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  If a film has been properly promoted, the audience arrives filled with expectancy. In the jargon of marketing pros, it’s been “positioned.” “Positioning the audience” means this: We don’t want people coming to our work cold and vague, not knowing what to expect, forcing us to spend the first twenty minutes of screen-time clueing them toward the necessary story attitude. We want them to settle into their seats, warm and focused with an appetite we intend to satisfy.

  Positioning of the audience is nothing new. Shakespeare didn’t call his play Hamlet; he called it The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. He gave comedies titles such as Much Ado About Nothing and All’s Well That Ends Well, so that each afternoon at the Globe Theatre his Elizabethan audience was psychologically set to cry or laugh.

  Skillful marketing creates genre expectation. From the title to the poster through print and TV ads, promotion seeks to fix the type of story in the mind of the audience. Having told our film-goers to expect a favorite form, we must deliver as promised. If we botch genre by omitting or misusing conventions, the audience knows instantly and badmouths our work.

  For example, the marketing of the unfortunately titled MIKE’S MURDER (USA/1984) positioned the audience to a Murder Mystery. The film, however, is in another genre, and for over an hour the audience sat wondering, “Who the hell dies in this movie?” The screenplay is a fresh take on the Maturation Plot as it arcs Debra Winger’s bank teller from dependency and immaturity to self-possession and maturity. But the sour word-of-mouth of a mispositioned and confused audience cut the “legs” out from under an otherwise good film.

  CREATIVE LIMITATIONS

  Robert Frost said that writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down, for it’s the self-imposed, indeed artificial demands of poetic conventions that stir the imagination. Let’s say a poet arbitrarily imposes this limit: He decides to write in six-line stanzas, rhyming every other line. After rhyming the fourth line with the second line he reaches the end of a stanza. Backed into this corner, his struggle to rhyme the sixth line with the fourth and second may inspire him to imagine a word that has no relationship to his poem whatsoever—it just happens to rhyme—but this random word then springs loose a phrase that in turn brings an image to mind, an image that in turn resonates back through the first five lines, triggering a whole new sense and feeling, twisting and driving the poem to a richer meaning and emotion. Thanks to the poet’s Creative Limitation of this rhyme scheme, the poem achieves an intensity it would have lacked had the poet allowed himself the freedom to choose any word he wished.

  The principle of Creative Limitation calls for freedom within a circle of obstacles. Talent is like a muscle: without something to push against, it atrophies. So we deliberately put rocks in our path, barriers that inspire. We discipline ourselves as to what to do, while we’re boundless as to how to do it. One of our first steps, therefore, is to identify the genre or combination of genres that govern our work, for the stony ground that grows the most fruitful ideas is genre convention.

  Genre conventions are the rhyme scheme of a storyteller’s “poem.” They do not inhibit creativity, they inspire it. The challenge is to keep convention but avoid cliché. That boy meets girl in a Love Story is not a cliché but a necessary element of form—a convention. The cliché is that they meet as Love Story lovers have always met: Two dynamic individualists are forced to share an adventure and seem to hate each other on sight; or two shy souls, each carrying the torch for someone who won’t give them the time of day, find themselves shunted to the edge of a party with no one else to talk to, and so on.

  Genre convention is a Creative Limitation that forces the writer’s imagination to rise to the occasion. Rather than deny convention and flatten the story, the fine writer calls on conventions like old friends, knowing that in the struggle to fulfill them in a unique way, he may find inspiration for the scene that will lift his story above the ordinary. With mastery of genre we can guide audiences through rich, creative variations on convention to reshape and exceed expectations by giving the audience not only what it had hoped for but, if we’re very good, more than it could have imagined.

  Consider Action/Adventure. Often dismissed as mindless fare, it is in fact the single most difficult genre in which to write today … simply because it’s been done to death. What is an Action writer to do that the audience hasn’t seen a thousand times before? For example, chief among its many conventions is this scene: The hero is at the mercy of the villain. The hero, from a position of helplessness, must turn the tables on the villain. This scene is imperative. It tests and expresses in absolute terms the protagonist’s ingenuity, strength of will, and cool under pressure. Without it both the protagonist and his story are diminished; the audience leaves dissatisfied. Clichés grow on this convention like mold on bread, but when its solution is fresh, the telling is much enhanced.

  In RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, Indiana Jones comes face to face with an Egyptian giant wielding a massive scimitar. A look of terror, then a shrug and a quick bullet as Jones remembers he is carrying a gun. The behind-the-screen legend is that Harrison Ford suggested this much-loved solution because he was too sick with dysentery to take on the acrobatic fight Lawrence Kasdan had scripted.

  DIE HARD climaxes around this graceful execution of the convention: John McClane (Bruce Willis), stripped to the waist, weaponless, his hands in the air, is face to face with the sadistic and well-armed Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman). Slowly, however, as the camera tracks around McClane we discover that he’s duct-taped a gun to his naked back. He distracts Gruber with a joke, snatches the gun from his back, and kills him.

  Of all the hero-at-the-mercy-of-the-villain clichés, “Look out! There’s somebody behind you!” is the most archaic. But in MIDNIGHT RUN screenwriter George Gallo gave it new life and delight by riffing lunatic variations in scene after scene.

  MIXING GENRES

  Genres are frequently combined to resonate with meaning, to enrich character, and to create varieties of mood and emotion. A Love Story subplot, for example, finds its way inside almost any Crime Story. THE FISHER KING wove five threads—Redemption Plot, Psycho-Drama, Love Story, Social Drama, Comedy—into an excellent film. The Musical Horror Film was a delicious invention. Given over two dozen principal genres, possibilities for inventive cross-breeding are endless. In this way the writer in command of genre may create a type of film the world has never seen.

  REINVENTING GENRES

  Equally, mastery of genre keeps the screenwriter contemporary. For the genre conventions are not carved in stone; they evolve, grow, adapt, modify, and break apace with the changes in society. Society changes slowly, but it does change, and as society enters each new phase, the genres transform with it. For genres are simply windows on reality, various ways for the writer to look at life. When the reality outside the window undergoes change, the genres alter with it. If not, if a genre becomes inflexible and cannot bend with the changing world, it petrifies. Below are three examples of genre evolution.

  The Western

  The Western began as morality plays set in the “Old West,” a mythical golden age for allegories of good versus evil. But in the cynical atmosphere of the 1970s the genre became dated and stale. When Mel Brooks’s BLAZING SADDLES exposed the Western’s fascist heart, the genre went into virtual hibernation for twenty years before making a comeback by altering its conventions. In the 1980s the Western modulated into quasi-Social Drama, a corrective to racism and violence: DANCES WITH WOLVES, UNFORGIVEN, POSSE.

  The Psycho-Drama

  Clinical insanity was first dramatized in the UFA silent THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI (Germany/1919). As psychoanalysis grew in reputation, Psycho-Drama developed as a kind of a Freudian detective story. In its first stage, a psychiatrist played “detective” to investigate a hidden “crime,” a deeply repressed trauma his patient has suffered in the past. Once the psychiatrist exposed this “crime,” the victim was either restored to sanity or took a major step toward
it: SYBIL, THE SNAKE PIT, THE THREE FACES OF EVE, I NEVER PROMISED YOU A ROSE GARDEN, THE MARK, DAVID AND LISA, EQUUS.

  However, as the serial killer began to haunt society’s nightmares, genre evolution took Psycho-Drama to its second stage, merging it with the Detective Genre into the subgenre known as the Psycho-Thriller. In these cops became lay psychiatrists to hunt down psychopaths, and apprehension hinged on the detective’s psychoanalysis of the madman: THE FIRST DEADLY SIN, MAN-HUNTER, COP, and, recently, SEVEN.

  In the 1980s the Psycho-Thriller evolved a third time. In films such as TIGHTROPE, LETHAL WEAPON, ANGEL HEART, and THE MORNING AFTER, the detective himself became the psycho, suffering from a wide variety of modern maladies—sexual obsession, suicidal impulse, traumatic amnesia, alcoholism. In these films the key to justice became the cop’s psychoanalysis of himself. Once the detective came to terms with his inner demons, apprehending the criminal was almost an afterthought.

  This evolution was a telling statement about our changing society. Gone was the day when we could comfort ourselves with the notion that all the crazy people were locked up, while we sane people were safely outside the asylum walls. Few of us are so naive today. We know that, given a certain conjunction of events, we too could part company with reality. These Psycho-Thrillers spoke to this threat, to our realization that our toughest task in life is self-analysis as we try to fathom our humanity and bring peace to the wars within.

  By 1990 the genre reached its fourth stage by relocating the psychopath once again, now placing him in your spouse, psychiatrist, surgeon, child, nanny, roommate, neighborhood cop. These films tap communal paranoia, as we discover that the people most intimate in our lives, people we must trust, those we hope will protect us, are maniacs: THE HAND THAT ROCKS THE CRADLE, SLEEPING WITH THE ENEMY, FORCED ENTRY, WHISPERS IN THE DARK, SINGLE WHITE FEMALE, and THE GOOD SON. Most telling of all perhaps is DEAD RINGERS, a film about the ultimate fear: the fear of the person closest to you—yourself. What horror will crawl up from your unconscious to steal your sanity?

  The Love Story

  The most important question we ask when writing a Love Story is: “What’s to stop them?” For where’s the story in a Love Story? Two people meet, fall in love, marry, raise a family, support each other till death do them part … what could be more boring than that? So, for over two thousand years, since the Greek dramatist Menander, writers answered the question with “the parents of the girl.” Her parents find the young man unsuitable and become the convention known as Blocking Characters or “the force opposed to love.” Shakespeare expanded it to both sets of parents in Romeo and Juliet. From 2300 B.C. this essential convention went unchanged … until the twentieth century launched the romantic revolution.

  The twentieth century has been an Age of Romance like no other. The idea of romantic love (with sex as its implicit partner) dominates popular music, advertising, and Western culture in general. Over the decades, the automobile, telephone, and a thousand other liberating factors have given young lovers greater and greater freedom from parental control. Meanwhile, parents, thanks to the rampant rise in adultery, divorce, and remarriage, have extended romance from a youthful fling to a lifelong pursuit. It’s always been the case that young people don’t listen to their parents, but today, if a movie Mom and Dad were to object, and the teenage lovers were actually to obey them, the audience would blister the screen with jeers. So, as the-parents-of-the-girl convention faded along with arranged marriages, resourceful writers unearthed a new and amazing array of forces that oppose love.

  In THE GRADUATE the Blocking Characters were the conventional parents of the girl but for a very unconventional reason. In WITNESS the force that opposes love is her culture—she’s Amish, virtually from another world. In MRS. SOFFEL, Mel Gibson plays an imprisoned murderer condemned to hang and Diane Keaton is the wife of the prison’s warden. What is to stop them? All members of “right-thinking” society. In WHEN HARRY MET SALLY, the lovers suffer from the absurd belief that friendship and love are incompatible. In LONE STAR, the blocking force is racism; in THE CRYING GAME, sexual identity; in GHOST, death.

  The enthusiasm for romance that opened this century has turned at its close to deep malaise that brings with it a dark, skeptical attitude toward love. In response, we’ve seen the rise and surprising popularity of down-endings: DANGEROUS LIAISONS, THE BRIDGES OF MADISON COUNTY, THE REMAINS OF THE DAY, HUSBANDS AND WIVES. In LEAVING LAS VEGAS, Ben’s a suicidal alcoholic, Sera’s a masochistic prostitute, and their love is “star-crossed.” These films speak to a growing sense of the hopelessness, if not impossibility, of a lasting love.

  To achieve an up-ending some recent films have retooled the genre into the Longing Story. Boy-meets-girl has always been an irreducible convention that occurs early in the telling, to be followed by the trials, tribulations, and triumphs of love. But SLEEPLESS IN SEATTLE and RED end on boy-meets-girl. The audience waits to see how the lovers’ “fate” will be shaped in the hands of chance. By cleverly delaying the lovers’ meeting to climax, these films avoid the prickly issues of modern love by replacing the difficulty of love with the difficulty of meeting. These aren’t love stories but stories of longing, as talk about and desire for love fills the scenes, leaving genuine acts of love and their often troubling consequences to happen in an offscreen future. It may be that the twentieth century gave birth to, then buried, the Age of Romance.

  The lesson is this: Social attitudes change. The cultural antenna of the writer must be alert to these movements or risk writing an antique. For example: In FALLING IN LOVE the force that opposes love is that the lovers are each married to someone else. The only tears in the audience came from yawning too hard. One could almost hear their thoughts screaming, “What’s your problem? You’re married to stiffs. Dump them. Does the word ‘divorce’ mean anything to you people?”

  Through the 1950s, however, a love affair across marriages was seen as a painful betrayal. Many poignant films—STRANGERS WHEN WE MEET, BRIEF ENCOUNTER—drew their energy from society’s antagonism to adultery. But by the 1980s attitudes had shifted, giving rise to the feeling that romance is so precious and life so short, if two married people want to have an affair, let them. Right or wrong, that was the temperament of the time, so that a film with antiquated 1950s values brutally bored the 1980s audience. The audience wants to know how it feels to be alive on the knife edge of the now. What does it mean to be a human being today?

  Innovative writers are not only contemporary, they are visionary. They have their ear to the wall of history, and as things change, they can sense the way society is leaning toward the future. They then produce works that break convention and take the genres into their next generation.

  This, for example, is one of the many beauties of CHINATOWN. In the climax of all previous Murder Mysteries the detective apprehends and punishes the criminal, but CHINATOWN’s wealthy and politically powerful killer gets away with it, breaking an honored convention. This film could not have been made, however, until the 1970s when the civil rights movement, Watergate, and the Vietnam War woke America up to the depth of its corruption and the nation realized that indeed the rich were getting away with murder … and much more. CHINATOWN rewrote the genre, opening the door to down-ending crime stories such as BODY HEAT, CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS, Q & A, BASIC INSTINCT, THE LAST SEDUCTION, and SEVEN.

  The finest writers are not only visionary, they create classics. Each genre involves crucial human values: love/hate, peace/war, justice/injustice, achievement/failure, good/evil, and the like. Each of these values is an ageless theme that has inspired great writing since the dawn of story. From year to year these values must be reworked to keep them alive and meaningful for the contemporary audience. Yet the greatest stories are always contemporary. They are classics. A classic is reexperienced with pleasure because it can be reinterpreted through the decades, because in it truth and humanity are so abundant that each new generation finds itself mirrored in the story. CHINATOWN is su
ch a work. With an absolute command of genre Towne and Polanski took their talents to a height few have reached before or since.

  THE GIFT OF ENDURANCE

  Mastery of genre is essential for yet one more reason: Screen-writing is not for sprinters, but for long-distance runners. No matter what you’ve heard about scripts dashed off over a weekend at poolside, from first inspiration to last polished draft, a quality screenplay consumes six months, nine months, a year, or more. Writing a film demands the same creative labor in terms of world, character, and story as a four-hundred-page novel. The only substantive difference is the number of words used in the telling. A screenplay’s painstaking economy of language demands sweat and time, while the freedom to fill pages with prose often makes the task easier, even faster. All writing is discipline, but screenwriting is a drill sergeant. Ask yourself, therefore, what will keep your desire burning over those many months?

  Generally, great writers are not eclectic. Each tightly focuses his oeuvre on one idea, a single subject that ignites his passion, a subject he pursues with beautiful variation through a lifetime of work. Hemingway, for example, was fascinated with the question of how to face death. After he witnessed the suicide of his father, it became the central theme, not only of his writing, but of his life. He chased death in war, in sport, on safari, until finally, putting a shotgun in his mouth, he found it. Charles Dickens, whose father was imprisoned for debt, wrote of the lonely child searching for the lost father over and over in David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, and Great Expectations. Molière turned a critical eye on the idiocy and depravity of seventeenth-century France and made a career writing plays whose titles read like a checklist of human vices: The Miser, The Misanthrope, The Hypochondriac. Each of these authors found his subject and it sustained him over the long journey of the writer.