The Rules of Screenwriting #2

2. Movies are CONFLICT!

You see, it is really the CONFLICT that audiences are paying attention to. This is really important: EVERY SCENE SHOULD CONTAIN MULTIPLE LEVELS OF CONFLICT. The more the merrier. Leave out obvious conflict, and your movie will be boring. Now, conflict does not have to mean super-heightened karate battles, Uzi pounding heavies, bank robberies, car chases, kidnappings, gorenography, or mass murder. I know these are staples of the movies, but good action does not necessarily make good conflict.

Conflict only comes from character and situation, and not from action. Action is best as a reaction to a great conflict of character and situation. What does that mean?

Two people face off at high noon. They both draw their pistols, and shoot. One falls.

Who cares? Yes, that is action, but as a script, that's really boring because all the conflict depends on the action. However, if one of the guys is a good guy trying to save the innocent townspeople from the bad guy, the wicked gunslinger, now we have a conflict which is made of character and situation. When these two get into the situation of facing off at the end of the movie, the action springs from their built up character conflict. This really should be obvious, but it never hurts to go over the obvious. Why? Because movies are obvious!

But remember, conflict that comes from character and situation doesn't necessarily have to lead to action. Action is a standby for movies because movies are a visual medium. However good conflict can be obvious yet subtle and full of surprises, and contain very little action.

Let's take a closer look at THE BREAKFAST CLUB and examine Brian's first line again. He's obviously telling the audience the plot of the movie, but he's telling it in a way that is dripping with conflict. Let's break it down.

BRIAN
Saturday...March 24, 1984. Shermer
High School, Shermer, Illinois.
60062. Dear Mr. Vernon...We accept
the fact that we had to sacrifice a
whole Saturday in detention for
whatever it was that we did wrong.
What we did WAS wrong.

This part of the line sets up a conflict of situation and a conflict of character. The situation conflict is that the characters Brian is speaking for would rather have been anywhere else in the world than in detention on this Saturday. They were stuck there. Then there is a great internal character conflict set up about right versus wrong, and knowing the difference. And there is also a hint of a WE vs. Mr. Vernon conflict, which is about to get a whole lot sharper:

BRIAN (cont.)
But we think
you're crazy to make us write this
essay telling you who we think we
are, what do you care? You see us
as you want to see us...in the
simplest terms and the most
convenient definitions.

This solidifies the WE vs Mr. Vernon character conflict and raises the stakes by refusing to write the essay he ordered. It goes so far as to question his motives, and accuse him of being lazy and unconcerned with how things really are. This is now a direct challenge to Mr. Vernon's authority -- it is the verbal equivalent of stabbing him. Then it gets even more interesting:

BRIAN (cont.)
You see us
as a brain, an athlete, a basket
case, a princess and a criminal.
Correct? That's the way we saw each
other at seven o'clock this morning.
We were brainwashed.

Ah, so the conflict introduced here is that Mr. Vernon (and society as a whole) tends to view these kids as stereotypes. They even view each other this way. But the kids AREN'T stereotypes. The movie is about these kids grappling with that conflict. Now that, as a concept for a movie, naturally leads to little action. I mean, a movie about kids dropping stereotypes probably isn't going to contain lots of bloody karate. Yes, there is some action in THE BREAKFAST CLUB - a wrestling tussle, some running around - but the action springs from the conflict of these very different characters being stuck in the detention situation together on a Saturday.

While this voice-over is telling us the obvious plot of the movie, it is doing so in a way that sets up the primary conflict of the movie. Notice again how this is all done in the first line. Why? Because movies are... well, you know, OBVIOUS.

But it serves a deeper function. Once the audience knows the plot, they can relax and expect the writer to deliver on the conflict she or he promises.

Movies tend to get into trouble when there is no obvious conflict onscreen.

The Rules of Screenwriting #1

I know what you are thinking: "Movies that follow the rules are boring. I'm an artist. I want to make movies that are DIFFERENT."

If you want to be a poet and write a haiku, you must follow the rules. I have read haiku poems that follow all the rules of haiku poetry, but which manage to blow my mind with their quality of artistry and thought. It is the same with movies. If you want to write a movie, learn what one is - learn the rules. That said, all rules are made to be broken. There have been some absolutely fantastic movies that have broken all the rules and succeeded beyond all expectations. Yay for them. But I guarantee that those filmmakers learned the rules first, they knew exactly which rules they were breaking, and most important, they had a very good story-based reason to break them. What is the message here? Learn the rules first, then break them as soon as you have a damn good reason to!

Okay. So what exactly are these "rules" anyway? Well, let's begin here:

1. Movies are obvious!

Number one rule. Movies are obvious. Obvious. Movies are really obvious. Yes, it is annoying, sometimes, how very obvious movies are. Be obvious.

The following is the entire first line of dialogue from THE BREAKFAST CLUB:

BRIAN (VO)
Saturday...March 24, 1984. Shermer
High School, Shermer, Illinois.
60062. Dear Mr. Vernon...We accept
the fact that we had to sacrifice a
whole Saturday in detention for
whatever it was that we did wrong.
What we did WAS wrong. But we think
you're crazy to make us write this
essay telling you who we think we
are, what do you care? You see us
as you want to see us...in the
simplest terms and the most
convenient definitions. You see us
as a brain, an athlete, a basket
case, a princess and a criminal.
Correct? That's the way we saw each
other at seven o'clock this morning.
We were brainwashed.

Before we've even met the characters, before we've seen any of the story, Brian (the brain) TELLS the audience exactly what the movie is, what world it is set in, who all the characters are, why they are there, and exactly what the ending is. All in the first line. He's telling us that these five different stereotyped kids are all going to spend the day in detention together, against their will, and by the end of the day, they will have learned right and wrong, dropped their stereotypical views of each other, and focused their collective angst on a mutual enemy - Mr. Vernon. The screenwriter is making it completely OBVIOUS to the audience exactly what movie they are seeing, so how do the filmmakers get away with it? Why don't we audience members walk out of the theater, eject the DVD, or change the channel after the first line? We might as well stop watching now because we know how the movie ends, right? Ah... but the pleasure the audience receives from the story is not in finding out WHAT is going to happen, but HOW it is going to happen.

Did anybody go to see WHEN HARRY MET SALLY for the surprise twist ending where she clubs him to death with the karaoke machine? No. People know Harry and Sally are going to end up together happily ever after. That's OBVIOUS from the poster! If she had clubbed him to death, the movie wouldn't have delivered what was promised by the poster, and audiences would have rejected it. Similarly, did anyone go to the movie expecting Titanic to arrive in New York? No. They went to see HOW the characters deal with the fact that the ship sinks.

In the first minutes of the movie AMERICAN BEAUTY, the main character tells the audience that he will be dead within a year. Right off the bat, the audience knows the ending of the movie, but that bit of obviousness is a great thing. Why? To the audience, that character looks young and healthy. Since he's he's not likely to die of a heart attack, now the audience is wondering HOW it will happen that he will die, and they're willing to sit through more of the film to find out.

Even THE SIXTH SENSE is completely obvious. In the second scene of the movie, the main character is shot and killed in front of our eyes. Then, he spends the rest of the movie hanging out with a kid who sees dead people. Hello? The reason the movie worked so well is that audiences are willing to turn their brains off as to the obvious nature of movies as soon as they go into the darkened theater. They're willing to let completely obvious things take them by surprise. However, if you don't feed your audience a steady supply of OBVIOUS, you will quickly lose them.

Chekov apparently said "If a gun is on the mantle in the first act, it must go off in the third." He was right, but Checkov was writing about play-writing. His technique is not obvious enough for a movie. If it's a movie, that gun is in CLOSE-UP in the first act. Somebody must be doing something with the gun while talking about it. Then, it can go off in the third act. In fact, since it's a movie, that gun is likely to go off in the first five minutes. Did I mention that movies are obvious?

All that said, the very best movies manage to be obvious while also being subtle and full of surprises.

Average movies are just plain obvious.

The very worst movies are neither subtle nor obvious.

First post!

Welcome to my new blog about screenplay structure.  Why am I doing this?

Every year since the digital filmmaking revolution began, cameras have gotten better and cheaper.  Non-linear editing systems, once exotic creatures, now come bundled with operating systems.  Computer graphics and desktop compositing now allow just about anybody to create a stunning epic movie.  The internet now allows filmmakers to completely bypass traditional media distribution and advertising bottlenecks.  Hollywood, by all accounts, should be dead. 

However, in that same time frame, there has been no similar technological advance in writing a screenplay.  As good as Final Draft (or other designated screenwriting software) may be, it doesn't profoundly cut the amount of time it takes to write a good script.  Why?  Because good writing is actually re-writing, or re-thinking and re-seeing your script.  Writing a good script is essentially just as hard today as it was ten years ago and fifty years ago.

With the proliferation of cheap HD cameras, more movies are being made than at any time perhaps since the golden age of cinema.  But most of these digital movies are at a significant disadvantage in the story department.  With digital production and post-production so (relatively) quick and easy now, digital filmmakers have a tendency to write and shoot the first thing that pops into the head.  This might mean that fresher stories will inevitably make it to the screen.  But it also might mean that new movies will get worse and worse.  Why?  Because screenplays have rules that help make stories good, and a lot of new filmmakers tend to ignore this basic fact.  

Hollywood still has the advantage of knowing the rules.   This blog is about the rules of screenwriting.  Don't think of them as Hollywood's rules.  Think of them as deeply human rules of refined storytelling on which Hollywood has been profiteering for nearly a century.  

I know a lot of good screenwriting books out there, and I know a lot of film schools that will be happy to take your money for pointing out the obvious.  But let's do it for free instead, and let's do it in blog form.

Next post...  The rules.