A Bit on the Slow Side

Contains spoilers for Survivors

I was going to wibble on about Survivors for a bit, but Rob Stickler has beaten me to it here (and in typically erudite fashion as well – I quote: “The apocalypse has been a slight inconvenience mainly manifesting in an inability to text.” Arf!).

Even so, there were a few things that bothered me, not least the issue of what appeared to be a weird structural decision on behalf of the programme makers. Survivors is of course a TV show, which means it should have different structural concerns than film. Arguably, TV should provide a broader canvas, which means that everything has more space to breathe, for characters to develop, for themes to expand; after all, a ninety minute opening episode is a lot of televisual space to fill up.

So, how did Survivors choose to do it?

Mostly by elongating twenty minutes worth of story into ninety minutes.

If Survivors was forced at gunpoint to shrink its six and half hour running time into a ninety page screenplay, then no doubt the first episode would be concluded well inside the twenty page mark. And if it was, would you have lost any significant scenes from the remaining seventy pages?

I don’t think you would.

It’s not that Survivors was particularly slow as such; it just took its own sweet time in getting to the point – probably a consequence of the realisation that there was ninety minutes to fill (I haven’t seen the original series, so I have no idea how the respective first episodes stack up against each other). A case in point was when Abby awoke after being in a coma to find her husband dead in the front room. If this scene had been designed for film and not TV, it probably wouldn’t have been longer than a page. Such as it was, we saw Abby do a huge variety of things before discovering her husband’s body, none of them particularly interesting or essential to the narrative. But then, don’t forget: there’s a lot of time to fill here. And if you’re not going to fill it up with honest to goodness story, you’ve got to fill it up somehow: watching characters eat, take showers and wander around deserted suburban streets is probably as good a waste of time as any.

The other strange phenomenon that came to mind watching Survivors was the fact that it’s essentially a re-make (yeah, OK, so the BBC describe it as a ‘re-imagining’, but that still makes it a re-make in my book). Add to this news that Day of the Triffids is to get a makeover next year, and you have to start to wonder what’s going on in TeeVee land at the moment (even Wallander was in effect a remake – BBC4 handily showed the original Swedish series for comparison the other night).

I’ve always (probably naively) assumed that the BBC doesn’t have to chase ratings in the same way that their commercial rivals do, which surely means the Beeb is able to indulge in a certain amount of risk taking. What you seem to have is the opposite: remakes aplenty (wasn’t there a rumour recently about a Reginald Perrin remake? Yikes!), Andrew Davies writing every costume drama in christendom and ‘single drama’ relegated to the seldom watched margins of BBC2. In comparison, ITV looks like a veritable hotbed of originality. And that’s a scary thought.

FCB in The Guardian

There was a good article in yesterday's Guardian by Frank Cottrell Boyce, which can be found here. As a little teaser, here's what he has to say about the three act structure...

All the manuals insist on a three-act structure. I think this is a useless model. It's static. All it really means is that your screenplay should have a beginning, middle and end. When you're shaping things, it's more useful to think about suspense. Suspense is the hidden energy that holds a story together.

Oooh, controversial!

I've been thinking about structure and pacing quite a lot recently, and this little article is helping me frame some of my thoughts in a wider context. I may well post some of this meandering old nonsense at a later date, but in the meantime, hop over to the article and have a gander.

Time Sick

I’m always fascinated by how screenwriters choose to show the passing of time (either forwards or back), as I think this is probably one of the hardest things to do in a novel and interesting way. On the most basic of levels, you can always go down the tried and tested title card or ‘superimposition’ route, i.e., “BATTERSEA DOG’S HOME, SEVEN YEARS LATER”. Even though one of the best films ever made – The Shining – does this, it always seems like cheating to me (I think The Shining gets away with it purely because it’s related to the concertina effect of the film’s structure – and besides, Kubrick didn’t like spending money on fripperies such as title cards, and who could blame him?). I remember reading an article by David Mamet (was it in here?) where students on a screenwriting course struggled with the same problem – the answer? Another old standby – a series of dissolving clock faces that show the passing of time. Hmmm – it does the job, but it’s a bit workmanlike.

However, as far as sheer invention goes, I don’t think you can beat the technique that Michael Powell and Emeric Pressberger used in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. The majority of the film is told in one long flashback, and the transition from present day to past (a jump backwards of some 40 years) is handled with what can only be described as a flourish of genius. The elderly Blimp (the fantastic Roger Livesey) has just wrestled a younger officer into a pool in a Turkish bath, where he proceeds to give him a well deserved slap. As the camera tracks up the length of the pool, the water momentarily calms as Blimp walks out the other end, some forty years younger and straight into the flashback. No title card, no explanatory text – nothing; and yet you are wholly aware of what has just taken place.

The periods between the various conflicts that the film centres on are also brilliantly handled: during one such transition, between the Boer and First World War, Blimp does not appear at all. However, the various animals that he shoots on his overseas treks do, all complete with an identifying plaque giving the place and date.

I could go on and on about this film all night (Blimp and A Matter of Life and Death are probably two of the greatest ‘British’[1] films ever made), as there’s so much here that demands further examination: Deborah Kerr’s multiple roles, the narrative treatment of the duel between Blimp and Kretschmar-Schuldorff – and so it goes.

For the meantime, check out some further information and archive reviews of the film here.
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[1] Michael Powell on The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp: “a 100% British film but it's photographed by a Frenchman, it's written by a Hungarian, the musical score is by a German Jew, the director was English, the man who did the costumes was a Czech; in other words, it was the kind of film that I've always worked on with a mixed crew of every nationality, no frontiers of any kind”.

Chip's Big Ass Post, part 2

Following my previous post on the subject, the way forward was to get some further notes from Lianne and a couple of overly critical friends and wrote a further two drafts. Zoiks!

* The ‘Coherent draft’ – a draft that keeps the voiceover and the non-linear structure but takes on board a lot of the more ‘minor’ comments – the aim here was to create a more streamlined draft without touching the more contentious elements of voiceover and structure.

* The ‘Hack and Slash draft’ – the equivalent of a Canadian seal cull. Voiceover? Gone. On deleting it, it became readily apparent that no, it wasn’t needed as – guess what – it didn’t add anything. The non-linear structure is curtailed to such an extent that the opening scene now appears as the script’s penultimate act. And you know what? It works a whole lot better. I still feel the (insecure?) need to dangle a little visual teaser at the outset, if only to keep people intrigued (and therefore reading), but the structure is now more logical and coherent (and what's more, the page count is down from 102 to 95 - result!)

My favourite draft out of the two? The latter. Non-linearity and voiceover can have the effect of obscuring what the real narrative thrust of your script really is – I think by taking them outside and giving them a good kicking, things are starting to look a lot clearer.

However, the one thing I haven’t done with the Hack n’ Slash draft is to take Lucy’s advice on board about chopping out the first twenty pages. With the first ‘flash forward’ scene cut back from three pages to one (and with no offending voiceover), I think it (sort of) sits OK. As an experiment, what I might do at some point is to see if I can reconfigure the first thirty pages and see what happens.

Co-incidentally, the two previous scripts I wrote before this one were written with some very strict rules to the fore - no voiceovers, no flashbacks, and strictly linear structures. If in doubt, KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid). I know why I abandoned these diktats for this particular script – it’s because it didn’t start out as a script at all. I wrote the thing originally as a novel, and then adapted it. In the novel, the structure was tight as a very tightly wound tight thing – however, in adapting it for a screenplay format, something went strangely awry. To be honest, what I think I did was to rely too much on the structure on the novel to inform that of the screenplay – it simply didn’t work. However, in the newer draft, it works better. And no doubt in subsequent drafts, it will work better still (that’s what I’m telling myself at least).

All in all, I love getting notes on my work, as I am well past that stage where I take any criticism on my writing as a personal insult. And believe me, I’ve been set upon by experts. The secret is to temporarily jettison your house-sized ego, and take from coverage what you need, not what you think people want to see.

On a final note, just to big myself up, this is from the first page of Lucy’s coverage:

(I think) your voice... is one of the most interesting ones I’ve seen in a long time. Not to mention bizarre...

I ain’t gonna argue with that...

Right - enough of this self-indulgence - normal service will be resumed soon with a festive photograph of a dog in a hat...

Chip's Big Ass Post, part 1...

I got some development notes back from Lucy Vee recently, so I thought it might be handy to outline what I do with them and how they help, if only to get it straight in my own head (the inside of which looks like a landfill of second hand books and discarded coffee cups).

As I’ve written before, my working methods are truly random, so this is an attempt to wrap some coherent thinking around a working process that is freeform in the extreme – which is a lot like telling a jazz quintet to shut the fuck up and only use three notes (‘cos, let’s face it, who needs more than three notes?).

Straight off the bat, it looks like I have a few problems:

* Overall, the script is ‘mental’ (Lucy’s comment? I just have to congratulate you for writing the most mental script I have read since I read one about a secretary who keeps an alien in her bra). Wow – I think.

The issue with ‘mental’ is twofold as far as I see it: a) it gets remembered (a good point), as opposed to b) the story is hard to define, which in Lucy’s parlance means it’s muddled (a bad point). Fair comment.

* The protagonist’s voiceover doesn’t really add anything, and pops up ‘randomly’ (hmmm – might be a problem with my structure here...)

* Narrative logic: it seems that I require some kind of mechanism/thematic plot point to make the reader suspend disbelief, especially as the narrative is a little ‘out of the ordinary’.

* My protagonist is a bit of a tit. Charming! To be honest, I don’t feel the overriding need to correct this very much, which means I must be a bit of a tit myself.

* As if I need to mention it, structure. For this script I used a tricksy non-linear structure, which according to Lucy does not have a discernible pattern. I think it does, but if Lucy can’t spot it, then it probably means that I’ve buried it under a ton of dialogue and/or voiceover, or that it’s simply too complicated to follow properly – which all boils down to the fact that, structurally, I’m in trouble.

If you’ve ever gotten notes from Lucy, you might know that she’s got a ‘bit of thing’ for structure – which is fine by me, as structure is the one thing I struggle with above all else, probably due to the jaw droppingly random way in which I work. It’s fairly obvious I guess, but without a coherent structure whatever you write is going to suffer horribly – logic goes walkies and narrative coherency does a bunk. I usually try and get round this by doing a frantic little dance with my dialogue and hoping that it distracts from the fact that my narrative is sliding all over the place like a drunk duckling on ice. Sometimes it works: with the more perceptive readers out there, it doesn’t. I’ve always prided myself on my dialogue to the detriment of anything else in a script, which is a bit like trying to put wallpaper up before the foundations have been built.

Lucy was meticulous in picking apart the non-linear structure of the script, and stated that it didn’t really have a discernible pattern. From my point of view, it’s not so much the fact that the script is non-linear, it’s just that the vast majority of what takes place occurs as a flashback. It’s a structure you see quite often with films such as The Prestige, which opens with an image that only makes sense later on.

My problem with the script I think, is that I start with what I hope is a strong visual image – problem is, the explanation of this image does not occur until very late on in the narrative (again, similar to The Prestige). To open with one of your strongest visual scenes is always going to be problematic, as you then need to provide (in my case, a very lengthy) back story as to how you got there, which can often necessitate a pointlessly tricksy structure. Lucy’s solution? It appears that I’ve come into the story too early, so all I need to do is to chop off the excess, which amounts to about twenty of the opening pages. Zoiks!

I don’t think I’m unusual in the sense that I overwrite and cut back in subsequent re-writes. First drafts for me often weigh in at 105-110 pages, which I think is WAY too long for a spec script (better to keep it under the magical three figure number I reckon). The draft that Lucy read is no exception – too much dialogue for a start, which is easily fixable (Incidentally, I loved the male banter... But do you need ALL of it?). However, I do tend to over-complicate matters when it comes to structure and plotting and often do not have a fully thought through structure in mind.

As for narrative logic: Lucy states that there are several scenes in the script (if not the whole thing) that require a huge suspension of disbelief (such as the protagonist being blown out of an airliner at 30,000 feet and surviving). The solution? I need a reason as to why weird shit happens. Strangely enough, Lucy identified a part of my script that I had included in an earlier draft but excised on the basis that it was too gross. My solution? Put it in back in, and hang the consequences. I’d got the logic back, but probably at the expense of having people go, ‘Ugh, that's disgusting!' Ah well – an acceptable compromise I guess (and don’t forget: memorable is good).

So, what did I do next?

(Due to the unprecedented big ass nature of this post, I think it’s only fair to break it into two...)

Full Metal Jacket – Structure-A-Go-Go

This post contains spoilers for Full Metal Jacket and Hidden.

I’ve always loved Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, so when I had to choose a subject for my MA 'effort' a few years back, it was a pretty straightforward choice. My title? The Use of Visual and Narrative Symmetry in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket. Catchy, eh? (OK, probably not). Rather than reproduce the whole thing here (and believe me, if you read it you would thank me a million times over), I thought I’d go over a few of its points just for the sheer fun of it...

First off, there is an excellent Kubrick resource here – it doesn’t look as if the site has been updated since 2002, but as far as on-line resources go, you can’t beat it. However, the one thing it doesn’t seem to cover in its discussion regarding FMJ is just how completely obsessed with structure this movie is – not just in the screenwriting sense of the word (where 'structure' usually means three acts, i.e., set up, conflict and resolution), but in its visual and narrative constructs as well.

I don't think it matters whether you regard FMJ as possessing two acts or the more traditional three, it is immediately apparent that the film is split into two very distinct halves – the Parris Island boot camp and the second part which takes place in Vietnam itself (which in fact is an abandoned gasworks in North London). Other than the apparent switch in location, the two halves of the film have very distinct visual identities: the Parris Island segment is ‘clean’, symmetrical, ordered. In the Da Nang segment, this symmetry has all but disappeared. The tension of the first act has almost completely dissipated and the film almost appears to drift, as if it is in search of a suitably involved narrative.

Some critics identified this as a major flaw of FMJ, but I think this is the whole point of the film. The Parris Island segment is structured around the figure of Sergeant Hartman, who stalks the boot camp within a variety of almost perfectly symmetrical shots. When Pyle kills Hartman, this pivotal figure is removed from proceedings altogether, and the ambience of the film drastically changes. To my mind, Hartman is the structural ‘core’ of the first part of the film, inasmuch as his words and actions provide meaning and organisation to what the recruits are experiencing. With Hartman dead, meaning and order evaporate, leaving the recruits to fend for themselves – hence the decidedly marked visual differences between the two halves.

There was a Kubrick interview in Newsweek around the time of FMJ’s release in which Kubrick stated that his intention with FMJ was “to explode the narrative structure of film”. Kubrick did this in FMJ by using structure to literally break up the narrative to the extent that the traditional notion of character is subsumed by structure itself. For example, the parade ground sequences demonstrate the rigid structure that the Marine Corps imposes on new recruits. Watch Pyle as Joker assists him in many aspects of Pyle’s basic training – initially, Pyle doesn’t get the hang of things at all. These sequences are shot from right to left, and show Pyle effectively going backwards. When Pyle starts doing better and responding to Joker's attentions, the sequences shift to left to right. In the first half of the film, character is expressed partially via the way that entire sequences are constructed. It’s probably the reason why FMJ has such a weird, unsettling ambience – the more formal elements of filmmaking have been brought to the fore, whilst the more traditional staples of narrative and character development are stripped back, leaving a film that is almost the diametric opposite of Platoon’s trite ‘war is hell’ message.

One of the most useful things I took from FMJ is that by suppressing or entirely doing away with the more commonly articulated elements of narrative, you can create space for interesting questions to be asked – a potentially far more intriguing state of affairs than the current obsession with McKee’s Story. Look at Michael Haneke’s Hidden – where a character’s ‘arc’ often describes a journey from non-awareness to enlightenment, Hidden does the opposite – a supposedly progressive liberal discovers that at the core of his being lurks an unpleasant, reactionary conservative – Georges’ ultimate reaction to where his ‘journey’ takes him is that he is more than comfortable with the way things are, a state of affairs that threatens to endure with the film’s famously cryptic and interminable closing shot.

All of which is very long winded way of saying that there can often be more to structure than meets the eye. The problem with discarding major narrative building blocks is that you’d better have something pretty compelling to put in their place, otherwise your script will look like an exercise in form for form’s sake – something that Last Year in Marienbad comes dangerously close to becoming. Alain Robbe-Grillet talks about his intention with Marienbad to "construct a purely mental space and time – those of dreams, perhaps, or of memory, those of any affective life – without worrying too much about the traditional relations of cause and effect, or about an absolute time sequence in the narrative." It all depends on the sort of script you want to write, and the types of themes that you want to explore.

Ravenhill, Waters, McKee

What follows is an article published in The Guardian on 21st December 2006 by Steve Waters (original article is here). There’s a Mark Ravenhill article that covers similar ground, but I suspect that Ravenhill hasn’t really read too much McKee – this doesn’t matter a great deal, as it’s a very entertaining read.

It now seems, as Steve Waters states below and Ravenhill echoes, that all readers, script editors and commissioners are now wrapped up in the “three act, sole protagonist, inciting incident” model of screenwriting. There are plenty of films that buck this trend – Paris, Texas, as Waters states below, but how about Psycho, Babel, Full Metal Jacket, The Prestige, Eraserhead, Chung King Express - the list goes on. If narrative is to be churned out to a predetermined, homogenised pattern, is it any wonder we end up with movies that are the production-line equivalent of Big Macs?
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“Story is a metaphor for life. Or so says the guru of "story", Robert McKee, whose ideas have spread like a virus. Infamous for having been impersonated by Brian Cox in Spike Jonze's Adaptation, McKee's ideas - which are expounded in his weekend seminars (£460, including software) and in his tome, Story - are on the lips of writers, script editors and commissioners. Such ubiquity surely places McKee beyond suspicion.

So what's the idea? McKee proposes that the art of story (which he promotes from humble noun to abstract concept) is on the wane. Movie-makers opt for mere incident to tart up underdeveloped screenplays, while in the arthouse sector story is snubbed by elitist conceptualism. As film audiences shrink, so story withers; for story was most ascendant when film was a mass art and when audiences weren't coteries.

There's much truth in this, and McKee's paean to the undervalued art of screenwriting is a corrective to years of auteurist ideology. But his ideas don't stop there; he seeks to offer a grand prescription for dramatic narrative comparable in its ambitions to Aristotle.

Here is the orthodoxy: every story has a three-act structure. It begins with an "inciting incident", centres on a protagonist under unimaginable pressure seeking a burning objective, and rides out on the spine of this quest with "progressive complications" ratcheting up the pressure. Thus every story is driven by antagonism, crisis, conflict - you can almost feel the honest sweat seeping from the pages of his book.

Can a man whose pupils include the winners of 26 Academy Awards be wrong? The old joke that there's a two-word answer to McKee - Paris, Texas - suggests he can. It's telling that the majority of his exemplar films are middlebrow products such as Ordinary People; when he turns his attention to Chinatown his reading feels off the mark. Theatre gets the odd nod but it's Ibsen's Hedda Gabler rather than When We Dead Awaken; God knows what he'd make of Saved or Blasted.

The most lethal fallout from McKee's approach comes in his proposition that good stories must be engineered in advance like municipal car parks, thus ushering in the stultifying world of 80-page story treatments where the improvised life of the narrative is nailed dead before a line of dialogue is written.

And this is not simply about fiction; I heard a TV producer admit that story is now colonising narrative history; and where the facts don't fit the template they are simply set aside. In the recent BBC docu-drama on the history of Rome it became apparent that the life and times of Emperor Augustus didn't conform to the demands of story to make the series: where was his third act crisis?

Isn't there already too much narrative cliche clogging up our relationship to experience; the Brown/Blair tiff is packaged in advance as a three act drama with deferred climax; Global Warming as a set of progressive complications yielding the mother of all climaxes. We can't blame McKee for his influence, but story's looking increasingly like another patent, branding random experience into manipulable commodity.

Truly great stories shatter the crust of cliche. I remember watching Caryl Churchill's play Top Girls and experiencing that delirium of uncertainty that great narrative art induces. What about the early Wim Wenders films which weave around their narrative core releasing us to enjoy time and space for itself. Writers learn their craft from the canon of drama but they should steer clear of recipes - and McKee's work has become one more ideology filtering out the shocks that radical fiction uses to shake us from our slumbers.”

Fun with Narratology

In yesterday’s Times, right next to a demolition job on Death Proof (Tarantino’s latest effort), there’s this from Pete Daly. Bearing in mind Lucy’s latest series on Structure, the only advice that Pete gives is that your movie should have a beginning, middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order (nice to know that things haven’t really changed since Aristotle, although Philip Larkin did paraphrase this slightly as “a beginning, a muddle and an end”).

Although there are opposing views to this, I guess that this piece of ‘advice’ is a good starting point for anyone looking for a wider discussion on structure.

That said, I think I’ll follow the debate over at Lucy’s for the time being. The problem with me and structure is that I can only think in terms of specific examples, and not from an overview perspective at all (which Lucy does so brilliantly). I might post some stuff on Full Metal Jacket at some point, which can certainly be said to have a beginning, middle and end, but it achieves this in what is in effect a two act structure. In addition, I think that Full Metal Jacket is a film completely obsessed with structure, not just in its narrative, but also in its visual style and thematic concerns as well.

Anyway, my word for today is Narratology.

Pip pip!