Screenwriting

The following is something I wrote concerning theme in story. It might be of interest...

INT. A ROOM SOMEWHERE – DAY

PAUL SCHRADER sits across a table from RICHARD THOMPSON, a writer from Film Comment magazine. Schrader is in the midst of describing a memory:

               SCHRADER

     I got hit with two other blows

     to the body at the same time: my

     marriage fell through, and the

     affair that caused the marriage

     to fall through fell through, all

     within the same four or five months.

     I fell into a state of manic de-

     pression. I was living with someone

     at that time, and she got so fed up

     with me that she split. I was stay-

     ing in her apartment waiting for

     the cupboard to run out of food. I

     got to wandering around at night;

     I couldn’t sleep because I was so

     depressed. I’d stay in bed till four

     or five P.M. then I’d say, “Well, I

     can get a drink now.” I’d get up and

     get a drink and take the bottle with

     me and start wandering around the

     streets in my car at night. After

     the bars closed, I’d go to pornogra-

     phy. I’d do this all night, till mor-

     ning, and I did it for about three or

     four weeks, a very destructive syn-

     drome, until I was saved from it by

     an ulcer: I had not been eating,

     just drinking. When I got out of the

     hospital I realized I had to change

     my life because I would die and every-

     thing; I decided to leave L.A. That

     was when the metaphor hit me for

     Taxi Driver, and I realized that was

     the metaphor I had been looking for:

     the man who will take anybody any

     place for money; the man who moves

     through the city like a rat through

     the sewer; the man who is constantly

     surrounded by people, yet has no

     friends. The absolute symbol of urban

     loneliness. That’s the thing I’d been

     living; that was my symbol, my meta-

     phor. The film is about a car as the

     symbol of urban loneliness, a metal

     coffin. I wrote the script very

     quickly, in something like fifteen

     days. The script just jumped from my

     mind almost intact. As soon as I fi-

     nished writing – I wrote it for no

     commercial reason, just because I saw

     that was the need – I gave it to my

     agent and I left L. A.; I didn’t come

     back for half a year, just bummed

     around the country. It took that long

     before I was ready to come back and

     face the problems here.

    ---Richard Thompson, FILM COMMENT, March-April, 1976

As a writer, one aspect of the craft has always troubled me: the concept of theme. Back in high school the teachers loved to ask us what the theme of this or that was that we were reading. I could never pin it down. ROMEO & JULIET… was it unrequited love? No, that was CYRANO DE BERGERAC. What was the theme of MACBETH? HAMLET? I didn’t know. I read them, but I just couldn’t pull it out.

Later, when I began to write at a professional level, when I studied books on writing, they always talked about developing your theme, knowing it in advance, staying true to it, and most important of all, your story HAD to have one!

I dreaded conversations where others might ask me what the theme of this or that was from among my stories. I wouldn’t be able to tell them. I’d look like a fool, a pretender, who really didn’t understand writing at all.

So, long ago, I read another interview with Paul Schrader, the writer of TAXI DRIVER, who later went on to direct many of his own scripts. Something he said started me on the path to understanding theme:

"I think there are three steps to writing a script. First, you have to have a theme, something you want to say. It doesn’t have to be a particularly great thing, but you have to have something that’s bothering you. In the case of TAXI DRIVER, the theme was loneliness. Then you find a metaphor for that theme, one that expresses it. In TAXI DRIVER, that was the cabbie, the perfect expression of urban loneliness. Then you have to find a plot, which is the easiest part of the process. All plots have been done; they’re fairly easy, you just work through all the permutations until the plot accurately reflects the theme and the metaphor."

And, wait for it... 

"You push the theme through the metaphor and you should come out with the plot."

---PAUL SCHRADER: THE HOLLYWOOD INTERVIEW, by Alex Simon

So I examined my stories and I tried to see if I had done that. Did I have a theme that I had “pushed through a metaphor” to get me to the plot? Sometimes, yes. But no, I couldn’t find it in every case. Theme was still dogging me.

Years passed.

Then I saw a BAFTA Seminar Schrader gave that was viewable on YouTube. It was a lecture on Schrader’s screenwriting process. Now this was long after that interview he had done. But in it, he again brought up the metaphor and plot process he used. But here, he started, not with the theme, but with, what he termed, “a problem”. And yet, as he progressed he was describing the very same method he had used in the interview when conceiving TAXI DRIVER. But now, his theme of loneliness had become his “problem” of loneliness. 

So he pushed his problem of loneliness though his metaphor of a cabbie, and out came his plot for TAXI DRIVER.

Now I understood. 

The theme is the problem of the story. Not the “who-dun-it” of the mystery plot, for example, but the “why-do-it” of the protagonist: the dilemma within the central character that is driving her/his/its contention with the story problem of the plot. If you can get at the deep reason for why your protagonist is doing what he or she does what they do in the story, what they want, what they need, something they may not even know themselves, you will identify your story’s theme. 

And suddenly, clear as day, I saw the themes in my stories.

So, my theme in the process of this little saga I’ve just recounted, is, of course, the problem I had in understanding… theme! A Moebius Strip inside a Klein Bottle within a castle designed by M.C. Escher!

So, yeah… the theme is the problem. It has always been. 

FADE OUT

This is the first time this has happened to me cause usually I struggle to find a good story to write, but lately I have SO many fantastic script ideas I don't know what to do. It started with a short film script I was writing for a competition and then somewhere in the middle of it I was like "I have an idea for a web series show" so I worked in great detail on the ideas for the web series script while I was still in the middle of writing that short film script.

And then I was gonna finish off the short film script and start actually writing the web series pilot. BUT THEN I was having a random conversation with my friend and I was like "I have another fantastic idea for ANOTHER web series script but the problem is both of my web script ideas are so good and now have so many details planned out for episodes, seasons, and how I want them to start and end. I have 3 major projects I'm working on.

BUT THEN IT KEEPS GOING. I woke up today on Christmas and I was like I want to write a Christmas full length film. I spend half of this day working on all the details and the idea is so solid I don't want to abandon it. So now I have this problem of I'm still trying to finish this short film script and now I want to start writing TWO separate web series scripts as well as a full CHRISTMAS MOVIE! I'm worried about accidentally not focusing fully on each project before finishing but it just happened this way. I had all these ideas come to me until I worked hard on all the details. I have multiple seasons already planned out for both web series shows and the entire movie planned out for the Christmas film. So it's not like I have vague ideas written down and won't start any of them

I’m relatively new to using stage32 and would love if someone can read my loglines and give me some feed back or at the minimum a rating. Also any tips to how to maximize my stage32 experience.

Someone asked me how professional screenwriters write outlines. I replied:

Writers write. Whatever way it works for them. When you start out, you're looking for the process. And over time you find out the only process is your process.

There are writers whose outlines are nearly as long as the finished piece. There are others who just write it, no outline. Paul Schrader makes a scene list, maybe 30 to 50 items. Then he tells the story to people and watches their reactions. The story grows until it's maybe 45 minutes long. Then he knows it can work.

The stereotypical screenplay outline is an almost skeletal, present tense, short story-styled telling of the movie. As flesh is added, and it begins to talk, it becomes a treatment, then a screenplay.

When I set out to write my first original screenplay—I had written adaptations and short scripts before that—I was sufficiently unsure of myself that I needed to see the whole story somehow complete on a single page. I had studied the form and decided to do it like this: I turned the paper horizontally, and at top left, I drew a line about one third across to the right. Then, writing as small as I could, I wrote tiny narrow columns of sequences of scenes, side by side hanging below the line from left to right and down about one third of the page. That was act 1. Then, just below those, I drew another line from left to right indented a little from the left, and ending a little before the right edge. I hung tiny scenes from that line down about another third of the sheet. That was act 2. Finally, i drew a third line below those, across from left to right starting two thirds of the way in from left, and hung more tiny columns of scenes from it. Act 3. I extended the line with a little arrow from act 1 pointing down and back left toward the act 2 line, and did the same for act 2 to 3. It went across the top, zigged down and back, went across further to the right, zigged down and back again, and then across to rhe left all the way right. In that way, I had the whole movie before me, and it looked like a progression from top left to bottom right. That gave me the confidence to script it. I laugh at it now, but I needed to believe, and this enabled me to do that.

My current approach is this: I make a few notes. I add scenes as they occur to me. Some dialogue appears. More scenes. Pretty soon it's 20 pages. I set it aside. After a while, a few more ideas occur. It gets longer. More dialogue. More scenes. I set it aside. I think about it. Steam gathers. I wait.

When I can no longer resist, I begin reformatting the outline that has now progressed to a treatment, into a screenplay.

An outline is a moving target. It should be messy, full of margin notes, arrows running from page three to pages five and one. It should seem unbalanced, distorted. It shouldn't work yet. That's when you know you're onto something, because you already see the story in your head before you can tell it.

So accept your own approach, your method. It will change as you grow as a writer. This is normal.

Happy Holidays everyone!

This is from an article I wrote a long time ago:

Story structure has become a riddle. We have bona fide experts, people with solid credentials, telling us story structure is critical. Many argue that story structure comes in 1 or 3 or 4 or 5 or 7 or even 9 acts! Others proclaim story structure to be a myth.

Set-Up: Blind Man’s Bluff…

They say that we shouldn’t care about the structure in our stories. New writers go from expert to expert, book to book, screenwriting boot-camp to guru seminar, never getting to a truth they can use. The answer eludes them.

So what is going on? Who is right? The answer, I will show, is everyone. Everyone is right. And, no one. No one is right. First, structure is a riddle, now it’s a paradox. Or, maybe not.

In the modern age, Hollywood story analyst Syd Field identified, and, in a series of books, laid the ground-work for a structural model of screen stories. Field referred to it as a “paradigm,” three connected parts, proportioned approximately in a 25/50/25% relationship. Borrowing from the first wave of screenwriters (who, in turn, had borrowed from classic drama and Aristotle), he called them “acts,” functioning in the story as “set-up, confrontation, and resolution.” He numbered these acts 1, 2, and 3, and he separated them with “plot points,” 1 and 2. He said that they were story events on which the story pivots as it plunges forward into each successive act. Later, he identified a “mid-point” that had the effect of amplifying the story’s momentum toward resolution. He found all movies had this arrangement. And he saw that it was good.

But then, others saw movies that didn’t seem to fit. The acts proportioned differently, and worse, sometimes there seemed to be more than three of them. Some among the new experts identified a transformational “character arc” for the protagonist that, they said, was utterly necessary for a successful story. Then others found successful stories with non-transforming protagonists. What was this thing called story structure, anyway?

New “paradigms” were developed. Some looked to classic music, some to classic myth. Others found eight or even more components. Many theorists built flocks of followers who, in turn, duly considered any theory but theirs heretical. The world was thrown into chaos. Screenwriting anarchy ruled. Syd Field’s books were proclaimed EVIL!

There is a classic book, Flatland, by Edwin A. Abbot, published in 1880, that tells the story of a two-dimensional being, a square, living in a two-dimensional world, who discovers he actually inhabits three dimensions, and that he is really a cube. It has a profound effect on his understanding of his world and his view of his own potential. It is required reading for many math and physics students.

Screenwriters, take heed: many of you are flatlanders. But know that you and your stories live in a multi-dimensional, multi-level world.

One is reminded of the story of the blind men all describing an elephant by feeling parts within their reach. One describes the trunk, a different fellow the ear, and another the tail. None can get it truly right. If there was a way to take the best of each description of the “story structure elephant,” what might it be?

As it happens, there is a way of looking at structure which allows this…

You’ve got to bear with me here. Computer networks are designed according to topologies: notions of the layout of the computers on the network in relation to one another.

Confrontation: On The Levels…

Networks are said to have topologies which are both physical and logical.

Yet computers are connected by wires and components which channel the wires in occasionally deceptive or unexpected ways.

The physical corresponds to the layout as it looks, while the logical is the layout as it functions on the wire.

A network can look like a ring, but function like a star, for example, where a managing source point on the ring interacts (to and from) with each of the other managed “end-points” on the ring. If one were to draw it, the source (or central) point would be, not as it is, on the ring itself, but as it seems to work, in the center, with “to” and “from” lines to each point surrounding it, like a star.

In essence:

--The physical is important and necessary due to the environment in which the network must function, the what and how of it.

--The logical is the topology which matters for the reason it exists at all, the why of it.

The physical is concerned with the carrying of the data or meaning, and the logical, is concerned with what is carried, that “meaning” to which we refer.

The parallel of computer network topologies to screenplay story structure is startling:

A level to “carry,” the physical network: in story structure, what happens, the plot.

A level for that which is carried, the data: in story structure, what the story means for the protagonist.

(And there are sometimes at least 8 protagonist-transforming sub-logical levels below that that I have identified: The Sub-Textual Level, the Symbolic Level, the Image Level, the Aural Level, the Montage Level, the Performance Level, the Environmental Level, and the Presentation Level. Most of these only operate in the great films.) 

It is effectively a multi-dimensional model, with the hardware effectively living in the 1st and 2nd dimensions, and the software living in the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th (time) dimensions. One can adequately describe the hardware portion of the network, how it works, in only two dimensions. But to understand why it works, one must add two more dimensions: depth, to separate it from the second dimension—for quantity of data or meaning; and time, to extend the first three dimensions and allow for changing or evolving data or meaning.

Other analogies work equally well. Fashion, for example: Story can wear a jumpsuit (no act/1 act), slacks and a shirt (2 act), a three-piece suit (3 act), or, like Diane Keaton in Annie Hall, a free-form, layered/accessoried look (4 – 9 act and beyond), but, deep down inside, it still needs to be a single, unified, transforming story. Even super-models can be complex. But skeletons all look pretty much the same, after the clothes and the skin are removed; just as do the three acts: set-up, confrontation, and resolution. However, inside the bones, the DNA, the individuality, the meaning, tells a different story, and each skeleton is unique.

Stories are not just endless series of connected events in infinite variety, amounting, nonetheless, to a mere chronicle of how things happened. They need to matter. Therefore, they must also be about why things happened. A story may unfold in the arctic with the Inuit, in an igloo; it may arise in South Africa, in a kraal; it may transpire in Buckingham Palace, itself. Or it may happen in all three. It may tell the tale of MY DINNER WITH ANDRÉ, in what might be seen as a single act, or it may tell the story of FOUR WEDDINGS AND A FUNERAL (which some schizoid analyses have trouble reconciling whether there are three or five acts). And yet, still, in both of the examples above, one can also uncover a meaning structure composed of three discrete parts (or acts).

So these two parallel descriptions, these two structures, both valid, both encompassing the whole, can only co-exist if on separate planes. This is the multi-level model, and it (and only it) can account for the length and breadth of story in all its “infinite" variety.

The physical structure of screenplays does “the carrying” up on the surface or plot level in any grouping of components which the writer deems necessary and which allows the story to succeed.

The logical structure of screenplays, on the other hand, succeeds at a level below the surface, and is always and only in three parts, where the meaning is found.

The logical level, the level of meaning, is below the physical or plot level because the meaning is, when done serviceably, not obvious. In fact, when done well, it is sub-rosa, hidden, and must be divined or inferred from the events of the plot.

Resolution: the "Why" of a Screenwriting Theory of Everything

Why is this? The answer is, because it’s true to life. Life rarely offers answers. And when it does they are concealed among questions and the struggles of living. When meaning is concealed, infinite meaning can be derived.

Infinite? Effectively, yes, because the meaning comes not from the story, but from the viewer, all the viewers. Greater and different meaning, even opposing meaning from the same viewers over the course of their lives. In truth, there is no meaning in the story, only "encoding" that is "de-coded" and then interpreted, by each viewer in each viewing based on the experience of their own lives. That is why writers, are often able to find surprising new meaning in their own stories.

So, how is the story’s meaning on that deeper level, the logic level, conveyed? Answer: through the experience of the protagonist. The protagonist either alters, transforms, as the result of the events of the story, or he/she/it/them fails to transform, despite the need for it. In that case, the meaning still transforms. It transforms where it always has, where the meaning of the tale really ever exists, within the audience. So there is a transformation of meaning, and it is articulated in the three parts, the three “acts,” wherein a protagonist encounters a dilemma (1), chooses to confront it (2), and ultimately either succeeds or fails to resolve it (3). In reality that protagonist is us, the audience, for that is where the meaning derives.

On the logical level the parts are always in threes. That is the simplest configuration from which to fully convey meaning. It is also the essential structure found throughout human reasoning: the logic syllogism, the dialectic, jokes, all of them work in threes. Anything more is superfluous, anything less, like "Cool Hand Luke" to the "Boss," risks failure to communicate. And that leaves room for the writer to, up on the physical level, create a plot in any configuration, any numbering of parts, he/she chooses. Provided it works for its audience.

The value of the multi-level model of story structure is (what else?) three-fold:

--It offers writers the ability for quick analysis of both existing stories (for study) and their own story ideas (for analysis).

--It offers the potential for audience illumination and growth.

--It more readily assures an entertaining and satisfying story experience.

Make no mistake, the physical and logical structures are always both present in serviceable works. Sometimes the logical exactly corresponds with the physical. Other times the two co-exist in separate configurations, on their own levels, and with little or no correlation between them.

The way to test the notion that a story’s structure is tied to the protagonist is to pick a successful story, ask oneself whose story it is, and chart the arc of transformation which that protagonist, either undergoes, or fails to undergo despite the need for it. “Whose story is it?” This is the most important question to ask in determining a story’s structure.

For all of this, an awareness of structure is good only to writers. As long as it works, audiences don’t care. To be sure, audiences would rather not know the structure of a beloved story, because it takes away the magic created by the piece and kills it. So, structure is for writers. It is useful, as we’ve pointed out, for conception, for efficiency, and later as the story is written, for unity, and for focus.

For audiences, then, it is valuable to the extent it works to yield its magical results. It is important not just to help writers work their way through huge blocks of narrative plot-line. It is valuable because it explains its subject to its creators. And, thanks to such functioning on the deeper level of meaning, it helps audiences in understanding their own lives.

So, both surface, physical-level structure, and deeper, logical-level structure are useful. One helps writers find a way to tell the story, and the other helps writers find a way to tell the truth.

I cover structure in much greater depth in two books: LATERAL SCREENWRITING - Using the Power of Lateral Thinking to Write Great Movies, and THE LAST REVEAL - Movies, Screenwriting, and the Decline of Western Cinemazation.

I've been working at a written pitch for my first drama. There have been no requests yet, but the feedback has been very positive and encouraging. The two producers both commented that they felt they would like more details on the "action" of the story and how it all comes together. I had originally included the character arcs and how they all pay off and am trying to come up with a better way to explain it. In the most recent version I tried dividing them up and describe the character arcs in one point and how it all comes together in another, but it just keeps feeling repetitive.

The advantages the producers like is it's a relatively small cast of characters, all university students, happens in a single day, and during the final performance of a play so there's plenty of drama happening on and off stage,

Anyone have any experience at pitching the drama and the best way to describe it?

Hello, I was wondering if anyone had a promo code for the Feature Comedy Screenplay Competition? Please DM me. Thanks!