Dale Kutzera.com

It’s taken two weeks, but I made it roughly through the dreaded pages 60’s and 70’s of my first draft.  Why is this latter part of Act II so difficult?  Writing minds want to know.

Most screenwriting books divide a screenplay into three acts.  Act One is about ¼ of the script, Act Two is half, and Act Three is another ¼.  These divisions are made in part by considering Act Two as the “new world” in which the story takes place.  Consider the ancient myths of a young man slaying a dragon.  The First Act sets up the hero and his village and the threat of the dragon.  Act Two then involves the hero leaving the village to slay the dragon.  Act Three is typically about the return to the village where the hero is hailed as victor.  Stories involving young men leaving home as boys and returning as heroes are ancient in the narrative tradition.

Today’s films rarely involve dragons (though “Jaws” is a modern interpretation of this story-type).  Today’s stories are more often about troubles and difficulties in modern life.  There is less leaving of home and more about troubles within the “village” or known world. The old saying about story structure applies:  In Act One you put your hero in a tree, in Act Two you throw rocks at him, and in Act Three you get him out of the tree.

The difficulty is that you can’t spend all of Act Two throwing rocks at your hero.  It becomes boring and repetitious.  The recent Cohen Brothers film, “A Serious Man,” suffered because it was simply one problem after another thrown at a hapless man.  At some point in time a hero becomes unsympathetic (un-respectable?) when he or she puts up with trouble without taking action.

This is why I always split Act Two..in two.  I suppose this would make for a Four Act structure, but to jibe with all the books I’ve read, I simply divide Act Two into Act IIA and Act IIB.  Most books do stress the importance of a mid-point to the film.  In mythology, this is the point where the hero has achieved a goal and starts heading back to the village (often with the villain on his tail).  In modern screenplays, this is typically where the hapless hero turns from reactive to proactive.

It is an important turn.  Vital really.  It isn’t hard to come up with the compelling high-concept that plays out in Act IIA.  It’s relatively easy to get your hero into this situation via Act I.  And getting the character out of the problem in Act III is often as routine as a big fight or car chase (yawn).  What separates real writing from lazy writing happens with the turn taken in Act IIB.  It ads dimension and scale to the sweep of the story, explores the premise on a deeper level, and carries the hero to new depths…setting up new heights in Act III.

In a nutshell, if the hero is being threatened in Act IIA, then he or she should becomes proactive and fight back in Act IIB.  In “Jaws,” for example, they go on the offensive with Hooper’s high-tech anti-shark weapons.   If in Act IIA the hero is enjoying some new power, then in Act IIB that power should take a darker turn from which the hero must escape.  You can see this in films like “Click,” “Bruce Almighty,” and even “Coraline.”

What I have learned is to be aware that the high-concept gag you’ve devised for Act IIA should include within it a possible weakness that the hero can proactively attack in Act IIB.

I’m on page 67 of my latest opus.  This first draft has moved at a snail’s pace…maybe a page or two a day.  It’s murder.  Some people write a fast first draft.  They call it the “vomit draft” or “garbage draft,” the idea being to just get something on the page so they can start molding the shaping the piece.  There is a lot to be said for this approach and if the words are flowing I am never one to stop working.

Rarely do the words flow easily, however, and this latest script follows a more typical pattern of thoughtfully considering every beat.  It’s agonizing.  I have an outline, but that only goes into so much detail.  It’s only in the first draft that I start to judge the physical action of each scene (the guts or purpose of the scene) and evaluate them with the ongoing character dynamics and overall thematic arc.  Then there are practical things like the blocking of how a scene begins,  how we transition to the guts of the scene, and what sort of button is put on the end that tips us toward the next scene.

Audiences today have little patience for lengthy scenes.  Look back at a film from the thirties and you’ll see a character enter a room, take off their coat and hat (great hats back then), pour themselves a cup of coffee, chit chat with the other person in the scene, and only gradually get to the heart of the moment (i.e. being fired from a job, or learning your wife is cheating on you).  Such slow ramp-ups are part of the theatrical tradition where you had to actually see the actor walk onto the set, and that carried over to early talkies.  Today’s filmgoer wants to cut to the chase:  “Dude, you’re fired!”  “Honey, I’m leaving you!”

Consider what each scene must do:  1) Move the story forward.  2) Convey what is motivating the characters.  3) Convey their internal dynamics. 4) Provide some entertainment value, and 5) Pique our curiosity for what happens next.  It’s a challenging to-do list.  I tend to pick my way through this minefield very carefully, step by step.  Hopefully, the thoughtful decisions I make now result in a story that is structurally sound.  The dialogue and sight-gags can change (actors do like to ad-lib, and directors do like to improvise business), but the overall structure of the piece remains strong.

What happens (the structure) is just as important as how it happens (the dialogue and gags), but you’ll never convince a producer, director, or development executive of that.  They believe a catchy concept can be larded with jokes and marketed for a quick buck.  Witness the recent spate of clunky rom-coms like “Leap Year” and “When in Rome.”  I haven’t seen either, and don’t need to…I can smell them.

On the good side, the closer I get to the end of a script, the easier it is to blast on through.  So much has already been set in stone, that the options for the last 20 pages or so are few.  Like putting a puzzle together, the more pieces you have in place, the fewer you have to work with.

“Young Victoria” and “Bright Star” are not the only soft-plot films in theaters this month.  Fall and winter are the season for Award-bait movies and typically they focus on those softer, character issues.  The ads for “Up in the Air” and “Crazy Heart,” give no indication what those films are about.  I know “who” they are about:  a guy who fires people and a drunk country singer respectively.  “Who” does not tell me “What.”   Harder plotted films indicate what the story is about…the events characters face…more than the people.

The entertainment value such character-oriented films offer is on shaky ground as noted in a nice article by John Horn in Thursday’s LA Times.  The total gross for such softer films is meager:  “Bright Star” $4.5 million; “An Education” $7.1 million.  Even the excellent “Hurt Locker,” a character film with action has only netted $13-million.   “Precious” (Full title:  “Precious: Based on the Novel by the Self-Agrandizing One-Name Author Sapphire”) has grossed over $40-million…not bad.  Given such grosses you can understand why I advise any writer reading these words to not write character-based scripts.  Instead write event-based scripts…with great characters.

I’ve never tried writing a soft, character piece, but I sense they are written differently than event-based stories.  I can only imagine, for example, that James Cameron used a lot of note cards to break a film like “Aliens.”  The physical setting alone required some thought.  You’ve got the base camp, the big reactor where the aliens are based, the drop ship in orbit, and the need to signal it from a gadget that is some distance away.   The design of these physical locations is a significant part of the plotting of the action.

The hard-plotted scripts I’ve written start with an idea, then the big tent-posts of the story (the Act Breaks), and then the heavy-lifting of breaking each act into scenes.  Only then do I open Final Draft.  I think of this as starting way up in the sky with a broad perspective on the story, and getting progressively closer to the ground until you are rubber-on-the-road writing a detailed scene-by-scene outline.   (This mid-level document – somewhere between an outline and a script – is an underrated tool.)

I get the impression soft-plotted movies skip a lot of the middle-level work and go from a general concept to scene writing.  Instead of starting on high and working in more detail, the writer just lets the characters and their actions come to life.  The resulting scripts can be at best living and breathing things with a natural energy and fresh sponteneity, and at worse unfocused, rambling, and not adding up to much of anything (see “Benjamin Button” for a prime example).

I saw “Crazy Heart” on a screener DVD recently and much as I like Jeff Bridges performance, I felt that not much happened in the film and the whole thing didn’t really leave me with any great insight into the human condition (unlike its better progenitor “Tender Mercies”).  A lot of recent films have left me with the same feeling.   Characters (and performances) are great, but they’re even better when they do something interesting.

I’m working on a story that involves a couple getting married, so naturally I’ve been watching films about couples getting married.  You might consider this a crass form of plagiarism, but it’s not.   In the movie business, a writer must be aware of the competition.  There’s nothing worse that writing a script only to have your agent tell you the concept is identical to a film that came out four years ago.

It’s difficult to be completely original in the screenwriting trade.  We’re trying to sell stories that merit the investment of tens of millions of dollars to produce.  This means the stories must have broad appeal, not only in subject matter, but in execution.  This shrinks the target down in terms what stories to write.  Complicating this is the fact that the commercial viability of a screenplay depends in part on what is popular at the time.  Studio executives are not stupid – if something is popular they will make more.   Writers aren’t stupid either, and if talking-animal comedies are selling, they will shelve their civil war drama and break a story with a talking turtle.

Tens of thousands of writers are shooting at the same narrow target that combines a fresh approach to a well-known genre that is currently popular and can be shot for under $30 million because it isn’t a period piece and doesn’t require A-list stars.   It’s not surprising when more than one writer comes up with the same idea.

This is why I recently watched “American Wedding,” the third American-Pie film.  It did not surprise me that the film was a total mess.   A three-quel like this isn’t about great concept or wonderfully plotted arcs…it’s about revisiting characters and cheap gags.   Even the first “American Pie” film felt to me like a loosely strung together series of raunch-gags featuring a hapless hero.  I despise hapless heroes.  The guy from “American Pie” is still hapless in “American Wedding,” still incapable of standing up to anyone, and I can’t understand what Willow from “Buffy” sees in him.

Some writers would look at such films and wonder why they should bother with things like plot, logic, and plausibility in their stories.  Why not just string together some crude jokes?   Answer: only established writers can phone it in.  Watching even a lousy film in the genre you’re working in can tell you what to stay clear of.  I fast-forwarded through “American Wedding,” and it did confirm that gags like a dog swallowing the wedding ring have been done to death.

It’s not enough to watch old films in the same genre as your project.  You need to know what is in the pipeline.  Quarterly “Coming Attractions” features in the L.A. Times Calendar Section tell you what will hit theaters in the coming months.  The “In Production” listings in Variety and the Hollywood Reporter tell you what will be in theaters in the next year.  Subscribe to Done Deal Pro to learn what scripts are being bought and buy whom.   These sales don’t guarantee the projects will get a green light, but do indicate what is selling in Hollywood.

Know the competition.  Then pray you finish your talking-turtle script before they finish their talking-tortoise script.