Formula Freaks

When I posted The Nature of Today’s Storytelling Debate, Miriam commented, “I agree that the ‘rules’ aren't hard and fast, and should be more of a jumping-off point than a map to follow slavishly. It's just that articles like this have a way of encouraging new writers to skip learning the basics and go straight to writing their 200 page epic narrated in voice over by a character who stays in one room.”

She’s right, as always, and I should begin with the caveat that I believe all aspiring screenwriters should go through the same learning curve. They should master the basics first. Bergman, Fellini, Godard, Altman all spent years working mainstream and mastering stories in the classical form before they dared venture into alternative types of storytelling, like the non-plot (and good luck getting that financed nowadays). But there’s wisdom in that. Newbies should, before they step onto the world stage, have quite a few scripts under their belt in which they’ve experientially gone through the process and really learned how to effectively compose a 3-act story as well as a rising conflict and sympathetic protagonists with goals and obstacles in their way and arcs in the end, all that crap. (Sites like Zoetrope and TriggerStreet are great for giving you endless feedback along the way.) These are the basics everyone should master. When you read a script from an aspiring screenwriter you want to get the sense that writer has really mastered the basics cold.

And I’d say that’s generally what the industry wants to see, too.

However, I have two thoughts:

1) Even though my audience is, I think, mostly comprised of aspiring screenwriters does not mean that I’m obligated to spend my days doing nothing but reinforcing the basics so as not to confuse them. Hey, this is my blog. I’m going to exhaustively explore the craft and consider all those things no one else has taken the time to thoroughly study, like subtext and visual storytelling. And if I feel inclined, I will explore higher levels of craftsmanship even if it means it goes against basic "principles." And I will be the devoted contrarian, too. I will absolutely challenge contemporary thinking about the craft. If not, what’s the point of being anonymous and having a blog? I should “go there” when no one else is willing or able to “go there.” However, all newbies should know that they must master the basics first. Just because certain “principles” might be wrong does not mean the industry will embrace you if you break those “principles.” Not until well after you’re established will you find any opportunities to break the rules and explore higher levels of craftsmanship.

2) On the flip side of all this, let me say that it’s one thing to look for basics in scripts submitted by unproduced writers, and it’s quite another to say that every single story - EVERY SINGLE STORY IN EVERY GENRE - must follow the same formula. That’s completely absurd. It’s madness! It never fails to surprise me in my travels through this biz and encounters with people who, despite the first impression of being obviously intelligent, educated, well-spoken, and established within the industry, actually believe that every single story must have a sympathetic protag with a clear goal and a character arc and an antagonist to stand in the way. Are you kidding me?

Let’s take, for example, the perfectly acceptable genre of satire (which was, by the way, never discussed in Robert McKee’s Story). Ebert sometimes spoke of this art form periodically in his reviews by saying that “satire is what closes Saturday night,” but I tell you that satire is, in fact, the highest form of comedy writing in existence. You cannot make comedy more brilliant than satire. (In fact, John Gassner said this repeatedly in his book, Masters of the Drama.) But, you see, the whole point of satire is to ridicule the protagonist. And you can't do that if the protagonist is sympathetic with a goal. Why else do you think we had Adolph Hitler as the protagonist in Chaplin’s The Great Dictator? That’s a beautiful film and a stirring condemnation of not only Hitler but also fascism, antisemitism, and the Nazis, whom Chaplin beautifully excoriates as “machine men with machine minds and machine hearts.”

For some writers I know, satire is what they love and it’s what they're good at and it's how they wish to express themselves. And yet, they get slammed again and again by idiot readers, consultants, analysts – those who actually provide coverage on scripts – because the writer “failed to offer a sympathetic protagonist with clearly defined goals that the audience can root for.” And while these talented writers struggle to get discovered, a beautiful art form tragically lies six feet under and relegated to cable news shows because our industry's infested with A) consultants who are nothing short of intellectually dishonest frauds, and B) thoughtless readers wholly ignorant of the genres they’re supposed to be covering and who spend their days looking for the exact same formula within every story. They don’t THINK about the unique parameters of a given genre.

There should be a name for these people – Formula Freaks.

They’re freaks. That’s all they are. They’re intellectual degenerates.

How about another example? Everyone hates the “passive protagonist,” right? However, in classical film noirs there was (throughout the 1940s, mainly) a class of protags you might characterize as the “male victim.” I’m talking guys like Walter Neff of Double Indemnity and Frank Chambers of The Postman Always Rings Twice. These guys were weak, passive protags who allowed themselves to be manipulated by the femme fatales and they blindly went along with some very evil schemes. You see, there was a point to the passive protag. It was the man’s passivity and weakness that got him into trouble in the first place, and in the end, he pays the price for it. It's like an exploitation of the worst fears in some men and a moral tale of what happens to the weak, emasculated American man.

If a writer wanted to compose a film noir today in the classical construction (with a femme fatale exploiting a weak male), are you really going to condemn that writer for having a passive protag?

9 times out of 10, they would, because the Formula Freaks don’t THINK about what it means to tell a story differently. They have a little chart in which they put check marks next to questions about sympathetic protags, arcs, and goals. They’re freaks.

Let me ask a few more questions to all you Formula Freaks out there: if every protagonist had to be sympathetic with a goal we can root for, then tell me, did you root for Citizen Kane to abandon his principles, betray his wife, and basically, lose everything? Did you root for Michael Corleone to order the execution of his own brother? Did you root for Anakin to switch over to the dark side? Did you root for Scarlett O'Hara to steal Ashley away from Melanie? Or better yet, steal her own sister's fiance so she can marry into a part ownership of his store and thus, get the tax money she needed to save Tara? Can you imagine the abomination of storytelling had a Gone with the Wind adaptation twisted Scarlett O’Hara into a sympathetic protagonist with a goal the audience can root for? Are you kidding me? Had they actually done that, I believe the fans would’ve been in such an uproar that Atlanta might’ve burned for a second time. Not every story (or great film that has made mountains of money) can so easily fit into McKee's narrow, simplistic formula. People WILL watch characters that are totally unlike them and even unsympathetic if they're entertained and/or fascinated by them. The sheer record of cinema history bears this out.

This all boils down to one very simple truth:

ALL STORIES MUST BE CONSIDERED INDIVIDUALLY.

Period.

This industry that reads thousands and thousands of scripts and judges all writers according to the same narrow McKee-like principles involving “sympathy” and “arcs” is a total fucking sham. Is it any wonder most films are the same shit? All you readers and consultants should get off your lazy asses and start THINKING about what it means for a writer to a tell a story differently and work within the parameters of what that writer was actually trying to accomplish.

Sigh…


If you please, let me switch gears.

Consider this rave review by Manohla Dargis of Paranoid Park:

The Hungarian filmmaker Bela Tarr has been instrumental in Mr. Van Sant’s recent artistic renaissance — evident in his newfound love of hypnotically long and gliding camera moves — though his tenure in the mainstream has left its mark too, as demonstrated by his rejection of straight narrative. As in three-act, character-driven, commercially honed narrative in which boys will be boys of a certain type and girls will be girls right alongside them.

The boy in “Paranoid Park,” Alex (the newcomer Gabe Nevins), lives and skates in Portland, Ore., where one evening he is implicated in the brutal death of a security guard. In adapting the young-adult novel by Blake Nelson, Mr. Van Sant has retained much of the story — a man dies, Alex writes it all down — but has reshuffled the original’s chain of events to create an elliptical narrative that continually folds back on itself. Shortly after the film opens, you see Alex writing the words Paranoid Park in a notebook, a gesture that appears to set off a flurry of seemingly disconnected visuals — boys leaping through the air in slow motion, clouds racing across the sky in fast — that piece together only later.

With his on-and-off narration and pencil, Alex is effectively shaping this story, but in his own singular voice. (“I’m writing this a little out of order. Sorry. I didn’t do so well in creative writing.”) Although you regularly hear that voice — at times in Alex’s surprisingly childish, unmodulated recitation, at times in dialogue with other characters — you mostly experience it visually, as if you were watching a still-evolving film unwinding in the boy’s head. Mr. Van Sant isn’t simply trying to take us inside another person’s consciousness; he’s also exploring the byways, dead ends, pitfalls and turning points in the geography of conscience, which makes the recurrent image of the skate park — with its perilous ledges, its soaring ramps and fleetingly liberated bodies — extraordinarily powerful.

Mr. Van Sant’s use of different film speeds and jump cuts, and his tendency to underscore his own storytelling — he regularly, almost compulsively repeats certain images and lines — reinforces rather than undermines the story’s realism. With its soft, smudged colors and caressing lighting, “Paranoid Park” looks like a dream — the cinematographers are Christopher Doyle and Rain Kathy Li — but the story is truer than most kitchen-sink dramas. This isn’t the canned realism of the tidy psychological exegesis; this is realism that accepts the mystery and ambiguity of human existence. It is the realism that André Bazin sees in the world of Roberto Rossellini: a world of “pure acts, unimportant in themselves,” that prepare the way “for the sudden dazzling revelation of their meaning.”


Let me switch gears again.

Consider this fabulous article by Kathrny Millard (who I’m sure would be thrilled to be quoted in a post called “Formula Freaks”). It's called Writing for the Screen: Beyond the Gospel of Story:

In a recent review of Tarnation (Cauoette 2003), writer Helen Garner speculates on the limited range of narrative strategies explored within contemporary cinema: “I have often wondered why cinema so rarely makes full use of what it can do better than any other art form except perhaps music; recreate the mind's random movements, its swooping back and forth in time, its fleeting connections and smashes, its lightening recoveries” (Garner 2006). For American screenwriting theorist, Howard Rodman, the over-emphasis on utilitarian screenplays, aimed primarily at attracting actors on the route to production finance, has contributed to a lack of life in contemporary screenplays. The complexity, beauty and messiness of life has been edited out of the picture, he complains: “The screenplay needs to be freed from utility. It needs to forget its planned itinerary – to open itself up to the beauty and terror glimpsed at the periphery of one’s vision” (Rodman 2006: 1).

I would argue that the processes of filmmakers from Chaplin and the Lumiere Brothers, to Wenders, Wong and Van Sant, all offer new possibilities for revitalising cinematic scriptwriting. The pre-planned, conflict-driven Story, evangelised in texts and seminars around the globe, points towards a narrow and overly prescriptive conception of cinema. Much can be learnt about the possibilities of cinema by examining how filmmakers have written, revised, rewritten and refined cinematic texts in the process of shooting, designing, editing and post producing their films. Studying scripts and their structures can only get us so far; examining instead how filmmakers have worked with images, and the traces that they and their collaborators have left of those journeys, returns us to the possibilities of cinema. After all, inherent in the caméra-stylo advocated by Alexander Astuc, was the idea that a more fluid way of writing with the camera would allow filmmakers to explore new philosophies, new world views.