Story Page 5

  In the penthouse they towel off her hair and find mismatched clothes for her to wear, and because she looks like this, the spotlight’s on her all night. Because she knows she has lost anyway, she relaxes into her natural self and from deep within comes a chutzpah she never knew she had; she not only tells them about her battle in the park but makes jokes about it. Mouths go slack with awe or wide with laughter. At end of the evening, all the executives know exactly who they want for the job: Anyone who can go through that terror in the park and display this kind of cool is clearly the person for them. The evening ends on her personal and social triumphs as she is given the job (doubly positive).

  Each scene turns on its own value or values. Scene One: self-doubt to self-confidence. Scene Two: death to life; self-confidence to defeat. Scene Three: social disaster to social triumph. But the three scenes become a sequence of another, greater value that overrides and subordinates the others, and that is THE JOB. At the beginning of the sequence she has NO JOB. The third scene becomes a Sequence Climax because here social success wins her THE JOB. From her point of view THE JOB is a value of such magnitude she risked her life for it.

  It’s useful to title each sequence to make clear to yourself why it’s in the film. The story purpose of this “getting the job” sequence is to take her from NO JOB to JOB. It could have been accomplished in a single scene with a personnel officer. But to say more than “she’s qualified,” we might create a full sequence that not only gets her the job but dramatizes her inner character and relationship to her mother, along with insights into New York City and the corporation.

  Act

  Scenes turn in minor but significant ways; a series of scenes builds a sequence that turns in a moderate, more impactful way; a series of sequences builds the next largest structure, the Act, a movement that turns on a major reversal in the value-charged condition of the character’s life. The difference between a basic scene, a scene that climaxes a sequence, and a scene that climaxes an act is the degree of change, or, more precisely, the degree of impact that change has, for better or worse, on the character—on the character’s inner life, personal relationships, fortunes in the world, or some combination of all these.

  An ACT is a series of sequences that peaks in a climactic scene which causes a major reversal of values, more powerful in its impact than any previous sequence or scene.

  Story

  A series of acts builds the largest structure of all: the Story. A story is simply one huge master event. When you look at the value-charged situation in the life of the character at the beginning of the story, then compare it to the value-charge at the end of the story, you should see the arc of the film, the great sweep of change that takes life from one condition at the opening to a changed condition at the end. This final condition, this end change, must be absolute and irreversible.

  Change caused by a scene could be reversed: The lovers in the previous sketch could get back together; people fall in and out and back in love again every day. A sequence could be reversed: The Midwest businesswoman could win her job only to discover that she reports to a boss she hates and wishes she were back in Terre Haute. An act climax could be reversed: A character could die, as in the Act Two climax of E.T., and then come back to life. Why not? In a modern hospital, reviving the dead is commonplace. So, scene by sequence by act, the writer creates minor, moderate, and major change, but conceivably, each of those changes could be reversed. This is not, however, the case in the climax of the last act.

  STORY CLIMAX: A story is a series of acts that build to a last act climax or story climax which brings about absolute and irreversible change.

  If you make the smallest element do its job, the deep purpose of the telling will be served. Let every phrase of dialogue or line of description either turn behavior and action or set up the conditions for change. Make your beats build scenes, scenes build sequences, sequences build acts, acts build story to its climax.

  The scenes that turn the life of the Terre Haute protagonist from self-doubt to self-confidence, from danger to survival, from social disaster to success combine into a sequence that takes her from NO JOB to JOB. To arc the telling to a Story Climax, perhaps this opening sequence sets up a series of sequences that takes her from NO JOB to PRESIDENT OF THE CORPORATION at the Act One climax. This Act One climax sets up an Act Two in which internecine corporate wars lead to her betrayal by friends and associates. At the Act Two climax she’s fired by the board of directors and out on the street. This major reversal sends her to a rival corporation where, armed with business secrets gleaned while she was president, she quickly reaches the top again so she can enjoy destroying her previous employers. These acts arc her from the hardworking, optimistic, and honest young professional who opens the film to the ruthless, cynical, and corrupt veteran of corporate wars who ends the film—absolute, irreversible change.

  THE STORY TRIANGLE

  In some literary circles “plot” has become a dirty word, tarred with a connotation of hack commercialism. The loss is ours, for plot is an accurate term that names the internally consistent, interrelated pattern of events that move through time to shape and design a story. While no fine film was ever written without flashes of fortuitous inspiration, a screenplay is not an accident. Material that pops up willy-nilly cannot remain willy-nilly. The writer redrafts inspiration again and again, making it look as if an instinctive spontaneity created the film, yet knowing how much effort and unnaturalness went into making it look natural and effortless.

  To PLOT means to navigate through the dangerous terrain of story and when confronted by a dozen branching possibilities to choose the correct path. Plot is the writer’s choice of events and their design in time.

  Again, what to include? Exclude? Put before and after what? Event choices must be made; the writer chooses either well or ill; the result is plot.

  When TENDER MERCIES premiered, some reviewers described it as “plotless,” then praised it for that. TENDER MERCIES not only has a plot, it is exquisitely plotted through some of the most difficult film terrain of all: a story in which the arc of the film takes place within the mind of the protagonist. Here the protagonist experiences a deep and irreversible revolution in his attitude toward life and/or toward himself.

  For the novelist such stories are natural and facile. In either third-person or first-person, the novelist can directly invade thought and feeling to dramatize the tale entirely on the landscape of the protagonist’s inner life. For the screenwriter such stories are by far the most fragile and difficult. We cannot drive a camera lens through an actor’s forehead and photograph his thoughts, although there are those who would try. Somehow we must lead the audience to interpret the inner life from outer behavior without loading the soundtrack with expositional narration or stuffing the mouths of characters with self-explanatory dialogue. As John Carpenter said, “Movies are about making mental things physical.”

  To begin the great sweep of change within his protagonist, Horton Foote opens TENDER MERCIES with Sledge drowning in the meaninglessness of his life. He is committing slow suicide with alcohol because he no longer believes in anything—neither family, nor work, nor this world, nor the hereafter. As Foote progresses the film, he avoids the cliché of finding meaning in one overwhelming experience of great romance, brilliant success, or religious inspiration. Instead he shows us a man weaving together a simple yet meaningful life from the many delicate threads of love, music, and spirit. At last Sledge undergoes a quiet transformation and finds a life worth living.

  We can only imagine the sweat and pains Horton Foote invested in plotting this precarious film. A single misstep—one missing scene, one superfluous scene, a slight misordering of incident—and like a castle of cards, the riveting inner journey of Mac Sledge collapses into portraiture. Plot, therefore, doesn’t mean ham-handed twists and turns, or high-pressure suspense and shocking surprise. Rather, events must be selected and their patterning displayed through time. In this sense of composit
ion or design, all stories are plotted.

  Archplot, Miniplot, Antiplot

  Although the variations of event design are innumerable, they are not without limits. The far corners of the art create a triangle of formal possibilities that maps the universe of stories. Within this triangle is the totality of writers’ cosmologies, all their multitudinous visions of reality and how life is lived within it. To understand your place in this universe, study the coordinates of this map, compare them to your work-in-progress, and let them guide you to that point you share with other writers of a similar vision.

  At the top of the story triangle are the principles that constitute Classical Design. These principles are “classical” in the truest sense: timeless and transcultural, fundamental to every earthly society, civilized and primitive, reaching back through millennia of oral storytelling into the shadows of time. When the epic Gilgamesh was carved in cuneiform on twelve clay tablets 4,000 years ago, converting story to the written word for the first time the principles of Classical Design were already fully and beautifully in place.

  CLASSICAL DESIGN means a story built around an active protagonist who struggles against primarily external forces of antagonism to pursue his or her desire, through continuous time, within a consistent and causally connected fictional reality, to a closed ending of absolute, irreversible change.

  This collection of timeless principles I call the Archplot: Arch (pronounced “ark” as in archangel) in the dictionary sense of “eminent above others of the same kind.”

  The Archplot, however, is not the limit of storytelling shapes. In the left corner, I place all examples of minimalism. As the word suggests, minimalism means that the writer begins with the elements of Classical Design but then reduces them—shrinking or compressing, trimming or truncating the prominent features of the Archplot. I call this set of minimalist variations Miniplot. Miniplot does not mean no plot, for its story must be as beautifully executed as an Archplot. Rather, minimalism strives for simplicity and economy while retaining enough of the classical that the film will still satisfy the audience, sending them out of the cinema thinking, “What a good story!”

  In the right corner is Antiplot, the cinema counterpart to the antinovel or Nouveau Roman and Theatre of the Absurd. This set of antistructure variations doesn’t reduce the Classical but reverses it, contradicting traditional forms to exploit, perhaps ridicule the very idea of formal principles. The Antiplot-maker is rarely interested in understatement or quiet austerity; rather, to make clear his “revolutionary” ambitions, his films tend toward extravagance and self-conscious overstatement.

  The Archplot is the meat, potatoes, pasta, rice, and couscous of world cinema. For the past one hundred years it has informed the vast majority of films that have found an international audience. If we skim through the decades—THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY (USA/1904), THE LAST DAYS OF POMPEII (Italy/1913), THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI (Germany/1920), GREED (USA/1924), THE BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN (USSR/1925), M (Germany/1931), TOP HAT (USA/1935), LA GRANDE ILLUSION (France/1937), BRINGING UP BABY (USA/1938), CITIZEN KANE (USA/1941), BRIEF ENCOUNTER (UK/1945), THE SEVEN SAMURAI (Japan/1954), MARTY (USA/1955), THE SEVENTH SEAL (Sweden/1957), THE HUSTLER (USA/1961), 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (USA/1968), THE GODFATHER, PART II (USA/1974), DONA FLOR AND HER TWO HUSBANDS (Brazil/1978), A FISH CALLED WANDA (UK/1988), BIG (USA/1988), JU DOU (China/1990), THELMA & LOUISE (USA/1991), FOUR WEDDINGS AND A FUNERAL (UK/1994), SHINE (Australia/1996)—we glimpse the staggering variety of story embraced within the Archplot.

  Miniplot, though less various, is equally international: NANOOK OF THE NORTH (USA/1922), LA PASSION DE JEANNE D’ARC (France/1928), ZERO DE CONDUITE (France/1953), PAISAN (Italy/1946), WILD STRAWBERRIES (Sweden/1957), THE MUSIC ROOM (India/1964), THE RED DESERT (Italy/1964), FIVE EASY PIECES (USA/1970), CLAIRE’S KNEE (France/1970), IN THE REALM OF THE SENSES (Japan/1976), TENDER MERCIES (USA/1983), PARIS, TEXAS (West Germany/France/1984), THE SACRIFICE (Sweden/France/1986), PELLE THE CONQUEROR (Denmark/1987), STOLEN CHILDREN (Italy/1992), A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT (USA/1993), TO LIVE (China/1994), and SHALL WE DANCE (Japan/1997). Miniplot also embraces narrative documentaries such as WELFARE (USA/1975).

  Examples of Antiplot are less common, predominantly European, and post-World War II: UN CHIEN ANDALOU (France/1928), BLOOD OF THE POET (France/1932), MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON (USA/1943), THE RUNNING, JUMPING AND STANDING STILL FILM (UK/1959), LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD (France/1960), 81/2 (Italy/1963), PERSONA (Sweden/1966), WEEKEND (France/1967), DEATH BY HANGING (Japan/1968), CLOWNS (Italy/1970), MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL (UK/1975), THAT OBSCURE OBJECT OF DESIRE (France/Spain/1977), BAD TIMING (UK/1980), STRANGER THAN PARADISE (USA/1984), AFTER HOURS (USA/1985), A ZED & TWO NOUGHTS (UK/ Netherlands/1985), WAYNE’S WORLD (USA/1993), CHUNGKING EXPRESS (Hong Kong/1994), LOST HIGHWAY (USA/1997). Antiplot also includes the documentary-cum-collage such as Alain Resnais’s NIGHT AND FOG (France/1955) and KOYAANISQATSI (USA/1983).

  FORMAL DIFFERENCES WITHIN THE STORY TRIANGLE

  Closed Versus Open Endings

  The Archplot delivers a closed ending—all questions raised by the story are answered; all emotions evoked are satisfied. The audience leaves with a rounded, closed experience—nothing in doubt, nothing unsated.

  Miniplot, on the other hand, often leaves the ending somewhat open. Most of the questions raised by the telling are answered, but an unanswered question or two may trail out of the film, leaving the audience to supply it subsequent to the viewing. Most of the emotion evoked by the film will be satisfied, but an emotional residue may be left for the audience to satisfy. Although Miniplot may end on a question mark of thought and feeling, “open” doesn’t mean the film quits in the middle, leaving everything hanging. The question must be answerable, the emotion resolvable. All that has gone before leads to clear and limited alternatives that make a degree of closure possible.

  A Story Climax of absolute, irreversible change that answers all questions raised by the telling and satisfies all audience emotion is a CLOSED ENDING.

  A Story Climax that leaves a question or two unanswered and some emotion unfulfilled is an OPEN ENDING.

  At the climax of PARIS, TEXAS father and son are reconciled; their future is set and our hope for their happiness satisfied. But the husband/wife, mother/son relationships are left unresolved. The questions “Will this family have a future together? If so, what kind of future will it be?” are open. The answers will be found in the privacy of postfilm thoughts: If you want this family to get together, but your heart tells you they aren’t going to make it, it’s a sad evening. If you can convince yourself that they will live happily ever after, you walk out pleased. The minimalist storyteller deliberately gives this last critical bit of work to the audience.

  External Versus Internal Conflict

  The Archplot puts emphasis on external conflict. Although characters often have strong inner conflicts, the emphasis falls on their struggles with personal relationships, with social institutions, or with forces in the physical world. In Miniplot, to the contrary, the protagonist may have strong external conflicts with family, society, and environment, but emphasis will fall on the battles within his own thoughts and feelings, conscious or unconscious.

  Compare the journeys of the protagonists in THE ROAD WARRIOR and THE ACCIDENTAL TOURIST. In the former, Mel Gibson’s Mad Max undergoes an inner transformation from self-sufficient loner to self-sacrificing hero, but the emphasis of the story falls on the survival of the clan. In the latter, the life of William Hurt’s travel writer changes as he remarries and becomes the much-needed father to a lonely boy, but the emphasis of the film falls on the resurrection of this man’s spirit. His transformation from a man suffering a paralysis of emotions to a man free to love and feel is the film’s dominant arc of change.

  Single Versus Multiple Protagonists

  The classically told story usually places a single protagonist—man, woman, or child—at the heart of the telling. One major story dominates screentime and its
protagonist is the star role. However, if the writer splinters the film into a number of relatively small, subplot-sized stories, each with a separate protagonist, the result minimalizes the roller-coaster dynamic of the Archplot and creates the Multiplot variation of Miniplot that’s grown in popularity since the 1980s.

  In THE FUGITIVE’s highly charged Archplot the camera never loses sight of Harrison Ford’s protagonist: no glances sideways, not even a hint of a subplot. PARENTHOOD, on the other hand, is a tempered weave of no fewer than six tales of six protagonists. As in an Archplot, the conflicts of these six characters are predominantly external; none of them undergoes the deep suffering and inner change of THE ACCIDENTAL TOURIST. But because these family battles draw our feelings in so many directions and because each story receives a brief fifteen or twenty minutes of screentime, their multiple design softens the telling.

  The Multiplot dates from INTOLERANCE (USA/1916), GRAND HOTEL (USA/1932), THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY (Sweden/1961), and SHIP OF FOOLS (USA/1965) to its common use today—SHORT CUTS, PULP FICTION, DO THE RIGHT THING, and EAT DRINK MAN WOMAN.

  Active Versus Passive Protagonist

  The single protagonist of an Archplot tends to be active and dynamic, willfully pursuing desire through ever-escalating conflict and change. The protagonist of a Miniplot design, although not inert, is relatively reactive and passive. Generally this passivity is compensated for either by giving the protagonist a powerful inner struggle as in THE ACCIDENTAL TOURIST or by surrounding him with dramatic events as in the Multiplot design of PELLE THE CONQUEROR.