The Franken-script

A recent Hollywood Reporter article (discussed by John August and Craig Mazin in this week's Scriptnotes) explores the trend of double-hiring writers for big movies:

Executives and agents say double hirings are on the rise partly because of the demands of the tentpole era. Dates for movies often are set while projects still are in development, creating urgency to move fast. And with reboots and reimaginings, studios sometimes ask for multiple takes before jigsawing the scripts together.

If you want the Cliff Notes version of what's wrong with Hollywood, circa 2014, there it is in a nice little package. You'd think that the business of screwing up big movies would be fully perfected by now, and yet there Hollywood goes finding newer and more complex ways to do it.

Honestly, I wish screenwriting really worked the way many executives seem to think it does; it'd be a hell of a lot easier. I've got one script that I've worked on on and off for years, during which time it's gone through about six distinct versions (four full drafts and two additional treatments). One version was funnier; another was more emotional; the most recent one was bigger in scope. The one in between had a really fun opening sequence but not much else.

Wouldn't it be great if I could just Frankenstein all those drafts together and end up with a script that has humor, emotion, big action and a killer opening? Yes. Yes it would. I'm sure it would actually sell, instead of only getting me a few general meetings with people who didn't want to buy it (or help me sell it). Unfortunately, that's not how it works. I can't stitch those drafts seamlessly together because each one is a different version -- a different take -- on the same basic story, and each of those versions has an organic set of characters whose behaviors drive that specific plot. Therefore, if I combined my favorite parts from each of those scripts, I would end up with wildly inconsistent characters and a senseless plot.

Which, I guess, is a fair description of a lot of tentpole movies these days.

Here's one of the in-development examples the article cites:

Warner Bros. hired writers Adam Cozad and Craig Brewer to each pen separate scripts for Tarzan, now in preproduction with Alexander Skarsgard and Margot Robbie starring. The studio preferred Cozad's action and structure elements and Brewer's characterization, so it fused both drafts. (Cozad now is working with director David Yates to finalize the film.)

Again: The idea that "action and structure" and "characterization" are such separate concepts that a different writer can handle each one and the whole thing can fit together like Tetris pieces? It's ridiculous. Action and structure are both functions of character, and "characterization" is exemplified by what a character does, which is also known as "action." If you try to force one specific version of a character down a path that isn't organic to him or her, you're most likely going to end up with a shitty script. (And I know this because I've done it over and over.)

Reboots vs. Remakes

In this week's episode of John August and Craig Mazin's Scriptnotes podcast, John and Craig answer a listener question regarding the difference between a "remake" and a "reboot."

The questioner (Ben) suggests this as the distinction between the two:

To me, you remake a singular film, and you reboot a franchise. "Stargate" can be rebooted because the TV series has continuity, and you can reboot or reset the continuity like a computer. There's no continuity to "Cliffhanger," though; it was a one-shot story. So it's a remake of "Cliffhanger," not a reboot.

To me (as well as to John and Craig) this makes total sense. And yet, as Ben points out, the entertainment industry rarely makes this distinction in practice. Virtually any time you read in Variety or Deadline about a new version of an existing property, the term being used is "reboot" (or "re-imagining," which wasn't mentioned on the podcast but is also commonplace) by either the publication or the studio or both.

So, why?

For one thing, there's the fact that Hollywood is, always has been, and always will be addicted to buzzwords. The moment a word or phrase becomes associated with something cool or popular or innovative, everyone instantly wants to use it to refer to everything, regardless of whether it actually fits. (I guarantee you that right this second, an executive somewhere is using the phrase "killer third act" to describe a macchiato.) Reboots have been having their moment ever since the mid-aughts, when Batman Begins and Casino Royale kicked off the trend (followed by Star Trek a few years later). Remakes just haven't enjoyed the same cachet; some have been successful (the Steve Martin Pink Panther) and some have been well-reviewed (the Denzel Washington Manchurian Candidate) but I can't think of any that have really lit the place up. Studios want to use the term associated with big hits, so they're apt to say "reboot" no matter what.

But while I think optics is a big part of this issue (as it is with most issues in Hollywood), I think there's more to it. I think the word "reboot" genuinely speaks to what studios hope and believe is possible with the films they're making.

The original Cliffhanger was a huge hit, taking in over $250 million worldwide (in 1993 dollars), and Stallone was still at or near his peak of stardom, but there was never a Cliffhanger 2. (In fact, of the top ten grossing films of 1993, the only one that was sequel-ized was Jurassic Park.) Here, twenty-one years later, such a situation is pretty much unthinkable; a studio president could easily be fired for declining to greenlight a sequel to one of the biggest movies of the year. And you can bet that the new version of Cliffhanger will be written with an eye toward making it a franchise, and that its stars will be contracted for at least three films. That's just the way things work now. (Pretty much the only studio movies that aren't designed with sequels in mind are Oscar-bait films, and there are even exceptions to that rule.) So, when Cliffhanger is referred to as a reboot -- even though it only ever existed as a standalone film that wasn't part of a larger mythology -- it's not an accident, and it's not just chronic buzzword-ism.

The one time the word "remake" is still useful is when a foreign-language film garners so much buzz from festivals and the Internet that an American studio decides that they need to produce their own version of it (Let Me In, for example). And in these cases, the studio wants to indicate that the movie will hew pretty closely to its source, except that it'll be in English with actors we all recognize. They're not trying to reinvent the wheel; they're just trying to sweep up all the money that was left on the table due to subtitle-phobia (and the fact that foreign films are rarely screened outside of major cities).

Gurus and Mentors

To the average Angeleno (and even moreso to people outside L.A.) screenwriters are a semi-amusing cliche: neurotic navel-gazers drinking too much caffeine and alcohol and fretting about all kinds of first-world problems.  Actual in-depth explorations into the life of the average writer are rarely published in the mainstream; instead, they're typically confined to the subsection of print and online media that is specifically By Screenwriters, For Screenwriters: magazines like Creative Screenwriting and Scr(i)pt, or the self-published blogs of individual writers (like, say, the one you're reading).

I was pretty intrigued, therefore, when the L.A. Times Review of Books published an article that is premised on the exact kind of navel-gazing that usually keeps us writers from being seen outside the walls of our own community.  The piece, written by Jonathan Zimmerman, is titled, "A Three Act Journey in the Land of the Screenwriting Gurus," and it explores a topic that is a perpetual hot button among screenwriters -- namely, the vast (and ever-increasing) numbers of screenwriting how-to guides.

Zimmerman's story is familiar to me and, I imagine, to most writers like me.  He wanted to be a screenwriter, but he grew up far away from The Industry (in Rhode Island), and thus it made sense to turn to screenwriting books as a primary source of knowledge on the subject.  One book turned into 25, and eventually he found that he was relying on how-to books so extensively that his work no longer even looked like his own: "Years later, I see as much Vogler [the author of one popular screenwriting guide] in the script as myself. It is stilted and feels foreign, like an awkward paint-by-numbers attempt at classical storytelling. Rather than writing, I’d been regurgitating undigested bits of Vogler onto the page, and the results were as unappetizing as they sound."  

He is far from alone in this experience.  Most screenwriting books are their own little bibles.  (One of them is even called The Screenwriter's Bible.)  They preach an orthodoxy that is designed to guide you through every word of your script, and writers both new and experienced can easily be tempted to follow them just as religiously as people tend to do with other holy books.  I've been in writing groups where people criticized my work simply by pointing out that it didn't follow the prescriptions of certain screenwriting books.  It is frankly a pretty spineless way of giving feedback, because you're ostensibly taking your own opinion out of the equation and outsourcing your criticism to a supposedly omniscient third party.  And yes, I'm sure I've done it myself on occasion.  Looking another writer in the eye and telling her that you, personally, have problems with her script is not an easy thing to do, especially for those of us who have very consciously chosen an introvert-friendly profession.  Likewise, when it comes to the actual writing, inventing your own stories and characters whole-cloth never ceases to be a frightening proposition.  Much easier in both cases to have a rock-hard set of principles to rely on, so that all you have to do is fill in the blanks.  

Eventually, Zimmerman decides that he'll need to abandon his screenwriting book crutches if he's truly going to move forward in his career.  It's a noble conclusion, but the guy's only written three scripts.  I'll bet you lunch at The Ivy that he dives back into the guides at least a couple more times.  And I don't blame him.  I've sworn off screenwriting books several times, which obviously means that I've also gone back on that vow several times.  In that time, I've come to the conclusion that these books are appealing to many of us not just because they're a synthetic cure-all for our creative woes, but because they're filling a genuine void -- taking the place of something that is sorely lacking in the world of screenwriting.  And that thing is mentorship.

In many professions, mentorship is a given. If you get into medical school, you're going to spend a lot of time around actual doctors, watching them do their jobs and getting plenty of feedback on your own techniques.  But if you want to be a screenwriter?  There's nothing remotely similar in place, unless you're lucky enough to have an aunt or uncle or family friend who's a successful writer and willing to show you the ropes.  (The Writers Guild has some mentorship programs, but they're only available to Guild members, which is kind of like starting your medical residency once you've already been hired as a surgeon.)  We are essentially on our own from the moment we decide to pursue a career in the field -- even our closest friends and family members don't usually understand what it is we're doing.  Is it any wonder that we could be drawn in by a book that promises to sit down with us and talk about how this whole thing works, what we're doing wrong, and what we need to do to succeed?

Obviously, screenwriting books are a dismal substitute for actual mentorship.  Most of the people who write these books are not mentors, but "gurus," to use Zimmerman's terminology.  They are not moved to write these books as a result of their stature in the industry (in fact, very few of them are successful working writers), but rather because they just happen to have figured out the principles of good screenwriting and they want to share their knowledge with the community.  Mentorship is a far less lofty principle, and yet far more useful.  You don't have to be brilliant, or even above average, to be a mentor.  You just have to be willing to show the next generation how you do what you do.  It sounds like a simple concept, but good luck finding it if you're an aspiring writer, because it's just not part of the infrastructure of the profession.  And as long as that's the case, self-professed screenwriting gurus will always be able to earn a living on the backs of the Jonathan Zimmermans of the world.

Managing myself

I have neither an agent nor a manager, so I don't have any firsthand experience working with either one, but I believe I have a pretty decent grasp of the difference between the two roles. An agent finds you work that's as frequent and lucrative as possible, while a manager is more focused on steering you toward the projects that are right for you and your career. These days I find myself spending a lot of time and energy doing the latter. Putting together a decent script takes me months -- sometimes a few, sometimes several -- and I want to have something significant to show for that kind of temporal investment. I want a solid addition to my portfolio, something that really helps to sell me as a writer. So I have to choose the right thing to write. I have to be my own manager.

Here are some of the criteria I use in determining whether an idea is worth my time to develop:

1. Is the idea high-concept; i.e., easily pitchable?

No, this is not me happily internalizing the marketing-driven world of today's studio system. I just want to make sure that people will read what I write, and I'm not exactly a known quantity in Hollywood (despite having 136 followers on Twitter, at least half of whom are not spam-bots!). But if I can sum up the appeal of the script in a zippy logline, then a stranger in a position of power just might deign to pick it up. To quote one of my favorite movies, these are the facts of the case, and they are undisputed.

2. Can I actually pull it off?

If coming up with a script that fit criterion #1 above were all it took, then L.A. would be stuffed to the gills with millionaire scribes. Great high-concept ideas are a dime a dozen; people who can execute those ideas are rich. A humanoid dinosaur and a supermodel travel back in time to stop the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. I would write that if I thought I could pull it off, because why not? Someone's going to read that script if it comes across their desk. But I don't think I have the chops.

Managers pride themselves on knowing their clients' creative strengths and weaknesses. As my own manager, I have to know mine. There are certain types of characters, certain types of scenes, certain types of plots that I know I can do well. I'm good at snappy dialogue and unexpected injections of humor. I can write a passable action scene, but I'm better at building and sustaining tension. These are all major considerations in the kind of script I choose to write.

3. Does the idea of writing this excite me?

This is a no-brainer, and should be for anyone writing a spec. If you have the power to choose what you write, choose something that really sparks your interest and makes you look forward to sitting down at the computer. Even the scripts that most ignite your passions will cause you pain and frustration at some point (if not many points), so it's essential to find a project that makes all that suffering worthwhile.

The right details

Here's a sample scene.

INT. BAR - NIGHT

Dim lighting from four overhead incandescent bulbs. Another six are burned out. The walls are brick and concrete; three crooked nails are hammered into the far side, about five feet up. Nine metal and vinyl stools are positioned against the bar, and thirteen tall, faded oak tables with three barstools each are staggered around the rest of the interior. The bar itself is polished mahogany, chipped away in places. The wall behind the bar is a mirror with protruding glass shelves, holding the following bottles of liquor (left to right): Dewar's, Johnnie Walker Red, Johnnie Walker Blue, Jim Beam, Maker's Mark, Knob Creek, Captain Morgan, Bacardi Gold, Bacardi Silver, Appleton Estate...

Okay, that's enough. Clearly, that's not how you write a script you want anyone to read. Unless it's animation! Then, from what I hear, you have to write it that way; otherwise, the animators won't know they need to draw all those things. Or, if the entire movie takes place in that bar, you could probably get away with that level of detail. But if you're writing a normal cinematic scene and you want to put the reader inside this location, this is not the way to do it. You need details, yes, but they need to be the right details.

So what are the right details? In my opinion, they're the details that convey (a) something distinguishing and (b) something emotional. Looking at the bloated description at the top of the page, the list of alcohols on display doesn't fit either of those criteria. You'd find most of those at any bar in America, from the Bel Air Hotel to an airport in Fort Lauderdale. And there's little emotional impact to be mined from rattling off a list of common boozes. On the other hand, the description of the lighting is much closer to the mark, if not exactly Oscar-worthy. The fact that more than half the bulbs are burned out signals that the place might not be all that well taken care of; might not be clean; might not be safe. Suppose our protagonist is a pre-teen girl and she has to walk into this bar alone, late at night. With that one brief sentence of description, we're starting to trigger emotional reactions in the reader. This place is no TGI Friday's. Something bad might happen.

Changing things up

The start of a new year is a natural time to make some changes, so I'm going to do that. I've been writing this blog since early 2008, and it's been a great opportunity to put down in print a lot of principles that have crystallized for me in the course of my development as a writer. (That was my mission statement, after all.)

But as time goes by, I find I'm devoting less energy to learning and more to applying what I've learned. Principles occur to me less often, and exceptions to the principles I've already learned occur to me more often. As a result, when I sit down to write a post about some basic tenet of screenwriting, I usually end up putting it on the back burner or discarding it all together, because I've already started mentally poking holes in it. And thus I've ended up with a whole lot of unfinished mini-essays on all sorts of topics. I only published eight posts in all of 2010, but I probably started three times that many; I just couldn't quite bring them off.

So I think I'm done with the didactic stuff for the time being. (The post below was kind of my last hurrah in terms of passing on tips and lessons.) But I'm not done with this blog. To the contrary: I'd like to expand it to include a wider variety of topics on movies, TV, books, L.A., and entertainment in general. I'd like to write about some of these things without forcing myself to tie them directly to lessons about screenwriting.

Anyway, we'll see how that goes.

Things I've Learned About Screenwriting, In Handy Bullet-Point Form

The end of the year (and beginning of the next) is a great time to make lists, isn't it? Everyone else seems to think so, and since I'd be hard pressed to come up with a list of the ten alt-punk albums with the best allusions to midcentury Bauhaus architecture, I think I'll just spout off a list of random things I've learned about screenwriting in the last ten or so years that I've been doing it.

• Drinking and screenwriting don't mix. Sure, it seems like every famous novelist of the last 700 years was known to suck down a few before sitting down at the computer/typewriter/quill, but screenwriting is different. You need full access to your logical mind, which is exactly the thing that alcohol takes away. Save the cocktail for after you're done; it'll help you decompress.
  
  
• If you decide to write a script because you think it will be a good learning experience -- and not because the story and characters excite you -- then don't expect it to be anything other than a learning experience.
  
  
• That being said, every script (and every rewrite) should be a learning experience anyway, and you should be looking for ways to grow and expand your talent with each one. Take chances; do things a little differently than you did last time.
  
  
• Writing advice is like religion: it's ubiquitous and comes in many varieties. It's also like religion in that people tend to use it to validate their own preconceptions, rather than challenge them. Thus, if you're the impulsive, impatient type, you're likely to fixate on the charming curmudgeon who tells you to plunge straight into the first draft with zero prep work, and ignore the zen master who tells you to spend two months on character sketches before you even outline. Which is too bad, because it's the second guy you should be listening to.
  
  
• Don't let anyone tell you that dialogue doesn't matter. There is virtually no script that cannot be made better by improving the dialogue, even if all the other elements are perfect.
  
  
• However, banter is not good dialogue.
  
  
• Also, improving the dialogue often means cutting some of it out.
  
  
• By far the most important reason to write an outline is to ensure that you have enough great scenes for a complete script. It's not fun, but you know what's less fun? Getting to page 50 and realizing you're already in the third act. If you're tempted to skip straight to FADE IN: without outlining, it almost definitely means you're going to come up short.
  
  
• About 10% of people who say they have writer's block are actively struggling with a story problem. The other 90% are just afraid to sit down to write because they think they'll have writer's block when they do.
  
  
• When reviewing someone else's script, be brutally honest but always leave them some hope. Find things to like about their writing style, or one of the characters, or something else. Say the nice things first, then go into the faults, and end with a statement of confidence in their ability to improve the script. All the better if you can find a great scene and tell them that more of the script should be like that. If their response is to defend almost every point that you criticized, well, that's too bad for them. The surest sign of a novice writer is the inability to handle criticism (and even more importantly, to use it).
  
  
• An "everyman" (or everywoman) protagonist who does exactly what the audience would do in the same situation is interesting only if she finds herself in truly extraordinary circumstances -- and even then, a more unusual character is usually more compelling.
  
  
• People who aren't writers themselves can often give incredibly useful feedback, because (a) they're human beings with feelings, just like your characters, and (b) they see movies.
  
  
• When you tell yourself that a script will be easy to write, what you're actually saying is that it will be easy to write badly.
  
  
• The great thing about aspiring to be a professional screenwriter is that you already get to do the exact same thing that the pros do. Nothing's stopping you from writing a movie that would cost $250 million to produce. Aspiring directors sure don't have that luxury.
  
  
• Lots of movies and scripts fail because the tone is inconsistent. And lots of movies and scripts succeed in spite of all kinds of other problems because the tone is perfect.
  
  
• A good action scene is not one in which a lot of cool things happen; it's one in which the audience legitimately worries that the good guys will lose.
  
  
• Never be afraid to think bigger. You want people to read your script and imagine a movie on a fifty-foot screen, not a webisode on an iPhone.
  
  
• If you find that you're forced to suck all the fun out of your premise simply for the sake of adhering to logic and "rules," then you're doing it wrong. A great premise that is well-serviced by the story and characters is the brass ring of screenwriting. If you can pull that off, nobody's going to notice whether you've broken a few "rules."
  
  
• And yes, the word "rules" should always be in quotes when it comes to screenwriting.
  
  

That's about all I can think of for now. ("For now" being the last few weeks that I've worked on and off on this list.) Happy new year and happy writing!

Anatomy of a (brief) partnership

The second half of 2010 has been kind of all over the place, writing-wise. In May I got married and went on my honeymoon having just completed the best script I ever wrote -- the first one that I could honestly say showcased my strengths as a writer. It earned a high score from ScriptShark, which meant it would be scouted to a variety of management and production companies. In the grand scheme of things this was a relatively small amount of validation, but it felt pretty great nonetheless; I mean, if one professional script reader thinks I have talent, I can at least hypothesize that there might be others out there who agree with him.

Anyway, when I returned from my hybrid Costa Rica-Las Vegas honeymoon (no, it wasn't planned that way), it was time to get cracking on a new project. Earlier in the year I'd talked with a writer friend about collaborating, and in June the time was finally right for both of us. We feel that we each have strengths we can bring to the table, as well as the added advantage of extra brainpower to tackle whatever problems come up.

Here's how that ends up going.

In early June, I work up a quick pitch for an espionage thriller/romantic comedy and meet my new writing partner for drinks to run it by him. He likes it! We're off to the races, bouncing around plot and character ideas, recommending movies to each other to watch for inspiration, and generally being excited about the prospect of writing a great script together.

Over the next couple weeks we exchange a lot of emails, discussing ways to improve the premise, strengthen the conflicts, and so forth. Then we meet up again to hash out our plan for moving forward. During that meeting we realize that what we have probably won't work. There are elements we like a lot, but also some very big, very fundamental problems that we can't see a way past. So we put our idea aside and start spitballing a new one along similar lines. By the end of the meeting we have a solid character and premise that seems like it'll sustain a movie.

Another week or so goes by. More emails, more spitballing, more story problems cropping up. When two people have to agree on everything that goes into a story, I begin to realize, the process is a lot less quick. We talk on the phone at one point and it feels like we've hit the wall once again. This time, the idea seems pretty solid but we're not at all sure it's going to be funny. (Our purpose from the beginning has been to write a great script that's both thrilling and hilarious.) Long silences on the line as we each try to think up a way to rescue the idea from the jaws of extinction. Finally, it occurs to me to change the story's setting to something more conducive to comedy. That we we can play the life-or-death stuff absolutely straight and rely on the incongruous surroundings to make people laugh. My partner likes this. He likes it a lot. Once more, we're off to the races!

Within a week, my partner is getting cold feet again. He's not sure it's going to work. But this time I really feel confident in the concept, so I decide to bang out the first 12 pages of the script to show him what I have in mind. And when I say "bang out," I really mean it. I haven't written a single page of script in months at this point and I can barely stand it. All the pent-up creative energy I've been storing up comes bursting forth, and it's every bit as thrilling and hilarious as I've imagined. I send it to my partner, he's fully on board with the approach, and -- you guessed it -- we're off to the races.

For a while. Then we start hitting more walls. We're exchanging lots of emails, can't seem to find a way to move forward, and then finally I toss out a brand-new idea for a completely different movie. Just something that popped into my head. Another espionage thriller/comedy, this time a sort of Spy vs. Spy with a romantic twist.

He loves it. I love it. We quickly decide to abandon our previous idea and move on to this one. It's fun, it's funny, it's easily pitchable, it's everything I've been wanting to write.

We're off! To! The! Races!

I'm about to leave town for a few days for another wedding, so we meet up before I leave and hash out a writing plan. We're not fooling around this time -- we feel like there's a real spark with this one, so we want to get right on it. I whip up the beginnings of an opening sequence from the road, and it doesn't flow as easily as I'd hoped but that doesn't faze me because I'm still in love with the concept. There are ideas that you really have to finesse to turn into a good script, and there are ideas that you just have to avoid screwing up, and this one is definitely the latter. Once I get home, my partner and I really get to work. I'm writing pages, he's writing pages, new ideas are coming fast and furious. Yes, progress has been slow up to now, but the great thing about working with a partner is that once you're really moving, you can move twice as fast.

Once again we hit some logistical snags with the plot and characters. The scenario is brilliant, but we're not sure how we arrive at it in a believable way. It's kind of like when Hitchcock demanded that the finale of North by Northwest take place on the faces of Mount Rushmore, and left it up to Ernest Lehman to figure out a natural way to end the story there. He did, but his account of how painful that process was is legendary. (The only difference with us is that there's no Hitchcock involved and also that we're not getting paid.) Undeterred, we continue working out story beats and writing pages. This will work, we think. It has to. It's great.

But within a few weeks I start to have serious doubts. The big problem, as I see it, is our insistence on making it a genuine action/comedy. For a movie in that genre to work, the premise has to be absolutely solid as an action flick, and then you can start dropping in the laughs. If the premise isn't solid, then you've only got a comedy, and that's not what we're going for. (True Lies is an action-comedy; Austin Powers is just a comedy, even though it has just as many guns and spies. We want to write a movie more like True Lies.) There just doesn't seem to be a way to keep all the story elements we want and make it believable. We wrack our brains over this issue for days and come up with nothing.

Finally, I meekly propose going back to the story idea that we had abandoned in favor of this one -- the idea for which I wrote those great first 12 pages. Maybe we were too hasty in moving on from that one, I suggest. Luckily, my partner is pretty malleable in these types of situations, so he says, sure, let's pick it up again. The advantage of having shifted gears for the past month is that we're able to look at the old idea with a fresher perspective. Now, with a few changes, it seems absolutely doable.

We meet up to hash out the story. (The Borders in Century City has been serving as our war room. It's a good spot for conversation, there's free parking, and nobody tries to kick you out for not ordering enough.) After an hour or so of discussion, we feel like we're ready to get going. This was always a good idea, and now it feels better than ever. With both of us cranking out pages on a regular basis, we should have a first draft in a month and a polished and ready-to-go script before Thanksgiving.

This time we're more tenacious than ever. When something doesn't work, we keep hammering at it until it's fixed. For a solid month and a half we're writing and rewriting, outlining and re-outlining, fully committed to producing an actual script. Sometimes it really feels like it's going to work.

But sometimes it really, really doesn't. And frankly, I'm getting impatient. By now I've devoted four months to this endeavor; it took me less time than that to produce the best script I've written. I'm anxious to keep moving toward my goal, which is to have a great portfolio of scripts that can get me paying work. It's starting to seem like this collaboration isn't the best way to get there. I share my frustrations with Alexis and her opinion is that I should do as much as I can to make the partnership work, because at the very least it will turn out to be a good learning experience for me. I agree with her logic; she knows that I tend to be impatient with just about everything, and it would be a shame to sacrifice all these months of effort.

Still, I can't help but hedge a little. It's been a long time since I've worked on anything that was my own, and I can't stop new ideas from coming to me. One day, when I feel like my writing self really needs cheering up, I take the day off work and challenge myself to come up with ten good story pitches in a variety of genres. That night, I read them to Alexis and our friend Rossanna over drinks and ask for their opinion. One idea in particular -- pitch number eight -- stands out to both of them as a winner, especially based on my personal writing strengths. Naturally, I start itching to write it.

Meanwhile, the collaboration is faring no better. The next time my partner and I meet up, we realize that we simply don't have enough story, and don't have any ideas for making it longer. Long silence ensues. It feels like we've hit every possible wall at this point, and I think we're both questioning our ability to cross the finish line.

I can't hold back any longer. I desperately want another script under my belt in 2010, I have a great idea for one, and if I start now I can make it happen. So, after a long sigh, I tell my partner that maybe the best solution is to step back from the material for a while and work on other projects. We can return to it later, with fresher minds.

He's okay with that plan.

I tell him about the idea I've hatched, the one that I already successfully pitched to my wife and our friend.

"That's the best idea you've ever had," he says. "You should go write that."

And like that, it's over. I go back to my world; he goes back to his. I drive straight to the nearest Umami Burger, whip out my notepad and start jotting down ideas. This time, when I hit a wall, I have no one but myself to consult... but I feel okay about that. It's worked for me up to now. If I'm diligent, I might just get a first draft done before 2010 is out.

The partnership didn't end up working the way I'd hoped, but that doesn't mean I won't try it again. Collaborating was interesting, even enlightening. It forced me to think in different ways than I'm used to, which is never a bad thing. Maybe best of all, it kept me focused on my own strengths as a writer, because I always wanted to be sure I was bringing something useful to the table. Hopefully, I'll be bringing a lot more the next time I team up with someone.

Layering

I'm a pretty big fan of Mission: Impossible 3, though I acknowledge that my opinion is colored by my overall enthusiasm for the work of J.J. Abrams in general, and the TV show Alias in particular.* Some people have criticized MI3 by saying that it's just a big-screen version of Alias, but to me that's what makes it great, and Tom Cruise clearly thought that the sensibilities of the two franchises were compatible when he hand-picked Abrams for the gig.

I bring this movie up because it's one of the few big-budget action thrillers in the last several years that has actually taught me a useful lesson about screenwriting. It's not a very complicated lesson, but it's a useful one and it applies to pretty much every genre. Since I can't find the script online, I'll describe the scene in question here:

Outside a remote German factory building, Ethan Hunt and his team have just staged a complex assault on a villain's hideout in order to rescue a kidnapped CIA trainee, Lindsey Farris. Ethan gets Lindsey aboard the helicopter and the team takes off, only to be pursued by two more helicopters piloted by some of the villain's men.

Pretty good so far, right? This was all quite thrilling on the big screen; I don't know how it looked on paper. I do know this, though: it's pretty standard action-flick stuff up to this point. Let's keep going:

Ethan's ace pilot maneuvers the helicopter through the spinning blades of an enormous windmill farm to escape the bad guys. One of the bad-guy helicopters crashes; the other manages to keep up.

Then -- all of a sudden -- Lindsey grabs her head in pain, screaming that she hears a loud noise (no one else can hear it). Ethan performs an x-ray scan with a handheld device and finds that a tiny bomb has been injected into her brain -- and it's been activated -- and she'll die if he can't defuse it in time.

Now things have really gotten interesting. On top of the helicopter chase, there's the imminent danger of Lindsey's brain-bomb. The chase is big-scale and threatens the entire team; the bomb is small-scale and threatens only Lindsey. Both elements are thrilling on their own, but the fact that they're happening at the same time, and in the same space, elevates the tension to an almost unbearable level.

Those bolded words up there are the crux of this whole thing. Most of screenwriting is, to use an industry buzzphrase, execution dependent -- meaning that just writing something (a script, a scene, a line of dialogue) is meaningless; you have to write it well to get any credit.** However, the example I've cited is an exception because the mere existence of those two elements side-by-side makes the scene thrilling. As a writer, you'd win points for that scene even if the execution were just so-so. To me, that makes it a pretty great technique to know about.

But there's more to this trick than just adding stuff to other stuff, and that's why I'm calling it layering. You need the elements of the scene to fit neatly together. In this case, the writers started with the helicopter chase and then inserted the brain-bomb crisis. The two elements are wildly different in scope (helicopter: huge, threatens entire team; bomb: tiny, threatens only Lindsey), which makes it possible for them to co-exist onscreen without being totally overwhelming or numbing to the audience. (Simply adding more pursuing helicopters to the mix would elevate the danger, but after the initial thrill of "ooh, there's more helicopters chasing them," the audience isn't going to perceive the threat much differently.) Furthermore, the brain-bomb has the added benefit of pulling on the audience's heartstrings in a way that the helicopter chase doesn't. Putting a single character in peril, rather than a bunch of them, is almost always more emotionally powerful.

The key to successful deployment of this technique is being aware of how often you can get away with using it. Too many scenes like the one above would exhaust the audience to the point of numbness; they'd cease to be surprised or thrilled by anything else in the movie. In MI3, there are only a few instances of layering; the majority of the action scenes focus on one element at a time, and as such they just have to rely on good old-fashioned execution.

*Really just the first two seasons of that show, to be even more particular.

**Actually, "execution dependent" usually refers to the kind of script that may be well-written but would require skillful acting and filmmaking to turn into a successful movie. Most studios and producers tend to reject that kind of material in favor of something that would be a hit even if it were directed by a blind guy and acted by the cast of a a local morning news show.

Advantages and disadvantages

I was talking with my writing partner last night about what makes a script a fun, easy read. Having a good writing style (prose/dialogue/layout) helps greatly, of course, but equally crucial is the way in which the story unfolds. In the course of our discussion, I realized that two principles in particular are key:

1. Almost any reversal/twist that hurts the protagonist will be welcomed by the reader/audience. They want to see how the protagonist is going to get out of whatever fresh hell this is, so they'll keep reading/watching.

2. However, a reversal/twist that helps the protagonist will usually be met with something between wariness and outright scorn -- unless the twist has been set up beforehand, in which case it can be very satisfying.

It might seem odd that I use the terms "reader" and "audience" interchangeably, given that a person reading a script most likely knows a fair amount about screenwriting, whereas the average moviegoer has never so much as cracked a book on the subject. In fact, audiences know quite a bit about writing, even if they don't know they know it. They certainly know enough to distinguish clever writing from lazy, sloppy writing.

Case in point: If James Bond spends ten minutes/pages battling his way through a small army of Russian soldiers to retrieve a jetpack the size of a pencil, the audience will have no problem believing that he can use that tiny gadget to fly to safety. On the other hand, if Bond is being chased on foot by evil agents through the streets of London and just happens to come upon an unlocked car with the keys in the ignition, the audience will call bullshit immediately. And why? I mean, which is actually more likely -- a six-ounce cylinder that makes you fly, or one person in a huge city accidentally leaving their keys in the car?

The answer is that it doesn't matter. The audience isn't responding to the actual plausibility of those things; they're responding to the strength (or weakness) of the writing. When they say, "That wasn't believable!" what they really mean is, "The writer didn't earn my suspension of disbelief."

Pomodoro

I've been hearing about the Pomodoro system for several months now, and finally gave it a try yesterday. Upon reflection, I'd say it's easily one of the best tomato-based productivity enhancers I've come across, certainly more effective than downing a Bloody Mary before launching Final Draft, but maybe not quite as motivating as having a friend stand by with a jar of pasta sauce that he threatens to dump on your head if you don't meet your page quota.

For those unfamiliar, let's control-c/control-v some Wikipediary exposition:

The Pomodoro Technique is a time management method developed by Francesco Cirillo in the late 1980s.^[1] The technique uses a timer to break down periods of work into 25-minute intervals called 'pomodoros' (from the Italian word for 'tomato') separated by breaks.

No doubt, there are any number of Ben Franklin-type people who will be eager to leap forth from the grave and claim that they were doing this exact same thing centuries or millenia earlier; but the point is that none of them came up with a catchy name for it. Speaking of which, that name comes from the kitschy kitchen timer that Signor Cirillo used in college:



It breaks down like so: 25 minutes on, 5 minutes off. The exactness of using a timer turns out to be fairly helpful in stimulating focus and creativity: no matter how much time you have left in the day, it feels really important to be productive while the clock is running. The break is also timed, which prevents you from getting too engrossed in your chosen distraction. (You've got enough time to get a glass of water and check a few blog headlines, but not enough to go on a snacks-and-YouTube binge.)

The physical object shown above can be purchased here, but who wants an actual ticking clock taking up space when there are easily downloadable apps that accomplish the same thing?

OSX: Pomodoro sticks a little ticking clock in your upper-right status bar and uses Growl notifications to tell you when the timer starts and ends. This is what I used, and recommend.

Windows: Keep Focused is much smaller and simpler; it uses a little hovering clock that, annoyingly, doesn't seem to be dock-able. There are probably other programs out there but this is what I was able to find with some quick googling.

iPhone: Pomodoro Timer costs 99 cents but looks snazzy and seems worth checking out.

Doubling down

In real life, people don't change easily. Even small adjustments in behavior or attitude often take years or more. In a movie, a character needs to change pretty dramatically in two hours. Getting him or her there in a believable, compelling way is one of the greatest challenges of being a writer, and by "greatest challenges" I mean, of course, "hugest pains in the ass."

One thing is for certain -- a character to have an important, defining trait that the audience wants to see change. That's a given. If the audience doesn't think there's anything wrong with the character, they're going to lose interest, no matter what kind of fancy plot mechanics and exotic locations we toss into the mix. "Cares a lot about the environment" probably isn't a trait that we would want to see change, unless we're Dick Cheney. "Cares a lot about the environment but neglects daughter," now we're in the ballpark.

With that trait defined, our next task is to come up with a mechanism for changing it (i.e., the plot). For our environmentalist, what could that mechanism be? Maybe he's presented with a great opportunity to spend more time with the kid, to be a truly meaningful presence in the kid's life. That sounds nice, except there's a big problem with it, because it's not believable that the environmentalist would choose that path. And if he does choose it, right now at the beginning of the movie, he's already made the big change and the story is already over.

As an alternative, then, consider this -- the environmentalist is presented with an opportunity to be an even better environmentalist, except it requires neglecting the kid even more. Is it believable that the character would choose this path? Sure, since we already know that the environmentalism is a lot more important to him than the kid is. So instead of choosing to change his/her negative trait, the character chooses to double down on it. And hopefully, what that will do is bring the consequences of his life choices into much sharper focus and force him to realize the truth that he's been studiously ignoring this whole time, whatever that may be. Only now is he truly susceptible to change.

The right way to steal an idea

Sometimes great story ideas just pop into my head. Other times, I have to struggle to come up with one. (This is often because that great idea that came to me turned out to be impossible to, you know, execute.) During that struggle, I'll mine a variety of sources, including but not limited to:

1. My own life and people I know.
2. Things in the world that interest me.
3. Other movies.

That third one is inevitable for most writers, I think. Few of us like the idea of "stealing" an idea from another movie, but the more you write scripts and see movies, the more you come to realize that anything you write is going to have similarities to existing material. This isn't because it's 2010 and we're so starved for ideas that we're turning Mafia Wars into a movie; it's been true for a very long time. (Blah blah ancient Greece, Aristotle's Poetics, etc.)

It's okay, though. If you go about it the right way, you can extract a great idea from an existing movie without anyone noticing. It requires stripping away a lot of "story veneer" (for lack of a better term) to get at the core ideas that make the story special.

Novice writers often do the opposite, and keep only the veneer of a movie they like without touching any of the underlying principles. (This is also the case 99% of the time a studio chooses to "reboot" or "reimagine" an older movie.)

Example: Let's say you've picked Rocky to mine for material. Since it's such an obscure film, let's summarize it first. A small-time boxer and loan shark enforcer gets a shot at a high-profile match with the heavyweight champ.

To me, the "story veneer" on this is everything to do with sports/boxing. If you try to use Rocky as a model for another sports underdog movie, you're treading on territory that's so well-worn, you can see the concrete under the floorboards. And you may be more likely to miss out or gloss over the real heart of the story.

So what is the real heart of Rocky?

To me? It's about having lived through so much disappointment that your expectations are through the floor. You're at peace (or as close to it as possible) with the prospect of never meaning anything to anyone, including yourself. You'll just get by for as long as you can, and then you're done.

And then out of nowhere comes the opportunity to prove that you really are somebody -- and not just somebody, but one of the very best at something that truly means something to you. If you succeed, you'll be on top of the world, but if you fail you'll never live it down; you won't even have the luxury of toiling in obscurity, since everyone will know that you blew it.

So, if you're going to pull this off, you have to exterminate all the negativity that's been infecting your brain all this time -- learn to trust yourself, to love yourself. Build your self-esteem up to a level where it can be truly validated... or truly annihilated.

And then you have to take on the single hardest task that's ever been put in front of you.

***

Does that sound like it needs to be a story about sports?

Of course not. It could be anything from a romantic comedy to a heist flick. It's a general set of circumstances than affords a certain type of character the opportunity to become something much greater. There are a ton of ways to turn this into a blueprint for a great movie, without inviting any obvious comparisons to Rocky.

Notice that this story archetype, while highly flexible, comes with its own creative limitations that are helpful in funneling our thought process. For example, the protagonist clearly isn't going to be the President of the United States, or a superstar homicide detective, or the captain of the Harvard debate team. (If you want to put one of those characters in the lead, chances the story will have to focus on something vital being taken away from them, rather than the chance to get even more than they already have.)

Plan A

To be a good screenwriter, you must be a master of misdirection. Yes, just like a magician. (The Prestige is a great movie precisely because it recognizes the inherent link between magic and filmmaking and embraces it.) Fortunately, learning this skill as a writer is not as difficult (I don't think) as learning it as a magician. It merely requires us to envision a larger story than the one we're presenting on the page or the screen.

For example: Let's say we introduce a protagonist on page one or two. We want the audience to get a feel for him, we want them to invest in him... but we don't want to tell them everything he's going to be required to do over the course of the movie, because that would ruin the fun. In fact, the less we can tell the audience plotwise without losing their interest, the better. There's plenty of time for plot in the pages ahead; right now we need them to understand the person they're going to be spending the next hour and a half with. Often, the best way to do this is to set the protagonist up with a very specific plan for getting what he wants out of life. The audience will see very little of this plan played out in the movie (perhaps even none) , and that's fine; its mere introduction serves two very important purposes. One of them is, as already explained, to tell the audience some important things about the character's psychology. The other is to create drama when the plot comes along and derails our protagonist's preconceived ideas for what to do with her life.

Alternatively, it gives the protagonist a reason to refuse to embark on the quest that the plot represents. This reluctance was often a part of mythological tales, leading Joseph Campbell to coin the apt phrase "Refusal of the Call" to describe the initial unwillingness (or unreadiness) of a hero-to-be. Typically, the protagonist's ambivalence will be at least partially resolved by the end of the first act, which is to say that while he does accept his quest, he may not be doing so for the right reasons or with a fully committed heart. Nonetheless, the progression from "totally unwilling" to "partially willing" represents an important segment of the character arc. It's not always feasible to include this element -- action movies in particular have a need to get things moving quickly, which can leave little time for a character to refuse anything -- but screenplays that do a good job of incorporating it are often more satisfying.

If a character has a plan before the real plot begins, she also has something she can return to later in the story when the plot leaves her beaten and exhausted. Furthermore, the way that plan now appears to both the character and the audience -- somewhere between "no longer valid" and "utterly ridiculous" -- should demonstrate the vast distance that the character has traveled internally over the course of the story. The audience will be seriously impatient with the protagonist at this point -- "Why is he going back to the job/girlfriend/belief system that I thought he'd advanced beyond?" -- but on some level, they'll understand why he's retreating. The sense of hope and satisfaction that arises when the character finally throws off the old shackles and heads forward into Act Three can't exist if we haven't set up a solid "Plan A" in Act One.

Screenplays I love: Four Weddings and a Funeral

I don't know if this will become a regular feature or not, but I find myself wanting to say a few things about Four Weddings and a Funeral, one of my favorite movies/screenplays of all time. Paradoxically, Richard Curtis's script breaks many conventions of cinematic storytelling while, at the same time, exemplifying a story that could only be told as a movie. (It was beaten at the Oscars by a screenplay to which similar praise could be ascribed: Pulp Fiction.) The strict limitations it imposes on itself work so perfectly that they end up seeming like advantages, and the result is a highly accurate, endlessly satisfying portrayal of the hazards of love and romance.

Charles (Hugh Grant) is one of the most memorable protagonists in the history of romantic comedies. Much like John Cusack's portrayal of Lloyd Dobler in Say Anything, the role came to define not only what we expect from a Hugh Grant movie, but what we expect from Hugh Grant as a human being. And yet for the most part, the screenplay tells us shockingly little about this character. We don't know what his job is, what his typical day is like, or even his last name. Up until the final minutes of the film, we only see him in the context of -- more to the point, in the shadow of -- other people's formal social events. (The one sequence in the movie that isn't a wedding or a funeral centers around shopping for one.)

To many writers, this kind of structure would be an uphill battle in terms of effectively setting up a character, but they'd deal with it as best they could -- seizing upon every possible opportunity to smoothly inject some exposition into the proceedings. Weddings, they might reason, are occasions where people are always introducing themselves and discussing their outside lives with strangers and rarely-seen acquaintances. But Curtis refuses to take advantage of any such loophole; Charles practically never talks about himself, and steers most conversations away from personal details. The few tidbits he drops here and there (saying that he could never get married, or that "[m]ost of the time I don't think at all. I just potter along" in relationships) are telling but vague.

So how does it work? How does Richard Curtis get away with all this? How does a vaguely defined protagonist walking through the same situation over and over add up to a great movie?

Well, first of all, it's a situation we all understand: not merely the experience of going to a wedding, but the period in our lives where it seems like everyone we know is getting married left and right. (Curtis himself apparently went to 72 weddings in ten years, so he knew whereof he spoke.) And as much as we might trivialize them as boring, useless social obligations, all weddings are powerful events that heighten our emotions. Even the wedding of someone we barely know (or wish we barely knew) is bound to serve as an occasion for some serious pondering of our life choices to that point. Attending multiple weddings in a short span amplifies those feelings. The writer knows this, the movie knows it, and the audience knows it -- without needing to be told. The same universal relevance applies when Charles falls in love with Carrie (quite literally at first sight) and deals with the difficulties, many of them hilarious, that their short-term romance entails.

Second, the structure of the screenplay gives it the kind of temporal scope that isn't typically feasible in a romantic comedy. Profound changes in characters' lives -- engagement, divorce -- happen offscreen between chapters, continually altering Charles's experience and perspective as time goes on. Months go by between Charles's first and second encounters with Carrie, though only minutes have passed on screen. He's still in love with her, but now she's engaged to a wealthy old Scot. Hope and joy immediately turns to heartbreak and painful rumination: a classic dramatic reversal made possible, again, by the film's atypical structure. By the third sequence, wherein Charles runs into Carrie while shopping for a wedding gift, enough time has passed that he's ready to let his feelings burst forth in a famously awkward confession... but it's both too late and too early for anything to come of it. Juxtaposing these scenes in a conventional script would never work; the drama would feel arbitrary and manufactured. But the film earns these compelling transitions by pinning its structure to the events that surround life changes, rather than the changes themselves.

Finally, the incredible cast of supporting characters serves to take some of the pressure off Charles without turning the film into an outright ensemble piece. (Curtis did attempt the latter in Love Actually, and the result, like many multistory ensemble films, was thinner and less memorable.) Even if we never completely know who Charles is, we're constantly presented with examples of who he isn't; thus, we form an impression based on the visible differences between him and his friends (and acquaintances, and strangers he bumps into, and so forth) and his reactions to their behavior. We also get occasional commentary from them on Charles's personality and life choices. Yet, they never seem to exist simply to fill these needs in the script; Curtis draws each one so vividly and specifically that they all feel like protagonists of their own individual movies -- an object lesson in writing secondary roles.

Four Weddings and a Funeral has aged well in the 15 years since its release, especially compared with the swath of wedding-porn embarrassments that the studios have churned out of late. It's clever, insightful, funny, and touching without trying too hard to achieve any of those characteristics. And best of all, it proves that screenwriting rules were made to be broken.

Useful scripts to read

When I started learning screenwriting in the late 90s, copies of screenplays weren't easy to find. There was the bookstore (for mostly older scripts in that annoying book-sized format), there were movie memorabilia stores and conventions, and there was the Internet, but the online pickings were slim (especially since PDFs weren't widely used yet). In 2009, however, screenplays are all over the place. Where once I tried to read pretty much every script I could find (since I couldn't find that many), these days I have the luxury of being selective. I try to read scripts that interest me, of course, but I also want them to enrich my knowledge of both the craft of writing and the current spectrum of work being done by professionals.

That said, here's a list of all the different types of screenplays that are out there, in ascending order from least useful to most useful (in my opinion/experience).

1. Commercially available screenplays of already-released films. The biggest problem with many of these: they're not really screenplays. They're transcripts of the finished movies, written (arbitrarily) in screenplay format. They describe what was on the screen, not what was in a writer's head. Most other scripts of this type are at least shooting scripts, which, again, often have little to do with the work of the original screenwriter. Instead, they probably reflect months or years of doctoring by other writers; preparatory revisions by the director/producers; and overly specific instructions to various departments (camera, sound, etc.). Meanwhile, that great screenplay that one person (or team) actually sat down and wrote -- the one that led to the movie getting made in the first place -- is nowhere to be found.

2. Screenplays for movies I've seen (often coincides with #1). A screenplay needs to create a vivid, compelling movie in the reader's mind. If the movie is already in my mind, then I can't gauge how well the screenplay accomplishes that goal. The language of the script can only serve to trigger existing memories, which isn't the same as creating new ones. On the other hand, reading earlier drafts can be both interesting and useful, as it enables me to see what changes were made along the way. I've done this with the recent movies Whip It and An Education, and it's clear that a lot of adjustments were made to both prior to (or possibly during) filming. In the case of An Education, many scenes were re-ordered or cut out entirely, all for the better (although Nick Hornby's ever-impeccable dialogue remained untouched).

3. Screenplays for not-yet-released (or unproduced) movies that were written on assignment. These days, this is most of them; spec scripts rarely get bought and even more rarely get made. But assigned scripts are less useful to me, because I don't know all the behind-the-scenes. With some of them, the writer is simply given a title and premise and then sent off on her own; with others, the writer may have 50 pages of outlines and sketches and notes to which he absolutely must adhere. The bottom line is that there are bound to be a lot of decisions in that script that weren't up to the writer; and the flipside of that is that there's no way to know how that script would have been received as a spec. Still, they can be good lessons on the art of working within someone else's framework, which is pretty much what professional screenwriting is all about. And they can showcase some pretty great writing regardless of the circumstances.

4. Spec screenplays that either sold or got the writer an assignment. The Holy Grail. These are the scripts that took aspiring writers from the sidelines to the big game -- that forced some executive somewhere to open her checkbook and give a chance to someone new. They're the best examples of what Hollywood is looking for in new writers... and they're becoming harder and harder to find as the studio system contracts and 90% of all movies appear to be written by the same four or five guys. Nonetheless, they're out there, and many of them are pretty thrilling reads from exciting new voices. These people made it; now it's up to me to work my ass off enough to follow in their footsteps.

Efficiency

When I was starting out as a screenwriter, I tended to write movies as if they were plays: a scene would begin when two characters entered a room, continue through their entire conversation, and then end when they were finished. I wrote them that way because I wasn't thinking like an editor.

Generally speaking, editors try to use the minimum amount of footage possible to tell the story. They're not likely to keep an unnecessary shot simply because it's beautiful, or to leave in a lengthy monologue for the sole purpose of enhancing the actor's chances of an Oscar. Their goal is efficiency, not indulgence. "Efficiency" isn't a sexy word. It might well sound anathema to the whole idea of artistic expression -- but it isn't. In fact, it can make for some truly beautiful and effective scenes.

Example #1:

FADE IN: On a college lecture hall. The PROFESSOR, a balding man in his sixties, walks up to the podium. He sighs and introduces himself to the class. As he goes over his plan for the semester, we can hear in his voice that his heart is no longer in this. Students eagerly raise their hands to ask questions but are dismissed with brief, vague answers. CUT TO next scene.

Example #2:

FADE IN: On a college lecture hall. The PROFESSOR, a balding man in his sixties, walks up to the podium. He sighs. CUT TO next scene.

Example #2, of course, is more efficient. There's very little that the longer version tells us about the Professor's state of mind that isn't fully encapsulated in that single sigh. (Plus, ending on the sigh makes it more noticeable than it might be otherwise.) But there's another reason that the shorter version is so much better.

Here's a professor going in to teach his class. This is his job, his livelihood, presumably his life's work. And we're not bothering to show more than a second of it. Implicitly, we're telling the audience that there's nothing in that lecture worth seeing. We're establishing the fact that this guy teaches, yet simultaneously establishing that this movie is not about his teaching. And on top of that, we're hammering home the emptiness of his experience. Guy goes in to teach a class. Whatever. Let's move on.

Example #2 actually comes from the movie The Visitor (written and directed by Thomas McCarthy), which is a model of efficiency throughout. While people often assume that small, character-driven films like this one will be ponderous and boring, it's quite the opposite; a great deal of information gets conveyed in the first ten minutes, and the plot takes several interesting turns before the thirty-minute mark. All of this is made possible by the relentless devotion on the part of McCarthy (and, of course, his editor Tom McArdle) to making sure that no scene is longer than it absolutely needs to be to move the story along and tell us what we need to know about the characters. There are very few "complete" scenes in the movie, but there are a great many beginnings or endings of scenes.

Most of the time, the beginning or ending is all we need. At heart, every scene in a movie needs to convey exposition and emotion: This happened, and this is how the character felt about it. The Visitor example above does both those things in about five seconds of screentime. Seeing the beginning of the scene, the audience is smart enough to hypothesize the middle and ending. Conversely, if we show just the end of the scene -- but that ending contains the necessary elements -- the audience will infer the beginning and middle. This is a good thing, because the job of the filmmaker is to make the audience think, not to do all the thinking for them. By engaging their imagination, we make the movie a deeper and more personal experience.

Idea

We hear the same basic principle about screenwriting all the time -- the protagonist needs to want something and it needs to be hard for him or her to get. If you're not sick to death of this axiom, you probably haven't been writing for long. (And yet it's never a bad thing to hear, because it really is true and a script that ignores it can go off the rails very quickly.)

But that's not the only way to look at a script. That's just the narrative perspective: creating a difficult quest for a character to succeed or fail at. Simultaneously, we're doing something else. We're challenging an idea. It might be a fairly simple idea ("Good triumphs over evil," "The truth will out," "Crime doesn't pay"), but it needs to permeate the story and it needs to be tested every bit as rigorously as the protagonist is. That means stacking the deck against it whenever possible, just like we do with our characters. At every turn, we want it to be easier to embrace the opposite of our idea rather than the idea itself.

An example. Let's see. How about Die Hard? (I know, I always go to that one. One of these days I'll see another movie, I promise.) Like many action movies, this one deals primarily in the principles of "Good triumphs over evil," and "Crime doesn't pay." And it does a great job of testing them. Look at those villains: a crack team of expert thieves with an arsenal of firepower and demolition equipment at their disposal. They're smart, they're ruthless and they've done their homework. Then there's the FBI unit sent to take them down: a bunch of overconfident, shoot-first lunkheads who seem bound and determined to blow the mission at every turn. Halfway through the movie, we have to be thinking... this is going to be the story that teaches us that good heroes triumph over evil criminals? And that's perfect. Like the protagonist, the principle at the heart of the film must always be in jeopardy. Both audience and protagonist must always be tempted to accept the opposite of that idea.

But then -- right in the end, when it counts the most -- the central idea proves its worth, exposing the fatal weaknesses in any arguments against it. And it is stronger for all the challenges it has faced to its validity -- even if we could have accepted it at face value from the beginning.

The first act, and rewriting

This month I've been doing my second page-one rewrite of a script that I started over a year ago. I had considered just giving it up, but the concept and characters still intrigue me enough to take another crack at it. Am I beating a dead horse? Maybe. But it's also a chance to experiment... with the plot, with my writing style, even with my approach to screenwriting in general.

Ordinarily, once I'm writing a draft, I try to plow through and get to the end as quickly as possible. I thought I was going to do that this time. But then something interesting happened: I didn't. Instead, 30 pages into it I've taken a step back to re-examine everything I've done, solicit feedback, and tinker with it at will. The danger in doing something like this is obvious: I'm writing a script, not a 30-page chunk of a script. The longer I spend messing with that section, the harder it could be to get the other 70-odd pages churned out.

I'm aware of all that, though; and right now, this seems like the way to go. The first act of a script is really incredibly important, and very hard to pull off well. It's setup. It's build-up. It's establishing characters and situations. In other words, it's not very sexy -- and yet it has to be if you want anyone to read it. So maybe it's not so crazy to think about spending more time on this part than on any other section of the script. The first page, the first several pages... they might be skimmed impatiently in hopes of getting to the exciting stuff, but if you write them with that in mind, you've lost the game from the beginning.

Another thing: it's a lot easier to rewrite this way, I'm finding. Rewriting discrete chunks of a 100+ page script can be a nightmare. Okay, I changed that. Does this still make sense? Hmm, it doesn't. Better change it. OK, now that doesn't make sense. Let's see. Skip ahead a little... ooh, just realized this is going to completely screw up that monologue on page 20. And so on. But working on 30 pages in a vacuum removes all those issues. It doesn't matter if what I change here affects stuff later on, because I haven't written any of that yet. I have a plot and a basic outline, but I'm flexible. It's pretty liberating.

We'll see how well this works when I'm done. Have I screwed myself over and killed my momentum? Or will polishing off the perfect first act energize me to crank out a great rest of the script?

Time

Usually, the premise of a movie will dictate -- in broad terms -- what its timeline should be.

CIA gunslinger tracks down nuclear terrorist. Probably not a ten-year saga.

Sweatshop toiler pursues an education and becomes a captain of industry. I don't see that one happening in real time.

But within that general framework, there's practically no limit to the freedom we have to fine-tune the temporal boundaries of a script. The amount of time a story takes to unfold (actual time, not screen time or page count), combined with the way we divide and compress that time to fit the length of our script -- i.e., pacing -- can greatly affect the storytelling tools we have available to us, as well as the way our story is ultimately perceived.

As demonstrated by the first hypothetical logline up top, suspenseful movies tend to demand a shorter timeline -- especially those that rely on the classic "ticking clock" element wherein the hero has a very specific amount of time to accomplish his or her task (find the secret formula, rescue the President's daughter, disarm the bomb, etc.). If the deadline is too long or too loose, the sense of danger will diminish and the audience will tune out. You don't see a lot of stories where the hero faces unspeakable danger, goes home and goes to sleep, then gets up the next morning to face more unspeakable danger. (Cop shows excepted.)

On the other hand, we also need to ensure that the audience makes an emotional investment in our characters; there's no suspense without that important bond. In order for that to happen, we need to let our viewers experience the protagonist's rhythms, rituals, and relationships -- which requires another "r" word: repetition. Showing the same character in the same setting repeatedly can be a valuable tool for making viewers feel like they're truly experiencing the life of that character. It's also a great mechanism for demonstrating change. Every week, Pete practices with his band... but this time we can see that his heart's no longer in it. Or: Peggy goes for her daily jog... but now that she's found true love, there's a spring in her step we've never seen.

But repetition takes time, and time drains suspense. How do we reconcile these apparently conflicting story requirements? For example, what if we want to write a really good, character-driven thriller (like I've been trying to do on and off for over a year now)? One solution is to use a sliding temporal scale. Nearly all movies employ this form in one way or another, but in this case we may want to be more specific and deliberate about it. The opening 10-15 pages could go through a week or more in the lives of the main characters -- setting the scene, building familiarity through repetition. Then we'd zoom in closer as key plot events occur more quickly and pressure on our protagonist to act increases; the remainder of the first act might only be a few days. From the second act onward, the timeline would continue tightening as the action picks up, and by the last 30-40 pages we'd be fully in real-time.

Of course, this is only one way to deal with the building suspense/building character dilemma. Time is on our side when we're writing a script (at least in this one regard!); we can bend it to our will. There are ways to pull off an utterly thrilling and engaging story where Act I takes place in real-time and Act II begins five years later. The Informant!, which I just saw last night, frequently skips a year or more between scenes but never loses its thread of intrigue. No matter which route we take, though, we must pay attention to the ways in which our manipulation of time affects the key elements of our storytelling. It's like sound mixing or color correction: no one notices when it's done well; everyone notices when it isn't.