Writing for the Screens

In anthropologist Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces, he describes the beginning of the classic mythological journey most efficiently: “The Hero ventures forth from the world of common day into the world of supernatural wonder.” That in a nutshell is pretty much the way 90 percent of all movies are made. This transition from Common Day… to Supernatural Wonder… and back again is what is termed THE HERO’S JOURNEY.

There are 12 stages or signposts to this Journey, and it’s up to us as writers to use them as directional markers in the creation of our stories. These signposts begin with the:
ORDINARY WORLD – Because so many stories take Heroes to “Special Worlds”, most begin by establishing an Ordinary World as a baseline for comparison. The Special World is only “special” if we see it in dire contrast to the Hero’s everyday affairs. While the Ordinary World may seem tedious and boring, it’s there that the problems the Hero will face on his/her Journey often appear.

It’s during this first stage of storytelling that our Hero is introduced. And with the Hero, of course, the suggestion of his/her Narrative Problem. Will Dorothy get home from Oz? Will the Little Train That Could make it up the hill?
Your Hero’s entrance into the story is important. You know the old saying, ‘you never get a second chance to make a first impression’? When introducing heroes, truer words were never spoken.
That’s not to say your Hero should enter on the back of some heroic act. Far from it. The Ordinary World must serve as our baseline for comparison. In History of Violence, Café owner Tom Stall, our Hero, is introduced as a father bringing solace to his young daughter who’s just awakened from a bad dream. Stall is a typical family man, loving father and husband…
CALL TO ADVENTURE – right upuntil he’s attacked at his lunch counter by two despicable, blood-thirsty serial killers who mean to kill Tom and the other half-dozen customers in the small café. This becomes your second signpost… and the story’s inciting incident.

Truth be told, the Hero’s Ordinary World is a static but unstable place. The seeds of change and growth are usually planted by the time we arrive, even though we may not yet readily know it. The energy needed to launch the story comes arrives with the Call To Adventure. In the Movie Jaws, this story’s energy arrives in the form of a shark victim washed ashore. In The Wizard of Oz, the energy arrives in the form of a mid-western twister. In Romancing The Stone the “energy” that ignites Kathleen Turner into running off to South America comes in the form of a frantic phone call from her sister.
REFUSAL – [28] And yet… while the Call To Adventure is a luring force to be reckoned with, most great Heroes don’t… at least not at first. The first thing all smart Heroes almost always do is REFUSE the Call To Adventure—your third signpost… Refusing The Call.
Why refuse? Put yourselves in the Hero’s shoes. You’re being asked to say yes to a great unknown—to an adventure that will be exciting but also dangerous… even life-threatening. It wouldn’t be a real adventure otherwise. Your Hero stands at the threshold of fear and does what any lucid human being would do before diving off the bridge—he hesitates. His/her Refusal is only temporary, true… but it serves to signal the audience that the Hero’s adventure is risky. Not a frivolous undertaking but a danger-filled, high-stakes gamble in which the Hero could lose his/her fortune… even their life.
Not to worry, of course. Lots of ways around the Call To Adventure. Refusal is a mask with many faces. The first is:
1. Avoidance… Where Heroes claim to be veterans of past experiences which have taught them the folly of such experiences. In the film classic, Chinatown, Jack Nicholson, playing L.A. Detective J.J. Gittes, doesn’t want to take on Evelyn Mulwray’s case (even though it’s a money-maker), because he’s been down this troubled path before.
2. In A Few Good Men, Tom Cruise, a Navy Attorney, is handed a case he’s expected to try, but Cruise tries to plea-bargain it away in order to avoid his Call to Adventure.

3. Excuses… Sometimes the Hero will rattle off a litany of weak excuses in transparent attempt to delay facing their inevitable fate. They would take on the adventure, they tell us, if not for a pressing schedule. Activities ultimately overcome by the urgency of the quest.
4. Positive Refusals… When the Call is a temptation to evil or a summons to disaster, the hero is smart to say no. In the Three Little Pigs, the little porkers wisely refuse to open the door… even in the face of the Big Bad Wolf’s powerful arguments. If you’ll recall in Death Becomes Her, Bruce Willis receives several powerful Calls to drink a magic potion of immortality. Despite an alluring sales pitch by Isabella Rossellini, Willis Refuses the Call and saves his own soul.

Persistent Refusal, however, can be disastrous. Continued denial of a repeated Calling is one of the marks of a Tragic Hero. At the beginning of Red River, for example, Tom Dunson (played by John Wayne) Refuses The Call to an adventure of the heart with a woman riding along on the trail drive, and thus begins his slide into certain doom. Instead of Refusing, the smart Heroes turn to the fourth signpost for help, securing a… Meeting With Mentor… which we’ll cover in next week’s Blog.

HAPPY VETERAN'S DAY!
We pause this week to honor the men and women who serve or have served in the U.S. Military… and most especially to those who have given their lives in defense of our nation. The two photos below were sent to me by ten different friends. Both of them blew me away.

PHOTO #1: When 2nd Lt. James Cathey’s body arrived at the Reno Airport, Marines climbed into the cargo hold of the plane and draped the flag over his casket as passengers inside the plane watched the family gather on the tarmac.

PHOTO #2: The night before the burial of her husband’s body, Katherine Cathey refused to leave the casket, asking to sleep next to his body for the last time. Before she fell asleep, she opened her laptop computer and played music the couple had loved.

To all Vets, and to all service men and women stationed around the globe, we salute you!

HAVE YOU SEEN OUR TUMBLR PAGE YET!? MAKE SURE YOU CHECK IT OUT at writingforthescreens.tumblr.com ! Thanks ya'll!

Progressive complications, the second plot point discussed in the previous blog, uses what story tellers call suspense to weave these story problems into a satisfying journey. Here’s how it works. The Inciting Incident launches the Hero on a quest to find the conscious or unconscious Object of his/her Desire. In truth, it’s not the OOD that’s most important in the story… but rather the journey that takes us to it.
In the movie The Fugitive, Harrison Ford wants to find the one-armed man who killed his wife. “Find that man,” Ford says over and over. The killer is the object of Ford’s desire… but the journey that finally leads Ford to find him is what the audience pays to see. In Alien, Sigourney Weaver wants to kill the monster. In Shakespeare In Love, a great bard wants the girl. But again, it’s the journey that takes each of them to the OOD.
So the Inciting Incident sets us on our journey, where we then run our Heroes through a series of Progressive Complications… but how? How do we show this uncertainty… this thing called suspense? There are five ways to do it –
Developing Complications… not to be confused with “Progressive Complications.” What is meant here is suspense growing out of the earliest threads of the “call to adventure,” subtle as that conflict might appear. Threads that can include character, exposition, theme and setting. Take for example Stephen King’s Story… The Shining. Remember the opening. A family arrives at the Overlook Hotel in the middle of the Rocky Mountains—caretakers who will brave the winter to watch over the place until the staff returns in the spring. Everyone who works at the hotel has left or is leaving—a bit off-putting considering the enormity of the hotel and its remote setting. Then there’s the hedges shaped like animals. A maze that appears almost haunted. Or the fact that there’s no way down the mountain after the snows hit. Each of these quirks by themselves is harmless. But together they create an uneasiness that becomes suspenseful.
The Race Against Time… Suspense created and used to dramatize an inevitable terminating event that will forcibly alter the Hero’s life by its outcome. Used as a device in practically every movie made, some stories are actually constructed around this one element. Ever see the movie Speed?
The Chase… It never fails that half way through many a journey, a third type of uncertainty rears its head—The Chase. Suspense created and used through a plot device common to no other media by evoking our intrinsic survival instincts in a kind of hunter-hunted pursuit. One of the best Chase scenes I’ve ever seen in a film occurred in Ronin. Another belongs to the first modern film to use the device effectively, and by doing so set the bar for the next 40 years, The French Connection. Another way to reveal suspense and keep your story’s Hero in a state of uncertainty we call –
The Rising Intensity of Crisis… or RAISING THE STAKES. Here suspense is created when each succeeding obstacle is more difficult to get around than the last. Simply put and most often used in stories, you escalate the jeopardy befalling your Hero and suspense is sure to follow. How about Die Hard? Fargo? Writing for the Screens
Hunt For Red October?
Finally, we have what is called Reversal as a way to manufacture suspense. Unexpected deception usually found at story’s end. Metaphorically speaking, we find the Hero forced to jump through hoops while his/her best friend suddenly decides to set them on fire. Remember the movie Ghost? Patriot Games? Or the John Travolta/ Christian Slater film Broken Arrow?

All great fiction melds the elements of craft (genre, theme, problems, story conflict, and character) into a spine that drives the story. These ingredients are stirred up in a cauldron of craft, simmered for months with thought and hard work, sprinkled with genius and wit, then served up to the reader as a well-wrought story. This cauldron, as it were, is where the plot of your story is born.
While some literary circles still view “plot” as a dirty word tarred with the connotation of hack commercialism, the loss is theirs. For plot is an accurate term that names the internally consistent, inter-related pattern of events that shape a story. To PLOT… is to navigate through dangerous terrain when confronted by dozens of possibilities, and somehow choose the correct path. Plot is, in short, the writer’s choice of events and their design in time. Moreover, this intricate dissemination of information takes place in FIVE parts called PLOT POINTS:

INCITING INCIDENT – What is often referred to as the “… joining of conflict resulting in crisis.” As you open your story, much of your tale’s “ordinary world” will hail from crime, courts, medicine, sports, adventure, slices of life, vacation, even war—and much of it will reflect the tedium and monotony that often fill the day. The Inciting Incident—what Chris Vogler, in his book The Writer’s Journey terms the “Call To Adventure”—arrives on the scene when an event in this ordinary world begins to cause more problems than our Hero is able to solve.
PROGRESSIVE COMPLICATIONS – What story tellers call SUSPENSE. A state of uncertainty in your story rising unabated to its climax, drawing your Hero as well as the Audience along with it. [NOTE: More about “suspense” in Blog 12.]
CRISIS – As the Hero wades through PROGRESSIVE COMPLICATIONS (or SUSPENSE), he/she comes to several turning points that alter his/her life and redirect their focus in the story. Essentially, your story as a series of set-ups and pay-offs, the resolution of each leading to a mid-story Crisis. The word Crisis in Greek means “to divide” and that’s exactly what the Crisis in your story does—divide it in two. When the hero survives the Crisis, they change—a lot like a caterpillar morphing into a moth. What fails to destroy them only makes them stronger and more resolved to get through the journey.
CLIMAX – It holds the final story problem to be solved–the Narrative (or Hero’s) Problem—the one that launched him/her on their journey. The Climax surrounds the point at which the Protagonist, after surmounting all of the complications and crises, and exhausting all of the actions to claim his/her Object of Desire (OOD)… has one left. Heroes now find themselves at the end of the line. No more tomorrows. No second chance to get this one right. The moment of truth is upon him/her. The Narrative Problem will be answered in the very next action the Hero takes.
In the Die Hard Franchise… The Narrative Problem is always answered in the affirmative. Will Bruce Willis save “the World”? The resounding answer YES comes shining through in every Climax. In The Fugitive… Will Harrison Ford find the one-armed man? The answer YES again found in the climax. In Perfect Storm… Will George Clooney get his fish? Regrettably, the answer NO comes in the Climax as well.
RESOLUTION – This fifth and final Plot Point occurs at the end of your story. Another name for this Plot Point is DENOUEMENT—a French word meaning “final resolution.” The actions taken by the Hero have now been completed and the outcome of his/her efforts decided. All that’s left to sort out are residual story matters still up in the air following your Climax.

Taking the subject of Character even further, we need to understand Character Arc. That is to say, arcing your Hero’s true character so that beliefs hidden inside your Protagonist’s essential nature change for better or worse over the course of your story.
To cite an example, let us turn to the David Mamet screenplay, The Verdict. In this story, tarnished Hero Frank Galvin first appears as a Boston attorney, dressed in a three-piece suit and looking like Paul Newman, unfairly handsome. But this, of course, is characterization.

The screenplay peels back this characterization to reveal a corrupt, bankrupt, self-destructive, irretrievable drunk who hasn’t won a case for years. Frank Galvin is an ambulance chaser. Divorce and disgrace have broken his spirit. We see him searching obituaries of people who have died, then going to their funerals to pass out his business cards to grieving relatives hoping to drum up business. This sequence culminates in a rage of drunken self-loathing as Galvin trashes his office, ripping the diplomas off the wall and smashing them before collapsing in a heap himself.

But then comes THE CASE. Galvin is offered a medical malpractice suit to defend a woman lost in a coma. With a quick settlement, he’d make $70,000. But as he looks at his client in her helpless state, he senses that what this case offers is not a fat easy fee but his last chance for salvation. Choice under pressure. Frank Galvin chooses the high road, taking on the Catholic Church and the Boston political establishment, fighting not only for his client but for his very soul. The legal battle changes his inner nature, transforming him into a sober, ethical, excellent attorney—the kind of man we guess he once was before he lost his will to live.

It turns out that the story takes our Hero to the Nuremberg Trials of the 1960s where he comes to discover that the Kate Winslet character was formerly a N**i hatchet woman who selected which Jews were to be sent to die in the concentration camps—and the one responsible for allowing 300 Jewish detainees to burn to death in a Polish church. Choices made under pressure provide this story’s Hero with the revelation of his young life—that he’d been sleeping with and reading to a virtual monster for the better part of his adolescent life.

The revelation of true character in contrast to characterization is fundamental to all great storytelling. Life teaches this grand principle: People aren’t always what they seem. In the film, The Reader, we meet Kate Winslet, a German ticket-taker on a train, circa 1961. To characterize her—that is to say, to sum up all of her observable qualities—one would say she is a woman in her mid-forties, tall, lean, unmarried, with dirty-blond hair, dark eyebrows and a thick German accent, who boasts a curious appetite for s*x, choosing to be intimate with a teenage boy who reads to her after making love. From this description, it would appear that we know a lot about her, yes? Yet in truth we find—as does our Protagonist—that when it comes to True Character, Ms. Winslet is anything but the lonely, middle-aged civil servant she seems.

TRUE CHARACTER IS REVEALED IN THE CHOICES A PERSON MAKES UNDER PRESSURE.
The greater the pressure, the deeper the revelation, and the truer the choice is to that character’s essential nature. We mustn’t confuse true character with characterization. Characterization is the sum of all observable qualities of a human being that another person can discern. Everything knowable through careful scrutiny—age and IQ; s*x and s*xuality; style of speech and gesture; choices of home, car, and dress; education and occupation; personality, values and attitudes—all the aspects of humanity we could know by taking notes on someone day in and day out. This singular assemblage of traits should never be confused with Character.

That said, all stories need to keep the Hero under as much pressure and in as much jeopardy as the writer can muster. Choices made by your Hero—or any character for that matter—when nothing is at risk mean little to your story. If for example a character chooses to tell the truth in a situation where telling a lie would gain him/her nothing, the choice is trivial and the moment expresses little. BUT… if the same character insists on telling the truth when a lie would save his/her life, then we sense that honesty is at the very core of his or her nature.

Consider this scene: Two cars motor down a highway. One is a rusted-out compact with buckets, mops and brooms in the back. Driving it is an illegal alien—a quiet, shy woman working as a domestic for under-the-table cash to feed her children. The car alongside her is a late-model Porsche driven by a brilliant and wealthy neurosurgeon. Two people with utterly different backgrounds, beliefs, personalities, language—in virtually every way their characterizations are opposite each other’s. But do we really know them? No. Of course not… but we’re about to.

Suddenly, in front of them, a school bus full of children flips out of control, smashes against an underpass, busting into flames, trapping the children inside. Now, we’ll find out who these two people really are. Who chooses to stop? And who chooses to drive on by? After all, each certainly has rationalization for driving by. The domestic worries that if she gets caught up in this, the police might discover she’s an illegal and toss her back across the border, leaving her family to starve. As for the neurosurgeon, he too worries that his hands may be injured—hands needed to perform miraculous microsurgeries where hundreds if not thousands of lives could one day hang in the balance. This is choice under pressure.
But let’s say they both stop and help. This of course tells us more about them, but which one chooses to help by calling an ambulance? Which one by dashing into the burning bus? Let’s say again that they both rush into the burning bus—a choice that reveals even greater character depth.

In the end, we may discover that deep within these utterly different characterizations there lies an identical character—that both people are willing to give their lives in a heartbeat for strangers. Or it may turn out that the person we thought would act heroically turns out to be a coward. Or that the one we thought would act cowardly turns out to be the hero.

Every story has a tone—a kind of scope that says: This is the type of conflict you can expect in this story. Whether it hails from within the Protagonist… or whether it spills over them at the hand of another person, institution, society, or Mother Nature herself, every story thrives on conflict. Any one of the five types of CONFRONTATION ARENAS just mentioned can overwhelm your Hero with unrelenting turmoil. When discussing this conflict, we tend to talk about it as a competition, in which the set-up for these contests is thusly stated: The HERO VS …

..HIMSELF – Here internal tragic flaws or unfortunate personal traits militate against your Protagonist, and can even destroy them.

…AN INDIVIDUAL – Competitive fascination with who is the better man (or woman).

…vs INSTITUTION – Conflict pitting the underdog Hero against the perversity and restraint of oppressive institutionalized conditions.

…vs SOCIETY – Here, religions, philosophy and geography conspire to confront the Protagonist with struggles that are far greater than the Hero or his problems.

…vs THE ELEMENTS – Human kind pitted against Mother Nature at her worst—earth, wind, fire, or water. Your Hero’s journey is up against insurmountable odds that can even include primeval elements like the ones seen in the Alien and Predator franchises.

A narrative hook is a literary technique in the opening of a story that grabs or "hooks" the reader's attention so that he or she will keep on reading. Or, in the case of a movie, so that the audience is engaged in the film from the very first frame..
When approaching a screenplay, think about OPENING scenes you’ve seen in other films. You know the saying: “You never get a second chance to make a first impression.” Audiences view films the same way. Scenes with hooks that suck you into the story on Page One are the kind of scenes worth remembering.

In 1975, the blockbuster film Jaws was released. It played at the Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood, one of the largest theaters of its day. Almost 1200 people attended the premier of Jaws, filling balcony and lodge seating to capacity. The film had been based on Peter Benchley’s best-selling novel by the same name, and the buzz running up and down the aisles as the curtain parted and the movie began was notable. The movie’s hook took care of the “buzz” and silenced all ambient sound in seconds. As the movie opens, two teens from an evening beach party head out into the water to go skinny-dipping. The boy is too drunk to get his clothes off and thus the girl dives into the water alone. The shark (which we never see in the scene) finds the girl just past the shore break and drags her through the water for over a minute before pulling her down. At the end of the of sequence you could have heard a pin drop. No one got up to eat, or use the restroom. Quite literally, no one stirred for the next two hours.
Hooks became necessary after the MTV age, where shorter attention spans required the writer to jolt the viewer. Movie-goers and readers now have less patience to wait for a screenplay or a movie to "get going." Horror, suspense, and crime films are notorious for using a death or a murder as a hook. Action adventure films and thrillers can do the same. In a lesser known film, Vertical Limit, a mountain climbing family is scaling a butte in Monument Valley “just for fun.” Trouble finds them when amateur climbers above them fall and in doing so leave our family of three hanging from a single piton. The father, who is lowest on the rope, realizes that the three must jettison weight if they are to survive and orders his son to cut the father loose, while his sister yells at her brother not to do it The tension in this scene never fails to silence every classroom I show it to.
These two examples of well-developed hooks are more than just grabbers, they also serve as a preview of what’s in store for the rest of the film.