mimitabu writes:

"Do [romantic comedies] usually have a protagonist? what does s/he usually want? "Get back into a family"? "Find happiness"? "Get over my ex"? "Become a better person so i can be a better father/mother"? Then i thought about the best romantic comedy, Annie Hall. i thiiiink you once wrote here that it has brilliant script, but i don't believe you've ever posted an in-depth analysis of it. Does it have a protagonist? Is it Alvy? What does he want? "To get the eggs"? Is he just living out some sort of narcissistic pathology? Are there rules that Annie Hall follows that other successful romantic comedies also follow? If so, do they do away with the idea of a protagonist altogether?

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What would you say are the top three pitfalls of pitching? Like, what are some rookie mistakes; what should come out of a successful pitch meeting; what are some things that you should never, never do? --pirateman

So in that situation [where some stranger walks in and ruins your pitch] do you just run with it and incorporate it or argue for your original point? --johnnycrulez

If you've been reading this journal for very long, you know that I'm the last guy you should ask for advice about pitching.

I hate pitching with a passionate, burning intensity. Partly because it's a degrading, humiliating experience antithetical to good writing, and partly because I suck at it.

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Can we see a break-down of the concepts behind the Multiple Acts school of writing? I've had the idea of three acts only shoved down my throat for years and it feels wrong to try to shoehorn a story into this particular artificial construct. Is there some magic number of acts, or do you just need to make sure your story has a beginning and an ending of some sort and build from there or something else entirely? -- quitwriting

Completely agreed. I don't fully understand what makes one act disparate from the next. -- erranthope

I'd be interested to see this as well. -- stormwyvern

I currently define an act as when the status quo changes into something else, and those changes are irreversible...How many acts, though? My answer right now is "however many you need to tell the story". -- Kent M. Beeson

Let me answer this the best way I know, by telling a story:

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55seddel writes: "Will you speak to why [The Dark Knight] is a melodrama and not a tragedy?"

A melodrama is a drama where "good" and "bad" are easily distinguished (the name comes from how, when the original melodramas were staged, the band played a cue so that the audience would know who was good and who was bad), events are fantastical and emotions are heightened well beyond real life. The Dark Knight fits all those descriptions quite well -- the good are good, the bad literally walk around with big distinguishing marks on them, the action is unrealistic (although grounded in a well-realized "reality") and the emotions -- both on screen and in the audience -- are greatly heightened. One of the acts even climaxes with a damsel tied to a big friggin' bomb as the hero races to her rescue. In a traditional Victorian melodrama, the damsel is tied to the railroad tracks and the hero is the Mountie who always gets there in time. The Dark Knight plays this scenario out almost to a T -- except that its hero races to the wrong address and the damsel gets vaporized.

A tragedy is, simply put, a story where the protagonist, trying to do good, causes his own downfall. Hamlet thinks identifying and killing his father's murderer will set everything straight in Denmark, and instead he winds up getting everyone killed and losing the kingdom to an invading horde. And The Dark Knight certainly contains elements of tragedy, no doubt about it. One could find parallels to Bruce Wayne in Timon of Athens or Titus Andronicus, great leaders who boldly step forward to improve the life of their city, only to find in the end they've made everything much, much worse. And, like Oedipus, Bruce Wayne seeks to discover the source of the plague on his city, only to find that it is himself.

But to call The Dark Knight a tragedy is to overlook all the other things it does so well -- it's a great superhero movie (a genre melodramatic by nature), a great thriller, a great crime drama, and a not-bad detective movie. It is all those things on a very sophisticated level, so much so that it doesn't quite have the time to develop a true air of tragedy. Better to appreciate it for what it is -- an exceptionally intelligent, incredibly dense, impeccably crafted action thriller that smartly addresses its audience in a way its genre never has before, and raises the "comic book movie" to an entirely new level of excellence.

(Many thanks to faithful reader The Editor.)

all stills swiped from film_stills .

berkeley314567 asks:

"I wonder if you're more interested in the structure than the actual content of the script?"

In a screenplay, there is no difference between structure and content, "actual" or otherwise. A screenplay is a collection of scenes devised in a certain way placed in a certain order to achieve a desired dramatic effect. In the same way that "character" is nothing but habitual action, the "actual content" of a screenplay is nothing but the scenes that fill its pages and the order in which they're placed. To say "I like the screenplay's structure but I don't like its content" is to say "I like that guy but I don't like the things he does."

David Mamet once said that the only question in an audience's head during a movie should be "What happens next?" The screenwriter's job is to keep the audience interested in the story. When the screenwriter does his job well, the audience gets sucked into the story and experiences the thrill of drama. When he does his job very well, the thrill of the experience is so powerful that the audience comes back again and again, even though they know how the story turns out. Spectacle may amaze and movie stars may charm, but if the screenwriter has not done his job well, the movie will still turn out bad and the audience will stay home. The Dark Knight engages the audience on a level unseen in movies lately, and does so while employing a number of bold innovations, which I will discuss as we move forward.

( Read more...spoiler alert )

noskilz writes:

"Do you think the rapid turnaround from theater to dvd is a problem? One of my friends refers to theatrical releases as "trailers for the dvd" and I usually don't worry about catching a film at the theater unless it's the sort of thing likely to benefit from a gigantic screen and sound system."

I think the rapid turnaround from theater to DVD is a problem -- but apparently not for the corporations that own the movie studios.

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samedietc asks:

"Do you have a theory/working principle about adaptations?"

Funny you should ask; I've recently reversed myself somewhat on the subject of adaptations. I used to feel that producers were willfully obtuse, that they labor diligently to purchase the rights to popular works and then, for no good reason, fundamentally change the nature of the piece out of sheer ego or sheer perversity. I felt that, if you're going to go to the trouble of purchasing the rights to a book or play or comic or video game or bumper sticker or whatever you've spent your hard-earned money on, you might as well stay as true as possible to the source material -- I felt that there had to be a reason why the original is popular, and the movie had to address that or else it would fail.

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With regards to yesterday's animated discussion of prologues:

I was in my local video store the other day. I found a copy of Oliver Stone's 2004 bio-pic Alexander for $3. My wife is a sucker for ancient Greek history and I'm a sucker for biographical drama and I said "that's my price!" and snapped it up. I took it home, put it in the machine, and what do you know? It starts with an elaborate prologue! About the history of ancient Greece!

My son Sam (6) is a natural-born movie buff, and that is a good thing. His younger sister, Kit (5), not so much. Sam wants to know how movies are made, how effects (both narrative and special) are achieved, how "they get it to look that way." Kit is attracted to characters.

I've tried to carefully manage my kids' exposure to movies, not so much to keep them ignorant of subversive material but to present a canon: Star Wars movies are good, Barbie movies are not. Justice League is good, The Wiggles is not. Pixar is exceptionally good, other studios require a more project-by-project assessment. The purposed end result of this cultural editing is that, when they become old enough to choose their own entertainment, they will be able to recognize quality over crap. I also want them to have an understanding of movie history and be able to appreciate older movies (like, you know, Raiders of the Lost Ark).

It is 1995 and I have purchased my first PC.

A friend of mine tells me about this game Doom that is the wildest, scariest, freakiest, most addictive thing he has ever encountered. I happen across a free shareware version of the game at Staples and think "What the heck, I'll try it."

The next 24 hours or so are a blur. I'm aware afterward that my arms hurt from working the keys so frantically for such an extended period of time, but otherwise it's just me and the game.

juozasg  writes:

"I love reading your blog, Mr. Todd Alcott, and learning about storytelling for the sake of increasing my enjoyment of movies. But I get pretty lost when you start talking about beats. Beats are probably a very obvious concept for writers, like but could you please explain for media consumers like myself what beats are and how to identify them in a story."

Beats are simply self-contained sections of a narrative, like steps rising up a flight of stairs. The narrative climbs up these beats until it reaches the landing, and that's the act climax.

You don't call them scenes because a beat can be made up of many scenes, and sometimes there can be more than one beat in a scene. They're like sequences, but "sequence" generally refers to the finished filmic product, not to the script itself and usually refers to a larger narrative concept.

"Daniel Plainview mines for silver" would be a "beat" from the first act of There Will Be Blood. That "beat" is made up of several "scenes": Plainview hacks at the walls of his mine, Plainview crouches by the fire, Plainview sets a dynamite charge, Plainview hoists his materials up from the mine as the dynamite goes off, Plainview falls in the hole, Plainview wakes up in pain, Plainview examines the rocks around him, finds silver. Those are all scenes, serving the beat "Daniel Plainview mines for silver."

Now then: scenes are also made up of beats. The opening beat of Jaws, "Chrissie Watkins gets eaten by a shark," is made up of several scenes, and those scenes are made up of beats. The very first scene, "Kids around the campfire," has three beats: kids play guitars and smoke pot, one of the boys smiles at Chrissie, Chrissie gets up and runs away, and the boy follows. The following scene, "Chrissie leads the boy across the beach," is made up of a few beats as Chrissie takes off her clothes and the boy gets increasing excited about the encounter to come, ending with Chrissie diving into the surf and the boy collapsing on the beach. The next scene, "Chrissie gets eaten," is made up of separate beats of Chrissie being attacked while the boy lolls drunkenly on the beach.

55seddel writes:

"I was fixin to write an animated western/film noir/horror film. Could you do a short blog about how to fuse genres? I am in a quagmire about what to keep and what to discard in my screenplay."

I don't know of any hard and fast rules about mixing genres, but I can point you toward two directors who do it well: Ridley Scott and Alfred Hitchcock. Scott loves to fuse genres: sci-fi and horror, sci-fi and noir, western and chick-flick. He takes elements from each genre and smushes them together so well that it feels completely natural and something new and exciting happens. Hitchcock, on the other hand, loves to upend his audience's expectations by starting out a movie in one genre and then switching it half-way through. Psycho starts as a melodrama about a woman in trouble and out of nowhere becomes a horror thriller, The Birds starts as a screwball comedy and out of nowhere becomes a horror thriller. Often, great new paradigms emerge from fusing genres, like Barry Sonnenfeld's Men in Black. And sometimes you get a clumsy misfire like Barry Sonnenfeld's Wild Wild West.

It's funny that you're writing a western/noir/horror film, because I was once involved in the development of just such a project once -- at least the western/horror part anyway. What I did was sit down and watch a ton of westerns and a ton of horror movies (well, monster movies really) and kept track of the beats that best exemplified their genres: the wide-open spaces of the westerns, the dark, claustrophobic interiors of the monster movies, the black-hat/white-hat morality of the westerns, the dark underbelly of the monster movies, etc, and tried to think of ways to combine them. How would monsters work in the harsh glare of the western's sun? Could I turn the conventions of the western to my advantage? Hitchcock found terror in a cornfield for North by Northwest, could I find it on a dusty desert plateau? Is the monster's desire rooted in the conflict between the white men and the Indians? And so forth.

I don't know how you work noir into that -- three genres is a lot to work with. Plus, you have to deal with the general lack of imagination you find in Hollywood executives. Fusing two genres makes them feel smart, fusing three is liable to make them say "I don't get it."

Steven Spielberg directed this segment of the pilot episode of Night Gallery. His direction is smooth and adequate to the task.

On the other hand, this is one of the most seriously bad scripts I've ever seen, and for that reason it merits further scrutiny. Gather 'round, students of screenwriting, and witness a virtual compendium of What Not To Do In A Screenplay.

andre_williams writes:

By the way I'm a screenwriter as well---writing a live action and animated project. Both projects are high concept. Any suggestions on writing animation, Mr. Alcott?

Two things come to mind:

1. Structurally, there is no difference between a screenplay for an animated movie and a live-action movie. The exact same rules of drama apply to both.

2. That said, there are reasons why some stories are better animated and some stories are better live-action.

Today's technology is so sophisticated, there's nothing that cannot be put on screen. If you want to write a live-action movie about a young deer learning about the joys and sorrows of life, you can do that. Similarly, if you want to write an animated movie about a woman of indomitable spirit who makes her way through the horrors of Reconstruction, you can write that too. However, animation tends to favor the needs of stories about fantastical creatures (talking animals, robots, space aliens) and unstageable spectacle, and live action tends to favor the needs of stories that depend on seeing the faces of real people.

The other thing about animation, of course, is that it needs to be planned out way in advance and once you begin production, there are very few opportunities for improvisation. So if your script is lacking, there is a strong chance your movie is going to suck even if the animation is wonderful. The inverse is, if your script is solid, the animation can have all sorts of things wrong with it and it will still be a good movie.

Because animation is so difficult and time-consuming, it's important to streamline your screenplay as much as possible before production. When I was working on Antz, Jeffrey Katzenberg often referred to the string of masterpieces he made at Disney (The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Alladin, etc) as models of structure. Jeffrey is a man of strong opinions, but he also knows when to listen to experience, and he told me that when he was at Disney, he saw some pictures of Walt Disney in story meetings. The "board," he saw, for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, had a total of 24 "story beats" in it -- 10 in Act I, 10 in Act II and only 4 in Act III. Jeffrey, being a smart man, said "Well, if Walt Disney figured structure like this, I would do well to emulate him." As a result, Jeffrey's Disney movies tend to have comparatively long first acts (40-50 minutes), compact second acts (30-35 minutes) and tumultuous, nuclear-powered third acts (15-20 minutes). As he liked to say, "The third act is a race to the finish line." By the end of Act II in a Katzenberg movie, all the conflicts have been brought into sharp focus, there are no more reveals or reversals to be had, and the plot is reduced to a set of vectors pitting the protagonist against whatever forces have been arrayed against him, usually with a ticking clock hovering nearby to add tension.

(A screenplay for an animated feature, by the way, should not be longer than 90 pages, and anything over 80 is pushing it. My draft of Antz was 83. I can't tell you why this is a rule, but it is. There are exceptions, of course -- The Incredibles is two hours long and I don't remember anyone complaining about the length.)

P.D. Eastman, Wikipedia says, was a protege of Dr. Seuss. His Go, Dog. Go! is a staple of the beginning-to-read set, and his Are You My Mother? is always welcome around my house. But for my money, Sam and the Firefly is not only Eastman's crowning achievement, it is also a compact, brisk, efficient course in storytelling, a small masterwork of character, plot and dramatic structure, far more accomplished than the much-more-famous, but ultimately-rather-meta The Cat in the Hat, and all achieved with a set of words designed for a 5-year-old to read.

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One of my favorite terms that I got from reading Robert McKee's Story is The Gap.

The Gap is simply the distance between what the protagonist thinks is going to happen and what actually happens. The wider The Gap is, the more interesting your story will be.

Example: you're at the water cooler, and a fellow employee says "Let me tell you about my morning." He goes on to tell you about how he ate some toast, watched Good Morning America, got dressed, checked his email and then went out to get the bus. This is a protagonist with no Gap at all, and thus his story isn't very interesting.

(On the other hand, if you are the protagonist in this story, your Gap is a teeny bit wider because what you expect to happen is that your co-worker will tell you a worthwhile story and what actually happens is he's a crashing bore.)

If your co-worker says that he bit into his toast and discovered there was a dead mouse baked into the bread, his Gap just got appreciably wider. If he says that he turned on the TV and started a fire because he has too many appliances plugged into his outlet, his Gap is wider still. If he says that he sat down to watch Good Morning America and found they were broadcasting his obituary, his Gap is about as wide as it's probably going to get.

The protagonist of 2001: A Space Odyssey is:

a) Moon-Watcher
b) The Monolith
c) Dr. Heywood R. Floyd
d) Dr. Dave Bowman
e) Dr. Frank Poole
e) HAL 9000
f) The frozen astronauts
g) None of the above

Yesterday's discussion of Le Trou led to some worthwhile questions about the nature and purpose of dialogue in movies. So as long as folks have questions about dialogue, I thought I would offer some thoughts of mine and we could have a, um, I don't know, some kind of thing where we talk back and forth about it.

Here's what I know:

I'm very angry that I've gone this long and nobody ever bothered to tell me about Le Trou, Jacques Becker's exemplary 1960 prison-break movie. What am I paying you people for?

( actual blog post within )

As my "Screenwriting 101" posts seem to be developing a loyal following of their own, I have gone and given them their own tag for easier reference.

Try it now!