Plot Devicesby Terry Rossio & Ted Elliott (here)
EXCERPTS:
THE WANG THEORY
We came up with this out of frustration in dealing with studio executives. We'd write a situation or line of dialogue that was a bit obscure or intellectual, and the exec would complain, "The audience is not going to get that." Our response: the audience didn't have to get it.
Story content has an effect beyond its literal meaning. We called it the Wang Theory, in honor of a series of commercials presented in the eighties by Wang Laboratories.
... By allowing characters to speak and behave smarter than the audience, you at least establish that they're experts. The technique is also effective at creating a sense of authenticity. And it's also interesting -- most people like that feeling of being exposed to the 'inside stuff,' even if they don't fully understand it.
THE MacGUFFIN
This is Alfred Hitchcock's term for, '
The item of importance that everyone wants, upon which the plot turns.'
The classic example is the 'microfilm' from NORTH BY NORTHWEST. Does anything ever really happen with the microfilm? Not really. It is truly a just plot device, something to help organize the events of the movie. ...
A slightly different example are the 'letters of transit' in CASABLANCA. There, the MacGuffin had an actual story function -- by possessing the papers, you can safely get out of town. ...
PLAY THE BEATS
Quite often the process of improving a story doesn't involve adding new twists and turns. ...
Instead of adding new aspects to a story, look to make the story more full and more satisfying by delving into the already existing moments, and making sure each aspect of every moment is played out fully.
... Good scripts seem to unfold moment by individual-delicate-moment. ... It's a full story, but you experience it one tiny limited moment at a time -- the more limited and particular, it seems, the better.
THE CLONE WARS
Studio executives love to cut stuff out of scripts. "Do we really need this?" is the challenge. And the answer is, well, usually, in point of fact -- no.
But that's when Ted and I invoke 'The Clone Wars' theory. It's that line from STAR WARS where Obi-Wan tells Luke, "He fought with your father in the Clone Wars." In the whole rest of the movie, there isn't another reference to the Clone Wars. Does it really have to be there? Not really. But
it's that kind of touch that made the Star Wars universe so real, to so many people.
THREE GREAT SCENES, NO BAD ONES
Jack Nicholson is reported to have said that he'd do a movie if his character had "three great scenes, and no bad ones." It's not a bad idea to
consider your screenplay from the strict -- and let's even say, ego-driven -- point of view of the actors who must play the roles. Can you actually point out the 'three great scenes' that you've designed for each of your leads? Are you sure that you haven't given any of them any bad scenes?
DON'T CUT THE LAST THING FOR A CHARACTER
It seems like this should go without saying, but
all characters should actually do something that has an impact in your story. At least one point where they significantly affect the outcome of events. Again, you should be able to point to the exact spot where you can say, "If we lost this secondary character, then the story falls apart right here."
If you've gone through and cut everything that a character does in the picture, then go ahead and cut the character, too. (In some scripts, this would mean cutting the leads!)
This rule comes into play quite often in story meetings, where secondary characters lose their story moments to two forces: the desire to shorten the script, and the desire to 'give the good stuff to the hero.'
EXTERNALIZE THE STORY
While it's great for characters to have strong inner lives, it's a mistake to organize a plot around the drama of a character deciding to change their thinking.
Consider how non-cinematic a change of heart truly is, without the actions taken as a result of the change.
Instead, it's the task of the screenwriter to take that inner journey of the character and give it a playing area. Externalize the issues, either into situations or other characters, and let the protagonist work things out where we all can see and hear it.
SUBTEXT, SUBPLOT
Subtext doesn't happen automatically as a side effect of telling a good story. Quite often you consciously design it in.
... the neatest thing we heard Robert Zemeckis say was (quoting from memory),
"Your sub-plot is where you can overtly play out your theme." Consider BACK TO THE FUTURE, and the sub-plot of Marty helping his mom and dad fall in love. One big obstacle was his father's lack of courage, which Marty helped him overcome. Overall, summoning the will to carpe diem was indeed the theme of the movie. What might have been too clunky for the main story worked great as a subplot.
AUDIENCE SUPERIOR, AUDIENCE INFERIOR
One useful technique is to track your plot from the point of view of each character. The idea is, if the story works from the perspective of each character, then you've got a plot that hangs together and probably doesn't have any major holes.
When doing that, we like to add another 'character' to the list -- the audience.
What the audience knows and believes at different points of the story, relative to what the characters know, is crucial to the believability of each scene. Sometimes a scene doesn't work not because it's not true to the character, but because the audience knows too much (or too little) at that point. Moving the audience from 'audience superior' to 'audience inferior'-- or vice-versa -- might be enough to fix the problem scene.
This is also known as 'visceral logic.' It's dangerous to play with, but a powerful tool. Beyond strict story logic, there is the emotional logic of the film. For example, if the audience wants something to happen, it's easier to make them believe that it can happen.
REVERSALS
Sometimes your convictions are the greatest stumbling blocks to fixing a story problem. It's that thing that you're certain of, that you don't challenge -- that you just know is right about a scene -- that stops you from finding the inventive solution. It's a good idea to have this general rule: challenge everything. Go through the problem scene step by step and consider the effect of doing the exact opposite of all your story decisions.
The audience will come to 'know' the character through their actions. When characters can make decisions that run counter to expectations, bringing reversals into the story, that's of immediate interest. (Once again, look at RAIDERS. When Indiana Jones ties up Marion instead of rescuing her, it's a marvelous reversal, and we gain huge insight into Indy's character by that one action.)
GO TO THE EXTREME
Characters, stories, and story beats fail far more often by not going far enough than by going too far. It is almost a rule that if you push a character, an emotion, or a situation to the absolute extreme, it will play on film.
THE RICK
We also call this, simply, the Rick character. In the old "Magnum, P.I." television series starring Tom Selleck, Magnum had an annoying friend named Rick. His function in the series was to serve as a sort of surrogate for the audience on the more outrageous story points. He was always protesting, "C'mon, Magnum..." as in, "C'mon, Magnum, there's no way those crooks would trust us with $7 million dollars in gold coins. It's ludicrous." (And this is exactly what the audience was thinking at that point.)
Magnum would then calmly explain to Rick just exactly why the crooks would, indeed, hand over $7 million in gold. Rick would be convinced, and in theory, the audience protests would have been addressed as well.
SMART VILLAINS, SMARTER HEROES
It's a great temptation to fix a problem not by coming up with a more clever solution on the part of the hero, but by making the villain dumb, so that the hero looks good by comparison. (This is a favorite technique among development executives.)
Don't do it. ...
So --
make your villains as smart as you can make them, even if that paints you and your hero, into an impossible situation. Then get to work!
IF IT'S NOT GOOD, AT LEAST MAKE IT SHORT
You get the idea.
MAKE THE PLOT MOMENT A CHARACTER MOMENT
This goes hand-in-hand with the technique above. Sometimes, the organic nature of a story is such that you're just stuck with a crummy scene, or an unbelievable plot twist. It has to be there, but there's no way to really make it good. So the first rule is, make it short. The second rule is: hide the fact that it's crummy.
Here's how you hide it.
Instead of making the scene about the story point (which emphasizes how weak it is) you make the scene about character. A passion, a fear, a desire, an anger -- doesn't matter what it is. Move the weak scene away from the logic-driven arena of plot, and into the emotion-driven arena of character, and you won't believe the story holes you can hide.
I'VE GOT A LITTLE LIST...
Here's my own, private, completely unsubstantiated list of
elements I think never work in movies:
- Cults (think DRAGNET, YOUNG SHERLOCK HOLMES)
- Babies in jeopardy (GHOSTBUSTERS II, WILLOW)
- Snowy locations (who wants to go make a film in the snow, anyway?)
- Regimented-worker-oppressive-society movies (remember TOYS?)
- Drug and alcohol addiction tales.
- Stories that turn on public opinion forcing a character to take action
- The sport that always looks bad on film, no matter how much they try to make it interesting: tennis.
- The sport that always looks good on film, no matter how badly it gets mangled: baseball.
And here's a list of sequences or story
elements that always seem to work gangbusters on screen:
- Poker games
- Seductions
- Bidding/auction scenes (think Alfred Hitchcock)
- An execution
- Sunny, tropical locations (consider setting your film in a location you want to visit)
- Maps and treasure hunts
- A race of any type
And to top off this list of arbitrary claims, here's
"Wordplay's Iron-Clad Rule of Box Office Success":
let your hero smile. Most films, and all bad ones, have the hero striding along wearing dour expressions, looking like their teeth hurt. But think of any movie you love, and I bet you can remember a shot of the hero breaking out in a grin. And hey, if you want a really big hit, let your hero smile in Act I, Act II and Act III. Works every time.
Very rarely is telling the plot the most effective way to tell the story.
HERO WITH A THOUSAND FACES
Consider what sort of hero is demanded by your story genre.
The DRAMATIC HERO succeeds due to his best efforts. The TRAGIC HERO fails despite his best efforts. And the COMIC HERO succeeds despite his best efforts -- usually to avoid heroism.
Rick in CASABLANCA is an example of a dramatic hero. Oedipus is the classic tragic hero, doomed from the start, no matter what he does. Bilbo Baggins of "The Hobbit" is a great comic hero, resisting the hero's call nearly to the end. (At the very end of a comedy, it's quite satisfying to let the comic hero have the same victory of the dramatic hero; another example, consider the ending of GHOSTBUSTERS.)
60 TWO-MINUTE SCENES
George Lucas once said that a film is "Sixty great two-minute scenes." When it comes down to actually shooting the picture, Lucas is absolutely correct. The director, actors, set designers, cinematographers -- they're all going to be thinking of the picture in terms of individual scenes, and there's only room for about 60 of them. Keep this structure in your head as you plot, and the content of your screenplay will naturally focus on the true, necessary beats of your story.
THE GILLIGAN CUT
This is a classic staple of comedy. A character protests vehemently, "What, you expect me to wear a grass skirt, stand up on top of Empire State Building and belt out the chorus of 'New York, New York'? Well, I'm not gonna... I'm just not gonna..." And then you cut, and see the character doing just that.
STORY VS. PLOT
The plot of your screenplay is what happens. The story is the particular way you choose to reveal to the audience what happens. The two don't have to be the same. The tendency is to be a slave to presenting the plot -- you think "It happens this way, so that's how I have to tell it this way."
But consider shifting the point of view, learning information through flashback, holding back information, or even revealing events to the audience out of order. Very rarely is telling the plot the most effective way to tell the story.
A couple of films to reference on this point: COURAGE UNDER FIRE, SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION, CITIZEN KANE.
WIDOWS, ORPHANS, & KILLING YOUR BABIES
Widows are setups that have no payoffs, because the payoffs have been cut. Orphans are payoffs that have no setups. Often they're still there because, even though they don't make any sense, they're still cool scenes.
That's where 'killing your babies' comes in.
No matter how great any individual scene is, you have to be willing to kill it for the greater good of the whole script. You must be ruthless. And you must have faith that you can come up with something equally as good.
THE MAIN RELATIONSHIP THEORY
One way to evaluate a story is to ask -- what is the main relationship presented in the story, and how
effective is it?
Most great films have one, or several, great relationships at their heart. ... The main relationships of a film are how the issues and themes of the story are played out on screen.
So ask yourself -- do you have a main relationship, or series of relationships? Are they fascinating to watch?
KIDNAPPING
When F. Scott Fitzgerald came to Hollywood, he had an immediate insight in writing for the cinema. He described scenes as being (paraphrasing from memory, here): "... carefully written and ordered in such a way so that the audience has no choice but to feel exactly what the filmmakers want them to feel." ...
Every word, every line, every moment of a screenplay will create a response in the person that reads it. A great artist has absolute control over those responses.
When the writer loses focus, and does not write to a set purpose -- that's when trouble happens.
