Structure, My Premiere and My Option

The film that I was hired to write in 2006 premiered at The Beverly Hills Hi-Def Film Festival on Saturday. I haven't heard any reactions to it, seen any reviews etc. Hmmmm.

I have heard that it might screen at TriBeCa in the spring.

I still haven't seen it.

A former student, a fine, fine writer, e-mailed me over the weekend and asked:
"Can't I just turn in a series of biting, poignant gut-punchingly visceral moments that made you want to laugh or cry?"

I don't think so.

Conveniently, I can speak on this subject having just seen "Burn After Reading" last night, a collection of great characters and some cool scenes that, strung together, add up to nothing.

What a waste of a movie! A film needs a narrative spine, it has to have an overall unity to make all the pieces mean something when slapped together.

A great example, one of the major artistic experiences of my life:

In 1980 I went to see Bill Cosby at the York State Fair. He came out and told one funny story, went off on a related tangent, came back to the story, went off on a related tangent, came back to the story and repeated the process for an hour.

It was one of the most brilliant, unified, cohesive pieces of stagecraft I have ever seen, so carefully plotted and conceived that I was truly left in awe.

The act had a narrative spine and everything else grew out of it organically, nothing was random and it all served to support the whole piece, the overall idea. A film should be about something and all the scenes should serve to make your overall point.

My formula:
Screenplay = Idea + Story + Plot
Idea - The overall themes and thoughts that inform the film.
Story - Everything that happens either onscreen or off even before the movie starts.
Plot - Everything that happens onscreen.

A simplified example:

Spielberg says, "I know, I have an Idea that I would like to express - 'War is bad'"

So there is this Story about the four Ryan brothers who go off to fight in World War II. Three of them are killed and the Army decides to find the other one and bring him back alive to avoid a public relations nightmare.

The Plot then follows Tom Hanks and a band of stereotypical caricatures as they hunt for Private Ryan, many of them getting killed along the way and leading the audience to realize how Bad War Is and how brutal WWII was. The three dead Ryan brothers are part of the story but not part of the plot because, for the most part, their deaths occur offscreen before the start of the movie.

You can be structurally sound and accessible without falling into cliche. I was really disappointed with "Slumdog Millionaire" because in the end, it really wound up relying on a seriously old school melodramatic cliche among other things.

My roots are in theater, offbeat, avant garde or absurdist theater. I have been influenced by more playwrights (Pinter, Albee, Stoppard, Ionesco) and stand-up comedians (Richard Pryor, Bill Cosby, Steve Martin) than I have been by screenwriters.

I have had to work to fight against my resistance to conventional three-act structure. When I read Syd Field's classic "Screenplay" back in the 80's I couldn't get through it, I was so disgusted by the idea that the art of cinema could be boiled down to a simple formula, X, Y and Z by page 10, An Act Break on or around page 30, Act 2A, mid-point, Act 2B, another Act Break on page 60 or 90 depending on how long the film is etc.

So my early screenplays were, in fact "a series of biting, poignant, gut-punchingly visceral moments that make you want to laugh or cry" as an almost defiant stance against the industry standard. There are filmmakers who can get away with doing this but, for the most part, I am not one of them or, I should say, I was not one of them.

As a screenwriting teacher and a writer-for-hire I have found that I have to utilize three-act structure and I have come to recognize it as a beautiful thing, a convention to work within and to push the boundaries of and I can appreciate when a film hits its marks like a precision instrument as much as I can appreciate the rare film that defies convention and still succeeds.

The film that opened this past weekend, adhered to three act-structure for the most part when I wrote it. The director's re-write did not. "Aftermath" the screenplay that I am selling, does not adhere to three-act structure in the conventional sense. A colleague of mine, screenwriter Joe Stinson, who wrote four screenplays for Clint Eastwood (including the line, yes, "Go ahead, make my day") read "Aftermath" and told me You managed to break all of the rules of screenwriting and still come up with a piece that works." Yay for me.