Episode #119
John, the screenwriter of Trainspotting and The Beach, talks about his latest project, The Program.
As a writer, you always want to put your best foot forward when submitting your work for consideration. Most of the time, the only thing that a producer, director, or reader will know about you is what you've written on the page. This is why it's so important to ensure your script is in the strongest place possible before sending it in and possibly wasting money on film festivals and contests, or getting frustrated without understanding why you haven't heard anything back.
This live recording of another ISA teleconference will help to demystify what makes a strong screenplay. As a currently working professional script reader based in Los Angeles, Joanna Ke has read and assessed countless feature scripts. She evaluates what's presently out on the market and sees first hand what's going into production. Joanna noticed that there are common notes she offers on why a screenplay is not ready for production or consideration. Get those notes BEFORE you submit!
Joanna passes on to you the Top 5 reasons that cause a screenplay to be weaker, knocking it out of consideration and even affecting the writer's reputation. It can be frustrating not knowing why your screenplay didn't go as far as you'd like or hearing crickets when you've put in a lot of hard work. Educating yourself on what readers actually look for can help you be a step ahead in the game before anyone even sees your script.
Hearing it straight from a reader like Joanna is a rare opportunity to gain insight into what might seem like a mysterious process. Even if you've never written before, shedding light on the screenwriting process from the perspective of a reader will help to understand a different aspect of the writing process that's not often discussed.
Episode #118
Anna talks about raising the money for her latest film, A Country Called Home, via Kickstarter.
Episode #117
Steve talks about his new book, Beating Hollywood, and offers a ton of practical screenwriter advice.
Episode #116
Shant talks about his award winning short film, Night of the Slasher.
Episode #115
Screenwriter/Director Jody Wheeler & Producer Steve Parker. Jody and Steve talk about this latest thriller film, The Dark Place.
A suspenseful intersection of horror and sci-fi resides at "10 Cloverfield Lane".
Scary movies don't always need vampires, wolfmen or creatures from the Black Lagoon to make us jump out of our seats. Sometimes man can be the most monstrous of all. That's what makes this informal sequel to J.J. Abrams' "Cloverfield" from 2008 so thrilling. Its beast is a man, as in John Goodman, playing a survivalist named Howard who's holding Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) captive in his bunker. He's rescued her from a car accident, and now won't let her leave because he says the planet is uninhabitable after an alien attack. Her suspicion of his honesty leads her into a dangerous cat & mouse game with her captor as this thriller blends the best of horror and sci-fi. Cleverly written and economically directed, this modest movie is a good address to park your keister at while it's still playing in the cineplex.
Here’s the perfect way to summarize the mid-point of any story. “Shit just got real”. And really, I could just stop the episode there because if you break down the meaning of “shit just got real” and apply it to the moment in your story where it does, officially, get real for the main character, then you’ve found your mid-point and you’re doing fine. If there isn’t a moment where the quote unquote “real” doesn’t occur. You’re missing your midpoint.
Sequence six is, in my opinion, the most important sequence of your script – especially in your early drafts because you can set a little destination for your main character by writing the mid-point complication before you write sequences 4 and 5 – just so you know where the main character will end up halfway through the story.
But nonetheless, here’s a straight forward breakdown of the mid-point. I always reference it specifically as, “the mid-point complication”. Emphasis on “complication”. If you just call the sequence your “midpoint”, then you’re really just defining the “when” instead of the “when and what”…and the “what” is always more important than the “when”. So here ya go…the basic breakdown of sequence six.
It’s the consummation, or twist. It’s where the “dynamic acceleration” occurs. Yes, you heard me right. Not the “dynamic manipulation” that I’ve referenced in previous episodes, but the dynamic acceleration. And I’m assuming you’re smart enough to figure out what that means, but still…I’ll explain anyway. It’s the moment where the dynamic character affects your main character so much, that your main character’s misbehavior or in other words, emotional problem, is so threatened that he will either go hide away in a hole in the ground, or change so drastically that he’ll seem like a new man. There is very little in-between there.
I'm taking a little break from the regular sequence to sequence episode structure here - it helps to keep things fresh and a little different, and to offer some insights on other aspects of the writing process beyond just the structural make-up. So I'll be releasing episodes called The Sidenote from time to time, and probably at random simply because ideas for other podcast topics pop into my head now and then and I want to, like I said, keep things fresh. And that's actually one of the topics today, but I'll get to that.
So while we work our way toward one of the most important sequences in a script - sequence 6 - and take a little break, I want to take a step back and address a disclaimer I have not quite mentioned in my previous talks here. Applying the structural tools I've been teaching so far to writing for television.
“Eye in the Sky” looks at how modern warfare is executed
Some movies create edge-of-your seat excitement with big set-pieces and rat-a-tat editing. This thriller does it mostly by focusing on people’s faces as they watch screens with scenes of a war being fought thousands of miles away. It’s how modern warfare plays out these days, employing surveillance satellites and drones that at times make it almost seem like a “Call to Duty” video game. The stakes are real though, especially when British intelligence gets a bead on terrorists plotting a suicide bombing in Kenya. The dogged Colonel Powell (Helen Mirren) wants to bomb their home base but getting the greenlight isn’t easy. The British government and American allies must weigh in and it’s one complicated chain of command. Apparently, it takes a village…even to level one. This modern “Fail Safe”, written by Guy Hibbert and directly by Gavin Hood, uses a stellar cast including Alan Rickman and Aaron Paul to play out a gripping morality tale that will have you debating its conclusions long after the movie has ended.
In this interview, I welcomed one of my favorite people. It was a blast talking with DJ, and he spent more time with me than my usual guests do. It's just a testament to his attitude and willingness to inspire.
D.J. MacHale is a writer, director, executive producer and creator of several popular television series and movies. As an author, his ten-volume book series: PENDRAGON: JOURNAL OF AN ADVENTURE THROUGH TIME AND SPACE became a New York Times #1 bestseller. D.J. attended New York University where he received a BFA in film production and began his filmmaking career in New York where he worked as a freelance writer/director making corporate videos and television commercials. But MacHale broke into the entertainment business by writing several ABC AFTERSCHOOL SPECIALS. Putting him on the map was his work as co-creator of the popular Nickelodeon series in 90's called, ARE YOU AFRAID OF THE DARK? He produced all 91 episodes over the 8 years that show was on the air - seriously impressive. D.J. also wrote and directed the movie TOWER OF TERROR for ABC's WONDERFUL WORLD OF DISNEY which starred Kirsten Dunst and Steve Guttenberg.
"Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice" doesn't do any justice to DC comics.
It may be the first ginormous tent pole film of 2016, but "Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice" bores and depresses when it should soar as high as the guy in the red cape. Director Zack Snyder's misbegotten sequel to his 2013 film makes too many of the same mistakes that his origins story did. "Man of Steel" was dark, dank and spent a lot of screen time and dollars on the destruction of Metropolis. Same here, only now he pairs Superman (Henry Cavill) with the Dark Knight (Ben Affleck) and their battle is even moodier and more brutal.
What should be rollicking entertainment is instead too long, too serious, and a downer from first scene to last. The movie also shoehorns in way too much story with multiple villains, Metropolis and Gotham settings, and the set-up of the DC characters who'll star in next year's "Justice League." Gal Gadot's Wonder Woman is the one saving grace here, providing a breath of feminist fresh air to counter all the testosterone. Snyder and his accomplished screenwriters Chris Terrio and David S. Goyer struggle to make their clash of titans meaningful, logical and cogent. It may slay at the box office, but this superhero movie just doesn't fly.
So you’re rumbling along on a road trip with your girlfriend, boyfriend, spouse, whatever. Let’s just set that stage for a second. You’ve been on the road for a few hours. The high and excitement of hitting the open road has kind of dwindled, though there is still some eagerness there…but you’re starting to get annoyed by your girlfriend’s choice in music, maybe a little bickering over which highway to take or which hotel to stay in that night. Nothing really bad or enough to have the two of you decide to never speak to each other again, but…there has been a few sideways glances and increases in the volume of the radio in order to drown out the other person. You’ve just finished up sequence 4 of your trip! You’ve hit a couple setbacks – maybe you hit some snow in Iowa or heavy rain that you didn’t expect. Maybe even a flat tire forced you to stop at a gas station or something, but you’ve plowed through. You’ve gone through it together, helping and assisting each other. The trip is building toward something, even though you don’t quite know what yet (and I don’t mean the final destination). There is a level tension at the very least and you’re realizing that if you continue to bicker, if you continue to dwell on the flat tire, that you’ve actually fixed, the trip will be disaster…it’s time to move forward and move forward together. Whether it’s a conscious choice or not, you both know this to be true.
You’re easing into sequence 5 of your trip. And sequence 5 is the topic of today’s episode, and like I said in the previous episode, sequence 5 is kind of a continuation of sequence 4, but with a very important distinction.
The stories that last forever have certain things in common. Mythic Themes and ArchePaths.
In this recorded teleconference with script consultant, mythologist, author, and screenwriter Pamela Jaye Smith you’ll see how you can follow classic Mythic Themes yet maintain your own personal style. You’ll also gain a powerful paradigm for writing stand-out, yet globally relevant characters using the ArchePaths of the Warrior, Clergy, Scientist, Magician, and Lover. Hosted by the ISA's, Max Timm.
Writers strive for originality. Producers always ask for "something different, something new"... yet keep making and remaking the same stories. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't. What makes the difference? What stories are the biggest hits and become classics? The ones that tap into the timeless myths - those captivating, meaningful stories we keep telling ourselves throughout the ages.
Are you stuck on that Hero's Journey? Your story not fit that pattern? Then you're probably not telling that story. That's okay. There are dozens of other powerful Mythic Themes: The Wakeup Call, Lost Love Rescued, Search for the Promised Land, Don't Ask - Don't Tell, Stealing Fire From Heaven, and many more. Learn how to align your inspiration with one of these classic themes understood around the world, and still maintain your own personal style.
Sometimes subtext just doesn't do it. Use the 3 Mythic Statements of Theme, Mission, and Lesson to create memorable, quotable lines.
Want to write characters actors want to portray? Use the ArchePaths of the Warrior, Clergy, Scientist, Magician, and Lover to craft dynamic, believable characters. Learn the hopes, fears, strengths, weaknesses, styles and more that guide each Path. With 3 levels and 3 approaches of each Path, there are plenty of combinations to keep your characters unique and provide dramatic conflict within their relationships and situations.
Use the Mythic Themes and ArchePaths to tap into our collective unconscious and create what we all yearn for in stories: familiarity and surprise. The familiarity comes from using these inherent universal patterns. The surprise comes from telling the stories and crafting the characters with your own unique style and vision.
And, these rich resources can also help you adapt all aspects of your storylines and characters for multiple platforms: features, TV series, webisodes, mobile games, graphic novels, fan-generated stories, and - who knows what's next?
As an added bonus, you can find insights into your own ArchePath and your own personal myths.
Proving the promise of your premise - fun and games - trials and tests:
Imagine that I'm planning a trip. I'm headed to a place like London, or Paris, or Edinburgh (all places that I would love to visit, by the way). I select the dates, I pack accordingly, I have a hotel reserved, the flight is taken care of. The usual stuff we do when planning a trip. Any of those three places, for me anyway, hold some semblance of familiarity for me. The English language is prevalent in each of those cities, though I would happily try and remember what I learned in my high school French class when going to Paris. All three cities are culturally similar in most ways to what I'm used to here in the US, and I basically know what to expect before visiting.
Now imagine that I'm sitting quietly in my living room, maybe watching an episode of House of Cards and hating Frank Underwood more and more every minute, and suddenly my front door bursts open, three men wearing black suits and sunglasses grab me, put a bag over my head, force me into their car, shove some sleeping pills down my throat and...the next thing I know, I wake up in the middle of a crowded street in Beijing.
I've heard Beijing is a beautiful city. I've heard that the Asian culture is amazing and something that everyone should experience...but compare this trip to the one I had previously described. The trip I would have taken to, say, London. Not only is this Beijing trip unplanned and, to put it lightly, a kidnapping, but the cultural differences are extreme in comparison, I have nothing packed - no suitcases, change of clothes, or toothbrush - and the language might as well be alien. I don't know where to go, who brought me there, or why.
Now what? That question - "now what?" - should be something that you have in your head when brainstorming not only your sequence 4, but the experience of your main character as she is experiencing her 2nd Act.
Oftentimes, when we’re developing the story of a film, developing the plot of the film, we’re afraid that we’re going to run out of story, that we’re going to run out of the right story. We worry that we don’t have enough story, or a good enough story, that our idea doesn’t work, that we don’t have the right ending, that we don’t know what we’re building, and we get scared.
We start to look outside of ourselves for structure. We start to look outside of ourselves for plot. We start to look outside of ourselves to figure out what happens. Maybe we look at another movie. Maybe we look at a screenwriting book. Maybe we look at a hero’s journey archetype. Maybe, heavens forbid, we look at a software program that pretends it can tell us what happens in our story. Maybe we look to our friends for advice, but none of these places are where we really want to be looking.
Where we want to be looking is inside the content of the screenplay itself. We want to be looking inside of what we’ve already written to figure out where we need to go.
All of the answers for where we need to go in your story already exist in the initial pages of your screenplay. The structure of your movie can grow organically simply by looking at the things that exist in your story, and saying, “If this is true, what else must also be true? And if this is true, what else must also be true? And if this is true, what else must also be true?”
In this context, by the time we make it to the end of the movie, in some way, everything possible must happen..."
So often, as screenwriters, we lock ourselves in our own little rooms. Like the main characters of Room, we get bound up by other people's rules, by our own comfort zone as screenwriters, by the movies that we have seen before. And we forget that every wall has another side, that there is actually something out there bigger than the story we know how to tell, than the movie that we've seen before, than the structure that we've been handed down, than the rules that have been imposed upon us.
And, Room, in its execution and its subject matter, really shows us what it is to transcend those rules, to transcend our expectations as we write, and to transcend the expectation of our audience for what our film is supposed to be.
Now, a lot of people who have studied the rules of screenwriting might look at a screenplay like Room and say "is this even a movie? Shouldn't this be a play?"
After all, nearly half of the film takes place in a single room. And, even when we get out of that room, most of the action still takes place in a single location: in the living room of a home.
And though this is certainly wonderful from a budgetary perspective, this is not something we see very often in movies. In fact, the dogma tells us this is impossible.
And, of course, there are reasons for that dogma. Movies are visual medium. By using the power of dynamic visual action, and the power of our cuts, we draw an audience into our stories. There a lot of reasons why these rules exist.
The problem happens when we start letting the rules rule the script, rather than the other way around. When we try to follow all the rules in a vacuum, rather than figuring out the rules we actually need for the story we want to tell...
...this week we're going to be looking at two Oscar Winners, Spotlight and The Big Short. And we're going to be discussing at them not only as good screenplays, but as examples of very different kinds of screenplays. We're going to be looking at them in terms of the difference between plot and structure. The concepts of plot and structure are ideas that get mixed up all the time. They are words that are often used interchangeably, but that in my opinion actually mean very different things. I like to think of plot as "the crap that happens in your movie," or, for that matter, in your life. And I like to think of structure as the choices a character makes in relation to that plot: the choices that change their lives forever. Plot is the stuff that happens, but structure is your character's change.
And if you think about your own life, you'll probably realize that the difference between plot and structure matters to you as well. You've probably met the person who gets a hangnail and it destroys their whole day. And you've probably also met the person who gets cancer and gets a whole new lease on life. You have probably met the person who finds beauty in the most horrible situations and the person who creates horror into the most beautiful ones. And this is the exciting thing about the difference between plot and structure.
Plot, as much as we obsess about it, is pretty much interchangeable. We spend so much time as writers, and in our daily lives, thinking about plot, worrying about "what happens next, what happens next, what happens next," that we forget to think about what it all really means. We forget that what really matters is not just what happens, but what the we do in relationship to what happens. And how we allow that to bring meaning and change to our lives. Having said that, I want to start with a script that flies right in the face of all that. A script that focuses mainly on plot rather than structure. And that script is Spotlight..."
Today's topic - sequence three - is a big one. It marks the end of your first act, propels the reader on the journey and gets the main character prepped for the 2nd Act...and most importantly introduces the secondary character, or as I sometimes refer to as the Dynamic Character. The sidekick. The mentor. The best friend. The guy behind the guy.
Lots to cover here, so grab something to write with, turn on your thinkin' caps, and let's get to work.
SYS Podcast Episode 114:
Director / Screenwriter Afonso Poyart Talks About His Film Two Rabbits
SYS Podcast Episode 113:
Screenwriter Gabriel Campisi Talks About His New Horror Film Little Dead Rotting Hood
SYS Podcast Episode 112:
Screenwriter & Director Agustin Talks About His New Film Badge of Honor Starring Martin Sheen
SYS Podcast Episode 111:
Screenwriter Brad Mirman Talks About His New Western Forsaken Starring Kiefer Sutherland.
SYS Podcast Episode 110:
Sean Baker & Chris Bergoch Talk About Their Sundance Comedy / Drama Tangerine.
Sequence 2, the Set-Up Event.
The Set-Up is kind of like the first impression on a date. It all hinges on how you present yourself right out of the gates. If I were to start babbling on about witchcraft and black magic on a first date, I would assume the girl would probably motion for the waiter to bring the check. But let's think about that for a second, because as strange as that example may be when trying to bring it back around to writing a screenplay, it does fit. It kind of makes sense, actually. Why does it make sense? Because that set up is completely involving the main character at the moment. The main character is setting up future events - whether he knows it or not, he's presenting the beginning of a story. Even though the story will likely come to a quick end because your date is going to run out the door after the black magic comment, it still instigates the beginning of something - a reaction.
When circling back to a screenplay, and if you wanted to simplify this as much possible, your 2nd Act of your movie (or middle episodes of a serialized TV show, for example), is a reaction. That's pretty much all the 2nd Act is if you boil it down to the most basic element. A reaction to an event. That event is what sets up everything that is going to then happen in the middle of your movie, but...and here's the important point to remember...from a character perspective! I'll say that again: the set up event is what sets up everything that is going to happen in the middle of your movie from character perspective.