Editing “Is” (Tip #72)

” In the active voice, the subject performs the action. In the passive voice, the subject is acted upon.”
Constance Hale
The Pleasures and Peril of the Passive/NY Times

Driving through Tennessee today I spoke briefly on the phone with William Akers who lives in Nashville and wrote the book Your Screenplay Sucks! So I thought I’d tap into his blog for today’s post.

Have you ever done a search for certain words in your screenplay? Akers suggests using Find (control F or Apple F) to look for words that you can edit to make your screenplay tighter and better.

Here are just three examples Akers shows how editing “Is” can improve your writing. (Check out his post 7 Deadly Sins of Writing to see a longer list.)

He is grinning…He grins.

Cheryl is looking at Stephanie… Cheryl studies Stephanie.

Betty is really pretty… Betty, hot as a two dollar pistol, struts in.

(Man, I’d hate to run a Find “Is” search on all my blog posts. Maybe for the book version.)

P.S. It’s worth noting that if you have the skill of Mark Twain you can use a passive voice quite effectively:
“The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” H/T Sin & Syntax.

Related Posts:

No Emotion? Your Screenplay Sucks!
Your Screenplay Sucks!

Scott W. Smith

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Character Introduction (Tip #71)

“You always want to start your story with the characters doing what’s essential to them. The most important thing to them.”
Michael Arndt
Little Miss Sunshine DVD Commentary

Examples of this are Rocky opens with Rocky boxing and  Arndt’s story Little Miss Sunshine opening shot of Olive being enthralled watching a beauty pageant on TV. What are some of your favorite and/or most effective scenes of introductions to characters from movies? (If there’s a You Tube link shoot it my way as I’d like to include a few of them in this post.)

Related Post: Starting Your Screenplay (Tip #6) Includes this quote: ”Who is your hero, what does he want, and what stands in his way?”—Paddy Chayefsky (Network), Three-time Oscar winner

Scott W. Smith

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The 99% Focus Rule (Tip #70)

If you look at the last decade of screenwriter Michael Arndt’s career it’s rather amazing. He won an Oscar for Little Miss Sunshine, then he wrote Toy Story 3 which was not only a brilliant screenplay but became a great movie that made over a billion dollars at the box office, he wrote the script for Hunger Games: Chasing Fire which comes out this year, and a few months ago it was announced that he would be writing Star Wars Episode VII. But it’s important to look at the decade before he had an agent and before he sold a single script and see if there are any clues that prepared him for the career he is currently having.

“The question is ‘How do you meet an agent?’ or get your script to an agent—It’s a mystery to me. Everyone sort of is able to find a different path, and usually it just comes to referrals. You can submit your script to contests, blah, blah, blah crap like that. For the real top-tier agents they just don’t care about contests or anything like that. I would recommend just working in the industry. Just by virtue of working in the industry you make contacts with people. If you keep talking to people you’ll find a way to get your script on the right desk. I was a [script] reader and I read at least a thousand scripts, and I’d say that out of those thousand scripts maybe twenty got made into movies, and maybe three or four were good movies. So it’s much easier to get your script read and it’s much easier even to get your script made into a movie then it is to write a really good script. So I would say 99% of your effort should go to writing a good script.  And my story is a testament to that. I spent a whole year—10 years—teaching myself how to write. It went to one [agent's] desk basically and once it hit that desk though it was like the doors were flying open. They were going to send it to Spielberg, and to Robert Zemeckis, and Steven Soderbergh—once they find something they think they can do something with it’ll just go straight up. So as a writer you can only control what’s on the page. You can’t control what happens to your script after it gets out the door, so just try and focus on making the script as good as possible.”
Screenwriter Michael Arndt  (Little Miss Sunshine, Toy Story 3)
2007 talk at Cody’s Books (at the 35:53 mark of the FORA.tv video)

It’s also important to know that Arndt’s career path is different that Diablo Cody took in Minneapolis (blogging & non-fiction author) and different than John Logan took in Chicago (playwriting)— but the one thing they all had in common is they focused (99%?) on writing a solid script that made the doors fly open. And both Cody and Logan also had one cheerleader in Hollywood that became aware of their work while the writers still lived in the Midwest.

P.S. So the Screenwriting from Iowa…and Other Unlikely Places Facebook page is live and less than 24 hours old. Thanks to those who’ve already jumped on board. Like those on the email list it helps inspire me while searching for quotes and insights that will help you in your writing and career. Plus there will be some things different on the Facebook than on the daily blog posts.

Related Posts:
The Secrets to Being a Successful Screenwriter (Seriously) —John Logan’s foucs and journey
Screenwriitng Outside L.A. 101 —Touches on Chris Sparling’s focus before Buried was produced and picked up at Sundance
Screenwriting Quote #10 (Nick Schenk) Schenk’s focus in Minneapolis before Gran Torino was produced
Self-Study Screenwriting—The focus of Frank Darbont and Sheldon Turner before they became  Oscar-nominated screenwriters

Scott W. Smith

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Pity, Fear, Catharsis (Tip #69)

“You’ve got to remember that the story is much more about the audience than it is about the characters or the plot. And it is much more about the audience than it is about the storyteller. “
Agent Julian Friedmann

“Aristotle described the formula. He did that two and a half thousand years ago. Not only did it work then, it still works today. So actually anyone who says there is no formula is wrong, there is. Aristotle did it in a way that makes it incredibly easy to remember. There’s three words – pity, fear and catharsis. He said you need to make the audience feel pity for a character. You do that usually by making the character go through some undeserved misfortune. What that does – it enables the audience to emotionally connect with the character. And once the writer has got that emotional connection between the audience and the character, the writer begins to have some control over the audience. You then put the character into a worse and worse and worse situation. And because of the emotional connection, the identification, the audience feels fear. When you release the character from the jeopardy or whatever the situation they’re in, the audience experiences a catharsis. Pity, fear, catharsis.”
Agent Julian Friedmann / @julianfriedmann
The Mystery of Storytelling

H/T to Daniel Martin Eckhart’s blog where I stumbled upon Friedmann’s TEDx Talk. You can find the entire transcript of Friedmann’s talk at Write, write, write.

Material referenced: Pity, Fear, and Catharsis in Aristotle’s Poetics by Charles B. Daniels and Sam Scully

Free PDF of Aristotle’s Poetics

Related Post:
40 Days of Emotion
Pity, Fear, and Catharsis and stories being about audiences all point back to the importance of emotion in storytelling. Perhaps the biggest mistake in screenwriting circles in the last 30 years has been putting “Structure, Structure, Structure” at the top of the story pyramid. Richard Walter goes as far as saying the emphasis on structure is one of the reasons there are so many ‘soulless” scripts out there.

Scott W. Smith

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Emotional Transportation Biz (Tip #68)

“I’m in the emotional transportation business. If you want to be in that position, you have to understand drama. You have to understand how characters interact. You must understand how to move audiences emotionally, because that’s what they talk about in word of mouth. You don’t talk about what the film was about, you talk about your experience seeing the film: I loved it, I laughed, I cried, I observed. That’s what makes people go to the movies.”
Peter Guber, Chairman/CEO of Mandalay Ent Group (Exec Producer Rain Man, Batman Returns)
MovieMaker magazine
Winter 2006
Page 69

Related Post: 40 Days of Emotion

Scott W. Smith

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Writing as Self-Exploration (Tip #67)

“We have everything we need right now to be completely happy. We’re going to blink and be ninety.”
Debbie (Leslie Mann)
This is 40

“I do believe in the old saying ‘we write the movie to figure out why we are writing the movie.’ I started out as someone who wanted to write comedy. I never thought about comedy being an intimate, vulnerable act. Latley I have accepted that writing is a form of self-exploration. I am trying to sort through how I feel about this life while attempting to make it amusing on some level. When I wrote Funny People my mom had just died from ovarian cancer, and the purpose of life was something I was struggling with, so I had the need to write about it. I am not sure if it was a form of healing or denial, but I seemed to have no other option. Lately I have thought a lot about where I am as a forty-four-year-old man. I don’t know if it is a midlife crisis or a simple taking-stock, but I have definitely been thinking about how it is going.”
Judd Apatow
Q&A for This is 40 which Apatow wrote and directed
This is 40; The Shooting Script, published by Newmarket Press

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Teenage Time Lock (Tip #66)

“Generally, the shorter the period of time depicted, the more intense the drama. The longer the period of time depicted on a film, the more chance there is that its narrative line will become episodic, making it difficult to keep the film flowing.”
Linda Seger
Advanced Screenwriting
Page 33

The great Milton Glaser once said, “Omiation stimualtes the imagination.” Several years ago I wrote a post called Screenwriting & Time (Tip #17) and I reminded of that post when I flipped though an old book by Linda Seger today and saw the above quote highlighted. Long before I started this blog back in ’08 I had book after book full of yellow highlighted sections. This blog gave me a nice outlet to pass some of those on and add some new thoughts and quotes. And dang, here we are five years—and more than 1,400 posts—later. Time flies.

And, in general, the quicker the time flies in your screenplay the better off you’ll be. If you’re looking for a challenge in the next year, why not aim to write a story that takes place in a single day? You want more limitations to embrace? Okay, make it a story about teenagers in a single day. Here’s a short list of pretty good films that fall under those parameters:

American Graffiti
Ferris Buelller’s Day Off
Rebel Without a Cause
The Breakfast Club

Can you think of others?

Scott W. Smith

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Paying for Transformation (Tip #65)

“Not all film heroes change: James Bond, Ace Ventura, Batman and other action figures are too busy effecting change, by saving the world or making us laugh, to undergo personal transformation. However, in the film stories we turn to time and time again, be it Casablanca, Witness, Moonstruck, Chinatown or In the Line of Fire, the hero solves a personal problem and undergoes change and endears him to us forever. We are grateful for their experience because most of us do not have the time in our busy lives to pursue self-transformation. Instead, we go to the movies. We pay movie stars a lot of money to show us how to change.”
Michael Chase Walker
Power Screenwriting
Page 4

P.S. Just last month I quoted Garry Marshall as saying, “Most good stories are Cinderella” and Blake Snyder once wrote that, “All stories are transformation.” Some transformation movies that quickly come to my mind are On the Waterfront, Toy Story 3, and most recently, Flight. What are some of your favorite transformation movies?

Related Post: Cheap Therapy – Related thoughts from John Gardner and Richard Krevolin

Scott W. Smith

 

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Writing Actor Bait (Tip #64)

 ”If you want to attach a star, then you really need to have a great protagonist. A protagonist who is really active, who is really initiating the action of the movie, who’s responsible for the forward momentum of the narrative. And perhaps there’s a transformational arc there, because that’s what actors want to play. They don’t necessarily want to play the same note through the whole movie, so it’s about exploring those layers and really creating an emotional resonance to the character. Because, remember, we experience the story through the characters and because we really care about their experience and what it is that their journey entails—that’s where the emotional element is going to be.”
WME Story Editor Christopher Lockhart
Script magazine, January/February 2012

November 3, 2012 update: Just saw the movie Flight starring Denzel Washington. If you want to see Lockhart’s words in action see Flight. It’s not hard to understand why two-time Oscar-winner Washington was attracted to the script by John Gatins. In an interview with The Root Washington said of his pilot role, “The complexity was wonderful to play…this was an adventure. Starting with the screenplay and the collaboration with the filmmaker, getting a chance to fly around in flight simulators, hanging upside down in a plane and playing a drunk.” That article by Miki Turner also mentions that this was one of the last projects Washington’s agent Ed Limato gave him before he passed away. Limato’s client list included Russell Crowe, Meryl Streep, Sylvester Stallone, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Marlon Brando—so he had a long track record of picking the right roles for his stars. Lockhart worked with Liamto for more than a decade.

Related Posts:
Christopher Lockhart Interview (Part 1)
Christopher Lockhart Interview (Part 2)
Christopher Lockhart Interview (Part 3)
Christopher Lockhart Interview (Part 4)
Christopher Lockhart Interview (Part 5)
“The Inside Pitch”
40 Days of Emotions
Writing Quote #22 (Dara Marks)

Remembering Ed Limato by Christopher Lockhart

Check out Lockhart’s free PDF article: I WROTE A 120 PAGE SCRIPT BUT CAN’T WRITE A LOGLINE: THE CONSTRUCTION OF A LOGLINE

 

Scott W. Smith

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The “Stuckinna” Plot (Tip #63)

Only three more days left in my Month of Marhsall, where I’ve been finding bits of wisdom from writer/director Garry Marshall. Long before his success in films (Pretty Woman), or as the creator of TV shows (Happy Days, Mork & Mindy), he was a comedy writer for some of the biggest names in the 60s; Lucille Ball, Danny Thomas, Joey Bishop, and Dick Van Dyke.

One cost cutting technique he learned from the world of sitcom writing (that some filmmakers today would call “containment”) Marshall calls the ‘stuckinna” plot.

“Another favorite formula of sitcom producers was the ‘stuckinna’ plot, in which the main characters would get ‘stuck in’ something because it helped reduced the number of sets and kept production values down. These stories might find characters stuck in a bath tub, a basement, an attic, a bus, ot anything that would be conducive to physical humor. Jerry [Belson] and I wrote a two-part Dick Van Dyke episode called ’8 1/2′ in which Dick and Mary got stuck in an elevator and were held up by a thief played by Don Rickles. The episode was nominated for a Writers Guild award, which goes to show you that just because an episode is cheap productionwise, it’s not without merit.”
Garry Marshall
Wake Me When It’s Funny (written with Lori Marshall)
Pages 81-82 

It worked for Charlie Chaplin when he got stuck in a cage with a lion, or in a cabin with a bear.  It worked for Hitchcock in Lifeboat.  And it worked for Rodrifo Cortes in the film Buried based on Chris Sparling’s script, where Ryan Reynolds is the sole actor on screen set inside a coffin. Embrace your limitations.

P.S. Another more subtle comedy tip in that Marshall quote is the title 8 1/2. While it wouldn’t resonate as much today, back in ’60s it would have been instantly recognizable as a humorous play on the 1963 Fellini film 8 1/2.

Related links:

Screenwriting Quote #124 (Chris Sparling)

Writing for Low Budget Films (includes a list of films shot on one location)

Scott W. Smith

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