Story Read online

  Because story in Hollywood film is often forced and clichéd, directors must compensate with something else to hold the audience’s attention, resorting to transformation effects and cacophonous derring-do: THE FIFTH ELEMENT. In the same vein, because story is often thin or absent in the art film, again, directors must compensate. In this case, with one of two possibilities: information or sensory stimulation. Either dialogue-heavy scenes of political argument, philosophical musing, and characters’ self-conscious descriptions of their emotions; or lush production design and photography or musical scores to pleasure the audience’s senses: THE ENGLISH PATIENT.

  The sad truth of the political wars of contemporary cinema is that the excesses of both “art film” and “Hollywood film” are the mirror images of each other: The telling is forced to become a dazzling surface of spectacle and sound to distract the audience from the vacancy and falsity of the story … and in both boredom follows as night the day.

  Behind the political squabbling over finance, distribution, and awards lies a deep cultural divide, reflected in the opposing world-views of Archplot versus Miniplot and Antiplot. From story to story the writer may move anywhere within the triangle, but most of us feel more at home in one place or another. You must make your own “political” choices and decide where you reside. As you do, let me offer these points for you to weigh:

  The Writer Must Earn His Living Writing

  Writing while holding down a forty-hour-a-week job is possible. Thousands have done it. But in time, exhaustion sets in, concentration wanders, creativity crumbles, and you’re tempted to quit. Before you do, you must find a way to earn your living from your writing. A talented writer’s survival in the real world of film and television, theatre, and publishing begins with his recognition of this fact: As story design moves away from the Archplot and down the triangle toward the far reaches of Miniplot, Antiplot, and Nonplot, the audience shrinks.

  This atrophy has nothing to do with quality or a lack of it. All three corners of the story triangle gleam with masterworks that the world treasures, pieces of perfection for our imperfect world. Rather, the audience shrinks for this reason: Most human beings believe that life brings closed experiences of absolute, irreversible change; that their greatest sources of conflict are external to themselves; that they are the single and active protagonists of their own existence; that their existence operates through continuous time within a consistent, causally interconnected reality; and that inside this reality events happen for explainable and meaningful reasons. Since our first ancestor stared into a fire of his own making and thought the thought, “I am,” this is how human beings have seen the world and themselves in it. Classical design is a mirror of the human mind.

  Classical design is a model of memory and anticipation. When we think back to the past, do we piece events together antistructured? Minimalistically? No. We collect and shape memories around an Archplot to bring the past back vividly. When we daydream about the future, what we dread or pray will happen, is our vision minimalistic? Antistructured? No, we mold our fantasies and hopes into an Archplot. Classical design displays the temporal, spatial, and causal patterns of human perception, outside which the mind rebels.

  Classical design is not a Western view of life. For thousands of years, from the Levant to Java to Japan, the storytellers of Asia have framed their works within the Archplot, spinning yarns of high adventure and great passion. As the rise of Asian film has shown, Eastern screenwriters draw on the same principles of classical design used in the West, enriching their tellings with a unique wit and irony. The Archplot is neither ancient nor modern, Western nor Eastern; it is human.

  When the audience senses that a story is drifting too close to fictional realities it finds tedious or meaningless, it feels alienated and turns away. This is true of intelligent, sensitive people of all incomes and backgrounds. The vast majority of human beings cannot endorse the inconsistent realities of Antiplot, the internalized passivity of Miniplot, and the static circularity of Nonplot as metaphors for life as they live it. As story reaches the bottom of the triangle the audience has shrunk to those loyal cinephile intellectuals who like to have their realities twisted once in a while. This is an enthusiastic, challenging audience … but a very small audience.

  If the audience shrinks, the budget must shrink. This is the law. In 1961 Alain Robbe-Grillet wrote LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD and throughout the seventies and eighties he wrote brilliant Antiplot puzzle pieces—films more about the art of writing than about the act of living. I once asked him how, despite the anticommercial bent of his films, he did it. He said he’d never spent more than $750,000 to make a film and never would. His audience was faithful but meager. At an ultra-low budget his investors doubled their money and kept him in the director’s chair. But at $2 million they would lose their shirts and he his seat. Robbe-Grillet was both visionary and pragmatic.

  If, like Robbe-Grillet, you wish to write Miniplot or Antiplot, and can find a non-Hollywood producer to work at low budget, and are happy with relatively little money for yourself, good. Do it. But when you write for Hollywood, a low-budget script is no asset. Seasoned professionals who read your minimalist or antistructured piece may applaud your handling of image, but decline to be involved because experience has taught them that if the story is inconsequential, so is the audience.

  Even modest Hollywood budgets run into the tens of millions of dollars, and each film must find an audience large enough to repay its cost at a profit greater than the same money would have earned in a secured investment. Why should investors place millions at enormous jeopardy when they can put it into real estate and at least have a building when they’re done, not something that’s shown in a couple of film festivals, shoved into a refrigerated vault, and forgotten? If a Hollywood studio is going to take this wild ride with you, you must write a film that has at least a chance of recouping its huge risk. In other words, a film that leans toward the Archplot.

  The Writer Must Master Classical Form

  By instinct or study, fine writers recognize that minimalism and antistructure are not independent forms but reactions to the Classical. Miniplot and Antiplot were born out of the Archplot—one shrinks it, the other contradicts it. The avant-garde exists to oppose the popular and commercial, until it too becomes popular and commercial, then it turns to attack itself. If Nonplot “art films” went hot and were raking in money, the avant-garde would revolt, denounce Hollywood for selling out to portraiture, and seize the Classical for its own.

  These cycles between formality/freedom, symmetry/asymmetry are as old as Attic theatre. The history of art is a history of revivals: Establishment icons are shattered by an avant-garde that in time becomes the new establishment to be attacked by a new avant-garde that uses its grandfather’s forms of weapons. Rock ‘n’ roll, which was named after black slang for sex, began as an avant-garde movement against the white-bread sounds of the postwar era. Now it’s the definition of musical aristocracy and even used as church music.

  The serious use of Antiplot devices not only has gone out of fashion but has become a joke. A vein of dark satire has always run through antistructure works, from UN CHIEN ANDALOU to WEEKEND, but now direct address to camera, inconsistent realities, and alternative endings are the staples of film farce. Antiplot gags that began with Bob Hope and Bing Crosby’s THE ROAD TO MOROCCO have been worked into the likes of BLAZING SADDLES, the PYTHON films, and WAYNE’S WORLD. Story techniques that once struck us as dangerous and revolutionary now seem toothless but charming.

  Respecting these cycles, great storytellers have always known that, regardless of background or education, everyone, consciously or instinctively, enters the story ritual with Classical anticipation. Therefore, to make Miniplot and Antiplot work the writer must play with or against this expectancy. Only by carefully and creatively shattering or bending the Classical form can the artist lead the audience to perceive the inner life hidden in a Miniplot or to accept the chilling absurdity of an An
tiplot. But how can a writer creatively reduce or reverse that which he does not understand?

  Writers who found success in the deep corners of the story triangle knew that the starting point of understanding was at the top and began their careers in the Classical. Bergman wrote and directed love stories and social and historical dramas for twenty years before he dared venture into the minimalism of THE SILENCE or the antistructure of PERSONA. Fellini made I VITIONI and LA STRADA before he risked the Miniplot of AMARCORD or the Antiplot of 81/2. Godard made BREATHLESS before WEEKEND. Robert Altman perfected his story talents in the TV series Bonanza and Alfred Hitchcock Presents. First, the masters mastered the Archplot.

  I sympathize with the youthful desire to make a first screenplay read like PERSONA. But the dream of joining the avant-garde must wait while, like the artists before you, you too gain mastery of Classical form. Don’t kid yourself into thinking that you understand Archplot because you’ve seen the movies. You’ll know you understand it when you can do it. The writer works at his skills until knowledge shifts from the left side of the brain to the right, until intellectual awareness becomes living craft.

  The Writer Must Believe in What He Writes

  Stanislavski asked his actors: Are you in love with the art in yourself or yourself in the art? You too must examine your motives for wanting to write the way you write. Why do your screenplays find their way to one corner of the triangle or the other? What is your vision?

  Each tale you create says to the audience: “I believe life is like this.” Every moment must be filled with your passionate conviction or we smell a phony. If you write minimalism, do you believe in the meanings of this form? Has experience convinced you that life brings little or no change? If your ambition is anticlassicism, are you convinced of the random meaninglessness of life? If your answer is a passionate yes, then write your Miniplot or Antiplot and do everything possible to see it made.

  For the vast majority, however, the honest answer to these questions is no. Yet antistructure and, in particular, minimalism still attract young writers like a Pied Piper. Why? I suspect that for many it isn’t the intrinsic meanings of such forms that draw their interest. Rather, it’s what these forms represent extrinsically. In other words, politics. It isn’t what Antiplot and Miniplot are, it’s what they’re not: They’re not Hollywood.

  The young are taught that Hollywood and art are antithetical. The novice, therefore, wanting to be recognized as an artist, falls into the trap of writing a screenplay not for what it is, but for what it’s not. He avoids closure, active characters, chronology, and causality to avoid the taint of commercialism. As a result, pretentiousness poisons his work.

  A story is the embodiment of our ideas and passions in Edmund Husserl’s phrase, “an objective correlative” for the feelings and insights we wish to instill in the audience. When you work with one eye on your script and the other on Hollywood, making eccentric choices to avoid the taint of commercialism, you produce the literary equivalent of a temper tantrum. Like a child living in the shadow of a powerful father, you break Hollywood’s “rules” because it makes you feel free. But angry contradiction of the patriarch is not creativity; it’s delinquency calling for attention. Difference for the sake of difference is as empty an achievement as slavishly following the commercial imperative. Write only what you believe.

  3

  STRUCTURE AND SETTING

  THE WAR ON CLICHÈ

  This may be the most demanding time in history to be a writer. Compare the story-saturated audience of today to that of centuries past. How many times a year did educated Victorians go to the theatre? In a era of huge families and no automatic dishwashers, how much time did they have for fiction? In a typical week our great-great-grandparents may have read or seen five or six hours of story—what many of us now consume per day. By the time modern filmgoers sit down to your work, they’ve absorbed tens of thousands of hours of TV, movies, prose, and theatre. What will you create that they haven’t seen before? Where will you find a truly original story? How will you win the war on cliche?

  Cliché is at the root of audience dissatisfaction, and like a plague spread through ignorance, it now infects all story media. Too often we close novels or exit theatres bored by an ending that was obvious from the beginning, disgruntled because we’ve seen these clichéd scenes and characters too many times before. The cause of this worldwide epidemic is simple and clear; the source of all clichés can be traced to one thing and one thing alone: The writer does not know the world of his story.

  Such writers select a setting and launch a screenplay assuming a knowledge of their fictional world that they don’t have. As they reach into their minds for material, they come up empty. So where do they run? To films and TV, novels and plays with similar settings. From the works of other writers they crib scenes we’ve seen before, paraphrase dialogue we’ve heard before, disguise characters we’ve met before, and pass them off as their own. They reheat literary leftovers and serve up plates of boredom because, regardless of their talents, they lack an in-depth understanding of their story’s setting and all it contains. Knowledge of and insight into the world of your story is fundamental to the achievement of originality and excellence.

  SETTING

  A story’s SETTING is four-dimensional—Period, Duration, Location, Level of Conflict.

  The first dimension of time is Period. Is the story set in the contemporary world? In history? A hypothetical future? Or is it that rare fantasy, such as ANIMAL FARM or WATERSHIP DOWN, in which location in time is unknowable and irrelevant?

  PERIOD is a story’s place in time.

  Duration is the second dimension of time. How much time does the story span within the lives of your characters? Decades? Years? Months? Days? Is it that rare work in which storytime equals screentime, such as MY DINNER WITH ANDRE, a two-hour movie about a two-hour dinner?

  Or rarer still, LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD, a film that liquefies time into timelessness? It’s conceivable, through cross-cutting, overlap, repetition, and/or slow motion, for screentime to surpass storytime. Although no feature-length film has attempted this, a few sequences have done it brilliantly—most famous of all, the “Odessa Steps” sequence of THE BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN. The actual assault by the Tsar’s army on the Odessa protesters took no more than two or three minutes, the time needed for jack-booted feet to march down the steps from top to bottom. Onscreen the terror expands to five times this length.

  DURATION is a story’s length through time.

  Location is the story’s physical dimension. What is the story’s specific geography? In what town? On what streets? What buildings on those streets? What rooms inside those buildings? Up what mountain? Across what desert? A voyage to what planet?

  LOCATION is a story’s place in space.

  Level of Conflict is the human dimension. A setting includes not only itsphysical and temporal domain, but social as well. This dimension becomes vertical in this sense: At what Level of Conflict do you pitch your telling? No matter how externalized in institutions or internalized in individuals, the political, economic, ideological, biological, and psychological forces of society shape events as much as period, landscape, or costume. Therefore, the cast of characters, containing its various levels of conflict, is part of a story’s setting.

  Does your story focus on the inner, even unconscious conflicts within your characters? Or coming up a level, on personal conflicts? Or higher and wider, on battles with institutions in society? Wider still, on struggles against forces of the environment? From the subconscious to the stars, through all the multilayered experiences of life, your story may be set at any one or any combination of these levels.

  LEVEL OF CONFLICT is the story’s position on the hierarchy of human struggles.

  The Relationship Between Structure and Setting

  A story’s setting sharply defines and confines its possibilities.

  Although your setting is a fiction, not everything that comes to mind may
be allowed to happen in it. Within any world, no matter how imaginary, only certain events are possible or probable.

  If your drama is set among the gated estates of West L.A., we won’t see homeowners protesting social injustice by rioting in their tree-lined streets, although they might throw a thousand-dollar-a-plate fund-raiser. If your setting is the housing projects of East L.A.’s ghetto, these citizens won’t dine at thousand-dollar-a-plate galas, but they might hit the streets to demand change.

  A STORY must obey its own internal laws of probability. The event choices of the writer, therefore, are limited to the possibilities and probabilities within the world he creates.

  Each fictional world creates a unique cosmology and makes its own “rules” for how and why things happen within it. No matter how realistic or bizarre the setting, once its causal principles are established, they cannot change. In fact, of all genres Fantasy is the most rigid and structurally conventional. We give the fantasy writer one great leap away from reality, then demand tight-knit probabilities and no coincidence—the strict Archplot of THE WIZARD OF OZ, for example. On the other hand, a gritty realism often allows leaps in logic. In THE USUAL SUSPECTS, for example, screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie arrests his wild improbabilities inside the “law” of free association.

  Stories do not materialize from a void but grow out of materials already in history and human experience. From its first glimpse of the first image, the audience inspects your fictional universe, sorting the possible from the impossible, the likely from the unlikely. Consciously and unconsciously, it wants to know your “laws,” to learn how and why things happen in your specific world. You create these possibilities and limitations through your personal choice of setting and the way you work within it. Having invented these strictures, you’re bound to a contract you must keep. For once the audience grasps the laws of your reality, it feels violated if you break them and rejects your work as illogical and unconvincing.