Logic in Films

For the unfamiliar, a "reveal" in screenwriting parlance is the placement of key, revelatory information in a story. Most times, the last reveal is the most important revelation of all.



FADE IN:


“Logic: The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding.”
---Ambrose Bierce


The previous post, Ambiguity in Films, is an appropriate lead-in to the subject of this post, Logic in Films (as in: the lack of logic in some films). Sometimes, they are, both of them, ambiguity and a lack of logic, about narrative negative space. Sometimes they go further, crossing the line back into a non-logical, positive use of the narrative space. I use the terms, “negative” and “positive” space, because ambiguity can refer to unknowns, missing information, and a lack of logic amounts to something similar: insufficient support for the sense of the narrative content of the story. Let me re-state that I am in favor of such intentional use. Many of you out there may not be (Perhaps, in the comments, we can hear from them/you). But, let me tell you why I am in favor of it.


I’ve made the point that the presence of ambiguity in a narrative film enhances the film’s resemblance to reality - even in films that are fantastic or otherwise non-realistic in their stories – because reality, similarly, always carries with it unknowns. For our purposes here, let me give a working definition of two terms: non-logic is an absence of logic in narrative stories; illogic is an extension of non-logic in which the result is a deliberate lack, or even a reversal of the story’s narrative logic, a conscious non-logic. Deliberate use of non-logic in films (i.e, use of illogic) can have the effect of intensifying a film’s ambiguity, and therefore, paradoxically (as regards negative-logic), intensifying its resemblance to reality.


How can this be?


If one examines the notion of reality, one is eventually forced to concede that reality isn’t an objective state or phenomena, but rather a subjective impression held in the mind of the perceiving individual. Reality is simply the sense our minds make of the world we perceive. So when the mind is presented with unexplainable perceptions, they amount, simply, to other realities. When I have encountered in my life startling “implausibles” or unusual and unexplainable facts/data/events, I have joked, “This just goes to prove that reality doesn’t exist!” But, of course it does. All of them do. And my reality is not yours.


Black people have been known to tell white people to try, sometime, driving through town while being black. It’s a completely different reality; one that has joined OWI (operating while intoxicated), and DUI (driving under the influence), as DWB (driving while black). You won’t be getting home at the same hour. In fact, some realities of DWB have mistakenly ended up on Death Row.


When we are children, we know less about the world we perceive around us. Much that we perceive fails to be understood from the perspective of our limited experience of the world. The way we, as children, deal with this is to unconsciously ignore it. In effect, we don’t see it. We can have it pointed out to us. We can be questioned about our perception of it, whereupon we will attempt to understand it and produce some imperfect interpretation. But, otherwise, we, kids, simply do not see it at all.


When we are adults, we understand some portion of our world. However, when we are faced with elements outside our understanding, we either make some kind of sense of it (e.g., religion, atheism), we ignore it altogether (agnosticism, laziness), or we continue to explore it and we bide our time (science, philosophy). I guess, like The Dude in the Coen Brothers’ film, The Big Lebowski, I abide.


When it comes to the use of illogic and non-logic in films (the former being its deliberate use and/or the reverse of logic; the latter being the absence of logic), many film-goers view such use with a one-size-fits-all interpretation: as a lapse on the part of the filmmakers. In many poorly-conceived, commercial films this is accurate. They exhibit non-logical narratives. Many viewers revel in their discoveries to the extent that all logical discrepancies are deemed lapses. Yet, such a lapse can be deliberate, the result of excisions by the filmmakers from the original script (or the earlier edit of the film) for pacing, running-time, and budgetary reasons, though certainly not for story reasons. It can also be the result of narrative sloppiness.


An example of narrative sloppiness: In Peter Bogdanovich’s Who The Devil Made It, p.334, director Howard Hawks, discussing [the plot-line of Raymond Chandler’s novel,] The Big Sleep, had this to say about the subject: “We were arguing about who killed so-and-so and we couldn’t come to any decision. So we wired Raymond Chandler. He wired back a name, and we wired him saying, ‘But, it couldn’t have been him - he was at the beach at that time.’ Making this picture, I realized that you don’t really have to have an explanation for things. As long as you make good scenes you have a good picture—it doesn’t matter...” Chandler was known to have a drinking problem. But he was also known to render his fictional world better (read, non-logically and so, realistically) than almost anyone. So, while even the author couldn’t really explain his story, if the story works sufficiently on other levels, as Hawks said, “it doesn’t matter”! This was Chandler’s reality.


“...Making this picture, I realized that you don’t really have to have an explanation for things. As long as you make good scenes you have a good picture—it doesn’t matter...” Narrative sloppiness didn’t matter.


I once read a criticism of Blade Runner in which the writer pointed out that it all falls apart if you question why the Tyrell Corporation made the dangerous Replicants indistinguishable from real humans. Why didn’t they mark them in some way, make them blue, or all look-alikes, or something, so they couldn’t hide among humans? The only reason was so that we had a story! Another case goes all the way back to the original King Kong: If the natives didn’t want the giant ape to break into their part of the island, why did they build the gate so large? And, please, psycho-analysts need not weigh-in. This was a story, not a case of a mass, gender-confused Oedipal Complex.


But there is also a body of films that do not fit into such assessments of author/filmmaker lapse. Their narratives are illogical, intentionally non-logical. Consider Alfred Hitchcock’s and Ernest Lehman’s, North By Northwest: The film is composed of a succession of Hitchcock’s favorite bits from his idea-file, strung together into a narrative line in which the characters travel in a “north by northwest” direction. But some might see the narrative as having gone strictly south. For me, the intriguing thing about these bits or scenes has always been how very intentionally absurd they were. The idea that someone would arrange for a man to travel far into the countryside to allow for him to be murdered by a crop-dusting plane, somehow equipped with machine guns; for an auction, presumably with security on-scene, to go as far as it does with a bidder bidding successively lower; that an international criminal owns a house on the backside-top of Mt. Rushmore, complete with landing strip; for adversaries to scramble on and across the presidents’ faces on the Rushmore Monument in business suits, with leather shoes, and without all of them falling; all of these are ridiculous in the light of the merest critical review. And yet, not only does the film get away with them, it becomes one of the capstones of one of the greatest directorial careers in Hollywood! For his part, responding to a woman critic’s comment that the film is “unconsciously funny,” reported in Peter Bogdanovich’s Who The Devil Made It, Ballantine, 1997, p. 475, Hitchcock said “Well, my dear, the film is sheer fantasy.” This was Hitchcock’s reality.


In Francois Truffaut’s book-length interview with the director, Hitchcock, Simon & Schuster, 1967, p. 69, they discussed his film of The Thirty-Nine Steps, and Hitchcock commented, “‘What I liked in (the film) are the swift transitions...’ and he described the succession of elaborate sequences in the film. Then he said, “‘The rapidity of those transitions heightens the excitement...’” Truffaut responded, “‘It’s a style that tends to do away with anything utilitarian... (a style) that’s extremely satisfying to audiences and yet often irritates the critics... they will analyze the script, which, of course, doesn’t stand up to logical analysis... a thoroughly casual approach to the plausible.’” And Hitchcock replied, “‘I’m not concerned with plausibility; that’s the easiest part of it, so why bother?’”


Then, he described the scene with the ornithologist in The Birds, wherein she just happens to be there at that moment, and he said, “‘I could have made up three scenes just to give that woman a logical reason for being there, but they would have been completely uninteresting... Aside from the waste of time, they make for gaps or flaws in the picture. Let’s be logical [The Last Reveal’s italics], If you’re going to analyze everything in terms of plausibility or credibility, then no fiction script can stand up to that approach, and you wind up doing a documentary.’”


“I’m not concerned with plausibility; that’s the easiest part of it, so why bother?’” Hitchcock’s work epitomizes the notion of fiction as the truth within the lie.


In Patrick McGilligan’s Backstory 1, pp. 276 – 7, screenwriter, Richard Maibaum, described working with Hitchcock on Foreign Correspondent: “I was writer number thirty... primarily I rewrote the...part of the old statesman who was kidnapped. (Hitchcock) said to me, ‘Did you read what we’ve got?’ Which was half-a-screenplay. I said, ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘What do you think about it?’ I replied, ‘It’s not very logical.’ He grimaced and said, ‘Oh, dear boy, don’t be dull. I’m not interested in logic, I’m interested in effect. If the audience ever thinks about logic, it’s on their way home after the show, and by that time, you see, they’ve paid for their tickets.’”


“I’m not interested in logic, I’m interested in effect.” By “effect” and by excluding logic, Hitchcock refers, to the emotional response in the audience to the dramatics of his film. This is where the use of illogic operates: on the emotional level. If the filmmaker can win over the emotions of the viewer, the filmmaker has won the viewer. In nearly every argument between emotion and logic, emotion carries the day.


“If the audience ever thinks about logic, it’s on their way home after the show, and by that time, you see, they’ve paid for their tickets.” Ever the showman, Hitchcock recalls for us P.T. Barnum who, after exposing his audience of “rubes” to one freakish display, tantalized them with… what, (a bird?), saying, “This way to the Egress!” and, making way for the next bunch, ushered them out.


And in his interview in Screenwriters’ Masterclass, p. 24, Silence of the Lambs screenwriter, Ted Tally, responding to a question on the need for logic, echoed Hitchcock’s reference to “on their way home after the show”: “No, I never worry about that kind of thing, what (director) Jonathan (Demme) called ‘Refrigerator questions’... he said, ‘You’ve seen the movie, you’ve enjoyed it, you get home and open the refrigerator and say, ‘Wait a minute, how could that guy have done that?’... If it doesn’t occur to you until you get to the refrigerator, it’s not important enough for us to worry about.’”


The plot-hole is where you find it. Sometimes it’s in the refrigerator. Sometimes it’s only in your head.


“Logic, like whiskey, loses its beneficial effect when taken in too large quantities.”
---Lord Dunsany


#


FADE OUT


Lee A. Matthias

Ambiguity in Films

For the unfamiliar, a "reveal" in screenwriting parlance is the placement of key, revelatory information in a story. Most times, the last reveal is the most important revelation of all.



FADE IN:


I’m a movie fan, but I am not obsessive about it to the point that I watch a film over and over. I know people who do that, and I admire their ability to enjoy something so thoroughly and so frequently. But for me, such single-minded attention to anything ends up making it something I eventually no longer ever want to see again. I found this when, younger, I listened to music over and over until I HATED the same songs I had once loved (some of you may remember Stairway to Heaven, Freebird, Frampton Comes Alive? For the rest, substitute Nirvana, Pearl Jam, or [insert hot band here]).


I carefully manage my movie likes. I’ll avoid seeing a favorite for years so that it can get back as closely as possible to the experience it was when I first saw it. This, too, has its problems, however. I remember seeing Ken Russell’s The Devils while in college. I came out of the lecture hall it was shown in by one of the film societies (remember those?) literally wiped out by it. It led to a session with friends and way too much beer, where we argued over it into the wee hours. Then I finally tracked down a copy on VHS a few years ago and watched it again. “What was the deal?” I kept saying to myself, as it droned on. You can’t go home again.


So films matter to me. Because I husband my interest in favorite films so, I suspect mine matter to me a good deal more than do others being re-watched for the 90th time in two years by most others. Am I being elitist? Let me explain. I like a well-done film just as much as anybody. But if it has shown me all it has, then the cute line or the clever reveal or the amazing car chase just aren’t enough reason to go back. Take, for example, The Sixth Sense. This is a movie that is just about as clever as they get and yet, unlike something like Memento, it remains an audience favorite. It is a marvelously worked-out deception, and was a great first viewing experience. But, I’m sorry, it blew it all right there, and there’s nothing more. Believe me, I looked. I can’t go back except to study it in the clinical sense. And that’s okay. Me? I went back to Memento.


The reason is that intrinsic to the films I return to again and again is an element of ambiguity. I didn’t initially realize this, but later, when I was examining my habits, I found the common element was that they all had a quality of ambiguity. Each of the films that drew me back had things about it that I couldn’t pin down, couldn’t understand, couldn’t solve. And when I watched them again I often found new things in them that led to even further mysteries. Now, before someone asks if I ever resolved some of these, I have to say that, yes, I have. And, once done, I find that, with rare exception, the films fall off my watch-again list, thereafter. This has happened with Pulp Fiction, Three Days of the Condor, The Big Sleep, and The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (though I’m holding out hope for someday seeing the longer road-show version if a print is ever found). It has almost happened with Memento. It has not yet happened with Chinatown, The Parallax View, Winter Kills, The Third Man, The Conversation, The Tenant, or Lost Highway, to name a few.


Ambiguity is an element that, when present, provides the film with a density, a quality of reality, missing from most films. I liken it to reality because life always has unanswered questions lurking out there on the fringes, and occasionally right there in the room with you. If the film’s plot is the iceberg tip, then the ambiguous elements are the rest of the iceberg, the hidden part below the surface. Films without some degree of ambiguity aren’t just facile, they are artificial. They amount to pictures of life, rather than life, itself. Films utilizing ambiguity are far better facsimiles of life, because, like life, they offer the promise of more.


Even films that are hyper-realistic, fantastic, or completely artificial, yet present a consistent universe, nonetheless have, through the presence of ambiguity, the opportunity to gain a quality of reality. This makes for a deeper engagement, a far stronger story experience. So, rather than tying up all loose ends, the wise filmmaker leaves some strings hanging, some doors closed, yet letting us hear the muffled talking from within. With it lives a universe of possibilities. #


FADE OUT


Lee A. Matthias

They Have NO Idea!

For the unfamiliar, a "reveal" in screenwriting parlance is the placement of key, revelatory information in a story. Most times, the last reveal is the most important revelation of all.



FADE IN:


The script gurus have no idea. They sure know how to write, but they don't know what to write. They've got no idea! 

Perhaps THE least-examined area of fiction writing and storytelling is the process I’ll call, Creative Idea-Generation. Good ideas are a foundation for broad-appeal, marketable writing. But many sources on writing down-play the process of idea-generation. Some writers claim they are stocked to over-flowing with ideas. Some say they have “zero-difficulty” getting ideas. And many dismiss the whole idea of idea-generation with, pronouncements like, “Ideas are a dime-a-dozen! It’s what you do with them that matters.”


Ahhh… sage wisdom. As though one needn’t concern oneself with ideas and just take the top one from that inexhaustible idea-file and start writing.


There’s a reason idea-generation is dismissed or given short-shrift by the writing gurus, how-to books, and websites: it’s the hard part. I’m not saying getting any old idea is hard. I refer to getting good ideas, great ideas. Just read scripts for a living if you doubt me. Or, you could watch every film that’s released in a given year. I don’t have to convince you that you’ll find a lot not to like. And I’m not saying that writing a 120-page masterpiece is easy, either. But lots and lots of bad finished scripts circulate through Hollywood every day. So, finding the truly great idea is, indeed, the hardest part.


I wonder how many writers can relate to this: an acquaintance who frequently talks to you about writing and films comes up and tells you he has “a GREAT idea for a movie”. “Oh yeah?” you say. “What?” And, with fire in his eyes, he says something like, “NASCAR.” You wait, but there’s nothing. So you say, “YYYeahhh, and… what?” “That’s it. NASCAR! Racing, man! It’ll make a blockbuster!!!” The sad thing is that this isn’t limited to that average Joe on the street. There are film industry executives who are right there with this guy, too! (remember Days of Thunder, Top Gun-in-a-car?) Oh, and the topper: now, if you even write a movie about geriatric marathon runners some day, you’ll be hearing from his attorney. My advice? Just look back, sadly and say Hollywood announced the NASCAR movie last week, and hope to God he doesn’t say, “Well, let’s change it to old farts who run marathons!”


A good idea is more elusive than the proverbial “honest man”.


If one surveys the vast available literature on screenwriting one finds very little on the subject of how to generate great ideas. I invite reader comments on their favorite ways to get ideas. Most books suggest writers read the newspaper, observe their fellow humans, mine their own experiences, and rely on their innate talent. I don’t know about you, but my past offers nothing for Hollywood consumption, my talent is far too insecure, and I have only ever gotten maybe two usable ideas from newspapers. I’m not knocking the method, but for me it’s just not on my top-ten list.


Most of the time the material derived from the daily fish-wrapper is just too familiar. How many variations on “Police Arrest Prostitutes in Sting” or “Prison Escapee Steals Bus” can you cook up? And if you try for one of those unique ones, like “Six-Year-Old Stows Away on Hot Air Balloon”, you might want to discuss with your attorney strategies to avoid being sued by a father who had planned his own story, and now needs to make bail. The weirder the story, the less likely YOU can use it. Either it’s tied up in legal issues, the rights will cost you more than a controlling interest in Universal Studios, or it’s already being sold to those nefarious individuals with the deep pockets.


There is no magic idea formula. Syd Field (Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting, et al) can give you his formula for what to do with your good idea, but he hasn’t got one for getting the thing in the first place.


There are, however, a host of things you can do toward getting to great ideas. I’ve spent more than a decade looking at this issue and am close to releasing a book on it: Lateral Screenwriting: Using the Power of Lateral Thinking to Write the Great American Movie. Now, before you think this is one of those Seven Habits of The Highly Successful Who Can Think and Grow Happy Using the Secrets of Genghis Khan kind of books, let me say it is closer to hard-learned experience from writers for writers. Along with the lateral methods, there are dozens of Hollywood screenwriting stories spanning the entire history of the movies. So, while there’s theory in it, it’s not all theory. In fact, it’s mostly practice.


I took a side job, one year, working in a bookstore. Every night, one of my duties was shelving new books. As any writer may have already guessed, that’s a very dangerous job for writers. You’re out there, working away, and then you pick up the next book from the V-cart and see the title. Next thing you know, you’re off somewhere in an aisle trying to read it before you reluctantly have to shelve it and move on. For me that was LOTS of books. Bookstores were places at which I just could not work. Football players get arthroscopic knee-surgery after years playing the game. I needed it after one year shelving books! Part time!


But somewhere in that year of torture, eye-strain, and massive credit card debt (despite the employee discount), I came across the work of Edward de Bono. His first book, Lateral Thinking, laid out, albeit, for me, in the driest, least-readable way, a process for generating good ideas. De Bono had taken this process and applied it to the world of business, offering his ideas to companies, organizations, and governments that needed to innovate, compete, or just to survive. His techniques turned around the marketability of the Olympics, changing it from an event no city wanted to one for which they compete, years in advance. So, if anyone was wondering why de Bono applied his ideas to the business side, well… that’s where the money is.


But I’m a right-brain kind of guy - just look at my desk-top some time (even my computer’s desk-top is cluttered!). I saw immediately that what de Bono was describing was something I’ve always done as a writer, albeit without understanding the process. The difference was that de Bono used his left-brain, analytical mind to devise techniques and methods that made what us right-brainers were haphazardly doing, into a methodical approach to consistently generate useful ideas. He did not guarantee you’d get good ideas, but he came close. As close as anyone could expect, I’d say.


I knew it worked because, as I describe in the book, I could recall a host of cases in my own work, indeed, in my own life, where I saw the lateral process in action. Now, here was a guy with some tools, power tools!


So, what if… I thought. What if de Bono’s ideas were brought over to the right-brain, creative side? After all, weren’t we better-equipped to use them? We’ve been thinking sideways all along. Lateral thinking, after all, isn’t some weird new flashy buzz-term. I now believe it’s the way the human brain creates, always has, in fact, created. Until now, no one has understood the process enough to try to make it work consistently. But, now, for business, de Bono has. And now, for stories, so have I.


De Bono’s approaches didn’t translate perfectly, but they did point to ways to develop right-brain analogs for some of his techniques. Along the way, I was able to add new ones of my own. With those as a foundation, I then approached the story-creation process itself, and, using real-world examples, applied the ideas to, and tested them against, real stories. That became Lateral Screenwriting, a book that is now complete and going through its final edit before finding a publisher.


It offers a variety of methods to get to good, marketable story ideas. But it doesn’t stop there. Ideas aren’t limited to story concepts, alone. Ideas are everywhere in stories, from the macro to the micro, the conceptual to the granular. Lateral thinking can aid writers at every level, and the remarkable thing is that many of the techniques the book offers work the same at any level. So the approach provides ways to get to good fresh stories, and also every feature and detail within them.


Publishers, if you’re out there… #


FADE OUT


Lee A. Matthias

When Genius Collaborates... CITIZEN KANE

For the unfamiliar, a "reveal" in screenwriting parlance is the placement of key, revelatory information in a story. Most times, the last reveal is the most important revelation of all.


FADE IN:


The release of a new print of Citizen Kane (1941) has re-opened the debate as to whose genius was responsible for the film’s enormous critical success. Many, many Best Films of All Time lists have it in the top ten, and several even list it as the greatest film ever made. When one mixes into this the still-extant hegemony of the French Nouvelle Vague (New Wave) and its auteur theory, we are primed for screenwriters to take a new wave of hits.


The Irish Independent.IE has recently weighed in with an article by Paul Whitington: 


“In the early 1970s the New Yorker magazine's legendary, fearsome film critic Pauline Kael set the cat among the pigeons when she claimed that Herman Mankiewicz, and not Orson Welles, deserved most of the credit for Citizen Kane. 


“Kael's attack on (the) masterpiece sparked a furious debate that has never quite been resolved. The release of a new print of the 1941 film... gives us a good excuse to re-examine it. 


“The new Kane print will be shown this month at the IFI, Temple Bar, as part of a Welles season, and is as breathtaking an achievement today as it was when first released. The question is: does Welles deserve the lion's share of the credit for it or not? 


“In an interview just prior to the film's release, Welles had remarked, almost in passing, ‘so I wrote Citizen Kane’. But in a darkened study in Hollywood sat a quietly fuming screenwriter who saw things differently.


“Herman J Mankiewicz was a sophisticated East Coast former newspaper columnist and wit who arrived in Hollywood in the late 1920s and subsequently put his literary stamp on films as diverse as The Front Page, Dinner at Eight and The Wizard of Oz. His brilliance as a screenwriter was well known to Welles, who went to pay the writer court in 1939.


“Orson had been toying for a while with the idea of a film about a public figure who would somehow encapsulate the American experience. 


“Mankiewicz had also been planning a screenplay about a celebrity of sorts that would be told by those who knew him (The Last Reveal’s italics)... It was Herman Mankiewicz who came up with the idea of William Randolph Hearst as a model...


“Pauline Kael would later claim that Mankiewicz had been planning to write a film about Hearst as early as 1925, but it was his collaboration with Welles that provided the spark. Once they'd hit on the plan, Welles was happy to let the screenwriter do his magic, and Kael would later dig up a former secretary of Mankiewicz's who claimed that Welles had not written a single word. 


“He may have made the odd change, but it seems certain that the lion's share of the writing was done by Mankiewicz, who was not best pleased when it emerged that RKO was not planning to give him a writing credit. On the finished film they got a co-credit, but many would later forget Mankiewicz's contribution.


“Pauline Kael wanted Herman Mankiewicz to be given due credit as one of the great creative forces of the 1930s and 1940s, and used the Holy Grail of Citizen Kane to make her case. Among those principally outraged by her actions were director and film buff Peter Bogdanovitch, who became a fierce advocate on Welles's behalf. 


“The new print of Citizen Kane will be released on November 13.”


Lest there be reader confusion, let me state that I take the position that commercially-presented films are inevitably and always, collaborations, comprising the contributions of any number of artists, technicians, production, releasing, distribution, publicizing, and exhibiting personnel. This can range as far afield as to include the projectionist of the re-release of the digitally re-mastered director’s cut re-dux, i.e., anyone involved in putting the film before an audience. And this said, I believe that this does not diminish any contributing artist’s genius. Film authorship is not a zero-sum game.


Author and screenwriting “guru”, Robert McKee described Citizen Kane as: 


“...a bloated exercise in razzle-dazzle spectacle, populated by stereotypical characters, twisted with manipulative storytelling, stuffed full of self-contradictory Freudian and Pirandellian clichés, made by a heavy-handed showoff out to impress the world...” – Story, HarperCollins, 1997, pp. 359 - 60. 


He may have been playing devil’s advocate. But I strongly doubt it, because he just takes his shot and never sets the record straight afterward. 


Nonetheless, he cannot deny the radically different approach Herman Mankiewicz and Orson Welles took with their film back in 1941. It’s well-known who Kane’s principle characters represent (William Randolph Hearst and his mistress, Marion Davies), so such criticism as stereotyping is dubious. Most of the supporting characters played small enough roles that the criticism is nearly irrelevant, anyway. And those that weren’t, the newspaper people, could no more be called stereotypes than could their colleagues in His Girl Friday, or The Harder They Fall, films which escape McKee’s ire. 


Welles’s systematic use of faster film stock, deep focus, and low-angle shots that included ceilings were in sharp contrast to the films of the time. Hollywood’s films in the 1930s and 1940s were not only shot mostly on sound stages, but they were shot as though on a stage, with three walls and nary a ceiling, as though under a theater’s proscenium arch. They exuded artifice.


Kane’s non-traditional narrative construction was, nonetheless, consistent with the subject matter and entirely ground-breaking in its formal usage. And this narrative approach, it is well-established (see Marc Norman’s history of screenwriting, What Happens Next, for example), was contributed by Herman Mankiewicz. 


The film, at one minute less than two hours (a not unheard-of feature-film running time), is called by McKee a “bloated exercise.” Perhaps he means “bloated” because of what he sees as its trivial subject-matter: merely the worth of a man’s entire life.


These techniques went on to be used in many films McKee lauds in his book and seminars, yet their first substantial use in a major Hollywood film is considered by him to be “razzle-dazzle”.


McKee holds far greater respect for another film from that period in Hollywood’s history, Casablanca. This film, in which the shooting was begun with only half a completed script, was written by, depending on which memoir or interview you read: 

• Howard Koch, a self-admitted, fairly wet-behind-the-ears (at that time) screenwriter who never ever approached its level again in a long Hollywood career (see his book, Casablanca, Script and Legend, Overlook Press, 1973).

• Brothers, Julius and Phillip Epstein (Julius Epstein claimed they wrote all but Casey Robinson’s “terrible” line, “A franc for your thoughts”, including saying what intersection (!) they were at when, in their car, they thought of the long-sought-after ending; Epstein claimed that Koch’s pages were never used; and said about the script that “There wasn’t one moment of reality in Casablanca”, and it was “slick shit”, in Patrick McGilligan’s book, Backstory 1, University of California Press, 1986, p. 171 and p. 185).

• Casey Robinson, who, also in McGilligan’s book, Backstory 1, p. 306-8, claimed, 1.) to have originally found the source play, Everybody Comes To Rick’s, 2.) was responsible for re-setting it against World War II, and, 3.) made Laszlo and Ilsa refugees. Then he claimed he came in after the Epsteins and Koch, and wrote the romance scenes and the ending (and can also say where he was when he wrote it!), though he magnanimously allows that Hal Wallis came up with the line “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship” that ended the film.

Casablanca is a film that escapes McKee’s charge against Citizen Kane of manipulation, despite putting dueling national anthems before its wartime audience, among other jingo-isms. Casablanca is said by Alan Fisk, whose mother lived in the real Casablanca at the time (see http://johnaugust.com/archives/2003/robert-mckee), to have caused laughter and ridicule on its debut due to its ludicrous depiction of the white city. Nonetheless, that 102 minute “exercise” receives a trim (or dare we say, bloated?) 360 minute shot-by-shot workout in McKee’s seminars. 


That all said, understand that I take no position as to Mr. Epstein’s assessment of the film that won him and his brother an Oscar. For my part, I like Casablanca, though it can’t hold a candle to Citizen Kane, the “Cult of Bogart” notwithstanding. And, no, I have not drunk the Welles Kool-Aid either.


Let’s consider a few of the primary innovations attributed to Citizen Kane:


Deep Focus - This cinematic stylistic approach puts its subject into his/its environment. It does this by using lots of light, a small aperture, and, often, a wide-angle lens so that the story subject is simultaneously in focus along with the depth of the physical world he/she/it is within. This, rather than being the only detail in focus with everything else softer or out-of-focus, thereby isolating the subject in the shot, and separating it from its environment. Its use in Citizen Kane was consistent with the story as told by individuals and episodes from the subject’s life and environment. It was a “deep-focus” narrative. Contributors – Cinematographer, Gregg Toland; Director, Orson Welles. 


Narrative Style - Charles Foster Kane is unknowable (as, in truth, is anyone). He is seen through his behavior as interpreted by us, and through the people that knew him, multiple viewpoints only, therefore. As we’ve said, this is a narrative version of deep focus, as it is a life in situ, or in its milieu. Contributor – Herman Mankiewicz 


Expressionistic Lighting and Camera - This cinematic stylistic exaggerates the visual impact of the imagery. It intensifies the deep focus effect by using camera angles that accentuate and/or subordinate the film’s visual subject for dramatic impact. It intensifies the dramatic effect by using lighting and shadow to lend mystery and surprise, as well as visual depth to the otherwise flat deep focus field. Contributors - Cinematographer, Gregg Toland; Director, Orson Welles.


Welles came to Hollywood at underdog-studio, RKO’s bidding after setting the New York drama scene afire with his all-black-cast production of MacBeth, and his infamous radio production of The War of the Worlds. His genius was legendary. RKO wanted it for its cachet. So Mankiewicz was used and discarded. But, lest we let our sympathies control us, his wasn’t the genius responsible for this great film. 


After auteur critic and New Wave director, Claude Chabrol, had been directing awhile, he found himself asked, once more, about the movement of which he had been a part. His answer? 


“There are no waves, there is only the ocean.” Chabrol to Andrew Sarris, Interviews With Film Directors, Avon, 1972, p. 75. 


Having been immersed in the collaboration, he knew something about who did what. 


Critics spend all their time worrying about the who and never considering for very long, the what. Films are what audiences come to see, not evidence of some artist’s worth. But critics need personality to dominate because beyond their reviews, they need to have a subject in order to write something more. After all, the film has already covered the film’s subject better than they ever could. One could see it as symbiotic, but between the critic and the audience, only one party really ever benefits, and that's the one who is doing the lying.


So, who is responsible?  


As always in the movies, it is the collaboration. With Citizen Kane there was a fortuitous convergence of talent that super-charged a group of individually-luminous artists. Each, himself, could be seen by his prior work to have aspects of genius about him. Together, in Kane, they became what can only be seen as a “super-genius”.


If collaboration-as-genius disheartens some who prefer the comfort of seeing Welles or Mankiewicz as the film’s sole genius, try looking at it this way: Welles was a genius; so was Mankiewicz, so were lighting-cameraman Gregg Toland, and also composer, Bernard Herrmann. There is no "zero-sum" about it. It was as if DC Comics’s Justice League of America made a film. You had Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, Flash, Aquaman… If genius collaborates… genius can result, even super-genius. #


FADE OUT


Lee A. Matthias

Goldman's Law

For the unfamiliar, a "reveal" in screenwriting parlance is the placement of key, revelatory information in a story. Most times, the last reveal is the most important revelation of all.


FADE IN:


In the computer world there’s something called, “Moore’s Law”. The name was coined by Caltech professor, Carver Mead, and referred to Intel Co-Founder Gordon Moore’s 1965 article, "Cramming more components onto integrated circuits", Electronics Magazine, 19 April 1965.


As described in its entry at Wikipedia, "Moore's Law describes a long-term trend in the history of computing hardware, in which the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit has doubled approximately every two years." This has held up ever since, and is projected to continue for several years more. It’s the main reason electronics hardware has gotten cheaper or stayed cheap, even as it got ever more capable and powerful.


I propose to establish the coining of “Goldman’s Law”. As every screenwriter well knows, Wm. Goldman stated in his seminal work about his career, Adventures in the Screen Trade, that, “Nobody knows anything” when it comes to predicting success for films. This is even true, amazingly enough, after-the-fact!


To wit:


Back in the early 1980s, Chuck Ross, a freelance writer, tried an experiment. He re-typed Casablanca under the original source-play’s title, Everybody Comes To Rick’s. He changed the name of Sam to “Dooley” (after Dooley Wilson, the actor who played Sam), and listed the author as “Eric Demos". He made 217 copies and sent a copy to each entry on the then-current Writers Guild of America-West List of Signatory Literary Agencies.


As reported on the Museum of Hoaxes website:


"Of the 217 agencies Ross sent the script of Casablanca to, ninety returned it unread. They did so for various reasons — it was their policy not to read unsolicited manuscripts, they weren't taking on new clients, or they were no longer in the agency business. Seven never responded. Eighteen scripts apparently got lost in the mail.


"Thirty-three agencies actually recognized the script. For instance, Alan Green of the Gage Group wrote back to Ross, "Unfortunately I've seen this picture before: 147 times to be exact."


"Eight noticed a similarity to Casablanca, but didn't realize it was Casablanca.


"However, thirty-eight agencies claimed to have read it, but rejected it. In other words, of those agencies that actually read the manuscript (or claimed to have), the majority did not recognize it as Casablanca, nor did they think the script was good enough to be worth representing.


"The comments Ross received included:

'I just think you need to rework it... you have excessive dialogue at times.'


'To bridge the gap between "talented writer", which you now are, and "professional writer", which is yet to come, you need professional help. And that will have to be paid for. I could recommend a "literary surgeon" who would help you, but are you ready to accept professional help????'


'I think the dialogue could have been sharper and I think the plot had a tendency to ramble. It could've been tighter and there could have been a cleaner line to it.'

'I gave you five pages to grab me -- didn't do it.'

'Too much dialogue, not enough exposition, the story line was weak, and in general didn't hold my interest.'

'Story line is thin. Too much dialogue for amount of action. Not enough highs and lows in the script.'

'I strongly recommend that you leaf through a book called Screenplay by Syd Field, especially the section pertaining to dialogue. This book may be an aid to you in putting a professional polish on your script, which I feel is its strongest need.'


"Perhaps strangest of all, three agencies expressed a desire to represent the work. A representative of the Lil Cumber Attractions Agency asked Ross who he might have in mind to play the character of Rick. The following conversation ensued:

Ross: 'Humphrey Bogart.'
Lil Cumber Rep: 'I meant somebody available now.'
Ross: 'Somebody like Bogart...'


"Finally, the Irv Schecter Co., after not replying for six months, contacted Ross to ask permission to send the script to a literary agent to see about the possibility of turning it into a novel.


"Ross's experiment led him to conclude that many movie agents have difficulty recognizing both well-known screenplays and quality writing, and also that submissions by unknown writers stand little chance of getting published."

The stats for this are fascinating: only 30 per cent of the WGA agencies that actually saw it, recognized it. And 38 others (35 per cent of those that reviewed the Oscar-winner) actually rejected it! 90 of the 199 scripts that made it to their destination were turned around at the door. That’s 45 per cent! But, perhaps the one that stands out the most is the eighteen (out of only 217) that were apparently lost in the mail; eight per cent! Lost! That ought to give you chills when you send out that mortgage payment on the last day. So, it’s probably not true. Probably most (or all) of those eighteen were just thrown away on arrival or are still awaiting their turn from deep within the agency’s slush pile.


Ross had done a similar number on the publishing world with Jerzy Kosinski’s award-winning novel, Steps, to similar effect. I’ll leave it to you whether Goldman’s Law extends to publishing or even to all of media.


Nonetheless, if ever there was evidence for the accuracy of William Goldman’s assessment, this was it! [Source article – Ross, Chuck (November-December, 1982), "The Great Script Tease", Film Comment, 18(6): 15-19]

So, after establishing through a Google search that there has been no prior motion, I hereby nominate “Goldman’s Law” to be established within the screenwriting arena in the same manner as Moore’s Law has been established in the electronics arena.

RAMSES

So it shall be written,

so it shall be done.
#

FADE OUT


Lee A. Matthias

"Whimmed" to Death

For the unfamiliar, a "reveal" in screenwriting parlance is the placement of key, revelatory information in a story. Most times, the last reveal is the most important revelation of all.

FADE IN:

On submitting to Hollywood, writer-director, David Lynch, referring to one of his earliest films, a short, THE ALPHABET (1968), once stated:

“That was the first time I ever submitted something, and someone was going to read it, and judge it, and decide whether they were going to pay for it. And you realize that, in Hollywood, a person writes a script and then they give it over to somebody and a certain process starts happening where the person that you give it to wants to understand it. And so a lot of stories get clarified to death (italics, mine). And now there’s like, ten people reading this thing. And they all need to understand it. And by the time all of them understand it, there’s no abstractions left, it’s not what the person originally wanted, there’s fifty million compromises already on this thing. And not one of the ten, maybe, is happy.”

And later, 

“When you write a book, there’s maybe your editor or somebody reading it, but it’s way more pure, and many things can be explored. Chances can be taken, and things don’t have to be explained.”

--- “Lynch on Lynch,” Edited by Chris Rodley, Faber and Faber, 1997, p. 51.

“A lot of stories get clarified to death.”

“You got that right!” say I. In fact, it may even be an understatement.

From the very beginning it was obvious that David Lynch was seen as an artist. He was given a measure of respect, allowed a latitude, that most new or almost-new writers and writer-directors rarely, if ever, get from the system. He only had to deal with clarifying his work to the power structure. Others, more often than not, have to justify.

Lynch’s stories, at least for me, lack clarification. They are odd, obtuse, ambiguous, and illogical. That’s why I like them. I like to explore Lynch’s ideas, test my responses, attempt to make sense of things, and accept my failures as “rain checks” for trying again another day. Life is ambiguous. We don’t know everything about everything. So things puzzle us, seem odd, obtuse, ambiguous, and even illogical. Lynch’s films are merely life… amplified, or… focused-down, right down to the terrific dramas playing out in the life beneath our feet.

I don’t want everything tied up into a nice pretty little package with a bow in my stories. I want there to be more waiting there for me to discover.

Way back in 1940 or so, science fiction author, Robert Heinlein, published a story called, “And He Built a Crooked House,” about an architect who designs a house in four spatial dimensions (plus one of time), rather than the three (plus time) we think we live in (if you’re interested in a description of what it’s like to do that and how it would be experienced, go here). I want that house! ‘Cause that’s where David Lynch writes his movies.

But the issue of accessing the film industry and its money, and the concomitant allowances and compromises one has to make to function in that system is interesting (in the Chinese curse sense). There are good and valid reasons for both positions in the struggle between the artist and business. And while I am sympathetic to business’s argument that it takes most of the risk by paying out those enormous sums, I cannot take a wholly practical, wholly arithmetical view. There’s a reason art is beyond the capabilities of scientists, executives, and accountants. Science and business are about how we live. Art is about why we live. “Why” trumps “how.” Animals get by on “how.” Only we need something more, and that’s “why.” And that’s art.

In the military a dichotomy is often drawn between the strategic and the tactical. Tactical is the immediate goal. Strategic is the bigger picture. Tactical is taking the hill, winning the battle. Strategic is winning the war. Art informs us about the processes of living so that we can assess for ourselves what living means for us. Art is strategic.

In a better world, business would serve the artist so that the artist could serve society. There would be failures and system-abuse, to-be-sure, but there would be benefits that out-weighed them.

In this world, art, of necessity, struggles with realities that unwaveringly demand an un-realistic success. And, yet, while the failures are legion, in every but the financiers’ minds, the benefits still out-weigh them.

In “Screen Plays: How 25 Scripts Made it to a Theater Near You - For Better or Worse,” HarperCollins, 2008, p. 4, author, David S. Cohen offers some comments on the studio development process:

“One successful screenwriter observes that when movie people have meetings, people defer to the cinematographer on matters of lighting, because he’s the cinematography expert. They defer to the production designer on the look of the movie, because she’s the design expert. But nobody defers to the screenwriter as the story expert. Almost everyone feels free to talk to the screenwriter as if anyone could do story better than he can.

“There are plenty of reasons for this. One is that a good script often looks effortless. The story flows so smoothly that you can’t imagine it turning out any other way. The characters say what they say and do what they do because it’s their nature. The whole thing seems to just work.

“In fact, it seems so solid, so inevitable, that it looks easy to improve it. Can’t we try this? Wouldn’t it be more interesting if we did that? I’d like it if we could put this in...

“Writers know, though, that a structure that looks as solid as a granite statue can actually be as delicate as a silk tapestry. Pull on a thread and the whole thing can unravel. Nonetheless, development executives, directors, and stars yank on those threads, then leave the writer to try to weave something beautiful from the debris. As a result, studio ‘development’ is one of Hollywood’s ongoing embarrassments. A studio will buy a spec script for a small fortune, put it through years of expensive rewrites, and at the other end of the process wind up with something they never would have paid ten cents for if it had been sent to them in the first place.”

And that’s on good days. On the bad ones the material goes into “Turn-Around,” awaiting another studio or producer to buy it away for the money already invested; or… it vanishes forever while languishing in Development’s netherworld, that storied state of anti-Purgatory known as “Development Hell,” Lost there in some kind of “Dantean eighth ring,” it well and truly is never to be heard from again.

In Development Hell, the studio-system’s Devil’s Island, almost anything can happen, bad or – remarkably – good, though none should be seen as any sort of expiation of sin. Here, the sins may really begin. First, as David Cohen describes, the studio piles on more sinners, other writers. The writers, in turn, labor at the beck and call of a procession of directors and stars, each of whom, on departure, as in the mythical story of Sisyphus, allow the “rock” of the script to roll back to the start. But, closer to a snowball than Sisyphus’s rock, the script may now hold much of what each writer has added. Why? Because the studio paid for it.

Only a leap of faith by an individual with the power to wield it will ever gain the script its freedom. And only an artist will ever restore the script to its original raison d’être. In nearly all other cases, the script will not have met the fate David Lynch described of clarifying itself until its magic has gone away. Instead, to borrow a term used by D.T. Max in his New Yorker article (referenced elsewhere in this space), it will have been whimmed to death. #

FADE OUT

Lee A. Matthias    

Scary Stuff

For the unfamiliar, a "reveal" in screenwriting parlance is the placement of key, revelatory information in a story. Most times, the last reveal is the most important revelation of all.

FADE IN:

“Let’s talk, you and I, let's talk about fear.”
“Some terrible, warty horror is menacing Elmville.”
---Stephen King, in his Foreword to his short story collection, “Night Shift”

Here we are at Halloween, and Hollywood has trotted out its newest creepy entries. It’s no accident that, once again, the scary movie that is blowing the doors off the competition is the one that gets its results through subtlety, suggestion, and audience anticipation. PARANORMAL ACTIVITY is on track to become the most profitable movie of all time:

THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT cost $60,000—some sources say $35,000—but to be conservative, I’ll use the higher number—and is listed at $248,639,099.00 for its box-office gross. That makes it the most profitable film of all time (an R.O.I., or Return on Investment of 414,399%!!!). So, costing a reported $15,000, PARANORMAL ACTIVITY only needs to gross $62,159,850.00 to equal that success. After only its first wide-release weekend, it is a third of the way there, and probably on track to take the profitability crown.

And, unlike the latest SAW incarnation (SAW VI), P.A. does it with nothing more than clever manipulation of its audience.

For me the most interesting question that arises is why don’t more filmmakers and producing studios understand this? Even when they re-make a classic like THE HAUNTING, they ignore what worked and slather on the special effects, the technology, and the silliness. The result is something so shrill it’s beyond belief.

First, let’s get something out of the way. I used the “M” word above: “manipulation.” The PC crowd considers anything that manipulates the audience to be dishonest and therefore bad.

NEWS-FLASH: ALL COMMUNICATION IS MANIPULATION!

Anyone who thinks that the latest commercial entry from Hollywood is manipulative, while that recent winner at Sundance that came out of nowhere, that film that is so “personal,” so “refreshingly honest,” is not manipulative, is fooling himself. (Interestingly, BLAIR WITCH was a Sundance dark horse hit; it needed an independent film festival to get noticed).

Personal cinema is no less manipulative (nor less artificial) than any other cinema, including SAW VI. In fact, I’d wager that it is a good deal less honest about its manipulation than almost any porno film! Personal films are not documentaries of personal experiences or sensibilities; they’re not didactic narratives or objective reporting. They are, instead, dramatic expression, and, therefore, they are just as subjective as the more commercial film product out there, if not more-so.

By their unique specificity, rather than a more common—and Hollywood-preferred—universality, personal films express a “reality” that is usually foreign to wider audiences and, therefore, less accessible than any found in the commercial product. They manipulate their audiences by persuading them to become interested, to find the commonalities they inevitably share with them, to like their heroes and dislike their villains. This is true be the villains people, simply plights out of life, or the merest ideas. Just like their Hollywood cousins, they manipulate their audiences to watch, breathlessly, as they plunge their characters and their audience’s biases into jeopardy or doubt, and ultimately to desire satisfactory resolutions. So, manipulation is persuasion. And no matter how you dress it, persuasion is sales!

The real question, then, is whether the manipulation positively serves the story, whether it positively serves the audience. If said manipulation acts in service to the filmmaker’s intentions, and they are artistically reasonable and ethical as evidenced by a generally satisfactory result, then such manipulation is valid and acceptable. Notice that I did not say the result had to achieve its ends through honesty. Deception is an axiom in art. The question, rather, is, “Does it serve the work effectively and to the benefit of a satisfactory audience experience?” So, while there is bad audience manipulation, all audience manipulation isn’t bad. As we’ve said, all communication is manipulation. The operative term, then, is “mutually-positive”—for the story, and for the audience—manipulation.

Scary movies succeed for the same reasons all movies succeed: they satisfy their audiences. Audiences aren’t satisfied by ever-larger explosions, ever-more diabolical torture devices. They are satisfied by having their expectations exceeded, by being happily or thrillingly surprised, by being entertained, not shown a demo-reel of new technology. They’re satisfied not by the quantity of blood, but instead by the quality of the experience.

So, how to achieve said quality? It’s a well-known principle that fear is far worse before the fearful event than it is during. That implies that what goes on in the audience’s mind is far more powerful than what goes on before its eyes. JAWS Director, Steven Spielberg, withheld the shark’s appearance until well into the film for a reason. He knew the audience’s imagination would generate suspense far better than he could with a rubber shark. As the Carly Simon song goes, “Anticipation… It’s makin’ me crazy.”

So, what’s scary?

In "Screenwriters' Masterclass," p. 25, screenwriter Ted Tally (SILENCE OF THE LAMBS) recounted how “Jonathan (Demme) was told once by Roger Corman, ‘The scariest shot in all of movies is the camera approaching a closed door, that you know somebody’s got to open it. The anticipation is much scarier than anything, it’s the most terrifying shot in the movie, it’s not expensive, it’s not special effects.’”

Anticipation.

Former editor (along with director, Robert Wise) under legendary 1940’s producer, Val Lewton, director Mark Robson (PEYTON PLACE, FROM THE TERRACE, VALLEY OF THE DOLLS) described a technique he came up with in the sound editing room for the low-budget Lewton horror films:

“In each of these films we had what we called the ‘bus’, an editing device I had invented by accident, or possibly by design, on CAT PEOPLE, that was calculated to terrify people and make them jump out of their seats.

“It derived from a sequence in CAT PEOPLE in which a girl was walking through the transverse in New York’s Central Park, imagining that she was being followed by somebody or something one supposed could be a cat of some sort, a leopard possibly, though one couldn’t tell. Looking over her right shoulder in terror, this girl backed away from the mysterious sound, ready to accept anything that might jump on her. From the other side of the park a bus came by, and I put a big, solid sound of air brakes on it, cutting it in at the decisive moment so that it knocked viewers out of their seats. This became the ‘bus,’ and we used the same principle in every film.” - "The Celluloid Muse: Hollywood Directors Speak," p. 237.

Surprise.

I remember seeing John Carpenter’s original HALLOWEEN on initial release with a group of friends from college. I had the unfortunate luck to sit next to a woman who felt the need to grip my leg above the knee as the film progressed. I recall that by the end of the film my leg had what appeared permanent nail impressions that had come through my denim pants enough to draw blood. Like a virtuoso conductor, writer/composer/director Carpenter brought his audience to the brink over and over, from slow build to pay-off, again and again, so that by the end we felt exhausted by the experience. And bloodied.

Rhythm, Timing.

A few years later, a friend described seeing Wes Craven’s film, A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET. He praised it for its genuinely fresh visual approach, describing a dream in which a menacing figure had grotesquely long and frightening arms as it emerged. The effect was at once new and uncannily weird.

Fresh. Different. Weird.

I took these influences to heart when I wrote my first scary screenplay, THE JUPE. In designing my tale, I looked for events that I’d never seen before, that were chilling and strange; I orchestrated the rhythm of the narrative to build to crescendos; I came out of nowhere with shocks that nonetheless were logical and believable after the fact; and I set-up situations so that my audience’s expectations would grow to the point of no return. I even paid homage to Val Lewton by finding a way to work in a “bus.” When I had a table reading of the script, many people remarked at how effective it was. Unusually, the script—a haunted house tale set in an old movie palace—was entirely written in the projection booth of the theater it was set in, …in the night, in the dark. Many nights over that period, while writing, I scared myself so badly that I almost could not leave the booth and make my way down and out of the empty old theater. The script has a sense of place that I’ve never equaled since.

I guess I’m glad so few films are genuinely scary. See, it’s rhythm and timing again. The bad ones serve as valleys before the run-up to those peaks that are. #

FADE OUT

Lee A. Matthias