Oct/091
Receiving Criticism
I’m sure you’ve heard many times, filmmaking is a collaborative art. It takes lots of people to make a movie, and most of them offer their opinions along the way. Screenwriters get criticism constantly through the development process, into production, and once the movie is released. In a series of posts, I’m going to explore the smartest ways to handle criticism, both constructive and destructive.
Being able to handle feedback and collaborate is crucial to a career in the film industry. Everybody from studio executives, to agents, to directors and actors is getting constant response to their ideas and creativity. Without input from other people there is no way to know what you are doing right, what you’re doing wrong, and how to improve it. Jack Canfield has a whole chapter in his book THE SUCCESS PRINCIPLES that discusses how the most successful people in all sorts of fields use feedback. The secret is being open enough to learn from it. What I’m talking about here is constructive criticism, comments that are made to improve the work.
That is the goal of story notes, to make the script better. Good enough to sell and great enough to get a green light. That is everyone wants, to make a movie. Hopefully you are working with brilliantly insightful executives, producers, actors, and directors. Unfortunately, that is not always the case. Many studio executives have no vision of the movie they want to make. It is safer for them to keep giving reams of notes, rather than risk their job by recommending a green light. Often directors’ vision of the movie differs from what you have written. Actors usually approach the story from their character without given thought to your carefully crafted structure and subtext. How do you navigate all of these conflicting ideas and agendas and keep some remnants of your original story? With two very important attitudes. You must be flexible and cheerful.
Flexibility is important because story notes and meetings are all about making changes. No writer has ever shown up at a notes meeting and been told we love it; don’t change a word. Before you go into the development process, decide what things are so integral to your story that you can’t change them. What would kill a little piece of your creative soul to change? Does your lead character have to be a woman? Does your story have to take place in Montana? Whatever they are, have intelligent, logical reasons to hold onto them in case you must explain your feelings. Think of everything else as up for grabs. Of course you hope they like what you wrote, but if not – oh well. Don’t spend the meeting arguing about holding onto things. That will get you branded as difficult. You may get some cockamamie suggestions. But you may get some amazing ones. The very best notes meetings are when each idea builds on the next, so that at the end the story is better than anyone envisioned. Go into each meeting as if it is going to be a fun, satisfying creative discussion.
Being cheerful when hearing constructive criticism insures that you are receiving the information. In order to profit from the feedback, you have to be open to what people are telling you. Be cheerful and engaged. There is nothing worse than having a conversation with someone about his project who is sullen and uncommunicative. Being cheerful also means not taking things personally. This is harder than it sounds. You’re alone in a room with a bunch of people criticizing your baby, most of whom have probably never written a script. Try to have the attitude that it’s all just opinion and everyone’s opinion is valid. An idea that rescues your project from development hell could come from the office intern or from an Oscar-winning screenwriter. Take it all in with a smile. Be excited to contribute. Discuss, don’t argue.
Taking criticism in an upbeat, flexible manner will insure that you actually hear it. Then you must have the discernment to choose which advice to take and which to ignore. You must balance the agenda of who’s commenting with your own goals. For example, if you’re talking with your best friend, he won’t care if you listen to him at all. On the other hand if your manager is giving you notes, she needs to feel heard. You want her invested in your project so that she’ll work hard to sell it.
Finally, having a positive attitude will help your career. These are the kinds of writers that people want to work with – smart, fun collaborators. Executives and producers talk to each other. Good reputations build careers, bad ones kill them.
Oct/090
Whip It
WHIP IT is about a young woman in a small Texas town who risks disappointing her beauty pageant-obsessed mom when she finds her calling skating at the roller derby. The roller derby is an original setting for a coming of age story, yet this movie was not very engaging. Why was it only good instead of great?
I think the problem is the main character Bliss (Ellen Page). The roller derby is supposed to liberate her, but when we meet her in the first act she is completely shut down. She is competing in beauty pageants because her mother wants her to, but Bliss’ feelings are never clear. Has she asked to get out of them? Is she terrified of disappointing her mother? What is going on here? Bliss’ best friend Pash (Alia Shawkat) is desperate to get out of Bowdeen by going to college. Yet college is never mentioned in Bliss’ future. She is a senior and would have already applied and be waiting to hear where she got in. She is miserable in her small hometown, but has no plans or dreams to leave. We never get the sense that Bliss is searching for anything so her attraction to the roller derby feels arbitrary. This attitude is part of the reason Bliss is hard to understand and root for.
This disconnect carries over to the roller derby. We don’t see Bliss develop strong relationships with the other girls or the coach. This is a fascinating world with great characters, but is strangely emotionless. We know very little about the team even though there are lots of skating scenes. The best scene in the movie, when Maggie (Kristen Wiig) tells Bliss to give her mother another chance, is unearned because we had no idea they were that close. Along these same lines, the team forgives Bliss very quickly for lying about her age. This seems too easy. We have seen no evidence that they love her that much to not be mad at her for even one second.
Finally, there was a big plot point that kept taking me out of the movie. Bliss is seventeen, lying to everyone that she is twenty one. At seventeen, you’re still legally a child and under the control of your parents. She could get the team in a lot of trouble. Furthermore, she’s having a relationship with a man in his early twenties and he could get in a lot of trouble for sleeping with an underage girl. Bliss’ age gave the whole romance a distasteful sheen. An easy fix for this problem would be to make her eighteen, a legal adult. Eighteen year-olds are high school seniors. Even better, make the story take place the summer after high school graduation so she feels fully like an adult.
In a coming of age story it is crucial for your lead character’s emotional journey to be fully developed. An original setting is not enough.
Oct/091
When Your Script Just Isn’t Working
Often I read a script and I can tell that the writer had what he thought was a cool idea, but he didn’t think it through. An idea is not a movie. A movie needs characters, conflict, emotion, and theme. If you haven’t thought all of these aspects through and start writing, you get a bad script.
Sometimes you can’t tell that your idea is just an idea until you have worked on it for a while. You’ve written twenty drafts and the scripts aren’t getting any better. Or you haven’t even made it to script. You’re stuck in outline. You just can’t seem to break the story. These are tough times for a writer. Do you keep plugging away or throw in the towel? My advice is if you’re having this much trouble, put the project aside. Some time away may give you clarity. When you pick it up again, you may be in the creative flow. Or not. No matter what happens. Don’t get discouraged and keep writing. Every writer has a script or two in a drawer that didn’t work. Each one is a learning process and the next one will be better.
Check out a great blog on this subject from the Bitter Script Reader.
http://thebitterscriptreader.blogspot.com/2009/09/sometimes-youre-gonna-lose-patient.html
Sep/093
Biopics: Slice of Life
A person’s life is so unwieldy, often it is easier to write about specific events or time periods rather than try to tell the story of their entire life. Two good places to start are the beginning and the end. In the beginning we get to see who our subject is before they grow into their icon status. At the end of the person’s life, we see how they ended up and what they feel about their life. Two great movies that illustrate this beginning and ending principle are ELIZABETH and FROST/NIXON.
There have been many biopics of Queen Elizabeth. What made ELIZABETH unique is that we had never seen her transformation from girl to queen. All of the other movies started when she was already the imperious Queen Elizabeth. Elizabeth’s father Henry VIII murdered her mother, Anne Boleyn. She grew up far from court, never expecting to be queen. This is the girl we meet at the beginning of the film. And she does things you would expect a young woman who has suddenly become queen to do. She buys beautiful dresses, has lavish parties, and enjoys a romance with a dashing young man. But the responsibility of running her country quickly become apparent. People, English and foreign, are trying to kill her. The country is almost broke. Both Spain and France are nefarious enemies. By the end of the movie Elizabeth has made hard decisions. She has put down a rebellion and burned people at the stake. She has given up her romance for the good of the country. The last thing she does is put on the white make up she wears in her portraits, becoming the queen that we and history know.
In FROST/NIXON the two men, David Frost and Richard Nixon, are both at crossroads in their lives. Three years after resigning in the Watergate scandal, Nixon is struggling with life out of the public eye. He is desperate to save his reputation. Meanwhile, Frost’s career is at a standstill. He puts up $600,000 of his own money to get an interview with Nixon. Both men see the interviews as a way to redeem their careers. Nixon is sure that he can outwit Fox and show America what a great president he was. Frost is equally determined to make Nixon admit that he knew about Watergate. Nixon is a broken man. He can’t believe that being the most hated man in America is where he ended up after a lifetime of public service. It is a measure of the power of Peter Morgan’s screenplay and Frank Langella’s performance, that when Nixon admits he broke the law, we feel for him. If only he had made a thousand different decisions, he wouldn’t have ended up here. If only…he would have been the great man and the great president he longed to be.
Sep/091
Lethal Weapon
Can a movie be more than one genre? Often. How do you juggle more than one genre in your story?
Let’s take an oldie but a goodie, LETHAL WEAPON. It’s been on my mind because I recently watched all four LETHAL WEAPON movies. LETHAL WEAPON is many things – buddy comedy, action movie, gritty police story, murder mystery. If you are writing a story with multiple genres, the first step is to decide what your movie is. What is the movie really about; that is the main genre. In the case of LETHAL WEAPON, the relationship of Riggs and Murtaugh is the heart of the movie. Some may disagree, but I think LETHAL WEAPON is a buddy movie. Buddy movies are about how two people realize they are better together than apart. Each man makes the other whole. Murtaugh gives Riggs stability and a family while Riggs helps Murtaugh realize that he is not ready to retire.
The writer Shane Black builds his movie (and by extension the mystery) around the Riggs-Murtaugh relationship. As they investigate, they build a rapport. By the end of the film, they have solved the mystery, caught the bad guys, and become friends and partners. The conventions of the modern cop movie are here too. The rogue cop and mismatched partners are given a brilliant spin. Riggs is suicidal and Murtaugh is trying to stay alive until his retirement. This set up gives lots of opportunity for conflict. Often in these cop movies, the good guys uncover a conspiracy. This mystery starts out as a suicide that turns out to be homicide that leads the guys to corrupt army drug dealers. Add some amazing actions scenes and you have a kind of cop movie that no one had seen before.
There is no rule about how many genres are too many. But to make your movie succeed, you must understand what your core genre is. Start with the emotional story of your character and build out. With luck you’ll come up with something original and maybe start a subgenre of your own.