, the mechanics, show.

Another word for story beats is plot. And lack of plot is the biggest problem writers of love stories have. Plot is what creates the magic in a story. It's the slight of hand, and mind, that delights the audience. It's also the structure that everything else hangs on. So when it is missing or obvious, especially in a romantic comedy, the story collapses and the audience realizes the magic is fake.

Dan in Real Life is the story of an advice columnist who falls in love with his brother's girlfriend at a family get-together. But this is not real life. Dan's parents live in a rustic little mansion by the shore. And his extended family has apparently won the Happiest Family on Earth Award. These people love each other so much that they spend their entire vacation in one uproarious communal activity after another.

The audience may well wish they lived in a family like this. But it is so far removed from reality that it becomes mechanical. The love between the characters is obviously being manufactured by the actors, because it has never been earned in the writing. And that makes the supposed love between the two leads seem manufactured as well.

But the biggest problem with this sequence of communal love scenes is that it kills the plot. The big reveal - that Dan has fallen for his brother's girlfriend - is in the opening set up. The rest of the movie repeats the same beat of yet another family get-together where everyone is having incredible fun but Dan. On those few occasions when the entire family isn't having fun, they are all gathered around in a kind of intervention/group therapy session helping Dan get his emotions and morals right.

28 Days Later

2007-10-20T11:50:00.000-07:00

Horror is consistently the most popular of all genres. And it is the cheapest type of film to make, so it is the form of choice for indie writers and directors. The problem is that horror is also the lowest form, typically devoid of story. So the question becomes: How do you write a horror script unique enough to sell that will also set you apart as a talented storyteller?

To answer that question I took a look at one of the best horror films of recent years, 28 Days Later. Writer Alex Garland succeeds by knowing the form so well he is able to twist some of the key beats to give the traditional zombie story new life.

Mastering the horror genre is more difficult than it appears. You may be surprised to learn that it has more specialized story beats than any other form. So while horror is usually done in the most simplistic way possible - as a killing machine on a rampage - it doesn't have to be.

Horror always shows people being reduced, to an animal or a machine, the lowest levels a person can become short of death. In effect, this genre shows us human devolution. Horror puts character under the most extreme pressure of any form. So it focuses totally on one emotion, fear.

Bad horror plays that one note of fear again and again, and the story is nothing more than permissible sadism. Good horror takes this reduction of characters and makes it positive. It asks: What is human? And can this human quality be maintained in a world where everyone is desperate and induced to be an animal, ie going beyond even immoral behavior to amoral behavior? In short, good horror creates a recognizable human world where people are morally tested in the extreme.

The writer of 28 Days Later understands the crucial requirements of good horror, and he executes them within the parameters of a low budget film. In the set-up, the hero, Jim, wakes up from a coma to find himself in an empty, trashed hospital. Outside, the streets of London are just as deserted. He's walking around in a giant ghost town (no extras to run up this budget).

After meeting up with a couple of other survivors, Jim learns the rules of this new world. Stating the rules of the world is one of the specialized story beats in horror, not only because it tells the hero how to survive in this unique horror world, but also because it suggests to the audience how humanity will be tested. Here, there are two rules: 1, never go anywhere alone and 2, only travel in daylight. One of the survivors, Selena, tells Jim, "Plans are pointless. Staying alive is as good as it gets." This is not only the key line in this film, it is the key line in any horror film. From now on, we will see if human behavior is possible or if base animal survival is all we really are.

Garland quickly gives his survivors a desire line, which is to reach a makeshift military outpost some miles away. The characters go on a journey where they defeat a number of attacking zombies. This is typical horror -- giving the audience a few terrifying fights -- and pays the dues of the form.

But then Garland kicks the story up to a higher level, and the film becomes much more interesting. The hero and his allies reach the outpost, a fortified English mansion, and apparent safety. But of course this is another of horror's unique story beats: the place of final refuge is actually the place of greatest horror (for a breakdown of all 15 story beats, see the Horror, Fantasy, and Science Fiction Class or the Blockbuster Horror Software). Our hero soon learns that the platoon plans to rape the women and when he protests, they take him off to be murdered.

Now Garland can compare two kinds of animal: the zombies may be rabid dogs but the soldiers are merciless pack animals who have chosen to discard their humanity in a totally rational, pre-meditated way. A storm hits and the mansion becomes a kind of haunted house where a battle rages between the hero, the soldiers and the zombies. And it becomes impossible to tell who is the most savage.

A lot of horror is laughably silly. But don't underestimate this form. It is the best strategy for writing a breakthrough script. And if you learn the genre well enough, you can write a horror picture that is a powerful, and respected, piece of storytelling.