SCRIPTS: Hearing voices by Ola Zaltin

It is said that a film is made three times: it is written, it is shot and it is edited. Every time it comes out somewhat different from what the original intent was. (Hell, quite often the original intent is all together forgotten, left for dead or just plain abandoned.)

Come to think of it, the three different stages of the making of a film could roughly be transferred to the classical three-act structure. There is the first act: the writing of the script, wherein we set up the central plot lines, introduce the characters – their flaws, wants and needs – and put the film in its proper genre. 

Then there's the second act, as it were, the actual shoot: the most arduous, conflict filled, relationship killing, suicide inducing, no-sleep-no-eat-lots-of-alcohol-and-pills a director can imagine. And then some. This all inevitably leads up to the climax of the process, which is the last day of shooting, plus one week of over-budget pick-up shots that were missed or lost, and then to cap it all off: the wrap party.

The wrap party is ostensibly there to celebrate the end of a successful shoot. In reality, it's the one time that the entire crew can unwind, let their guard down and go bananas. And they do. There's drinking like the world ends tomorrow, drugs in the stalls, making out in the corners and shagging on the lawn. (This is all before the appetizers, mind.)

After that comes the mellow third act, the easing of the tension, tying up all the loose ends that is the editing process.

*

As a screenwriter, you are naturally heavily involved with the first act of this melodrama – the writing part. I've mostly written with directors and not for them, so to speak. Meaning that we meet for days and weeks and talk and walk and I take notes and go home and write and send it off and then more back and forth via e-mail and then new sessions in conference rooms that drag on forever and a day with copious amounts of coffee and snacks.

During this initial part of the making of a film, I am the director's best friend, drinking buddy, confidante, confessor and priest combined. In my experience this involves baring your inner-most secrets (most lofty dreams) and get acquainted with his or her family in general.

However, slowly people start to trickle in on the meetings. Other voices are introduced into the conversation. Voices that all have a point of view, helpful advice. Constructive feedback. A producer, a co-producer. A line-producer, casting-agent, actors, set-designers, prop-masters and even the odd editor show up in the heretofore empty conference room. As the project gains funding and therefore momentum you suddenly find yourself in a room with people demanding the director's - your (by now) best friend's ear and time, and you hardly know the half of them. But they know you: you're the originator. The screenwriter.

Your job at this stage of the development process (sometimes also known as hell) is to remain utterly calm and to the greatest possible extent remain objective. Now this might look easy on paper, but in real life it's a proper mind-fucking you're in for. What you thought were absolute givens: what your character wanted, what gender it had, background, dreams, the car he or she drove, the dog she had are now suddenly again - after weeks and months of talking and writing with and for director – up in the air.

Questions like: “Can the main character be Nigerian instead of Norwegian?”, “What if he's a woman?”, “Can the castle not be a two-room apartment in the Bronx?”, “What if she is an alien vampire, instead of a Colombian aid-worker?”

And so on, and so on. You have to listen to these people, because no. 1 (2 and 3) they have the money. Without the money, no film. Also, these voices, (most often the voices of producers), have an irritating propensity to actually know what they're talking about. Sad to say, but they're good, and you better listen.

So your job suddenly becomes not sitting alone in a room with your best mate dreaming up great stuff, but listening, taking notes, going to meetings and listening to people – a dizzying array of voices – meaning all the best, but heavily trampling your love-child: the screenplay.

Now, I've gone to film school and I've partaken in many workshops and script-labs and whatnot, but the thing I've never heard taught is how to keep a steady course under the onslaught of well-meant advice from a dozen voices at once. This is one of my flaws as a screenwriter. So me sitting here pontificating sounds a bit strange, at least to my own ears. Let's just say that I'm speaking from hard-won experience whilst simultaneously writing a note to self.

First of all: be aware that it is going to happen. This might sound obvious to write here, but I can't emphasize how important it is to know beforehand that there's going to be a shitstorm of good advice by people who mean well, but who unintentionally will rip your story apart. Before taking your first meetings, anticipate – as well as you can – what the question marks and feedback will be. Have answers prepared, if not written down.

Secondly: (and this is the tough part) LISTEN. Listen, because these people are professionals, they want to make the best film possible, and they usually have a ton of experience. Experience that is much more far-reaching than yours. They know about markets, funding, co-production, viewer segments, what's trending, what's not, what actor is looking for a project, the director of photography that would be perfect, etc etc. While you have your nose in your pages, deep down in the story, these guys have the broader view and can steer your project clear of cliffs, shoals and ice-bergs (read: megalomaniac actors, Armenian gangsters and Nigerian investors).

But when you listen, keep that first rule in mind: hold on to the rudder, remember what your project started with. What was the spark, the passion, the drive, the endurance to get it all down on paper and shared with the world? What made you lose your job, get thrown out by your partner, eat spaghetti and ketchup for months and lose your car? That initial falling in love with the story, the zone you were in when you wrote it, is what you have to hold on to, explain better and better, and polish until it is no longer the turd it began its life as, but a shining diamond.

Listen with prejudice. Take what you can use, throw out the rest. Argue for your view and give ground when needed. Choose your battles. (A fine string of clichés that, but hey, they're clichés for a reason, right?)

It has been said that a screenplay is never finished – it is abandoned. There's some truth to that. Whereas a novel can be rewritten ad infinitum, and then helped through its teething by a wise and considerate editor – a screenplay is only alone with its maker for a short while and then subjected to a tsunami of good advice, bullshit, nonsense and wisdom in an extremely confusing maelstrom of voices.

Yes, at one point you'll have to abandon it, give it over to the (hopefully) competent hands of the director and his huge team of professional film-makers: the crew.

Which, incidentally, leads us back to that midnight madness, the king hell trumpet of all orgies, the mother of all bacchanalia: the wrap party.

As a screenwriter, you were there when it all started, with that little seed, that original idea for a story. Perhaps a title, or a character, maybe a conflict set you on your way. You developed it alone, later with the director and then gradually a huge team assembled to actually make the darn thing happen. Now, a year later (or ten, give or take) you're invited to the wrap-party. The last time you saw the crew, they were a disparate group of individuals trying to come together to make something as a team. After the shoot, they are now a hardened bunch of team mates that have been through hell and survived it. They've bonded on a profound level, having faced down all kinds of craziness and soul depleting work schedules for weeks and weeks. The tension, both sexual and physical is palpable: this gang have given it their all for a very long time, suppressing all kinds of desires and hatreds. Now it's time to let it out and they're a tight-knit bunch of desperadoes by now. You, on the other hand, are not part of this particular clan anymore. You've taken a holiday, or perhaps started up a new project, or switched to driving buses. Short of the long: you're by comparison sane.

Eyeing you, everyone in the room (when not fucking or fighting) will whisper “who invited that weirdo?”. Not so fun, but that being said: apart from bare-knuckle spectator blood sports, nothing beats going to a wrap-party.

The last act of the making of a film is, of course, the editing. This is the third time it is “made”. Now the director assembles all his footage and tries to tell a cohesive story out of all the madness and mayhem that once upon a time began with words on paper: the screenplay. This is a very quiet period in a film's birth. I've been called to sets, but rarely, and I've visited editing suites, but never for any real input. From here on in it's the director, editor and producer's ball-game, and good riddance.

In the end, after all that's been voiced, talked about, discussed and fought over at the script-stage – leading to the insanity of shooting a movie on sets and out in the world, day and night for weeks and months on end – ending with the arduous task of assembling all those scenes into a coherent story – hopefully (when the PR and distributors get their shit together and streamlined), the finished product will headline the director's name. But in truth it will be a vast number of different people, from different backgrounds, with different opinions, credos and points of view that have, in spite of it all, come together and spoken together: with one voice.

Scripts: Go to Jail to Break Free by Ola Zaltin

Freedom - whoppee! I’ve got the whole world as my stage. I can write whatever I like, about whomever I like, living wherever I like. The computer screen is pristine white, the cursor winks at me invitingly and I can type faster than a choirboy runs from a bishop.

So where to begin?

I think I want to tell a story about a boy and a girl, who meet in...Nairobi. He’s English middle-class visiting grandparents; she’s a girl from the slums. No. Wait. She’s English white middle-class visiting her dad who’s stationed in Nairobi working at the embassy, and he’s the dishwasher at the embassy, living in a hut in the slums with his five siblings.

Okay. Delete all that, not another Slumdog Millionaire. In fact, now that I think of it, I’ve always wanted to write the new Star Wars, only with actual galactic stars as living creatures and sentient creatures battling out during the big bang.

...or maybe not. Better have another glass of red. Or not. Slow down now. White page again. Deep breath (and yeah a little sip of Merlot never hurt Hemingway, did it? He only put a shotgun in his mouth, no biggie. Big glass of Merlot then).

Who’s the main character? Man? Woman? Transgender? Dog? A talking stuffed bear? A Lego piece?  Is it a main character story, or an ensemble cast? Is it told V-O, narrated by an old man remembering his youth told in flashback - or, hey! Maybe it’s a silent movie?

And genre, God! (More Merlot, and there might be some vodka in the freezer for later on.) Romantic comedy? Tragi-comedy? Historical drama? Cop drama? Drama? Comedy? Black comedy? Comedy comedy? Strange film set in Korea? Sci-fi, low-fi, wifi - shiiiiit. What the FI have I got myself into? (Wine glasses are for ponces, btw, wine tastes best straight from the bottle.)

I haven’t even started (or in fact I have - about 13 times - but it’s looking to be a sad ending. Or should I make it a happy ending? For which character, in what location, told by whom? Aaargh.

Freedom is choice. And if there’s too much choice, you get lost - both mentally and geographically (anyone who’s ever visited a US supermall knows what I’m talking about).

For me, the trick is to take away as much “freedom” from my story as possible. Because if the whole world is your stage; if your characters are unlimited, if anything can happen at any given moment - you’re lost on an ocean of possibilities. This (to me) is both bewildering, scary and uncreative.

Writing - at least screenwriting - is not about freedom. In fact, it’s about rules, and strict ones at that.

So let’s rewind the tape, erase that computer screen once again and start over. What if, in fact, you didn’t have any freedom when you started writing your story? What if you had some very narrow parameters to work with, some absolutely unbreakable rules?

A typical film-school writing assignment is something like “two guys and a girl in a room”: one is pregnant, one is the father, there’s a gun, and a million dollars: only one leaves the room alive.  Write the scene. You have 30 minutes. Go.

(Producers, by the way, love these kind of scenes and movies: one room, one house, one apartment. They hate overseas travel, night scenes and any kind of film with Grand Central Station in it: it’s called “Writing with your wallet” - in fact, their wallet. A producer will ten times more likely accept a script that’s cheap to produce than one that needs thousands of extras dancing in Grand Central Station at night in costume.)

Examples of films that come to mind with small casts and limited locations are:

Pieces of April

Basically located in a tenement building and a car. The building where April lives, and the car that her family is travelling in, to come to her Thanksgiving dinner.

Bound

A lesbian (yes, with Gina Gershon: go see) noir crime thriller set in one apartment.

Before Sunset, Before Sunrise and Before Midnight

Okay, the films take place in three different locations (but only one for each film); Vienna, Paris and Pelopenessos, Greece, but it’s basically two people growing up, bickering, talking and meeting - and parting.

Those are just from the top of my head. The list could be made almost endless. (Oh, here’s another one: Little Miss Sunshine: A dysfunctional family travel cross-country in a beat-up VW bus to a pageant they all know their pre-teen daughter IMPOSSIBLY can win. One car, one family. Brilliant.)

Imprisonment is a great ally for the creative screenwriter. Freedom the enemy. Instead of mumbling to a possible collaborative partner:  “Uh, yeah, it’s about, like, my dad and stuff…?” Do your homework; build that prison before you even leave your room. Boil down the location. Sketch out the characters (no more than five, ever). Set up your parameters before you write one single word on page. Will there be a murder? Will cops figure - or not - if it’s a crime drama? Will the press play a part - or not - if it’s a legal drama? For example, have a vague idea, at least, of the ending.

Then, when all that is done: let loose, and let your characters take a right where you’d planned a left, argue when you’d wanted silence, make love when celibacy was the rule. For short: break the rules. But to do that you have to have rules in the first place, right?

For me, as a writer, creative freedom is impossible without imprisonment: rules that help me build the screenplay in a coherent and structured way. And what is school, workplace, the army, prison - hell, driving down the road - but rules?

In real life we all live (and mostly abide) by rules, from dawn ’til dusk, and then some. And why do we (mostly) go to the movies?

To see people break the darn rules. 

SCRIPTS: The Art of Adapting by Ola Zaltin

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away… A young student at the University of Lund, Sweden, was browsing for course literature - history of ideas, if you must know - when he kind of maybe perhaps possibly just by chance stumbled into the film section of the academic bookstore.

The book that caught his eye was a paperback by a chap called Syd Field and the title was “Screenplay”. In my defence, I did buy the study literature as well, but to be honest I didn’t really read it. What I read was Field’s how-to-write a screenplay guide, laid out in easy beats. I was hooked. It didn’t take long before Field’s “The screenwriter’s workbook” and “Selling a screenplay: The Screenwriter’s guide to Hollywood” (seductive title, that) and Linda Seger’s “The Art of Adaptation” began easing out the works of Heidegger, Spinoza and Arndt on my bookshelf. Academic studies went to shit, nights were spent reading about how to tell a story for the screen.

Film had always been there via my father who was a professor in sciences but a true romantic and arts lover, who took us kids to exhibitions of Monet (okay shit), Operas (Carmen being my fav) and Kurosawa films (yay!). It was The Seven Samurai that had me at hello - where I lost it at the movies, as it were. I saw it in a dingy “arthouse” (read: shithouse) cinema in Copenhagen in or about circa 1982. It was - of course - all in Japanese, and the subtitles in Danish; a language I did not well master in those days. But looking back now, I realize I got the whole damn story blow by blow. Because it’s so extremely well-acted and told dramatically in a visual way that you cannot but get the gist of the story.

Inspired by Seger’s book about adaptation, I set to work adapting my favourite novel of the time (and to this day, on my top five list) Martin Amis’ “Money - a suicide note”. I had already read it twice in Swedish, and then thrice in English. Now I set about the task of notating - with three different coloured marker pens - the pieces that I wanted to visually tell in a screenplay: the descriptive parts, the dialogue parts and the - I-don’t-know-what-parts. This was 25 years ago. I just remember marking up the novel with three different coloured markers. It’s still standing here beside me on the bookshelf. I’ve read it at least three times since.

Short of the long: I ended up with a big fat pile of pages; I believe something like 350 pages thick, with what amounted to a chronological telling of events and dialogue lifted pretty much verbatim from the novel (choice cuts, naturally) and then adding a few words here and there at the beginning and the end. I was way too much in awe of Mr. Amis’ text at the time (still am) to dare really work it, knead it, challenge it.

However, I was on my path to becoming a screenwriter - or so I thought. In the end, all those readings and re-readings and late nights hacking away at a prehistoric laptop where I had to do all the darn formatting myself (as opposed to today when MovieMagicScreenwriter formats it as I go along) kind of maybe pretty much paid off.

When applying for the Danish Film School, I used the script (amongst other texts) to fake myself into their prestigious screenwriting programme, then headed by the inestimable Mogens Rukov of later fame. 

So adaptation is where I began, but that’s not the topic of this particular sermon. I’d like to try and share with you some of my experiences of screenwriting, which is a very collaborative process, and in the end, the true art of adapting.

See, all stories start in some odd place of your brain. A fragment, an image, a smell; whatchamacallit - something, somewhere tickles your story-telling nerve and sets in process a story told by you and no one else could tell that particular story. That’s the beauty of it: if you latch on to a story of your own design, it’s yours and yours alone.

Until the moment you share it with someone else. From that moment on, you go down a beautiful, lovely, inspiring and horrendous nightmarish path to hell. Because from then on, your story is not your own - you share it, with producers, directors, money men, TV-station bosses, wives, girlfriends, ex-girlfriends, town car drivers and their brood. 

As the “originator” (as Richard Price once beautifully termed it) you are, to some extent the king of control, the master of your domain. That is until you show your text to someone else in the TV/film business.

Now, there are, to my mind, two things about this: one good, one bad. One inspiring, one tough. The first one (let’s start with the good news) is that someone, some place out there, likes your text. Yay! The second one is, this person (company, agent, person of interest, devil spawn,  gremlin) will after that first back-slapping session of camaraderie, closeness, friendship and brotherhood - say something along the lines of: HOWEVER.

When the sentence begins with HOWEVER, or BUT, or something similar - you know this is when the dance begins in earnest. This is merde creek sans les paddles.

This is where the art of adaptation begins. Not adaptation from one media to the other - but the art of adapting to other people. You have proven yourself a pages person, now you have to jump in and become a people person.

There really aren’t many how-to books about this part of the process. (If there were, they’d be called something like “Run to the hills” if that title wasn’t already taken by Iron Maiden.) Because now, after having dreamt your beautiful little dream and typed it out, printed it and shared it with the world at large - now comes an army of very well informed, very wise, very full of talk and very powerful people that want to tell you just exactly is WRONG with your text. To name but a few, there’ll be the director and his agent, the directors’ girlfriend or boyfriend (most often both), your agent, the producer, his pooch and the team of story editors he’s brought along, the DP and his little kingdom of serfs. You know you’ve hit rock bottom when the town car driver starts commenting on the latest draft.

When you step out of same said car, take the elevator up to hell and enter an “informal meeting” you realize - much to your disbelief - that there are product placement people, franchise agents, TV-station underbosses, wives, girlfriends, boyfriends, story editors, storyliners, in-house scriptwriters and men in dark shades and black suits standing against the wall with their hands clasped in front of them and you really don’t want to know who they are. Seriously.

This is when you know you’re about to be right royally done over. Because these people, or the people they are associated with (don’t ask) have bought your text. So now you’re just a little pilot fish hanging on the great white that was formerly known as your screenplay. And you’re not going to be able to hang on for long.

This bastard - this thing of your creation - has suddenly attained a life of its own. It’s ALIVE! And it’s out to kill you.

*

Yeah okay so I got a bit carried away there. I’ve experienced the above, but I’ve also experienced great rides of inspiring collaboration and fun adapting. Some of them have developed into life-long friendships.  It’s a struggle bringing stories to the screen, but you have to trust your collaborators, their enthusiasm, their drive and their passion. I once wrote down three basic collaborative rules (and strange enough - they have now become framed at Norwegian state TV).

They are, as follows:

1. Every morning, come with a story to the table. It doesn’t have to be funny, or good, or dramatic or whatever. Just come with a story. A little anecdote; an observation. Story-telling is a muscle that needs exercise. Train that muscle. Come with a positive to the table every day.

2. Never say no. This is harder than it sounds. It means: if you’re listening to someone else saying something really off or silly or down right stupid: your gut reaction will be to say: No. Stop it. That’s just not funny, smart, sad, good, (take your pick). BUT - here comes the but - but instead say, ‘Hrm. Interesting. But what if…” The what if is key here. Because what you’re doing is not putting up a big red light of non-communication: you’re actually keeping the ball in play. “Hrm, cool. But what if…” and you keep the conversation, the process of developing, in motion.

3. Never shut your mouth. This is an old one, but it can’t be stressed enough. Think out loud. Embarrass yourself, embarrass people around you, quack away. For short: don’t be afraid. It’s all about keeping the creative juices flowing, of laughing, of crying, of telling and thinking of what matters the most to you in your life - the most painful and the most humorous, preferably mixed up in one great joke (see nr 1).

So, yeah. The art of adapting is not really taught at film schools or in books. You have to jump in there and swim. Some people are better at this than others. I think, in the end, we all take a toll. Because you go in there and smile and you’re wide open and you want to be liked, you want your text to swim, to get along with the others - and you go home drained and tired and there’s Jack on the kitchen sink and such.

You come home and you have a buzz because people like your text and they want to pay you money for it, but then you’re alone and spent and there’s a notebook full of panicky scribbles written whilst keeping a calm face on the 32nd floor with those goombas lined up along the wall (jeepers creepers who are these guys!?) and there’s pills and there’s Jack and good night and good luck.

The art of adapting is a great challenge, if you have the mettle. I dream of a world where I am a novelist and only have to interact with a sexy agent or a lovely editor about two times a year over lunch. This, however, is just a fantasy. I actually love the grind: the immense seclusion and insane interaction of screenwriting.

Beats working.

SCRIPTS: AN INQUIRY INTO THE PAST

By Ola Zaltin

“Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.”

So ends one of the most famous detective films in history.

Whatever actually happened in Chinatown (the title of the film) is only hinted at throughout the story. The notion we get is that whatever happened in Chinatown - in the past - was not good.  It has, in fact, tainted and jaded our protagonist no end. It was probably the reason JJ Gittes was dismissed - or left - the police force and became a private investigator.

Furthermore: we get a strong indication that it was what happened in Chinatown that brings our protagonist to the brink of disaster - and beyond - once again: his stubborn belief that he can fix the world. The laconic ending line from his erstwhile partner summing it all up: you can’t.

*

Most stories are told from here on and forwards. “This is the set-up, this is what happens, this is how it ends.” (A tiny village is each year beset by a marauding gang that steal their meagre crops. A party of villagers venture into the big city to hire samurai to protect them. The samurai do so, but lose most of their members in the endeavour. The samurai have won a pyrrhic battle: the farmers are the real victors. Seven Samurai.)

In the straight forward told narrative, if the past is used at all, it is to tell us something about our characters. This backstory is often there to give our main characters a bit more texture and humanity (or not, as in this piece of climactic ending exchange from Runaway Train: “Sara: You’re an animal! Manny: No, worse! Human! Human!”) Their history, their inner turmoils and struggles will lead them to either 1. Learning the life lesson at hand: happy ending, or 2. Not: tragic ending.

“Detective story” as a genre will be taken loosely within the context of this particular columnist’s venture into the past. What I will call “Investigative” stories can range in subject matter from an in-your-face plucky single mother of two taking down a huge corporation in court, to a quiet English butler re-evaluating his life, to the super-rich of America trying to save their own skin. 

Stories that have very different storylines, but share this: the characters attempt to untangle a web of lies and deceit going back in time: be it huge corporations having poisoned innocent men, women and children; or a lone butler looking back on his life trying to make the remains of his days make sense; or a lawyer trying to find out what really happened on that one single day.

All three films here - chosen at random - are firmly set in the present, but involve a great deal of history: what happened, and how and where? They are of course Erin Brockovich, The Remains of the Day and Reversal of Fortune. (The last film’s story based on real events and in a stroke of genius by the screenwriter Nicholas Kazan, the voice-over narration is done by the woman central to the drama - now in a coma. A device later used with similar success in Desperate Housewives.)

*

None of the above mentioned stories could by the farthest stretch of the imagination be called detective stories, but they share the central element of one driven main character researching the past to solve a puzzle in the present. The investigative storyline gives the writer a handful of very useful tools for telling the story.

1. A main character with a drive and passion: trying to answer a life-changing question.

2. A strong backstory motivating the main character for his or her quest.

3. People trying to stop main character from reaching his or her goal.

4. The titillating central question: is it true? is it not? who’s the culprit? what really happened?!

5.  Will it be a happy ending? We invest our emotions in the main character, hoping for a happy outcome to their quest.

Philomena, starring Judi Dench, is a good example of an investigative storyline that is neither a thriller nor a detective genre film. Philomena is a middle-aged woman with grown children. She carries a great secret burden: when a young woman, she had sex before marriage, became pregnant and was thrown out of her family and forced to give her baby boy away to nuns, who gave him away to unknown parents. She gets in contact with the reporter Sixsmith, who decides to help her research the story, and find her son. Nuns, Americans, ex-partners, bureaucrats all conspire to stop Philomena on her quest. Will she find her lost son - and how and what will he be? A junkie or a happy family father? Philomena sets out on her life-altering journey.

See the five or so beats in the above? How although it’s no detective movie or thriller - it uses the same dramatic elements to tell a story of finding something hidden in the past to great effect.

*

Detective stories are by nature told in the reverse. The central question here is: “What happened?” and there’s a fair amount of time travel involved to solve the crime.

When a detective story begins, the murder is already done, or will be, within minutes of screen time. The detective(s) arrive to find a fait accompli. Now it’s time to start the research back in time, minute by minute, hour by hour, and map the victims background, friends, enemies, movements, witnesses - and so on; you know the drill.

This is usually set against a ticking clock - and clocks, as we all know, move forward. The detective(s) are under pressure to travel back in time, to prevent the murderer killing in the future.

My own way of writing crime (or investigative) stories comes in stages. The first is thinking of the crime, who committed it, why and how. I.e. creating the backstory; the road into history that the detective will start travelling down, step by step and hour by hour into the past. Much of this is often background work on the characters involved in, or around, the murder. Their lives, their liaisons, their jobs, dreams, secrets (up and above all, their most innermost and secret drives and fears) and goals.

The second stage is covering the whole thing up. When I know who committed the murder, and how and why, and what the red herrings will probably be, who profits from keeping the history being kept hidden, and thus will look suspicious (but not necessarily be the guilty party).

This trail is akin to a detonator wire I’ve covered by sand, that the detective will uncover and follow and which will blow up in his face (or hopefully not) at the end of that line. A flow chart of webbed wires, in fact, were some will lead to duds, some branch off in unexpected directions but in the end, one wire will be found to be the right one that leads to the denouement - the defusing of the big explosion, as it were.

Then and only then does the detective come onto the stage, stage three in the process.

Also here is the question of how and why central. How does the detective (or an “investigator” such as Philomena) come into the story? Why now? What happens that triggers the story?

And why is this character chosen as the detective/investigator, what drives him or her? What makes it absolutely impossible for them to say no to the challenge of heading down that dark and scary tunnel into the past that might very well give them some nasty shocks, uncomfortable truths, deadly enemies and most probably put them in harm’s way? What is the reason he or she just HAS to undertake this perilous journey? (Hint: it’s often something to do with their own past…)

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The collection of data to solve the crime is at the very core of the investigation.

Modern film and TV-series almost all have their ubiquitous data-nerd: Benji (Mission Impossible franchise), Penelope Garcia (Criminal Minds), Job (Banshee), Finch (Person of Interest) to name but a few. There’s nothing these geniuses can’t find in an instant, cross-indexing and illegally searching, providing passwords, background, aliases, locations and floor plans, (somehow - also magical - always being able to have radio-contact with our protagonist, although said is 200 meters underground in a cement bunker 200 kms away) etc etc. To me, this has ruined the basic art of knocking on doors and talking to people, and sadly, gradually taken the impossible out of the mission. Person of Interest is a clear indicator of the state of things, as it is involved with the stopping of future crimes, not even yet committed. (It also moves so fast and was so uninvolving this viewer opted out after ten minutes of viewing.) The basic premise of uncovering something hidden and dark has been reduced to typing on a keyboard and bingo; the idea of searching your way, slowly and painstakingly down through the corridors of time, replaced by a matter of pressing Enter and hey presto, here’s the culprit!

Call me old, but I’m more and more beginning to enjoy series like Foyle’s War, or more recently Inspector Gently, detectives inhabiting a world before the internet and mobile phones, where a lot of walking and talking, pondering and observing and going back and talking solves the crime. HBO’s new series True Detective takes the element of going back in time full on with (so far) great success. Telling the story of a 17-year hunt for a serial killer it divides its time deliciously between the present day interviews of the two detectives first involved with the case 17 years ago, and flashbacks to that time, when mobile phones were scarce, the world wide web unborn and there weren’t any radio masts yet in the bayous of Louisiana.

The pace of a series without mobiles and internet is slower, it takes its time. We get to know people, their idiosyncrasies, strengths and weaknesses. We lean forward to learn more and engage, as opposed to leaning back and getting everything served with the click of a mouse from the resident nerd IT-oracle. (The other day I found a guy on a message board asking if anyone noticed, right at the end of episode two of True Detective, what looked like four stones being dropped in the lake as the camera tilted up and away from the church. I personally think that it wasn’t stones. Or something meant to be there, just fish surfacing coincidentally or whatever, the wind. But just the fact that this guy is so super into every scene, every movement, every possible clue, is both telling and endearing.)

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Famously, Chinatown screenwriter Robert Towne first wrote the ending as a happy ending, with the evil father Noah Cross being shot, and daughter Evelyn surviving. Polanski’s instincts told him this would make it just another bland cop thriller, and reversed it, with the resulting tragic ending. Polanski was right: with a happy ending, the whole shebang would have sunk without a trace.

To be a bit glib, story is a part of history; and history must be an integral part of every good story, be it a happy or tragic ending. From character background to the investigative storyline to detective films proper, history is a very essential part in a film or tv-narrative. Research it, explore it, develop it and use it - or you’re history. 

SCRIPTS: True Story Fiction

By Ola Zaltin

We live our lives in an ever-growing stream of media cascading down on us in ever-increasing amounts. Only a Luddite with a monastic bent (with cravings for Weetabix and water on an outer-outer, outer Hebridean reef) can evade this Niagara of nonsense raining down on us with the force to stun, incapacitate and render us utterly incapable of discerning between what is worthwhile and that which is Miley Cyrus.

Forever trying to catch the elusive present, (truly capturing the Now: also known as herding cats), it seems the more our post-modern ironic age progresses, the better we technologically get at catching the moment; snapping the Instagram, sending the Tweet, doing the Vine. But where are we? Where am I? Really? Where is the moment where we get to rest, to put away the mobile phone, close down the laptop, unplug the iPad: to truly reflect about our life without our faces glowing of LCD-blue reflected glare? To quote Kierkegaard: “Life can only be lived forwards; but is understood backwards.”  To me, it seems we today are living in a constant breathless forward, hunting for the next Now, but letting our backward - our memories - become piles of meaningless snapshots of empty symbols of our sunshiny smiling status and success.

In TV and film writing, there’s of course fiction and non-fiction, with the documentary attempting the art of doing history real justice. Fiction film and TV, however, gets into very murky waters when it tries to tell a story based on real events or an autobiographical account: embellishing, dramatizing or outright falsifying what really happened. And this is where it gets interesting, from a dramaturgical point of view.

Because the thin red line here is between telling the real story as true as possible, versus telling it as well as possible. And (almost) every time film-makers attempt to give the “real” story some salt, pepper and vinegar - the living survivors, the real life people, will cry “foul!” and every time the writers tell the story beat-by-beat-as-it-were, it becomes an incredibly dreary piece of muck. (With, of course, some very notable exceptions.)

Cases in point: 

Band of Brothers was based on biographer Stephen E. Ambrose’s book of the same name, and followed some real men, (some that died in the war) of the allies’ campaign in western Europe leading up to VE day in 1945. Likewise, The Pacific did the same thing but told the tale of American men in the Pacific theatre of operations during WWII. To me, they share the same problems (and that is not that Tom Hanks and Stephen Spielberg produced both series). The main problem being that the producers had to try to tell the story as closely to how it really happened: one of the selling points of both series is that these are real people and true stories. And right there, they run into creative difficulties. The characters are never allowed to become real people, although they are based on real people. Despite taking some poetic license with the fictionalized tale v. what really happened, it never really takes off. They become puppets in the producer’s attempt to show “real war, real living men”. And real war is sad, and boring, meaningless and empty, and for some few minutes: terrifying. “Hurry up and wait”, as the old US Army saying goes, is the usual day of a soldier. Most of all, trying to depict real war as it is, is very very hard if you’re doing it from a preset of real events. Because your half-fictional story, based on real events, very easily becomes sad, boring and empty - very seldom terrifying, with few exceptions meaningful. This is where, for me, where the bough snaps. I recently re-viewed both series in their entirety, and just as the first two viewings, I came away not remembering one single character’s name, not one single really awe-inspiring sequence or scene that moved me to laughter, true fear, or love and understanding of the men put in these terrible situations.

Compare this to the Spielberg-directed Saving Private Ryan. This is a wholly fictional story, but based on real events (D-day landings) and here Spielberg excels: he gets to take history and make it into his own story - with the panache, humour, swagger, fear, love and dedication the citizen soldiers of WWII possessed. Add fierce combat scenes, amazing steady-cam work and amazing attention to detail and the film completely re-wrote how war movies are told and produced forever. Freed of the chains of real characters and “who died/who didn’t”, Spielberg and screenwriter Robert Rodat went full-out and killed off characters to the right and left with abandon - what suits the narrative dictates who lives and who dies.

Saving Private Ryan has come under some intense criticism: after all it wasn’t the USA who won the war, they merely out-produced everyone else. It was the Soviets who took the full brunt of the Wehrmacht and kicked their ass, at the cost of millions and millions of their population and soldiers. (And on a scriptwriting note, the whole film - told as a flashback through the eyes of the now much aged Private Ryan - makes a very big non-sequitur: how on earth could he know all that happened BEFORE Captain Miller and his squad actually found him in a field on the outskirts of Ramelle?) However, I find this the hallmark of a great fictional story based on actual events, instead of being flat and insipid (Band of Brothers, The Pacific)  a great true story fiction tale is one that sparks off debate and opinionated discourse, in a word: passion.

Two other excellent films, based on true events - one without any actual survivors, the other with survivors - are United 93 and Das Boot. Incidentally, both are about doomed people encased in pressurized tubes of metal, albeit under very different circumstances. Both attempt to recreate how it really was, and both succeed in their own different ways.

Das Boot (1981), the tale of German submariners during WWII, based on the book by Lothar-Günther Buchheim, created a sensation when it was released in 1981 and to this day stands not only as a WWII classic, but a film classic all of its own. Author Buchheim did not like. In a lengthy “review” he pointed out all the faults, the “over-dramatization”, the cheap thrills and so on. And reading this review, one chuckles fondly, as it becomes so abundantly clear how Buchheim has no clue whatsoever what “dramatization” entails, and that director Wolfgang Petersen made all the right choices, down to the last depth charge, in the choices he made in trying to depict a fictional version of true life memories of survivors.

United 93 (2006) attempts to chronicle what happened on one of the four airplanes hijacked on 9/11, the only flight that did not make it to its intended target. Writer/Director Paul Greengrass faced a huge challenge, script-wise, as no one survived the crash in a field outside Shanksville, Pennsylvania. He only had relatives’ stories about their lost ones, and the cell-phone calls they made from the hijacked plane to go on. He re-created the characters (remaining mostly nameless throughout the film, as passengers probably wouldn’t have had much time for cordiality) from the memories of their bereaved families and friends, and naturally had to guess a lot of what went on during those fateful 30 minutes. With so little to work with, Greengrass as both screenwriter and director pulls it off without a hitch and makes a very convincing interpretation of events.

  

To sum up: real-life stories and characters are very tricky to adapt for the screen, but when done right, can be just plain riveting (this writer’s new addiction is the HBO series “Masters of Sex” with a brilliant Michael Sheen in the lead role). As we’re inexorably drawn into the Oscar-season, it might be worth noting how many Oscars have gone to real life stories and characters. Charlize Theron won her Oscar for Monster, Jaimie Foxx his for Ray, Cate Blanchett The Aviator, Philip Seymour-Hoffman for Capote, Helen Mirren The Queen - and these are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head. You do notice a trend, though, I hope? (Also: Daniel Day-Lewis won both his Oscars from portrayal of real-life characters.) This award season is no different, with the list of potential nominees ranging from Tom Hanks, twice, for a supporting Oscar in Saving Mr. Banks to Best Actor in Captain Phillips to Leonardo diCaprio for Wolf of Wall Street, Judi Dench for Philomena, and on goes the list (when going to the bookies: expect a huge rainfall of statuettes for 12 Years a Slave).

I believe one of the factors why real-life characters portrayed on film are so popular is that we, the audience, are invited to compare the actor’s version to our memories and perceptions of the character being played. Afterwards, we go “Yeah, that’s the amalgam of Thatcher, brilliant, she nailed it” or “What a ridiculous thing, to give an Oscar to an American playing the queen bitch of British history.” Whatever one’s view, we’re sure to have one.

Real life historical events - the more tragic, the better - inspire our emotional investment. As Kate Winslet says in the mockumentary Extras (supposedly playing a nun in a film about Anne Frank): “I don’t think we’re going to need another bloody film about the Holocaust, I mean how many have there been? We get it: it was grim, move on! No I’m doing it because I’ve noticed, if you do a film about the Holocaust, you’re guaranteed an Oscar!”

Funny, because two years later Winslet won hers for her role in The Reader, a film where she plays an ex-concentration camp guard. Now that’s True Fiction. 

SCRIPTS: Home Box Office by Ola Zaltin

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Scripts: A Season in Film

By Ola Zaltin

Buongiorno! It’s a balmy Italian 26 degrees C outside on the patio, the sun is shining and here I sit locked away indoors writing about summer and film (something viewed in cooled and darkened rooms) - a paradox if there ever was one. But let’s get to it.

In screenwriting, there’s a myriad of devices to help the writer structure his story, and the audience to follow the resulting plot. (I’m mixing genres and styles below at whim, because what I’m after is the stone-cold narrative device that drives the story - what makes the engine tick, and us watching.)

A road movie is a great vehicle (punny me) to get characters together in a cramped space and see what happens. Either you know where you’re going (Little Miss Sunshine: a beauty pageant) or not (Thelma and Louise: anywhere but home) but either way the road movie is a wonderful motor (oh stop it!) to get the weird and the fantastic happen, while the scenery changes outside the car windows.

Another way to spice things up is to tell the story of one day (the most important day) in the life of a character. Training day is a great example, or Speed. Both these are action flicks of course, and it serves the format well: a tight and condensed time frame where all can, and will, happen.

That being said, romantic films - and comedies - can benefit from this concept as well. Well-known examples are Before Sunrise and Before Sunset (romantic stories that use an even shorter time-frame) and Groundhog Day (comedy: one day - over and over again).

Other ways to hook people into a story ranges from the main character being chased by unknowns wanting the ‘MacGuffin’ they mistakenly think you possess (North by Northwest) -  to chasing the similarly totally meaningless MacGuffin (now called the “Rabbit’s Foot” - yes, really) in Mission Impossible III.

The plot engine might be a moral dilemma: will she keep the baby or not (Juno). Or a mystery opening, pulling the audience into the flashback explanation of why there’s a man lying face down, drowned in the pool he admittedly always wanted (Sunset Boulevard)

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So you got an engine: a narrative piece of neatness that will keep us glued till the end of the story, hankering to know if the boy will get the girl, the girl will keep the baby or the super-agent will find the, ahem, Rabbit’s Foot.

You’ve decided on a main character, his backstory, where he lives and what kind of world he inhabits. But what’s the weather like?

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What I will here call “seasonal films” isn’t a genre, or even a thematic device. A seasonal film is when the season itself plays an integral part in the telling of the story. Using a season in film can be incredibly powerful and instrumental tool for setting not only the heat or chill factor, but also the general ambience of a story.

Winter films come in two main varieties. One is the brutally ice-cold as a polar bear’s ass meter- deep-snow-dark-all-24-hours of howling blizzard film. This is where winter is death, a setting connoting frozen souls and metaphorical ice-box hearts. The characters inhabit a tough, rough world where only the fittest survive. Films in this category would include for example Runaway Train, The Grey, Enemy at the Gates and Let the right one in (Låt den rätte komma in).

The polar (I said stop it!) opposite, but just as snowy, are the holiday films. They are almost without exception American, and come in the flavours Thanksgiving and Christmas. Generally speaking, Thanksgiving movies for some reason have a more complicated, character-driven drama feel to them; exploring the complexities of family get-togethers, generational differences and sibling rivalry, to name a few friction-inducing dramatic elements. Typical Thanksgiving movies are for example The Ice Storm, Nobody’s Fool (a largely forgotten gem of a film and a personal favourite) and Pieces of April.

Christmas movies are often more mushy, lovey-dovey, peace on earth and to all. For some reason. Maybe something to do with Baby Jesus being born. Or all the eggnog drunk. As opposed to the drama winter movies, where the protagonists battle against the elements outdoors to survive, the indoor Christmas movies are about cuddling up and looking out at all that absolutely just perfect looking snow, darling. These films are about giving, understanding what life is all about and becoming a better human being. The ur-story  is of course Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, and all the films in this genre hark back to that initial tale. The most famous ones are  It’s a Wonderful Life, Miracle on 34th Street and need I say it: A Muppet Christmas Carol. 

The comedies, both Thanksgiving and Christmas, are legion and you’ve probably seen them all.

In the end, both these holidays give plenty of material to both drama and comedy writers. We all come to these family events with certain apprehensions, fears and hopes and it’s rich material to use for the screenwriters. The films’ popularity derives from the fact that we have all (more or less - we Europeans don’t know Thanksgiving per se, but family gatherings painfully well enough...) experienced these events, and so recognize many of the beats in the stories, and laugh (or cringe) with recognition. The drunk aunt, the belligerent uncle, the embarrassing gift, the sibling you want to kill, the cousin you wish you were - we know it all, and all the holiday movies do is magnify our commonly experienced lives.

P.s. I forgot to mention Die Hard. Yes, it is: “I have a machine-gun. Ho ho ho.” (And then there’s Fargo, which comes into a category all its own.)

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Spring and Autumn films are, in my humble opinion, not as many and as explicit about their seasons as winter and summer films. Sure, there’s a number of autumnal movies, often with Fall or Autumn plus something in the title. People being introspective walking through parks and kicking through heaps of leaves wondering why their girlfriend left, and so on. But the season itself often doesn’t stand out as a force in the story as in summer and winter films. Characters don’t generally grapple with the weather as much. Which brings us to...

...Summer films. Now. According to me,  summer films come in two distinct flavours. Heat films and Nostalgic films. Let’s start with Heat. Films where high temperatures are prevalent make for stories of great tension and high stress levels. Can you imagine, for example, Dog Day Afternoon taking place on a chilly November day? No, I didn’t think so. Do the Right Thing wouldn’t even be possible in a December sub-zero NYC; the soaring temperatures is why the whole story gets started in the first place. The blazingly hot Brooklyn weather sets off the characters like live ammo thrown into a fireplace. Typical Heat films are Rear Window, Falling Down and Barton Fink. Although of different genres and different ages, these films all take place in a pressure cooker that make things go horribly awry in different ways. Incidentally, the film Heat has nothing to do with high temperatures as such, although I should go on to mention The Hot Spot, a much neglected but excellent southern noir directed by the late Dennis Hopper with a superb Don Johnson in the lead role.

The second category, Nostalgic summer films uses summer as a backdrop for fond reminiscing about summers past, often slightly photoshopped and ajaxed by way of memory’s amazing ability to toss out the shit and keep the shinola. Stand by Me is a classic example in the nostalgic variety of summer films. It’s told in flashback, with the grown up writer book-ending the film,  telling the greatest adventure of his youth. Just as with the holiday films, we connect strongly to these kind of stories, as they again hook into our own lives. We’ve all gone on a hiking trip as adolescents (Moonrise Kingdom), had a first kiss (My Girl), been scared by the bogeyman (I know what you did last summer), and heard tall tales from eccentric grandpas (Secondhand Lions).  And, yes, we’ve had shit summers with rainy days and quarrelling parents in too small summer houses with damp cots and outdoor loos - but that’s just why we love the funny sunny films of the slightly sanitized and spruced up variety. 

American Graffiti doesn’t use flashback as a narrative tool, because the whole film is a flashback to a gentler, more naive era in America. It also uses the limited time period as a contrivance; in Sweden the film was aptly named “The last night with the gang” which while not overly poetic, describes the storyline pretty well. Though set in the present, On Golden Pond explores a long marriage, a wobbly father-daughter relationship and the budding friendship between an old man and an adolescent boy - among other things. Like many Holiday films, it sets a family in a place - a summerhouse - where memories are stored, and awakened. Sometimes with pain, sometimes with relish - often both in the same beat. The main motor at work here is our wish for mutual understanding, respect and ultimately reconciliation between the characters. Perhaps not always possible in life, but then where, if not in the movies?

Finally in this category of nostalgic and sweet summer films is one that is much harsher but all the more honest. Wild Strawberries (Smultronstället) Bergman’s summer road-movie is both an inner journey for the main character Dr. Borg, reminiscing about his family and life choices, as well as the actual journey south through Sweden in all its resplendent summer glory. Today not many have seen it, but let’s just say that The Remains of the Day owes a huge debt of gratitude to Bergman’s film.

So is the genre dead, has everything been done? Not by far. There’s always a new twist, a new take on the summer film (or, if you will, the seasonal film.) Two recent British films both use summer to great effect. In James Watkins’ Eden Lake a young couple trying to escape civilization for a weekend, experience horrors in the woods unspeakable, whilst Ben Wheatley’s Sightseers takes a pitch black (and incredibly funny and refreshing) comedic look at modern British camping. Again, they take experiences most of us know of or have lived through first hand, then twist these commonly shared moments into pitch black evil fun with aplomb.

But to be able to write about summer, you have to go out there and experience summer. Which is what I am about to do right now. Ciao!

Scripts: Stranger than Fiction

by Ola Zaltin

I’m channel surfing again, so what? I’ve already cleaned the apartment, colour-coded my books, re-potted the plants and flossed the cat’s teeth (ok, I don’t have a cat, but the neighbour’s volunteered - if somewhat evasively - the hurdle was to hold him still but as my niece says: if it ain’t working, you simply haven’t used enough gaffer tape.) For short: anything to avoid writing that horrid article for WWJ. “Non-fiction”. I mean, seriously, where DO they get it all from?

So I’m hopping from channel to channel, merrily procrastinating away another afternoon in a very clean apartment with some very happy plants and good-looking bookshelves and someone pounding on my door yipping away for cat and country about the RSPCA in the background. Which is when something catches my eye and I suddenly can’t make my thumb obey my brain and push the button for the next channel. And no, it’s not Playboy channel (not this time, at any rate).

In fact, I don’t know what it is. It’s utterly strange, what I’m watching. There’s black and white footage from some kind of eastern block country in the seventies. Oldsters being interviewed about I think Czechoslovakia back in the day. An English woman in her seventies, who I am starting to understand is looking for her heritage in the Jewish part of Prague that was before WW2. I haven’t watched any channel more than 10 seconds tonight, and now already 20 minutes have passed without me moving a muscle. Okay, truth be told, I just made up the specifics of the documentary. But you know the feeling: you just have to find out what the story is and so you stay on the channel. At least if you’re curious, and I believe most writers are, on one level or other.

In the image-saturated society of today we have become extremely adept at decoding moving images. I dare anyone reading this not being able to tell within five seconds after switching to a new channel what genre it is, whether made for tv or film, what decade it was produced, and round about where we are in the story. Sounds like a lot? Yet you do it without thinking about it 25 times per evening, give or take. If you watch the telly, that is. If not, stop reading. Now.

Genre is easy of course, rom-com, detective stories, comedy, thrillers, historical dramas etc; we all know them. TV-productions generally contains more talking heads, few movie-stars (for natural reasons), whereas films have another aspect-ratio, better lensing and more landscapes and so on. Production decade isn’t a biggie either, as we decode this fast as well, based on things like resolution, black & white or techni-colour or colour, the way the dialogue runs, the fashion and interior decorating of the sets, and more. Even historical dramas from another decade aren’t that hard (e.g. “Kelly’s Heroes”: a film from 1970 set during the second world war has Donald Sutherland as a hippie in a tank...).

Where one has landed in a film when channel surfing can be figured out through some easy tells: if the camera is zooming in slowly, it’s the very opening. If it’s slowly zooming out, the credits are about to start rolling. The beginning means a lot of talking, a lot of exposition, things are moving along at a rather sedate pace. Middle means things just got a lot more complicated and dangerous (spot the film: the Death Star is in fact fully operational, Jules is kidnapped by Davian, Cobb’s projection of Mal sabotages the plan, and so on and so forth ad absurdum). When it starts raining and the guy just lost the gun, the girl plus his nerve and the storm of the century is headed for the coast with 100 feet waves saturated with very miffed cyborg sharks - that’s when you can tell we’re beginning to see the climax and approaching the ending of the story.  And so on, there’s a dozen other simple signs that we decode and  understand more or less subconsciously.

This is part of my theory why documentaries make such fascinating viewing. Being so inundated with Hollywoodese and its formula story telling, well made documentaries has become a breath of fresh air, an anti-dote to the make believe world of been there seen that. Although knowing what’s around the corner can be very comforting in story-telling terms, we also need to be surprised, get to know new worlds, true drama and deep sorrows and real-life triumphs. After all, this is what fiction strives to portray.

So what makes documentaries so watchable? To find out more about this I called up Swedish documentary film maker Fredrik Gertten (whose film ”Bananas!” http://www.bananasthemovie.com/ is now out for distribution in the UK). It came as no surprise that his genre of documentary film-making, doesn’t have a script per se. More of an outline, a question he is curious about. Something worth exploring to see if there is a story behind the headline, the article or the tip-off. What came as more of a revelation was that he said good documentaries were character driven. Fredrik told me that once he has the subject matter researched, he goes looking for the character that can tell the story. Without this person, no documentary. Which blew me away, because this is so very much like fiction script writing. Without a strong protagonist: nada.

It hit me, upon a quick mental run-through of my favourite documentaries, that they all had amazing main characters or groups of characters. Hoop Dreams (1994), Capturing the Friedmans (2003), Dont Look back (1967 - easy: the main character is Bob Dylan) and The War Room (1993) are ones that immediately leap to mind. They all have amazing stories, strong characters and very involving story-lines.

Then there’s Grey Gardens (1975) possibly my favourite documentary of all time. It concerns the mother and daughter relationship of Big Edie and little Edie Bouvier and their solitary and impoverished, half crazed and vividly alive existence in the eponymous Grey Gardens, a derelict mansion in the posh East Hamptons. The fact that little Edie was first cousin to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis made quite the headlines when the film was first screened.

I won’t even try to describe the film, it has to be seen. I will never forget mother and daughter Bouvier (how can you, when the main character little Edie every other night goes up to the attic with a bag of cat-food to spread out for the visiting badger?). It’s one of those things, if you wrote it as fiction and showed it to someone they’d immediately say it was completely outlandish and wholly unbelievable. Man, you just couldn’t make it up. Larger than life and incredibly heart-felt. Stranger than fiction. 

Scripts: Plot, Rinse and Repeat

 by Ola Zaltin

Once upon a time, on a dark and stormy night, in a galaxy far, far away...

...a story began. Probably, this ur-story began around a camp-fire, and probably because someone died. (This was some millennia before Celebrity Big Brother, mind) Someone had died and to explain the inexplicable, a person close to the deceased started telling the story of who he, or she, was: what they did in this life and where they went in the hereafter.

Thus; religion and story-telling became inextricably intertwined. A dual, Manichean, universe evolved that would influence most world religions to describe an everlasting storyline of good vs evil.

To make the legends that developed into story clearly recognizable as tales of woe, wonder and mystery, a formula began to develop: It was a dark and stormy night - There was once a - ‘Twas the year of - Etc.  Stories started taking on a certain form, a template, if you like. There was a hero. There was an adversary. But most of the time we already knew the outcome. The good guy would climb up to sit at God almighty’s side. The other fella would wash his hands in eternity: The hero would overcome all the obstacles, the adversary would vanish in a fiery pit.

This is where plot begins. Joseph Campbell was the great old man who synthesised millennia of story-telling into “The hero with a thousand faces” (1949) and it became a seminal work, with the later “The Power of Myth” (1988) seriously bringing him to Hollywood’s attention. Because if it’s something Hollywood has been looking for since Day One, it’s the answer to this question: what is the recipe for a block-buster  money-making mega-hit? How do you make tons of cash on stories. Later on, Christopher Vogler would distill Campbell’s work into the now legendary “The Writer’s Journey: Mythic structure for writers.” (1992), which was exclusively aimed at screenwriters.

Although this article isn’t about Vogler’s book,  I dare you, dear reader, to check it out on Wikipedia and not laugh out loud when you recognize exactly all the steps of the Hero’s Journey, being portrayed in film after film from Hollywood ever since Star Wars (George Lucas was a huge fan of Campbell), to now almost any modern crime, drama, rom-com or action film.

Basically, scripts set up a question-mark in the beginning: Will the detective find the killer? Will the boy get the girl? (When watching both of these genres - romantic comedy/drama action - note how after the last denouement, either romantic or dramatic, not very many seconds of film are left. I.e. The guy finally gets the girl? End of story. The Detective captures/kills the killer? End of story. Both plot engines - the question marks set up at the beginning of the story are null and void the second they are answered - and our interest fades faster than you can spell THE END)

I’ve previously mentioned it, but I’ll gladly be a repetitve old bore: character is plot. The main-character must take action. Action is forward momentum and action defines character - and so - plot. Imagine, if you will, a young American dreamer sitting on his room writing endlessly on his blog about his dream to become an action-hero, kick bad-guys’ asses and getting the girl. And that’s all he does. Nothing else.

Now, imagine the same set-up, but the guy making his own costume and walking out on the streets to become a super-hero. However, the first thing that happens is he gets brutally stabbed in the stomach by punks - then hit by a car. (Goal, Action: Twist). That was the opening of Kick-Ass, if you hadn’t noticed.

Because in the world of  formulaic film, you’ve got to have a plot-point 1: the first serious turning-point of the story. I think of it as throwing a  king hell-size spanner into the motor we just got humming smartly along. Something that seriously alters the course of the story.

In Four Weddings and a Funeral, e.g,  this would be the second wedding, when Carrie introduces her fiancée to Charles, dashing his romantic hopes, and spinning the story into unexpected waters.

I’ll refrain from getting into the mid-point the second plot-point and the possibility of a four-act structure and the mid-act ”pinches” of Syd Field and whatnot. Life’s too short. (And my word-count is headed for the moon.)

 As for the outcome in both films: the characters overcome insurmountable adversity and get the girl. Not surprised? This is probably because there is such a beautiful wonderness as Suspension of Disbelief. And without it, film-making would be dead in the water.

These three words mean that although we know that Bruce Willis is an actor and acting in a fiction recorded on celluloid  and reading from a script;  if it’s done well enough, we’ll still sit on the edge of our seats. Will he survive the 101 guys with machine-guns after him in a highscraper? Oh Willis, will you make it? Yippee-kay-yeee motherfucker!! (He does.)

We instinctively buy into this ancient sense of community around the warm camp-fire light. “Let me tell you a story,” and we hunker down and we hush up and we point our bright eyes to the story-teller and our bushy tails into the cold dark night and share stories. In kids this is very pronounced. When my niece Filippa wants to hear Where the wild things are read for the umpteenth time that day - nevermind week - she’s displaying the same instinct we grown-ups have as well (albeit we think we disguise it better).  For  there is something strangely satisfying about knowing the outcome of a story.

This, to me, is the central role of plot: an exciting question-mark set up to be answered, a sense of forward propulsion, astounding and unexpected things throwing us off track, coupled with the age-old safeness of suspension of belief and the the knowledge that at least here, within this story, we can rely on that all will end well.