Why Does the Screenwriter Cross the Road?. Joe Gilford
alt="image"/> OBSTACLES, PROBLEMS, AND NEW RELATIONSHIPS: This is Act II. These will be consistent with your character’s journey. In mythology, Jason has to go get the Golden Fleece. He’s beset by all sorts of disasters and tests to his character and his skills. Same with your movie. In Chinatown Gittes gets involved with the real Mrs. Mulwray, first as an adversary, then as a lover. He meets and goes up against her father, Noah Cross, the most powerful man in Los Angeles. Additionally, there are a variety of characters and situations that bring Gittes into a crisis, make him face his past, and, in the end, bring him face-to-face with his worst human problem.
These elements will cause an engagement in your audience and will result in an emotional reaction to your story. This is known as the catharsis, a meaningful emotional response. I believe it’s not so much a purging as it is a movement within a person’s psyche.
Finally, you need to set up two key questions for your story:
1. What is your character’s “path to satisfaction”? In Chinatown it is Jake Gittes’ drive to bring down Noah Cross and expose the land-grab scheme that will steal the city’s water supply. This “Path to Satisfaction” is a lousy idea for the protagonist, but he/she doesn’t know that. It’s the thing they must do to get satisfaction. It’s not until the end of the story that they understand what they should have done in the first place!
2. What is the real change your character experiences? Jake Gittes learns that he’s cursed with a good heart and a lousy head. He’s done this before; he’s tried to do good, but it ends up hurting someone close to him. And now, once again, tragedy. “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown,” as one of his associates tells him. It’s you (the main character) . . . and you can’t do a damn thing about it.
And here is what I call the screenwriter’s mission. This will make the conflict in your story continuous and create the tension you need to keep the energy level going. Put this somewhere visible or get a brass plaque made and hang it near your workspace (I would recommend tattooing it to the backs of each hand, a la Night of the Hunter):
Your protagonist struggles for satisfaction (the “plot”)
but . . .
the writer is going to
teach this character a lesson that will last (the “story”).
“Putting It in the Box”: A Screenplay Is Like a Chair — You Gotta Be Able to Sit in It!
Everybody knows how a movie works. There’s a beginning, a middle, and an end. A good story. Humor me and forget about watches. Let’s talk about furniture. A good story is like a good chair. It has legs. It has a seat and a back; sometimes it has arms. But fundamentally, anybody who uses it needs to sit in it. Some are more comfortable in your chair than in others. That’s the way it goes sometimes. But when you’re looking for a good chair, you really know what you’re looking for. You’re not looking for something you cannot sit in! You will choose the one that’s as comfortable as you can find and/or fits in with your home or office.
Same with your story. It needs to be identifiable as a story. It must adhere to the ages-old requirements that have worked for over two thousand years.
It also has to be different enough for people to say, for example: “I’m excited at this new approach to Romeo and Juliet. How’s this sound: New York’s Hell’s Kitchen, the 1950s, Puerto Rican and white teenage gangs killing each other for supremacy in a run-down urban neighborhood. But the love affair between two of them causes tragedy.” Or, “I like this bank robbery movie about a guy who just needs one last score and then he’ll marry the neighborhood girl he’s been in love with since grade school.”
Sure, we’ve seen them before. Yet, we can create variations on these stories ad infinitum. A chair is a chair, yet there are so many different kinds of chairs!
So, don’t not make any old chair. But make your chair and make a chair that works.
This is something I call “Putting It in the Box.” It means you must create a recognizable story. The script must have the traditional elements that all stories are made up of. Like a chair: legs, a seat, and a back. When someone reads your script he/she will say, “It’s a script. There are problems we need to fix, but on the whole, this is a sound story with recognizable elements.”
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