Scripts Needs an Audience

*cross-posted with Broadhumor.blogspot.com

Today, I'm thinking about the difference between playwrights and screenwriters, and in particular what screenwriters can learn from their theater counterparts.  It's a jumble, so this may or may not coalesce into lucid ideas.  I'll give it a go.

Playwrights exercise absolute control over material, screenwriters do not.  Part of the reason is that the playwright controls timing while in movies, the director and editor control timing. If you write comedy, timing can make or break a  laugh, but drama is also about the building and delivering of emotionally triggering moments. Screenplays just are not as complete as play scripts. Screenwriters don't know if their story works so long as it is only on the page, which makes it hard to grow and get better. 

Playwrights also can't know from the page either if their play works as theater, only if it works as literature the way Shakespeare does. Text on the page doesn't tell you if a joke will work as dialogue.  Reading Moliere, I don't laugh. Yet almost any production of Moliere delivers one belly laugh after another.  Playwrights have opportunities to get a read from real audiences on their work at every stage of their development. They get plays produced by small theaters and hear their words come out of the mouths of various performers. They cannot blame the director or actors if the same scene falls flat in two different productions. They learn how to write scenes that actors can act and that audiences will respond to.  Staged readings will draw an audience and allow playwrights to test their work in a theater with live actors.  But readings of scripts are not the same as readings of plays because the screen is not a stage.  What is a screenwriter to do?

The Seven-Minute Itch

*cross-posted with broadhumor.blogspot.com

I want to take a minute to talk about the 7-Minute Itch. After 8 years of looking at hundreds of short films for the Broad Humor Film Festival, films that started well but then sagged and died despite all the good work that went into them, I think many of the failures of comedy are in the structure of the overall script. In a short film, somewhere around 7 minutes, the story needs to take a turn. A big turn, to change the game entirely for the audience. It doesn't have to be a Hollywood change where the stakes for the main character suddenly escalate, thought it can. It could be any turn that wakes up the viewer lulled into "knowing" what the film was about and ready for it to be done. Curiosity is aroused. Instead of being ready for it to end, I want to see where it goes from there, at least for another 7 minutes. Then wrap it up. Or take yet another turn, a different turn, and then I'll be with you to the end of your half-hour. (Stories over a half-hour long need even more in terms of story, with almost as much depth as a feature, and they have a very hard time finding a home in film festivals.)

CAVEAT: When you hear 7 minutes, do not think of a stopwatch. Think of a cigarette. Cigarettes burn at different speeds depending on how much and how often you puff on them, but if a cigarette stays lit, it has a maximum span before it fizzles and goes out. If you want to keep smoking, you have to light another. A completely new cigarette. Likewise, your story after your 7-minute turn, should feel like a new movie. You can stretch it a bit if you are bringing your film to a bang-up finish. However, if you add another five minutes of interesting complications in the same vein as the rest, it causes a kind of despair: I'm tired of this. Let me go! You may love the charm of the moment, but if I feel the mental and emotional equivalent of an attack of claustrophobia, your charming scene becomes torture to me, no matter how well done.

 EXCEPTION: If you are making a film that is more experimental, an artistic deconstruction of comedy, or a recursive philosophical parody (we had a French film like that the first year that was 26 minutes) all bets are off. But a discussion of comedy and aesthetics has to be for another day.

The 3-Fold Path to Writing

When the left brain writes without the right brain, the result has no value.  Nothing new gets said.  When the right brain writes without the left brain, the result has no value.  It is too disorganized to say anything intelligible to the reader.  You need both.  Unfortunately, neither side likes working with the other.  That is where YOU come in. 

You must be the horizon that both connects and separates the two.

Psychology has talked about this trinity. So have some religions.  They give it different names.  Freud called it id, superego, and ego.  The id is impulsive and childish, full of life energy but no control.  The superego is all about control, and following rules, but has no humor, no compassion, no creativity.  The ego is the self that negotiates the world, reining in the id without crushing it and softening the superego while honoring its sense of duty. 

I like the image on the Tarot card called The Chariot.  The most common image shows a person standing in a chariot pulled by two sphinxes (sometimes they are horses): one black and one white.  The charioteer holds the reins loosely if at all.  Whether the two beasts are resting or running, they are perfectly balanced. 

How does this work in writing?  The left brain likes things to be tidy, to be the same every time.  This allows it to process information faster and faster, and it feels very pleased with itself. Anything unexpected or unusual confuses it. It doesn’t like to wait until the creative right brain can figure things out.  So the left brain will want you skip over any idea or demand that would need input from the right.  It does this by writing the first thing that comes to mind and moving on as quickly as possible.  The result is boring and the reader’s right brain stays asleep. It the left brain then becomes stuck and can’t think of what to write, it yells over to the right brain for help, but gets no answer.  Why would the creative genius that is the right brain care to help the disrespectful bullying of an unappreciative left brain? The left brain, getting no answer, swears the right brain is lazy and finishes the writing however it can just to get it done.  Then, when the result is weak, it says, “I can’t write” and it has a tidy excuse for its bad performance.

And that statement is true.  The left brain can’t write.  Nor can the right brain. Only YOU can write. And it is you who must remember that when the right brain is asleep, it is not lazy.  It is Snow White and the poison apple is boredom.  To wake it up, you must be more than the mirror of your two brains: the jealous queen and the innocent child.  You must become the king, who is missing from this fairy tale.  The absent king allows the mischief to happen.

The king’s job, like that of the charioteer in the tarot card,  is to guide his people onto the right path.  To pull the load evenly.

Start with the Baby Not the Birth

*cross-posted with broadhumor.blogspot.com

I was talking to a filmmaker, a good one, about beginnings. I was trying to figure out a way to convince her to consider cutting the top of her film, but she loved it and so did her circle of beloveds. So I used the movie-as-baby analogy and took it a step further. Your movie may be an amazing baby, but if you introduce me to it by showing me the delivery or, God forbid, the act of conception, I am so outta there you have to work doubly hard to capture my heart. TMI, folks, too much information.

Seeing act of birth can be beautiful and amazing to family. The lovemaking that leads to conception is also beautiful, but not really something I want to watch if I'm not one of the parties in bed - and even then, probably not. Keep all that in your heart, and possibly in the extra value content on the DVD, but take it out of the film. Show me the shining, luminous new being already washed and swaddled in its blanket. All that other stuff you are so sure needs to be in there so I know what's happening probably is covered again later. And even if it's not, I can figure stuff out. I know where babies come from. I know that you had to do the deed and nine months later push it out. Not necessary to explain. Start with the baby, not the birth.