Writing the short film 3th - Part 9

Who are you? Why are you here? What do you want at this moment? Put this away with Exercise 7 and leave both in your portfolio for another 24 hours. At that time, go through both exercises, underlining the phrases or sentences that best describe your characters and their interaction, especially in light of your answers to the questions above. If you already have a catalyst, make note of it. If not, find one before going on to the next assignment. EIGHTH ASSIGNMENT: WRITING A CHARACTER-BASED OPENING You are now going to revise Exercise 8, with the result put in proper screen- play format. Use your thesaurus, if necessary, to find words that convey what you see in your imagination, words that will make your characters come alive for the reader. Once again, it would be helpful to have your teacher, classmates, or knowledgeable friends respond to what you have written—essentially the first draft of an opening for a possible short script. NOTES 1. Callie Khouri, symposium on Thelma and Louise, Writers Guild of America West, November 1991, unpublished. 2. Aristotle, Poetics, ed. Francis Fergusson, trans. and introduction by S. H. Butcher (New York: Hill and Wang, 1961). 3. Callie Khouri, “Thelma and Louise,” unpublished screenplay. 4. Robert Towne, “Chinatown,” unpublished screenplay. 5. Christian Taylor, “Lady in Waiting,” unpublished screenplay. 6. Lisa Wood Shapiro, “Another Story,” unpublished screenplay. 7. Karyn Kusuma, “Sleeping Beauties,” unpublished screenplay; and Susan Emerling, “The Wounding,” unpublished screenplay. 8. Anais Granofsky and Michael Swanhaus, “Dead Letters Don’t Lie,” unpublished screenplay. FILM DISCUSSED IN THIS CHAPTER The Red Balloon, directed by Albert Lamorrisse, 1955. 46 Writing the Short Film Ch04.qxd 9/27/04 6:04 PM Page 46 5 TELLING THE DRAMATIC STORY You judge films in the first place by their visual impact instead of looking for content. This is a great disservice to the cinema. It is like judging a novel only by the quality of its prose. ORSON WELLES Orson Welles undoubtedly would have agreed that the images of a narrative film, whether visual or aural, should, like the language of a novel or short story, serve to illuminate the tale. Rust Hills, in his excellent book on writing the short story, elaborates on a similar point: “A successful short story will thus necessarily show a more harmonious relationship of part to whole, and part to part, than it is usual to find in a novel. Everything must work with everything else. Everything enhances everything else, inter-relates with everything else, is inseparable from everything else—and all this is done with a necessary and perfect harmony.” 1 What he writes is as true for the short film in relation to the feature film as it is for the short story in relation to the novel. But unlike novels and short stories, which are meant to be read, narrative film and television are forms of drama; if a story is to work as drama, its content needs to be organized in terms of dramatic structure. The word “drama” derives from the Greek word dran, which means to do or to act. A drama, whether presented on a stage or on a screen, is the story of an action, intended for presentation before an audience. In previous chap- ters, we have been exploring storytelling in images; in this one, we will dis- cuss storytelling in terms of drama. 47 Ch05.qxd 9/27/04 6:04 PM Page 47 SOME BASIC DEFINITIONS What follow are some of the important and widely used terms that we will be using throughout this book: Protagonist, meaning main character, is a word that comes from the Greek words for “first” (protos) and “struggler” or “combatant” (agonistes). So the protagonist is the main struggler in the story. The word antagonist comes from the Greek words for “against” (anti) and, once more, “struggler” or “combatant” (agonistes). The antagonist, whether human, man-made, or a force of nature such as a mountain, desert, or rag- ing storm, is the force or obstacle with which the protagonist must contend. It is the story of that struggle that provides the plot. In some stories, the main characteristics of the antagonist are virtually the direct opposites of those of the protagonist; in others, the antagonist can seem almost a twin or second self of the protagonist. That is not to say that the most engaging antagonist of all can’t be the protagonist’s own nature, his or her own arrogance, fear, or unadmitted needs. It is also important to note that the stronger the antagonist, the stronger the conflict, and the harder the protagonist must struggle to achieve his or her goal. The decision as to who or what should be the antagonist in a film script is always a crucial one; the designation sometimes shifts from one character to another as a writer goes through revisions. In any drama, the main conflict is the struggle between protagonist and antagonist—again, whether the antagonist is another character, a man-made disaster, a force of nature, or simply an aspect of the protagonist’s own charac- ter. The more there is at stake, the more dramatic—in every sense of the word— the conflict. Dramatic action, or “movement of spirit,” as Aristotle defines it in the Poetics, is the life force, the heartbeat, of any screenplay. 2 Psyche, the word he uses for spirit, meant both “mind” and “soul” to the ancient Greeks—the inner energy that fuels human thoughts and feelings, the underlying force that motivates us. The catalyst is the incident that calls the protagonist’s dramatic action to life. It is sometimes called “the inciting incident,” e.g., the little boy rescuing the magical balloon in The Red Balloon, or the breaking of the rope as the hero is about to be hung in Incident at Owl Creek Bridge. The climax is generally the moment of greatest intensity for the protagonist and a major turning point in his or her dramatic action. Even in a fairly short script, the climax is often the culmination of a series of lesser crises. Recognition—according to Aristotle, “a change from ignorance to knowl- edge”—usually, though not always, closely precedes or follows the climax 3 ; it is the point at which the protagonist realizes where the dramatic action has taken him or her through the course of the events that have made up the 48 Writing the Short Film Ch05.qxd 9/27/04 6:04 PM Page 48 story. In some forms of comedy, where the protagonist does not experience any kind of illumination, recognition is often reserved for a character who is an interested onlooker, or for the audience itself. Scene is a word with many definitions. We will be using it primarily in the sense of an episode that presents the working out of a single dramatic situa- tion. The scene is the basic building block of any narrative screenplay. Every scene in a short script should serve to forward the action. ADAPTING A MYTH OR FAIRY TALE: A FIRST EXAMPLE One of the interesting things that becomes apparent on reading a number of myths—whatever tribe or culture they come from—is how soon after relat- ing the birth of the cosmos storytellers found it necessary to introduce con- flict. And no wonder! Generation after generation, people looked about them and tried to make sense of what they had observed, what they knew from their own experience: that human beings have needs and that these needs bring them into conflict with one another, as well as with the gods. In the Book of Genesis, we are told in a beautifully worded, carefully detailed listing how God created all things, animate and inanimate, in six days and rested on the seventh. We are told that He formed the first man out of dust, breathed life into him, and planted a marvelous garden for him to live in. Then God gave Adam and Eve a single prohibition: they could eat the fruit of every tree in that garden except one—the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Also, most important for any kind of dramatic story, Adam and Eve were left the freedom to choose: eat or don’t eat, obey or disobey— it is up to you. Familiar as we are with our own curiosity, our own desire to get to the bottom of things, as well as our own need to resist authority, we recognize that the seed of conflict has been sown in Paradise. In that seed lies the beginning of a dramatic situation, for Eve (and then Adam as well) wants one thing, while God wants another. The serpent is God’s antagonist in all things; the serpent’s initial approach to Eve serves as catalyst in this story of the Fall. Two questions often prove major stumbling blocks for film and video students, as well as for filmmakers who have never written a narrative script. What, specifically, do I write about? How, specifically, do I write about it? In screenwriting, general ideas are of little or no use when you sit down at a desk to write, and it is often difficult for those who are not “natural” writers (in the way one may be a “natural” cinematographer or director) to come up with fruitful story ideas. Yet, as anyone experienced in the arts knows, learning a skill is a process, and that process has to start somewhere. Where?—In the case of a short script, with a simple adaptation. Telling the Dramatic Story 49 Ch05.qxd 9/27/04 6:04 PM Page 49 From the very beginning of the film industry, fiction and drama have proved unending sources of film stories, and it has been our experience in many years of teaching that adapting a myth or fairy tale offers the novice screenwriter an immediate way to learn how to structure a short script. Stories that began as oral narratives almost always are dramatic in struc- ture and lend themselves easily to visualization. For these reasons, and because such material is both readily available and in the public domain (that is, not under copyright), we will be using examples of such adaptations throughout the rest of this chapter. If you have a short story already in hand that you would like to adapt, the working techniques we describe are much the same. STRUCTURING A FIRST ADAPTATION What follows is an example of the process by which a myth can provide source material for very different narratives, any one of which an audience might enjoy without being familiar with the original story—which is not to say that a viewer’s experience of the film wouldn’t gain in depth and reso- nance if he or she were familiar with it. The myth we have chosen to adapt is the Fall of Icarus. Briefly, the story material we are working from is this: Daedalus (which means “cunning artif- icer”) was both a renowned artist and a brilliant architect and inventor. Jealous because his nephew and favorite pupil Perdix seemed likely to sur- pass him in every way, he took the boy to the top of the Acropolis and hurled him off. For this he was condemned by the authorities, but he managed to flee to the island of Crete with his young son Icarus. There the tyrant Minos gave him sanctuary and an almost impossible assignment—to design and oversee the construction of a prison for the Minotaur, a sacred monster with the head of a bull, the body of a man, and an appetite for human flesh. Because the Cretans had to feed the Minotaur youths and maidens chosen to be fed to him, the prison would have to be designed so that the victims could be forced to enter but would not be able to find a way out. Daedalus solved this problem by designing and oversee- ing the building of the first labyrinth. Instead of rewarding him, however, the tyrant Minos imprisoned both Daedalus and his son in a high tower overlooking the sea. Determined to escape, Daedalus painstakingly fash- ioned two pairs of wings from feathers dropped by seabirds, binding them together with melted candle wax. When the wings were completed, father and son each strapped on a pair. Daedalus warned Icarus not to fly too high or Apollo, the sun god, would melt the wax of his wings. The boy promised to be careful, and the two set off from the tower over the water. Everything went well until Icarus, intoxicated by the glories of flight, began to climb 50 Writing the Short Film Ch05.qxd 9/27/04 6:04 PM Page 50 higher and higher toward the blazing sun. Daedalus cried out to him in warning, but the boy ignored him until at last the wax holding together the feathers of his wings melted, and he plunged headlong into the sea. Here then is our basic material, culled from a number of versions of the Daedalus/Icarus myth. There is more material than we could possibly use for a short screenplay, but we won’t know which details will be important until we have answered some key questions. These are questions you may find it helpful to ask yourself each time you begin writing (or, for that mat- ter, critiquing) a short screenplay. FINDING A STRUCTURE (I): EIGHT PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS 1. Who is the protagonist? 2. What is the protagonist’s situation at the beginning of the script? 3. Who or what is the antagonist? 4. What event or occasion serves as catalyst? 5. What is the protagonist’s dramatic action? 6. What is the antagonist’s dramatic action? 7. How is the protagonist’s action resolved? 8. Do you have any images or ideas, however unformed, as to the climax? The ending? What follows are the answers we came up with for a short project we imagined as an animated film or video of three or four minutes’ length, using the ritual occasion structure: two characters in a closed situation, with the seagull’s appearance as the appearance of the stranger who changes everything. (The approach would be basically the same whether for anima- tion or live action.) To give you an idea of the process, we have included something of the reasoning we employed in responding to each of the ques- tions. 1. Who Is the Protagonist? Before considering this question, it is important to note once more that most short films or tapes work best with a single protagonist; there simply is not enough time for an audience to identify with more than one. The exception is with certain kinds of comedy—slapstick, parody, or satire, for example— where a writer may not want the audience to identify with the main charac- ter but to maintain a psychological distance from all the characters. (Think of how one views W. C. Fields, the Marx Brothers, or the main characters in Telling the Dramatic Story 51 Ch05.qxd 9/27/04 6:04 PM Page 51 most cartoons.) Thus, short comedies often have two or even more main characters. As the project we are considering is a drama, however, we will want to have a single protagonist. What we must ask ourselves right off is, do we want our script be about what happens to Daedalus, or about what happens to Icarus? Either one would be intriguing. Do we want to tell the story of a bold and willful exile, a brilliant inventor, who works out an ingenious way to escape from prison with his son and, in so doing, loses that son? Or do we want to tell the story of a boy in exile, almost as bold and willful as his father, who escapes from prison only to destroy himself by flying too close to the sun? These are two very different main characters, whose actions would lead to very different plots. For this project, we have decided to choose Icarus as our protagonist; how- ever, to demonstrate how profoundly different the plot could be were we to choose Daedalus, we will give a synopsis for a longer, live-action project about Daedalus after the story outline about Icarus. 2. What Is Icarus’s Situation at the Beginning of the Script? The shorter the film or video is to be, the more license is given the scriptwriter to plunge right into the middle of things. In this case, because the film is to be so short, it makes sense to open with a scene showing the boy and his father in the tower as if they’d been there for some time. In order to give viewers the opportunity to discover for themselves what kind of youth Icarus is and how he feels about being imprisoned, we need to show details of his daily life in prison. However powerful the images onscreen, viewers won’t be able to identify fully with the boy’s intoxication at flying if they haven’t first observed the soul-destroying nature of his captivity. So, the answer to Question 2 is that Icarus has been imprisoned for some time, along with his father, in a tower by the sea. Visualizing the scene, we came up with the idea that Daedalus has been supplied with parchment and stylus to pass the time, but that Icarus has been given nothing. Perhaps he’s gathered up gull feathers from the parapets around their chamber and amused himself as best he can with them. 3. Who or What Is the Antagonist? In every version of the myth that we looked at, Icarus was warned by Daedalus not to fly up toward the sun, and in every version he ignored the warning. Because of this, and because we do not want to complicate the story by intro- ducing another character, Daedalus is the logical choice for the antagonist. 52 Writing the Short Film Ch05.qxd 9/27/04 6:04 PM Page 52 . is as true for the short film in relation to the feature film as it is for the short story in relation to the novel. But unlike novels and short stories,. Where?—In the case of a short script, with a simple adaptation. Telling the Dramatic Story 49 Ch05.qxd 9/ 27/04 6:04 PM Page 49 From the very beginning of the film