New Script Mag (& Bleu)

Hey guys,

I’m in the new July/August issue of Script magazine with an article called “How to Show Don’t Tell,” a favorite subject of mine. It’s hard to condense the topic down to 3,000 words, but I covered trusting the face, actions defining characters, locations, Jennifer van Sijll’s Cinematic Storytelling, and so much more. I also offered some insights about a film called Bleu and thought I might repost an old article on the film so you can see the complete analysis.

For more articles on “How to Show Don’t Tell,” feel free to visit my section on the Art of Visual Storytelling.

I also really love this video.

-MM

-----------------------------------

Hey guys!

I’m the only screenwriting blogger who is CRAZY enough to follow-up a popular article about The Dark Knight with Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Bleu, the first in his Three Colors Trilogy. Only 6 people will give a shit, I’m sure, but if you’re one of the six, baby, this article’s for you.

Even if you’re not familiar with Bleu (or Blue), you’ll love the stirring tribute to the film in the vid above. Much of what I’m about to write can be seen in the video. Here’s the thing. Kieslowski truly was a genius. And one of the great annoyances about screenwriting gurus today is how they say endlessly to “show, don’t tell,” but they never tell you HOW. Hence my series on the Art of Visual Storytelling. Hence my article on Cinematic Storytelling and my praise of Jennifer van Sijll’s brilliant book of the same title. And hence the need to talk about Kieslowski, because he was THE MASTER of “show, don’t tell!”


Revisiting Bleu again last weekend, I was so blown away by the visuals that when I watched the film yet again with Anne Insdorf’s commentary, I had to pull out my phone and start taking notes. When I first saw the film, I thought, “wow, that was kind of weird.” But now I think that the film wasn’t weird at all but that the problem was me because I had for so many years a weak visual vocabulary, thanks to Hollywood spoon feeding me most of my life with dumbed-down shit.

There’s a great article about Kieslowski in Salon. They wrote, “In 1995, the Los Angeles Times asked Krzysztof Kieslowski how movies should participate in culture, and this was his reply: ‘Film is often just business -- I understand that and it's not something I concern myself with. But if film aspires to be part of culture, it should do the things great literature, music and art do: elevate the spirit, help us understand ourselves and the world around us and give people the feeling they are not alone…’” I love it! They went on to write, “The richly textured trilogy capped Kieslowski's extraordinary career, taking on the deepest and most complex moral subjects with grace and panache, but always at ground level. Ostensibly it was derived from the French Revolution themes of liberty, equality and fraternity, and their corresponding colors in the French flag. But the films are deeply personal and in many ways Polish; they restore those lofty concepts, without diminishing them, to humble human proportions.”

Blue is the story of a woman, Julie (Juliette Binoche), whose husband and daughter die in a car accident. Her reaction is to escape - to run away from her past, from her friends, from her life, and from her pain. Did you see the moment in the video where she scraped her knuckles along a rock wall? She really was scraping her hand across that wall. In any case, in one scene, Julie sees one of her servants in the kitchen and asks her why she’s crying. “Because you’re not,” is the reply. Then she sells everything. “I don't want any belongings, any memories,” she says. “No friends, no love. Those are all traps.” She moves away and lives in a quiet apartment. Interesting that you sympathize with her situation but you can’t connect with her because she’s made herself so emotionally closed off to everyone around her. She’s a character in a sympathetic situation but she’s not a sympathetic character. So you find yourself rooting for her to change, to face her pain and reconnect with the world again, because you know that her story is really about the rehabilitation of a human spirit after a painful tragedy.

Simple story, right?

With Kieslowski, every aspect of the film was used to support the telling of the story. I recall the commentator saying repeatedly that Kieslowski would pare down the dialogue, pare down the dialogue, and pare down the dialogue, until only the most essential words are spoken and everything else is communicated through visuals. This brings to mind what Ebert said of the film: “Binoche has a face that is well-suited to this kind of role. Because she can convince you that she is thinking and feeling, she doesn't need to ‘do’ things in an obvious way… Here, too, her feelings are a mystery that her face will help us to solve. The film has been directed by Krzysztof Kieslowski, born in Poland, now working in France, and, in the opinion of some, the best active European filmmaker (he made "The Double Life of Veronique" two years ago). He trusts the human face, and watching his film, I remembered a conversation I had with Ingmar Bergman many years ago, in which he said there were many moments in films that could only be dealt with by a closeup of a face - the right face - and that too many directors tried instead to use dialogue or action.”

He trusts the human face to convey feelings and information!

And how does one write that?

Very carefully.

Hehehe…

Consider how Kieslowski uses music to help tell the story. He doesn’t just have the brilliant composer, Zbigniew Preisner, design a soundtrack to play alongside the story to force the audience to feel a certain way during a scene. Instead, Kieslowski makes Julie’s former husband a famous composer who was working on his final assignment, the theme to the reunification of Europe, which can be heard in the vid above. This music is what brings Julie back to life. She first denies the music exists, rejects what bits he had composed because it was a source of pain in her life. Later, she works with a man to finish the music, which paralleled her own reunification with the people in her life. There are times when she hears the music and it haunts her. She can’t deny it or escape it. She has to face it, just as she has to face her own pain. Julie went from passive escapist to active contributor.


You might notice in the picture above, which is taken from the film that most of the music sheet is blurry. This isn’t without meaning. Many shots in the film were from her point of view and her left eye was damaged in the car accident. You may recall in the video the shot of the feather swaying with Julie’s breath and the blurry hand behind it reaching out to her. That’s what she saw. Did you see the closeup of the doctor’s reflection in Julie’s eye? That was no special effects. That was a real reflection using a very special camera. We could see the doctor better in the reflection in Julie’s eye than Julie could see him. Later, in the end, we’ll see a reflection of Julie’s naked back in the eye of her lover. He finally SEES her in a moment of emotional honestly.

There were a number of moments where you’d also see extreme closeups of specific objects, like the shadows over Julie’s coffee cup on a table in a coffee shop. Wonderful! It’s very European in the sense that they create visual poetry out of everyday banalities. On the one hand, it’s beautiful to see and on the other hand, it makes audiences appreciate everyday experiences that much more. It enriches their lives. Kieslowski does that, but here, it’s a crucial element of the story. You may have noticed beginning at 2:56 in the video a shot of a sugar cube above a cup of coffee soaking in the coffee before it gets plopped into the cup. I believe it’s followed by another moment where we’re shown Julie's reflection on an upside-down spoon dangling in the neck of a water bottle. Beautiful, right? It’s also crucial to the story.

The spoon and sugar cube represented her own self-obsorption. It was her focusing on something obscure to shut out the world, to escape from it. She’s trying to put a lid on her world and her immediate environment. She’s shutting out all the things she doesn’t accept. And in that scene in the coffee shop, she’s rejected the man who loved her, and she’s trying to ignore the music the flute player outside is playing because it’s similar to her husband’s last piece of music, which she denies and avoids. But then she finally drops the cube into the coffee and goes out to address the issue of music with the musician.

MORE NOTES:

At times, like right in the middle of a conversation, the film would suddenly go black and all we’d hear is music. Then we’d return to Julie’s face. You might think, “What the hell was that all about?” It was Julie’s blackouts, her being lost in her own memories.

Throughout the film, you’d see blue lights reflected on her face, particularly the glass crystals she carried with her, which she ripped from the blue chandelier that hung in her daughter’s bedroom. That was the only thing from her past she could not let go. The light on her face signified the ghosts of her past, the presence of memory.

Twice you’d see what might first seem to be inexplicable shots of bungee jumpers. But if you think about it, it’s not without meaning. It shows how far we can fall and come back up again.


The opening shot, pictured above, and the closeup of a car’s tire just sucks you into the tragedy that is to about to befall the protagonist.

The motif with windows - when Julie visits her mother, we see them talk through a window filled with other reflections that illustrated visually the dislocation of their relationship. Glass that separates us also connects us as when the nurse looks in on Julie when she tried and failed to commit suicide. Yet, glass invites us in but keeps us out as when Julie visits her mother a second time and decides not to go in.

The mice represented her first dealings with the pains in her life. Her getting the cat was one of the first transitions in her character arc.

Interesting that when Julie visits Lucille, who works in a sex shop, and has a conversation with her, Kieslowski chooses to not use the old school shot / reverse-shot technique. Instead, he chooses to have his camera pan back and forth to reveal the flesh on display in the background between them because the flesh has come between them in their relationship. However, when they both lean forward, Kieslowski illustrates that they both have moved past what’s come between them. Later, when Julie talks to her husband’s mistress, it’s a shot / reverse-shot because the characters are not as close.

The pool was a place of escape, yet incomplete mourning.

Other reading: the Krzysztof Kieslowski blog-a-thon and Roger Ebert’s How To Read a Movie.

-MM

“Morality,” Exposition, & Adverbs

Not long ago, I read through the July, 2009, issue of Esquire. In it, there is a new short story called “Morality” by Stephen King, which is available in its entirety here. This story evoked a few thoughts about exposition and adverbs. Plus, this gives me the chance to post pictures of Bar Refaeli, because the words of King’s story were painted on her not-so-terribly-unpleasant body for the cover.


I don’t know why Script Mag doesn’t do covers like this. I’ve offered to pose nude, too, but Shelly seems reluctant. Hehehe…

“MORALITY”

First, I’m going to praise King and then rip him a new one.

The story is very simple. You have a financially struggling young couple. The husband is an aspiring writer working part-time as a substitute teacher. The wife is a nurse to a retired and wealthy priest, who decides that he wants to do something really really bad before he dies. He propositions the nurse to do this on his behalf for $200,000.


THE HANDLING OF EXPOSITION

Here's a classic example of good exposition. King never tells you what the proposition is. We know it’s really bad. We know it involves blood. We know it has to be filmed so the priest can watch this dirty deed later in his mansion. And we know this moral question of “should we or shouldn’t we do this really bad thing” is tearing apart the young couple. So you’re hooked. You keep reading because you want to find out A) what the proposition is and B) if they’ll do it. But you will not learn any of these details until the time has come to carry out the dirty deed.

This is good exposition in a nutshell: it’s putting a question in the minds your readers and making them want to keep on reading to get the answer. A lot of amateurs, I suspect, would’ve given the game away early. They would've explained in full detail what the proposition is when it’s proposed, which not only makes the story less intriguing but it’s also risky because if the proposition’s not interesting or juicy enough, people will stop reading your story right then and there.

Essentially, just show instead of tell then show.


There are exceptions, of course. Sometimes you have to explain a plan beforehand, so that people know what’s supposed to happen and feel tension when that plan goes terribly wrong in the midst of its execution like in a Jean-Pierre Melville film. Or, as in the case with Titanic, James Cameron wisely explains how the ship sinks before we see the ship sink so that we will understand what’s going on as the ship is sinking and can stay focused on the story.

But putting questions in the minds of the readers to make them want to keep reading even from scene-to-scene is an art form. I loved a point that Carol Phiniotis made in her column, “The Art of the Rewrite,” in the brand new July/August issue of Script Magazine:

Scene transitions are often overlooked. A simple line of dialogue at a scene’s conclusion can greatly affect the flow of your story. In an early draft of American Beauty, a scene transition between Jane and her soon-to-be boyfriend Ricky played out as follows:

RICKY
Come on, let’s go to my room.

By the shooting script, Ball revised the line:

RICKY
You want to see the most
beautiful thing I’ve ever filmed?

While the first transition is functional, it falls flat. However, the second transition not only engages Jane, it also engages the audience. We’re invited to participate in the mini-mystery Ricky has woven.

I whole-heartedly agree.

Although I’d stack this Bar Refaeli vid up against Ricky's fluttering plastic bag any day of the week. Hehehe…



LET’S TALK ADVERBS

I place the blame for everyone’s hysteria about adverbs squarely on the shoulders of Stephen King. Remember what he wrote in On Writing? “The adverb is not your friend.” “The road to hell is paved with adverbs.” King was and is horrifically wrong about adverbs.

Of course, he backs up his opinion with Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style, a book SO pre-digital age and revised only 4 times since 1918. About 50 years later, E.B. White wrote in The New Yorker, “I felt uneasy at posing as an expert on rhetoric, when the truth is I write by ear, always with difficulty and seldom with any exact notion of what is taking place under the hood.” Even Strunk, the English professor, said, “the best writers sometimes disregard the rules of rhetoric. When they do so, however, the readers will usually find in the sentence some compensating merit, attained at the cost of the violation.”

WHAT? You can break the rules?

But King told us to follow the rules. You do not use adverbs, period. And every time I read an adverb in one of his stories, I want to stand on the rooftops and scream “HYPOCRITE!” The man is incapable of abiding by his own rules. This short story alone has over 100 adverbs. (Yes, we counted.) Consider these doozies:

With the hiring freeze currently in effect in the city's schools…

or

…but it would be a very small contract, likely a good deal less than you currently make as a teacher…

Would anyone argue that “currently” is essential in either sentence?

…the stroke had left him partially paralyzed on the right side…

Wouldn’t a hater of adverbs change that to “semi-paralyzed?”

She was also a masseuse and occasionally…

Wouldn’t a hater of adverbs change that to “on occasion?”

…although Chad had had a relatively good few months teaching...

Couldn’t that sentence be rewritten to describe exactly how those months were good without having to resort to “relatively?”

It was the first time she had really thought of him in connection with money.

“Really?” Isn’t that the mother of all bad adverbs?

Deliberately planned and executed.

Aren’t most plans “deliberate?”

…she wrote simply: Savings.

Can’t we see for ourselves that what she wrote was simple?

And so on. Here’s the deal about adverbs. No one will complain about your adverb so long as it’s a good adverb. There is nothing wrong with an adverb so long as you’re not being redundant, like glitters brightly. Why say ran speedily when you can just say raced? Most people think of adverbs in terms of a word that reinforces the adjective: extremely gorgeous, really sensual, etc. Shoot me now, right?

But a good adverb can inject an air of freshness to those stale words: bitingly gorgeous, witheringly sensual.

In fact, I prefer adverbs that are almost contradictory to the words they’re supporting: delightfully hypocritical, engagingly demented, sporadically authoritative, and charmingly brutish.

Not long ago, I read a fabulous book, Spunk & Bite by Arthur Plotnik, a spirited argument against Strunk & White’s principles. He writes:

Arts reviewers (and blurbists) everywhere seem enamored of [adverbs], and little wonder; it offers an alternative to shopworn critical adjectives like brilliant, gripping, or plodding. It can also tweak such adjectives toward fresh meanings, as in yawningly brilliant.

These examples feature what grammarians call “adverbs of manner.” They reveal the way in which a thing or quality is distinguished. According to yet another New York Times critic, Allesandra Stanley, a new television show was “deliciously horrifying,” distinguishing it from other modes of horrifyingness. Writers also toy with so-called adverbs of degree, which answer the question “how much”? Performances are routinely described as “hugely boring” or “minutely entertaining.”

When a term and its modifier seem paradoxical, like horrifying and deliciously, they form the rhetorical device known as the oxymoron. Oxymorons can produce any number of effects: sarcasm, incisiveness, archness (i.e., roguishness, sauciness). But not all adverbial zingers employ the incongruity of terms in contrast. Many reach for metaphor, as in lashingly funny, or hyperbole (exaggeration), as in woundingly beautiful. In addition, critics often find –ly forms suited to the put-down. Slate’s Gary Lutz called the grammar chapter of the fifteenth edition of The Chicago Manual of Style “perversely unhelpful” – though I deviantly disagree.

Plotnik had other examples I enjoyed like dormantly Mormon. (Why write 20 words to avoid an adverb when dormantly Mormon will work just fine?) Other examples: gloriously uproarious, scarily fervent, militantly prosaic, incongruously ordinary, juicily ridiculous, resolutely unclever, wittily intricate, inflammatorily hostile, and metaphysically naïve. Consider, too, all the adverbs in 15,000 Useful Phrases.


So now we’ve come full circle back to Bar Refaeli. I couldn’t help but smile at the use of adverbs in Ross McCammon’s article on the Israeli model. As he’s observing the words of King’s short story getting applied to her body by an “application professional,” he writes:

She is wearing white bikini bottoms and a red bikini top, which is pulled up, revealing the bottom third of her breasts. The skin there is white. She reads a novel in Hebrew. She doesn't talk. She doesn't move. Without her clothes on, she looks 10 percent larger. She is thin, of course, and her stomach is impossibly taut. But she has grown somehow. Maybe it's the clivvage.

She's become inaccessibly exquisite.

Indeed!

-MM

I love that.

This will be quite the strange post, I’m sure, but here’s a collection of fabulous quotes about characters I’ve read recently in other articles.

First, The Hurt Locker, which has been on my radar for some time.



I loved A.O. Scott’s review of the film and in particular, his character descriptions. That he gets the characters so well and feels compelled to articulate excitedly the distinctive differences in the personalities of the characters already tells me that the writer has done a good job:

“The Hurt Locker” focuses on three men whose contrasting temperaments knit this episodic exploration of peril and bravery into a coherent and satisfying story. Specialist Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) is a bundle of nerves and confused impulses, eager to please, ashamed of his own fear and almost dismayingly vulnerable. Sgt. J. T. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) is a careful, uncomplaining professional who sticks to protocols and procedures in the hope that his prudence will get him home alive, away from an assignment he has come to loathe.

The wild card is Staff Sgt. William James (Jeremy Renner), who joins Delta after its leader is killed and who approaches his work more like a jazz musician or an abstract expressionist painter than like a sober technician. A smoker and a heavy metal fan with an irreverent, profane sense of humor and a relaxed sense of military discipline, he approaches each new bomb or skirmish not with dread but with a kind of inspired, improvisational zeal.


Scott also delved a bit into the depth of William James:

And Mr. Renner’s performance — feverish, witty, headlong and precise — is as thrilling as anything else in the movie. In each scene a different facet of James’s personality emerges. He can be callous, even mean at times, but there is a fundamental tenderness to him as well, manifest in his affection for an Iraqi boy who sells pirated DVDs and his patient solicitude when Eldridge, under fire and surrounded by dead bodies, has an understandable bout of panic.

I love that. [I should also mention that Mark Boal, the screenwriter, wrote an article about his experience writing The Hurt Locker in the new July/August issue of my beloved Script Magazine. I loved his opening sentence: Embarking on an embed with the troops seemed like a good idea at the time, but I’m seriously reconsidering now that I’m on an Army C-130 cargo plane that is plummeting to the earth. Hehehe... That’s fabulous. Good job, Mark.]


I read not too long ago about the two-year first look deal between Focus Features and Sam Mendes that may have Mendes directing Andrew Davies's adaptation of George Eliot's book, “Middlemarch,” a project that, as Arifa Akbar reminded us in the Independent, Martin Scorsese had hoped to get around to himself. In any case, I was reading about “Middlemarch” on Wikipedia to refresh my mind about the story, and I loved what was written about self-delusion, which may be one of my favorite aspects about characters:

Most of the central characters of this novel have a habit of building castles in the air and then attempting to live in them. Because they are idealistic, self-absorbed, or otherwise out of touch with reality, they make serious mistakes. These mistakes cause them great unhappiness, and eventually their illusions are shattered. Some characters learn from this process, and others do not. Those who learn not to build castles in the air generally end up happy, while those who persist in ignoring pragmatism are miserable.

Dorothea, who wants nothing more in life than to do good, rejects a young man who would have been a reasonably good match for her in order to marry the aged scholar Mr. Casaubon. She does this because she likes the idea of being an assistant to him and helping him with his great intellectual pursuits. Unfortunately, she is so much in love with her image of Mr. Casaubon that she fails to notice he isn't actually writing anything. He is supposedly working on a great work that, when completed, will link together and explain all world mythologies. However he is so obsessed with creating a perfect work of scholarship, and so afraid of criticism from his peers, that he never publishes anything. He is not interested in contributing to the discipline for its own sake; rather he uses scholarship to enhance his ego and improve his image. Dorothea, in her youth and enthusiasm, does not recognize this. Later, when she meets people who genuinely do love knowledge for its own sake (Ladislaw and Lydgate come to mind) she cannot help but notice the discrepancy between what she wanted and what she actually chose. Yet this discrepancy does not keep her from marrying foolishly a second time, to Ladislaw whom she hardly knows. Based on a few days' acquaintance developed during her honeymoon and a handful of occasional conversations, Dorothea is attracted to Ladislaw but does not have an opportunity to get to know him. Their mutual love is developed apart from one another.

Lydgate, the other tragic character in this novel, chooses his wife based more on physical attraction than on a knowledge of her character. He marries the materialistic, self-absorbed Rosamond Vincy who, unbeknownst to Lydgate, has been harboring her own delusions and misconceptions about who Lydgate is. Once safely married, they each find out exactly how poorly they suit one another. He cannot free himself of Rosamond, yet he is unwilling to set aside his (and her) upper-class pretensions to buy himself the time and resources to conduct the medical research he wants to do. He ignores the basic financial reality of life in Middlemarch, does not dispense prescriptions, and alienates patients by not filling what they believe to be his proper role as a doctor. Eventually he succumbs to Rosamond's desire to leave Middlemarch, and turns into the kind of doctor he never really wanted to be, his research permanently abandoned. He becomes financially successful, which appeases Rosamond. After Lydgate dies, Rosamond marries someone better suited to her tastes, who can indulge her materialism and who never asks her to do anything difficult…

Rosamond Vincy Lydgate never abandons her delusions about herself, and persists in viewing herself as a perpetually wronged princess even though she's scheming and manipulative. Yet she does eventually realize that being married to an idealistic doctor is not easy, and that marrying into a wealthy family does not guarantee that she and her husband will be rich. She also realizes that Lydgate, whom she decided she loved because of his upper-class background and distant origins, is not the meal ticket to which she felt entitled. At the end of the book, after Lydgate's death, Rosamond correctly identifies the attributes most desirable to her in a husband: a fat wallet and an indulgent nature. She obtains such a husband and lives happily ever after.

I love that. Plus, I once dated a girl just like Rosamund Vincy. Hehehe… “Middlemarch” is in the public domain and available for free at Project Gutenberg. (See my other post on adaptations.)



Above is a vid of Disney characters who have imbibed some tobacco. There's another vid here about smoking in the top ten films of 2008.

I was at my new favorite cigar hangout smoking a Partagas 160 (I save the 150s for special occasions), and I was flipping through various cigar magazines. In the Winter 2008/2009 (volume 14, no. 1) issue of Smoke magazine, with a cover image of libertarian Tucker Carlson (bow-tie free, thankfully), there’s an article about smoking characters in comic books, called “Smoke & Ink,” by Max Gartman.

Pretty interesting read. Gartman covered The Comics Code, which was similar to cinema’s old Hays Production Code and had set standards for both editorial and advertising content in comics to protect children from “corrupting influences.” Just as Sidney Lumet’s film, The Pawnbroker, paved the way for change to the Hays Production Code, Stan Lee also did battle with The Comics Code in 1971 when he was approached by the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare to do a story on drug abuse. Here’s Gartman:

Lee agreed, and wrote a Spider-Man story where drug abuse was portrayed as unglamorous and dangerous – and the Comics Code Authority had a fit. Despite the fact that the story was written with the intent to act as a cautionary moral tale, the Code was against it: “no drugs” meant no drugs. Lee published the comics anyway, without the Code’s stamp on the book, and upon the success of this story, the Code backed down, paving the way for change...


Here’s a sampling of comic book characters who smoke cigars.

First, the GOOD GUYS:

Hellboy: Red demon who fights for the U.S. government (and MM has it on good authority that the cigars were Nicaraguans).
Wolverine: (Logan) The hard and wise one from the X-Men.
Puck: The little guy in the black onesie of Alpha Flight.
Sgt. Nick Fury of the Howling Commandoes and later of the clandestine S.H.I.E.L.D.
Grey Hulk: (Joe Fix-it) One of the many Hulk incarnations.
Cable: The fire-arm-hauling-leader, for a time, of X-Force.
The Thing: (Ben “Clobberin’-Time” Grimm) of the Fantastic Four.
Howard the Duck: Yes, he really was a duck – and a cab driver, too.

Second, the BADDIES:

Kingpin: (Wilson Fisk) The master manipulator who ran the New York City crime scene.
J. Jonah Jameson: (JJ) Peter Parker’s boss at the Daily Bugle.
Gen. Thunderbolt Ross: Hulk’s antagonist.


Here’s the bigger point: what’s the significance of a character who smokes? What does that convey about the character?

Here’s what Gartman had to say:

Smoking, first a luxury, then the demon-spawn of society, has now become a marker of those who operate outside of the norm. These are people who partake of a substance that can damage health – and knowingly accept that risk, like the adults that they are.

Cigars and cigarettes still carry meaning as symbols… The cigars that our characters smoke mark them as not-one-of-the-herd, as one who is capable of making decisions solo, without Big Brother to look over each and every step. They’re still markers of class, of elegance, and of power. Nobody who knows what they’re doing will treat a good cigar like trash, because there’s an implicit knowledge of everything that goes along with the cigar – the history, the culture, the weight of the world against each smoker. And still, they shoulder the burden, and march on, smoke in hand.

Interesting. I love that.

The Darabont Collection

Hey guys,

Below are links to my somewhat recent reviews of Frank Darabont’s latest screenplays. I must say, Fahrenheit 451 was such a fabulous experience, probably the best read of the year so far for me, that the other scripts didn't quite measure up.

This brings to mind an interesting topic, something that all writers go through. What do you do when you write something everyone loves and then you follow up with scripts that don’t quite measure up? Everyone goes through this. Friends will tell you, “I liked this one, but it’s not as good as that last one you wrote.” There’s a mentality in the world, particularly Hollywood, that you’re only as good as your last script. Am I going to stop reading stories of friends and writers just because their last few scripts haven't been as good as some of their earlier successes? Perish the thought. We know better. Screenwriting is a long-term devotion to the craft. Stories aren't born great. They are shaped into greatness with a little help from our friends.

An inevitable part of life is that you will achieve varying levels of success and yes, that includes failure. So what do you do when this happens to you? You take the lumps and keep writing. You stay obsessively devoted to the craft. You find stories you’re passionate about and you apply everything you know about the craft to make each and every story you touch reach its fullest potential.

There's also a lot to be learned from stories that don't quite work.

-MM

-----------------------------------

Fahrenheit 451
…this is easily the best script I’ve read so far this year. The handling of the story is right down the line everything I would’ve done had I landed this assignment. It’s everything I would want to see in an adaptation of the book. Every strength in the book that I listed at the beginning of the article is evident in the script.

Law-Abiding Citizen
…what bugs me about this story is that it has such potential for greatness and yet the filmmakers, which I’m sure includes a lot of interference from this bloated committee of producers, seems content to let this story flounder in the realm of marginally above grade B-movie thrills.

Mine
I can pinpoint where the story lost me. It lost me in the 80-page range. It really lost me in the 90-page range. Then it pulled me back somewhat with a thrilling car chase sequence. After that, I was just waiting for the predictable events to play themselves out. And then I was disappointed that those events played out as predictably as I thought.

Script Review – “Law-Abiding Citizen”

I knew what I wanted to say about Law Abiding Citizen long before I ever finished the story, probably in the mid-60-page region.

First, the script. I’m looking at a September, 2008, shooting draft by Frank Darabont (previous revision by Kurt Wimmer). This script was also in the hands of Sheldon Turner and David Ayer. Apparently, the story has changed dramatically over the last few years. The version I have concerns Nick (Jamie Foxx), an assistant D.A. who must deal with a victim-turned-vigilante-but-actually-a-twisted-criminal-mastermind (Gerard Butler). His name's Clyde. He wreaks havoc on the entire city of Philadelphia all from inside his solitary jail cell. It brings to mind aspects of other films like Silence of the Lambs, The Dark Knight, and Shawshank Redemption (with a smattering of The Green Mile). Kind of intriguing, isn’t it? How does he do it? Once they get that hook into you, once he starts wreaking havoc from inside his jail cell, you have to read to the end to find out exactly how it was all done.

Darabont feels like the natural choice for this kind of material. He was set to direct the film, but rumor has it there was an ugly parting of ways between the director and committee of ten producers on this project. Yes, I said TEN producers. I don’t know the details, but dealing with ten producers sounds like a recipe for a nightmare. Now the film is being directed by F. Gary Gray who gave us The Italian Job.

I’m not sure how well I can articulate this, but what bugs me about this story is that it has such potential for greatness and yet the filmmakers, which I’m sure includes a lot of interference from this bloated committee of producers, seems content to let this story flounder in the realm of marginally above grade B-movie thrills.


You have a man named Clyde, who, in the opening scenes, loses his wife and daughter to a pair of murdering bad guys. Loved it. Totally gripping. Then, he deals with Nick and some other attorneys. He’s infuriated that only one of the two bad guys will be prosecuted. The other will confess, testify against his accomplice, and in return, he’ll serve a minimum sentence. The other will get lethal injection.

Cut to about ten years later. It’s come time for the bad guy to get his lethal injection, which goes horrifyingly wrong in a scene almost reminiscent of the botched electrocution scene in The Green Mile. The other bad guy is also coincidentally butchered beyond recognition around the same time. Naturally, the cops pick-up Clyde who gives himself over willingly. While they have Clyde in jail, he starts making demands. Give me a comfy bed and I’ll confess to the murder. So they give him a bed and he confesses. Then he says, give me my iPod and I’ll confess to something else. And they do. And this goes on until he starts promising that he’s going to kill every man in the room.

And they do, indeed, start dying in very interesting ways.


Great setup. Loved it.

How Clyde accomplishes these amazing feats, I would not dream of revealing. Why he does these things, however, is a cause for a script review, because this is where I believe the script falters.

Clyde is obviously doing these things because he’s never gotten over the deaths of his wife and daughter. Perfectly understandable. He’s also doing these things to exact revenge onto those responsible for the murders and subsequent injustice that followed. Okay, I get that. He wants to stick it to a justice system that only half succeeded for him. In his scenes with Nick, though, he only goes so far as to impress upon him the pain of losing one’s family and the need to be angry about injustices and compromises with murderers.

Eh. That’s rather weak.


A mastermind would not need to sit inside a jail cell and wreak havoc on a city just to make those minor points about pain and anger. A mastermind would sit inside a jail cell and wreak havoc on the justice system to make points about the system’s inherent weaknesses. And this is the core of my concern: there needs to be something deeper and more meaningful here to warrant the telling of this story. You may recall that, in The Dark Knight, the Joker wasn’t just crazy and committing random acts of terror on the city. He was out to make a point to Batman about human nature. Remember what he said?

Their morals, their code... it's all a bad joke. Dropped at the first sign of trouble. They're only as good as the world allows them to be. You'll see - I'll show you... when the chips are down, these civilized people... they'll eat each other. See, I'm not a monster... I'm just ahead of the curve.

That’s what this story is damn near crying out to be, what it’s missing: a deeper point that Clyde should be making about the justice system.

Halfway into this script, I wanted to just rewrite all of the dialogue. And then I realized that the dialogue is weak because the setup is weak. The setup is weak because Clyde’s motivations and reasons are weak. You need a higher purpose here, an ongoing conversation between Nick and Clyde as to whether one should have faith in the justice system or not just as Batman and Joker were having an ongoing discussion about human nature. And this debate begins when they talk about how one of those two murderers gets away and continues through his time in incarceration. In the end, Nick should triumph, the system is faulty but still good. As it is, this story regresses into a who-can-outhink-the-other-contest, which isn’t as satisfying.


Three more points:

1) At first, Clyde demands that he only speaks with Nick and relents when other lawyers insist on participating in the talks. Why make such demands if he’s only going to relent and nothing becomes of it? If Clyde can get them to put a bed in his cell, he can certainly force them into letting him talk to Nick and Nick alone. That’s what this story calls for, an evolving relationship between Nick and Clyde, just as you had an evolving relationship between Clarice and Hannibal Lecter. This should only be about Clyde and Nick, a contest of beliefs and wills. So when, say, Clyde makes demands about having records in his cell and someone other than Nick interrupts and answers that question for Nick, you’re undermining an opportunity to develop that relationship between protagonist and antagonist.


2) A note about Nick’s temperament. Nick is quick to go off the handle, to threaten Clyde, and leap over a table to strangle him, etc. That’s dangerous, because that could undermine audience support of the protag. They will respect and support more a man who can stay focused and keep his cool. But the test, the inner conflict, for Nick could be him keeping his cool when he wants so much to kill Clyde. And Clyde’s always prodding him and trying to push him over the edge. That could create a tension and a battle of wills between the two characters that would add layers to the dialogue and the scene. And of course, ultimately, Nick would be able to defeat Clyde because he kept his cool and didn’t fly off the emotional handle as Clyde did in seeking revenge. For me, amateurish screenwriting is very much like that, sudden extremes of obvious emotions in characters. But, over time, when a writer matures, I think you delve more into subtleties, layers, and subtext in the scenes. Because you know enough to ask yourself: “what would be more interesting - a guy who is disciplined in keeping his cool facing his ultimate challenge and watching him struggle to keep his cool throughout the conversation or a guy who flies off the handle whenever he’s pissed?” You know good and well that Clarice wanted to scream her head off in the dungeon with Hannibal, but she didn’t. She kept her cool, stayed focused on the case, and struggled through it. We could see her struggling and supported her for the difficulties she was going through.

3) It’s a bad decision that the Spook would make himself known to Nick and the team in order to pass along a bunch of verbal exposition. THEY should be the ones to find HIM.


To everyone’s credit, there’s a lot of great suspense and thrills. How the murders play out and how Clyde accomplishes these things are the elements that would impress some people who see the film. But this could’ve been so much better. And what would’ve made this story and this film a classic, something that would make people want to revisit this again and again and again, is a deeper point and an evolving relationship between the two main characters.

I can already hear the argument: “what the hell’s wrong with above average B-movie thrills?” I say fuck that. Shoot for the moon.

-MM