Reading Screenplays Page 2

  Bear in mind that the important genre convention is that the point of the story is to get the character successfully to pass through to the next phase (at the appropriate time); but this is not necessarily the goal of the character. The writer may make the character want something else or may have them resisting the transition in order to generate drama. It is the audience that cares whether or not the rite of passage is negotiated successfully. If you are reading this kind of script, analyse carefully how the writer has made us care, or what might be done to further this? The conflict for the character is internal and often situational, set by the constraints of their environment, and this conflict is manifested in problems with people such as parents, siblings, partners, etc. The character is changed by these experiences at the end of the story.

  Stand By Me is still the classic ‘childhood to adolescence’ and ‘loss of innocence’ story retold from the perspective of the adult looking back; My Life As A Dog tells the same story from the point of view of 12–year–old Ingemar, who has to grow up very fast. Somersault and An Education both offer versions of trying to ‘fly too soon’ into adulthood; Lars and the Real Girl tells the same story but through the experiences of Lars, who hasn’t made the transition to adulthood at the age of 27 and needs to. At the heart of American Beauty is Lester’s mid–life crisis and the story is about his need to accept the stage of life he is in. About Schmidt is an example of the rite of passage to retirement and the recalibration of one’s sense of self at this stage.

  Road movie

  The most important element in the road movie must be the journey, and reading a script for a road movie should reveal very clearly the motivation for undertaking it. The motive may be the desire to get away from something (the police, a boring environment) or to get to something (a beauty pageant, a sporting event) but, whatever it is, the journey should be challenging and testing for the character and it should result in change to one or more characters. The audience and the characters will share the dramatic goal of completing the journey.

  Unlike many genres, the road movie can support an episodic structure; the characters journey though the story–world and the writer doesn’t have the usual imperative to set up or resolve every event along the way. Whilst a single character can undertake a journey, having two or more characters on the road will contain a relationship in a physical space that can generate tension, meltdown and resolution to this story element.

  In Little Miss Sunshine, the beauty pageant could have been set in Albuquerque, where the family lives, as there is no inherent story reason for it to be set in California. But this is a story in which the family needs to change its attitude to what it means to win. Having a van with a sticky gearshift and a broken horn effectively assists this in several ways: it keeps the family in one place whilst generating urgency and moving the story on; it gives them something to work at together every time they stop or start; it is the cause of significant practical obstacles to progress on the journey that they need to complete within a fixed time; it is absurdly unfortunate and therefore very funny; and, lastly, but still importantly, the bright yellow VW van creates a striking visual image.

  There are many classic road movies (and many good books dedicated to analysing and appreciating the genre) like Thelma and Louise, Bonnie and Clyde, Easy Rider, Wild at Heart, Mad Max, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Paris, Texas, and, more recently, Sideways, Broken Flowers and Little Miss Sunshine. David Lynch’s The Straight Story is a beautiful example of the genre, telling a simple, moving story about the efforts of Alvin Straight to get to his dying brother before it is too late.

  Thriller

  Like horror, this is a very broad genre, but a key generic definer is that thrillers are designed to be realistic. However extreme the situation, we are aware that psychos exist and bad things do happen, and that, occasionally, we may each put ourselves in some danger. One of the most important ways that thriller stories attain realism is through the construction of the antagonist – the character who perpetrates the threat. It is imperative that the audience glimpses the motive that drives them and in such a way that, for a moment, we understand their need for revenge, justice, vengeance. The most important aspect of the protagonist, the character who is under threat, is their survival! The audience is invested in their ability to survive. The range of situations found in thriller stories is too extensive for generalisation but one consistent element is the stake. In a thriller, life is at stake. If you are reading a thriller script, ensure that the threat is to life, rather than a job, or status, or a marriage.

  Beyond that inviolable principle, examine the way that an audience is involved in, and relates to, the story. In a thriller film it is through the character of the protagonist. There is no better way of describing this character than by specifying that they need to be just like us, which we may loosely define as being ‘normal’. Normal people don’t have too much or too little of anything. We generally have homes, families, jobs, hobbies and are generally pleasant. At the start of the story it is quite likely that the protagonist’s only goal is for everything to stay as it is. These are not characters that are looking for change and, because they are not really engaged with the idea of change, they often remain quite oblivious to what is going on around them until very late in the story.

  Because the story will require them to deal with a big problem, they should be invested with the right attributes such as competence, cleverness, being fit and resourceful. Any serious gaps in their functionality, like having narcolepsy or being too chubby, or a serious shortcoming that the protagonist cannot just miraculously ‘overcome’ in order to win through, will affect our willingness to identify with them. It is an important convention that this character isn’t fundamentally changed by the experiences of the story.

  There is an exception when the writer intends the thriller story also to be a cautionary tale. In this case the character can have too much of something or gaps in functionality – the character may be overly ambitious, for example, or an alcoholic.

  Thriller stories can also rely on dramatic irony, on the audience having more information about the situation than the character/s, and in this way the story can elicit our care and concern as well as generating the tension.

  Examples of classic thriller films are Single White Female, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle and Pacific Heights, all of which employ the convention of dramatic irony whereby the audience knows much more than the characters. Misery and Fatal Attraction both offer a masterclass in generating tension with the premise of crossing paths with the wrong person and the danger of misreading the signs. More recently, good thriller films have included Internal Affairs, The Departed, State of Play and Tell No One.

  Romantic comedies

  Audiences enjoy romantic comedies, obtaining a vicarious experience of the power of love and confirmation of the ideal that ‘the one’ exists. Attaining this should be the main objective of the rom–com. There is, or should be, nothing else at stake. The world depicted is benign and ‘feel–good’ and the rom–com’s banter and situations need to be imbued with genuine and clever comedy. Over the last ten years or so the romantic comedy genre has evolved from being the exclusive preserve of the young, straight, white middle classes. The protagonists may now be old, black, gay, religious, ugly, and so on. What remains common to the stories is the controlling idea that ‘the one’ exists for the protagonists and that, of course, the protagonists are entitled to experience and consummate this love.

  This entertainment is not hard to sell to an audience. We all believe that everyone deserves to love and be loved so the task of the writer is to convey this underlying ‘truth’ through the characters. The job of the reader is to ascertain that this has been done convincingly, particularly in rom–coms where the characters display seemingly unpleasant characteristics such as arrogance, smugness, presumption or vanity.

  Consider where, and how effective, is the scene or sequence that enables the audience to get behind the lover
s and want them to be together in the end.

  A common problem in romantic comedy scripts is for one or both of the characters to be destined to learn something about themselves and to need to change in order to find the love that has eluded them so far. However the character trait or the lesson learned has to elicit the audience’s empathy rather than feelings of pity, sympathy, or, worse, contempt. The character having to learn not to be a ‘door–mat’ is likely to be rather needy or foolish, which may well elicit sympathy from the audience, whereas the character who learns to accept him/herself as ‘good enough’ will be more likely to generate empathy.

  It is surprisingly easy for writers to write unsatisfactory characters in a rom–com by misunderstanding the nature of the journey for both the characters and the audience.

  Classic examples of romantic comedies are When Harry Met Sally, Pretty Woman, Sleepless in Seattle, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Bridget Jones’s Diary and Notting Hill. More recently the genre has tackled unexpected pregnancy, deportation and splitting up rather than getting together in films like Knocked Up, The Proposal, The Break Up and (500) Days of Summer.

  Drama stories

  What are the conventions of the drama genre? An agreed definition is unlikely but, in my work, I find it useful to characterise dramas as stories about ‘things that can happen to us’. These are things like accidents, an unwanted pregnancy, an affair, a divorce, sudden death, the suicide of someone we know, being made redundant, loss of fortune, crisis of confidence, house repossession. These events are imaginable and would impact on our lives, which we work hard to keep as ordered as possible.

  Essentially, drama stories are about interruptions to life, so the drama’s premise is ‘life is fragile’, while the meaning is simply to affirm for us that, whatever happens, ‘life goes on’.

  To some extent, most story ideas may be described as dramas – perhaps not highly motivated political thrillers, or murders, because they can be specific to the particulars of the story–world and characters – but most other stories tell of an interruption to someone’s ordered routine, their ordinary life, whether they meet someone they are going to fall in love with or whether they are lost and can’t find their way home. If a story idea can be deployed in a genre with more marketing muscle than the drama genre, suggesting that the project is steered accordingly could be the sensible approach.

  Drama stories are structured around an interruption to the lives of their characters. Clearly it is important for the reader/viewer to have knowledge of life preceding the event in order to properly gauge the event’s impact, and the way in which that information is delivered and managed will dictate the structure. We may come into the story long after the interruption has happened, as is the case in Rachel Getting Married. In this story, Kym, Rachel’s sister, was 16, high on drugs and in charge of their little brother, Ethan, when she crashed the car and he died. However, the story starts some years later when Kym is out of rehab and a guest at her sister’s wedding, for this is the moment when Kym is going to confront her past and find some kind of peace and resolution. The audience are aware that something happened but do not know the details until quite late in the story. You Can Count On Me offers a prologue. In four short scenes at the start of the film we see a couple in their car, on a winding road in heavy rain. We hear a horn blast and the crash and then cut to the local policeman ringing a doorbell that same rainy night, opened by a teenage babysitter. In the house, in the background, are two young children. The next scene is the funeral where we see two coffins and the two children holding hands tightly. The image mixes to two grave stones, and the woman tending them was that young girl. In this way the writer has told us the important information that we need in order to imbue with more depth the specific situations of the characters. In Juno, the interruption is integral to the story on screen. Juno’s situation at the start of the story is ‘pregnant’ and the story explores her efforts to manage her situation.

  The writer’s choice of structure and how the information about the interruption is delivered will determine the specific dramatic question – the particular aspect of life that this story is concerned with. It is really important that drama stories do not try to cover all aspects of the characters’ lives but offer a specific reason for this story to be told now. The dramatic question is covered in more detail in the section on structure, but, as an example, Juno’s decision to give her baby to the perfect family is what drives the story, whereas the dramatic question is, ‘Will Juno survive this interruption to her life and get back to being a teenager?’

  There should be at least three key characters in a drama story simply because drama explores the fallout from unexpected events and characters must display a range of different reactions. Within every group there will be, at one end of the spectrum, the ones who feel cursed and unlucky and, at the other end, the ones who pick up the pieces and think it could have been worse. For a drama story to reach the broadest possible audience it should have a range of points of view, expressed through the characters, enabling each member of the audience to relate to someone on screen for some of the time at least.

  Characters in drama stories do not need specific goals, by which I mean the passion to get into ballet school (Billy Elliot), or trying to bring justice to a community damaged by a negligent water company (Erin Brockovich). It is important that the characters are established as people getting on with their lives, simply because something is going to happen that will interrupt the normal course of events. As illustrated in the examples of Rachel Getting Married or You Can Count On Me, the characters may continue to deal with the interruption for years, but, before it happened, they were getting on with their lives. Goals may arise from the interrupting event and how it is managed (or not managed), but characters with a very specific desire or a driving passion for something may reduce the story’s appeal to a broad audience. Some characters may change as a result of the experiences of the story and some may not, just like life.

  The source of conflict in a drama will always be the situation which affects the characters, which is then reinforced and expressed through the relationships on screen. Unlike most other genres, drama is the one where the story may not necessarily be resolved. Life goes on. The relationships may have shifted, the worldview is a little different, nothing will be the same again, but life goes on.

  Reading drama scripts requires an appreciation of subtlety in the story. To focus on the goals of the characters in the drama by trying to answer the question what happens if the character doesn’t get or achieve ‘it’? (whatever it may be) is the likeliest way to miss this subtlety. Whilst this question is usually appropriate for genre stories with a clear goal or desired outcome, in drama stories it is more important to assess whether the characters’ range of responses to the event in the story feels truthful. Whether or not members of the audience have themselves experienced an unwanted pregnancy, or a redundancy, or a fatal traffic accident involving their own family, we can recognise the kinds of responses that will arise and the behaviour that will result. If the audience can understand the decisions and the actions that the characters are taking they can anticipate the outcome – good, bad, or both. Once there is an outcome to anticipate there is a story in which the audience becomes engaged. Without consequences, it may be just an account of an event.

  Examples of drama films are Kramer vs Kramer, which tells the story of a marriage separation; The Big Chill, which looks at the impact of one member’s suicide on a group of former college friends; and One Night Stand, which deals with the consequences of just that. In the Bedroom is a classic example of someone being in the wrong place at the wrong time and the terrible aftermath for his family. Three Colours Blue and The Ice Storm tell of accidental death; Crash, 27 Grams and Amores Perros all look at the impact of a car crash on a range of characters.

  ASSESSING STORY AND GENRE FOR THE REPORT

  When you finish the first reading of a script consider carefully the genre this story bel
ongs in (or could belong in) and use the conventions of that genre to guide your thoughts by considering these questions:

  Does it sit in the right emotional territory?

  Does the story’s meaning succeed within the genre?

  Are the characters’ goals appropriate to the genre? Or do they have goals not required by the story?

  Do the characters have the right attributes for the story?

  Do the characters feel truthful?

  This approach is not put forward as a prescriptive one for any specific story choices in terms of the events; it should, however, help to determine that the ‘component parts’ which an audience may readily recognise are in place, and, in this way, the audience – both the reader and the eventual viewers – may trust that they are in good hands.

  Clearly, any generic conventions may be played with or indeed ignored. This may work if there is adequate and thoughtful compensation, such that our expectations of the story are fulfilled but not in the exact way that we may be anticipate. Genre is not a method that should result in making films formulaic. Genre is about understanding that films are integral to our storytelling tradition and we all need stories to help us make sense of our lives.

  Finally, script readers must trust in their understanding of how all stories work. Enjoy the learning and the thinking and be confident.