О режиссуре, введение PDF
О режиссуре, введение PDF
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"Remarkable... I know of nothing in print that is quite like it... This book will have a long and useful life in film schools.
As for the rest of us, members of the general audience,... reading it will make you a more alert and intelligently respon¬
sive moviegoer—and me a better reviewer, V dely taken to heart, it might make movies a little bit better too.”
-•RICHARD SCHICKEL. LOS ANGELES TIMES
also edited by Paul Cronin
HERZOG ON HERZOG
ALEXANDER MACKENDRICK
„ NEW YORK
MAP 2 2 2017
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
www.fsgbooks.com
23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15
To my sons: Kerry, Mathew and John Mackendrick
Contents
Epilogue Z89
■
.
Foreword by Martin Scorsese
How do you teach film directing? I’m not sure if we’ve come to
a consensus yet. Everyone seems to approach the task dif¬
ferently. Which should come as no surprise. After all, the
medium is still young - a little over ioo years is nothing com¬
pared with the thousands of years it’s taken for painting, dance,
music and theater to evolve. What are the traditions of film-
making? Where do you begin? What do you teach, and in what
order?
This collection of writings by Alexander Mackendrick is
a good, solid starting point. That it’s of great value to stu¬
dents almost goes without saying - anyone who studied with
Mackendrick during his long tenure at CalArts, and who
received these writings in the form of handouts, can attest
to their value. But I can also easily imagine a college without
a film program building a curriculum around these writ¬
ings. They’re that clear, that concise, that comprehensive.
Mackendrick knew that you couldn’t reduce film-making
to any one thing. He knew that it was about storytelling
and that it was also about images, that it was about acting and
editing, action and words. And that more than anything else,
it was about practice. Theories are fine, but practice is every¬
thing. “Though it will be only a couple of weeks before you are
familiar with the basic mechanics of film-making, it will take a
lifetime of hard work to master them.” As someone who feels
like he’s still just beginning, who has to start all over again with
each new movie, I can attest to the truth of Mackendrick’s
words.
Mackendrick had practice, and plenty of it. He came up
through the studio system - Ealing to be exact - where he did
FOREWORD IX
some of the best work in the middle of what is now remembered
as the Golden Age of British film comedy. The Man in the White
Suit. The Ladykillers - the last Ealing film, and one of the best.
For him, they were simply practice.
Mackendrick came to the United States after The Ladykillers.
Burt Lancaster brought him over to work on a movie called
Sweet Smell of Success. Some of you might have heard of this
picture - one of the most daring, startling, savage ever made
about show business and power in this country. “I cannot rec¬
ommend the film for student study on aesthetic grounds,” writes
Mackendrick, by way of introducing a section on the screen¬
writing process and the varying contributions of Ernest Lehman
and Clifford Odets to that film. It may sound like false modesty,
since Sweet Smell of Success is now recognized as a milestone in
American movie-making. But for Mackendrick, it was simply
more practice. It takes a lifetime, and even then it shouldn’t feel
like enough. He knew this.
“Process, not product” was his mantra to his students. The
creative process - not the creative method, or the creative sys¬
tem. The process. Which never stops. Even when you’re resting,
letting an idea take root. Mackendrick knew this.
I’m not implying that he was an anti-intellectual Hollywood
pro - all you have to do is leaf through this book, with its ref¬
erences to Ibsen and Sophocles and Beckett and Levi-Strauss, to
dispel that notion. This book takes on everything from Dramatic
Irony to Mental Geography, the relationship between the
director and his actors to the structural soundness of Last Year
at Marienbad. But on almost every page, Mackendrick lets the
reader know that all of it, from the lessons about crossing the
axis and the condensation of screen time to the techniques for
cultivating ideas (“Collecting Data . . . Organizing the Data . . .
Incubating the Material... Preserving the Spark” - sounds right
to me), is worth nothing without practice.
As for the differences between art and entertainment, narra¬
tive and non-narrative film-making, they are simply matters
of taste and temperament. You can only find out through . . .
practice.
This book - this invaluable book - is the work of a lifetime,
from a man who was passionately devoted to his craft and his
art, and who then devoted himself to transferring his knowledge
and his experience to his students. And now it’s available to all
of us. What a gift.
FOREWORD XI
Top: Alexander
Mackendrick (left)
directs Joan
Greenwood (second
from left) and Alec
Guinness (centre) in
The Man in the White
Suit (1951). Courtesy
of The Joel Finler
Collection.
Bottom: Mackendrick
contemplates a
miniature made for
The Maggie (1954).
Courtesy of The Joel
Finler Collection.
Introduction
INTRODUCTION Xlll
1. See Philip Kemp’s legendary and much revered Sweet Smell of Success (1957) in
Lethal Innocence: The Hollywood, followed by Sammy Going South (1963), A High
Cinema of Alexander
Wind in Jamaica (1965) and Don't Make Waves (1967).1
Mackendrick
(Methuen, 1991). For a For students of film, more important than Mackendrick’s nine
history of Ealing features is his excellence as a writer and pedagogue, a role he was
Studios, see Charles
to play until his death in 1993 at the age of eighty-one. Copies of
Barr’s Ealing Studios
(University of his notes remain prized possessions among CalArts graduates
California Press, 1998). who speak of their mentor with veneration. Designed to guide
students through the disciplines Mackendrick called Dramatic
2.The Mackendrick
Construction and Film Grammar (‘the narrative and visual
Legacy’, American Film
(March 1976). devices that have been developed through inventive direction and
performing during cinema’s short history’), the notes are master¬
3. From an unpublished
ful studies of the two primary tasks confronting the film director:
interview at
Mackendrick’s CalArts
how to structure and write the story he wants to tell, and how to
office, 8 March 1990, use those devices particular to the medium of film in order to tell
conducted by John that story as effectively as possible. Devoid of obscurantism, con¬
McDonough, to whom
centrating on the practical and tangible rather than abstract con¬
I am indebted for his
permission to cite from cepts of cinema as ‘art’, they reveal that Mackendrick had the
this conversation. talent not only to make films, but also to articulate with clarity
and insight what that process involved.
The reasons why Mackendrick chose to quit directing and
become a teacher are not difficult to understand. By the late
1960s, as Patricia Goldstone has noted, he ‘found himself spend¬
ing more energy on making deals than on making films’.1
Mackendrick admitted that, after Ealing Studios was sold, ‘I had
a disheartening time in many ways as a freelance director on the
open market, something I was never really suited for.’
xiv
Mackendrick’s widow Hilary remembers that ‘however ambiva¬ 4. See Philip Kemp’s
lent Sandy was to the cosy world of Ealing compared to the life article ‘Mackendrick
Land’, Sight and Sound
of the independent film-maker, he had a regular salary, which
(Winter 1988/89).
relieved him of the pressure of finding income to keep going in
between projects.’ 5. For several weeks in
depression throughout his life, and from childhood had been 6. Charles Champlin,
severely asthmatic, which led to the emphysema that eventually ‘Putting It on Film Key
killed him. Sandy was desperately worried when he wasn’t to New CalArts
Program’, Los Angeles
working and couldn’t see a film in sight, and felt bitter about
Times (31 August
how he’d been treated by the film industry.’ At this time, 1969).
INTRODUCTION XV
8. An early CalArts director, Mackendrick believed CalArts was the place where he
brochure explains that could best channel his energies and indulge his ‘present passion’:
Mackendrick joined
the ‘unanswerable question’ of whether or not film-making
the Institute faculty in
1969, two years prior could be taught, one with which he was to become increasingly
to the arrival of the fascinated. ‘I find myself absolutely riveted to this particular
first students. In those
thing I’m doing now by a strange and unbeatable mixture of
two years he was
‘instrumental in the exasperation and curiosity,’ Mackendrick explained, ‘and I’m
development of the absolutely devoted to finding out how it works.’ Noting that he
Institute’s program in found being associated with his students’ rites of passage ‘very
Film and Video’, and
played a ‘major role in
touching’, he explained that during his first years at CalArts he
the overall design of the wasn’t in the least scared of learning how to teach, ‘because I
Institute’. To this day think that is essentially what a film director does most of the
the School of Film and
time.’
Video is run on the
structural lines that Michael Pressman, now a producer and director, was in
Mackendrick laid down Mackendrick’s first class at CalArts. ‘Sandy loved teaching, and
nearly thirty-five years
we really could feel how excited he felt about it,’ says Pressman.
ago.
‘He had several careers: illustrator and cartoonist, graphic artist,
screenwriter, then a director, and then a teacher. He had walked
away from the film industry, and there were many people in the
business who couldn’t understand why. I was twenty years old
and I certainly couldn’t understand it. Today, after twenty-five
years in the business, it makes sense to me: Sandy just wasn’t
interested in the machinations of Hollywood. CalArts was the
perfect environment for him, a place where he could give students
the invaluable benefit of his knowledge.’ Hilary Mackendrick
says that ‘it was as a teacher that Sandy found his true metier,
and I suspect his remarkable critical faculties were more appro¬
priate to teaching than to film-making. I know his last ten years
at CalArts were his most fulfilling.’
Regarded by many as one of America’s most progressive
schools of higher education, the California Institute of the Arts,
as its current brochure notes, ‘was incorporated in 1961 as the
first degree-granting institution of higher learning in the United
States created specifically for students of both the visual and the
performing arts. The Institute was established through the vision
and generosity of Walt and Roy Disney and the merger of two well-
established professional schools, the Los Angeles Conservatory
of Music, founded in 1883, and the Chouinard Art Institute,
founded in 1921.’8 Under Disney’s guidance, degree programs in
xvi
dance, theatre, design, critical studies and film/video (including 9. The ‘Film Graphics’
the influential experimental animation course9) were added to program, headed
by Jules Engel, was
those in art and music. Richard Schickel has written that for
born out of the Disney
Walt Disney, CalArts was ‘on a grand scale, his own dream of an studio’s desire to
artist’s utopia reconstituted; it was the old studio art classes establish a source of
animators to fit their
grown up. A good deal of Disney’s estate went to this, his last
needs. It soon became
monument, which he saw as a place where all the arts might clear that Engel’s students
mingle and stimulate one another.’10 were not being sufficiendy
geared toward
Established ‘with the dream of starting a tradition of academic
commercial animation,
unorthodoxy’,11 CalArts has always viewed the ‘industrialisation’ whereupon the ‘Character
of the arts with a healthy disregard. Though it has fed Hollywood Animation’ department
its best and brightest students from its inception, the Institute (from where some of
CalArts’ greatest film
was originally conceived as ‘a facility in which students could
successes have emerged,
make films as an artist paints pictures, a creative setting neither including directors
vocational nor academic.’12 Jack Valero, one of Mackendrick’s Tim Burton and John
Lasseter) was established.
first teaching assistants in the early 1970s, remembers that
CalArts ‘was a very experimental place, a kind of bohemian 10. Richard Schickel,
paradise where the key word was “interdisciplinary”. There were The Disney Version
(Discus, 1968), p. 306.
never “teachers” and “students” at CalArts, only artists with
varying degrees of experience. Though every film school has its 11. ‘Putting It on Film
own character, being situated just outside Los Angeles and not Key to New CalArts
Program’.
right in the belly of the beast has always given CalArts more free¬
dom to experiment than other schools, for example USC and 12. ‘The Mackendrick
UCLA.’ As Mackendrick explained, Hollywood studios ‘don’t Legacy’.
dare, can’t afford, to try new things. We can.’13
13. ‘Putting It on Film
Key to New CalArts
This is a group of schools of ‘Art’. Art-with-a-capital-A. From the Program’.
beginning we declared that we were not a trade school: we did not
aim to provide the kind of training directed at preparing students for
employment in the industry. By industry, of course, we mean the
movie business that, in capitalist America (whether or not we like to
face the fact), is a profit-motivated enterprise designed to produce a
consumer product for a mass market. In general, the teachers at this
institute are not in favour of commercialism. Most, if not all of the pro¬
grams, encourage students to regard the work that they do as self-
expression.
Examine the word. Expression, in the sense of externalising con¬
cepts, and self in the sense of feelings and thoughts that are individual.
The self-expressing ‘Artist-with-a-capital-A’ is intent on producing
INTRODUCTION XVII
14- ‘Putting It on Film work that presents an image of his or her feelings, thoughts, intu¬
Key to New CalArts itions, and then makes that work publicly available.
Program’.
‘There’s something obsessional, compulsive about wanting to
15. Independent
make films and we should go with it, not discipline it,’ said
(8 March 1991).
Mackendrick in 1969.14 As such, rather than working to ‘com¬
16. ‘The Art of the mercial standards’, something they would probably end up
Film’ (BBC Radio,
spending their entire working lives doing if they chose to enter
June/July 1955).
the film industry, Mackendrick urged students to toil over their
‘own personal projection’ of who they were.
Nevertheless, although CalArts concentrated on ‘what’s called
independent film-making, as distinct from movie directing’,15
Mackendrick was reluctant to speak of cinema as an ‘art’, sug¬
gesting that unlike the film director and his multitude of col¬
leagues, ‘the true artist works alone’.
xviii
training. He was anxious to spell out to CalArts students - 17. ‘A Film Director
many of whom prided themselves on being ‘artists’ yet dreamt of and His Public’, The
Listener (23 September
gainful studio employment as Hollywood ‘professionals’ upon
1954)-
graduation - that there were very definite skills they needed in
order to become efficient storytellers within that system, or
indeed any area of film production.
One would not banish pianos from a music school on the grounds
that an ability to play is merely a technical skill. We expect you to be
able to read a light meter, focus a lens and use an editing machine,
because these instruments of the craft are inseparable from the prac¬
tice of the ‘art’ of the film-maker.
INTRODUCTION XIX
Opposite: to what the Institute strove to be: an arena for complete freedom
Mackendrick teaching of self-expression, an experimental laboratory devoid of any
classes at CalArts
commercial considerations for the industry. Mackendrick was
aware of the appeal of experimental storytelling and actively
encouraged students to follow such paths by ensuring there was
a wide spectrum of teachers at the film school. Don Levy and
Nam June Paik taught avant-garde film, Jules Engel tutored stu¬
dents of experimental animation, and Terry Sanders and Kris
Malkiewicz instructed those interested in documentaries. But he
nevertheless felt that many of the methods of the avant-garde
were at best controversial, at worst an evasion of students’ real
tasks as film-makers. ‘Sandy constantly pushed students to ask
themselves exactly what it was they wanted to be avant of,’ says
Lou Florimonte, who taught at CalArts with Mackendrick for
%
many years.
If they didn’t have a grasp of how story structure and film functioned at
the most rudimentary level, just what was it they were experimenting
with? Sandy believed there were certain ‘rules' that serve as the
bedrock of narrative storytelling, a good knowledge of which would
help students master their craft. But he encountered many students
over the years who felt that stories needed to have something of a
magical and unknowable element to them and who were resistant to
the way he reduced narratives to their nuts and bolts. Consequently,
Sandy's ideas were seen by some as being old-fashioned, unadven¬
turous, and rather commercially orientated, a perception that came
from his emphasis on discipline and structure.
Art schools often attract the kind of people who are resistant to learn¬
ing certain things. Sandy was the one person at CalArts who said to
students, ‘By coming here and ignoring those things, you are missing
out on things you need to know about.’ Though he liked to explore the
work of so-called ‘experimental’ film-makers, Sandy represented the
old guard and believed there were certain skills that storytellers
needed to acquire before flushing their psyches out through their art.
Because he could be resistant to people who wanted to make some
kind of passionate mess before they could render even the most
xx
18. Scope: ‘Alexander basic shapes, Sandy was sometimes in conflict with students who
Mackendrick’, BBC TV thought he was blocking their personal expression.
(1975)-
Mackendrick, driven by his acute understanding of the grim
realities of life in the film industry, felt he was doing no such
thing. Wanting to equip students with the most functional and
adaptable collection of tools as possible before sending them out
into the world of work, the key to his approach was simple: to
train students ‘so they can cope with anything that might hap¬
pen’.18 With the rudiments of film grammar applicable to all
forms of cinema, Mackendrick believed that pushing students to
familiarise themselves with the concepts he discussed in class
would help them express themselves with maximum clarity in
whatever realm they chose to work in.
After nearly ten years as Dean, Mackendrick resigned to con¬
centrate solely on his teaching at CalArts where he was, by all
accounts, a hard taskmaster. ‘Sandy’s ideas were quite advanced
for some students, and it’s perhaps fair to say he wasn’t a natural
teacher for beginners,’ says film historian Philip Kemp. ‘In the
classroom, where he wielded impressive authority, his way of
teaching was to be very tough, on the grounds that if students
were talented and motivated - if they had a genuine need to make
films - they would get through regardless.’ But though he had a
certain aggressiveness and intellectual arrogance about him,
Mackendrick elicited fierce loyalty and respect from his proteges,
who fought to study with him. ‘Sandy wasn’t intimidated by any¬
one, yet could be very intimidating himself,’ says Lou Florimonte.
It was difficult to relax when you were with Sandy as he was con¬
stantly turning things upside down in a challenging and provocative
way. He never set out to offend; he just wanted to keep things alive,
and as a teacher was extremely mischievous and unpredictable in a
very creative way. For Sandy, good was never good enough, and he
would accept a student’s deficiencies only after every effort had been
exhausted - long sessions of guiding, illustrating, arguing, pleading
and threatening. His real gift was being able to see with incredible
clarity the work that was presented to him, and one simple comment
to a student often meant his ideas would fall into shape. If a student
did finally get Sandy's approval, he knew he had a project ready to
take out into the world.
xxii
Mackendrick had various methods of pushing students in the
right direction. One of the most rudimentary was repetition, an
important cornerstone of his system of instruction. Many stu¬
dents recall his aphorism ‘Process, not product’ and belief in
what he called ‘repetition directing’, the practice of small throw¬
away exercises that would place students on the steep learning
curve that a mastery of film-making requires. Another, tied to
the idea that student films were either ‘too long’ or ‘much too
long’, was to place an egg-timer on his desk just as a student was
about to tell his story in class. A third was based on the series of
cards on the walls around his office, upon which were written
various principles. David Brisbin, a former student and now a
production designer, explains that
INTRODUCTION xxiii
accord. One of the things I find most frequently missing in students as
they arrive at CalArts is not imagination itself, rather the knack of
making a disciplined effort in the development of fertile invention.
Intelligent and critical students are all too apt to use ‘thinking’ as a
substitute for the much harder work of ‘imagining’ at the intuitive,
emotional and sensory levels. People who talk about things instead of
doing them tend to use analysis as a substitute for creativity. But a
statement about the kind of effect you want to achieve is never a sub¬
stitute for the often exhausting labours that must go into actually cre¬
ating that effect. Work is the only real training.
The next day he would hand me seven pages of notes and drawings
about it. As a lazy seventeen-year-old who had cobbled together
those few pages the night before my meeting with him, I was amazed
at what Sandy was willing to do as a teacher. He worked so hard for
us, much harder than we deserved. He was never a nine-to-five
teacher, and we never felt when he closed his office door behind him
in the evenings that he had left his ideas and students behind. His
response to our work was so incredibly un-lazy and passionate, and
there was always a kind of warning bell that I heard whenever I was
with him. To me it rang: ‘I am the writer and director of films you are
still watching thirty years after I made them. The determination and
commitment I have shown is something you will need if you are to sur¬
vive in the world I have left behind.' In retrospect, I have come to
understand that within those seven pages that pulled apart and ulti¬
mately annihilated my work, Sandy’s lesson was that in order to make
something good, real diligence is needed.
I’ve never met anyone who has as universal and as integrated an under¬
standing of how you get a written story onto the cinema screen as
Sandy did. The highest praise I can give him is that he showed us how
xxiv
superficially we looked at cinema. Through my understanding of his
handouts I can intuitively articulate what it is about a film that excites me
and - crucially - what is lacking in a bad film. What made Sandy unique
was his emphasis on craft and his avoidance of talking about ‘art’ in
abstractions and generalities. He was an instinctive systems builder,
combining the soul of an artist with the expertise of an engineer, and with
a true renaissance man’s sense of detail displayed a profound and sys¬
tematic understanding of cinema’s complex weights and measures.
Sandy could look at any apparatus and break it down into its component
pieces, and taught that by peeling back the layers and carefully studying
something, whether it be an image, a story, a vaudeville act or a joke, it
was possible to unlock the mechanisms that made it work, and just as
importantly be able to express what it might be lacking.
INTRODUCTION XXV
19. See Lance Lee’s the Watergate scandal, and raises pertinent questions about the
A Poetics for nature of non-fiction film-making. F. X. Feeney recalls that ‘the
Screenwriters handout was Sandy’s way of getting us to understand that all
(University of Texas
Press, zooi), Michael
forms of television and cinema should be looked at in terms of
Tierno’s Aristotle's film grammar. It was apparent to him that there was someone
Poetics for structuring the narrative of the Watergate broadcasts, just as
Screenwriters:
there is behind the most elementary piece of news reportage,
Storytelling Secrets
from the Greatest Mind political propaganda or educational film.’ But ‘The Watergate
in Western Civilization Hearings’, like other texts absent from this book, seems to be
(Hyperion, zooz), and
very much an adjunct to classroom discussions and screenings,
Ari Hiltunen’s Aristotle
in Hollywood: Visual and lacks the energy of Mackendrick’s writings included in this
Stories That Work collection.
(Intellect Books, zooz).
Several handouts dealing with dramatic construction have
also been excluded, for example ‘From Book to Screen: The
Third Man’ that compares Graham Greene’s novella with the
screenplay he wrote for Carol Reed’s 1949 film, and another
that reproduces a particular chapter of John Steinbeck’s novel
The Grapes of Wrath alongside the relevant dialogue from John
Ford’s 1940 film version. One of Mackendrick’s most memo¬
rable exercises was created when he took the set of storyboards
he had drawn of Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane - a film told in a
series of flashbacks - and re-edited them so they ran in chrono¬
logical order. (‘Needless to say,’ wrote Mackendrick, ‘it isn’t as
good, since what has been thrown away is the central thematic
idea: the exploration of why the man was the kind of man he
was.’) And though his lengthy handout on Aristotle’s Poetics -
primarily made up of excerpts from the Greek classic with short
commentary interspersed - is also missing from this collection,
Mackendrick repeatedly urged students to read the work.19
Several handouts not reprinted in full are quoted from in this
introduction, which also contains interviews with former stu¬
dents and colleagues, as well as extracts from Mackendrick’s
unpublished (and always undated) notebooks.
In Mackendrick’s archive there is a large collection of his Step
Outlines and storyboards (often with accompanying dialogue)
of scenes from various films. In the days before video and DVD
players, these pages must have been treasure-troves for students.
But today, however masterful a draftsman Mackendrick was,
they seem poor substitutes for the films themselves, titles that
xxvi
include The Asphalt Jungle, Casablanca, The Life of an American zo. Homo Ludens:
Fireman, On the Waterfront (opening murder, Johnny Friendly’s A Study of the
Play-Element in
backroom, taxi cab), Touch of Evil (dynamite in shoe box),
Culture (Beacon
Intolerance, Shadow of a Doubt (various sequences, it being a Press, 1955; first
film Mackendrick frequently used in class), Le jour se leve, La published in German
in 1944).
grande illusion, The Hustler, ST2. (Guido’s first appearance at
the spa) and North by Northwest (crop-dusting). Two of zi. Touchstone Books,
Mackendrick’s favourite examples were the final scene from 197Z.
Chaplin’s City Lights and the 1957 Western 3:10 to Yuma, a film
zz. Impro (Methuen,
that in Mackendrick’s mind was constructed with ‘simplicity
1981). See also Impro
and economy’, full of ‘formulaic and archetypical’ characters for Storytellers (Faber
whose dialogue ‘has an immediate purpose and effect’. and Faber, 1999).
INTRODUCTION XXV11
Z5- See Richard L.
(Mackendrick told students that ‘if you have ambitions to prac¬
Gregory’s Eye and tise comedy, you won’t learn a lot from books.’) In a summing
Brain: The Psychology up for their final class, Mackendrick wrote to students:
of Seeing (Oxford, first
published in 1966, now
in its fifth edition). What is it I have been trying to demonstrate for you as we have been
vivisecting all these stories - stories as varied as prehistoric myths,
ancient epic tales of gods and heroes, classic works of the theatre,
folk stories, fairy tales and even anecdotes, and finally as commercial
mass entertainment? It’s this: they all seem to share a similar
anatomy. Though wildly different in their content, they are curiously
alike in structure.
xxviii
Gregory’s point is that even our everyday perception of reality is in a z6. ‘Do Make Waves:
sense illusory. Film/video language is a system of visual and aural sig¬ Alexander
Mackendrick
nals conveying meaning and structure to the mind, not the eye. The
Interviewed by Kate
mechanism of the eye (not only the camera-like aspects of the physi¬ Buford’, Film Comment
cal eye itself, but the nerve-chemistry of rods and cones in the retina) (May-June 1994).
supplies information that passes along the optic nerve to the cortex
where the signal is decoded and interpreted. This is a complex
process, but what is important for the film director to understand is
that the brain (the mind’s eye and ear) is active. The eyes may do
some of the decoding, but it is the brain that reads the visual and oral
information, sometimes relying on information from both, as well as
calling on stored memory, to find meaning. In short, perception is not
a passive activity: it involves making a decision about the sensory
data that is supplied.
INTRODUCTION xxix
zj. AFI Workshop.
I am nothing but the centripetal force that holds these interpretations
together. I may privately think I did it all, but in fact I’m kidding myself,
z8. ‘As I See It with because the director is merely the channel of other people's talents.27
Alexander
Mackendrick’, Film One of Mackendrick’s most ardent beliefs about the collabo¬
Teacher (Spring 1953).
rative nature of film-making - and a critical link between the
two sections of this book - was the importance of writer and
director working together in order to bring their visions to the
screen within the same film. As far as Mackendrick was con¬
cerned, the technical concerns of film grammar were never to be
explored independently of story, while at the same time any
competent piece of cinematic storytelling was an inevitable
example of how ‘form can never be entirely distinguished from
content’. Mackendrick was keen to emphasise that everything in
a film should be at the service of the narrative, whether it was
lighting (‘What mood and emotional tone can be established
through the use of light and shadow?’), editing (‘If I cut here,
what will be revealed to the audience, what will be left out, and
how will this help tell the story?’), framing and shot size (‘If I use
a close-up here rather than a long shot, what am I asking the
audience to think about?’), camera movement (‘If I move the
camera, from whose point of view will the audience be experi¬
encing the action?’), or acting (‘How can I use this prop to con¬
vey a particular story beat to the audience without saying
anything?’). ‘Every bit of a film’, wrote Mackendrick, ‘ought to
be a necessary part of the whole effect.’iS Simply, the wide array
of concepts articulated in the two sections of this book were
always intended to reinforce each another.
By plotting, in two intricate handouts, the precise physical
moves of characters in various scenes from Orson Welles’s
Touch of Evil and Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront, by alerting
students to the camera rftoves and shot sizes used to reinforce
thematic content, by demonstrating how the characters interact
with each other and with on-set props, Mackendrick was able to
show just how unified his notes on Film Grammar, Dramatic
Construction and acting are. ‘How does one go about planning
the camera angles and moves, the staging of the actors, and the
decision when to cut away from one shot to another?’ he asked
in a handout.
xxx
It must start with the story, needless to say. When working with a text, 2.9. For those who
the first thing a director must do is break the scene down into moves. think the publishing
industry’s slew of
This doesn't mean physical moves, rather the dramatic beats that
didactic texts on
mark the intentions of the characters, the steps of story progression, dramatic structure
all of which are only later gradually translated into the staging of the (today most evidently
actors. What students must do is think first from the point of view of applied to screenplays)
is a new phenomenon,
the performer and only then consider what things look like through
the i960 Dover edition
the viewfinder. of William Archer’s
Play-Making contains a
There exist several practical guides to film production, and short bibliographical
many volumes that purport to teach the craft of writing for the essay by John Gassner
entitled ‘Books on
cinema.19 While preparing this collection I read a good number
Playwriting’. Though it
of these texts, something that enabled me to understand what makes ‘no attempt to
makes Mackendrick’s book so distinctive. be inclusive’, thirty-five
books published
First, unlike most books on the subject, On Film-making is
between 1890 and
written by a bona fide film-maker, a man whose cinematic 1958 are cited.
achievements are recognised more than thirty-five years after he
directed his final film. Moreover, his insights as a teacher come
not only from his years of practical experience, his time spent as
a professional writer and director in Fiollywood and elsewhere
(Mackendrick was nearly sixty years of age when he taught his
first class), but also from his subsequent twenty-year study of
how film-making might best be taught.
Second, Mackendrick is a lucid, vibrant and invigorating
writer. Compared with the overwhelmingly shallow and self-
serving prose of the more than three dozen authors I consulted
(primarily those claiming to know the secrets of dramatic con¬
struction), this volume has genuine literary qualities. It also,
thankfully, eschews the ‘Believe in Yourself’ and ‘Maximise
Your Creative Powers’ approach taken by so many ‘how-to-
write’ books.
Third, most crucially, Mackendrick’s belief in the exploitation
of cinema’s unique qualities as a storytelling medium is some¬
thing other books on screenplay writing largely ignore. So
enthralled by their apparent understanding of how a well-written
film script is structured, these authors either totally disregard or
breeze perfunctorily over the inextricable links between the
work of the screenwriter and the film director. But as Mackendrick
explains in the following pages, a writer’s ability to do his job is
INTRODUCTION XXXI
30. David Mamet, On severely curtailed if he has only a superficial knowledge of
Directing Film how cinema functions as a medium. Most other books explain
(Faber and Faber), that dialogue should be kept to a minimum (the old adage
1991, p. 71.
‘show, don’t tell’ is ubiquitous), while the subtly distinct idea
that words be used merely as ‘the sprinkles on top of the
ice-cream cone’30 is relatively unexplored. A good example of
Mackendrick’s characteristic approach is his discussion of ‘sub¬
text’, a crucial component of any film story. In most of the books
I consulted, subtext seems to be confused with ‘subplot’ and is
explored explicitly from the writer’s or actor’s point of view.
Though in the theatre it is the actor’s job to render even banal
dialogue meaningful (with - as Mackendrick would call it -
different ‘colours’), with cinema it is the competent director who
will use the fundaments of film grammar to turn script pages
into effective cinematic sequences. By not taking into account
what the camera, lighting and editing machine are able to con¬
vey to the audience - regardless of what is being said by the
actors - other authors explore only half the story. In fact, most
other volumes scarcely touch upon the concept of visual story¬
telling at all, and when they do they often make what
Mackendrick would have considered a fundamental error. For
many, a film that contains beautiful cinematography and
imagery is ‘visual’. But to Mackendrick such works were merely
pictorial. A truly visual film, he explained, is one that exploits
the medium of cinema to the fullest extent by telling its story pri¬
marily with shot-to-shot images.
This volume is not the final word on the craft of film-making,
merely one man’s carefully considered thoughts on the subject.
Much of what follows may be seen by some readers as repre¬
senting an extreme point of view. But this is probably the point,
for Mackendrick was aware that students would pick and
choose from his ideas, inevitably combining them with other
teachings, as well as their own notions of what cinema is.
Always keen that film-makers steer clear of books about cinema
(‘talking about film is something of a contradiction in terms: it is
already in the wrong medium’) and reluctant to edit his own
writings into a coherent text for publication, Mackendrick was
anxious that students concentrate on the practical applications
of his classroom teachings.
xxxii
One of the ideas that pervaded CalArts from day one was that
of ‘No information in advance of need.’ As far as Mackendrick
would have been concerned, this book (which is full of informa¬
tion) is perhaps best appreciated by those neophytes who have
already experienced their own practical difficulties in writing
and directing for the screen. But even for those people who feel
the need - erroneously, Mackendrick would have insisted - to
read a book or two before they pick up their equipment and
start experimenting, it is safe to say that these notes contain
much that film-makers and artists might dwell on. Cameras and
editing systems are, to paraphrase Jean Cocteau, as accessible
and affordable to today’s directors as pen and paper are to the
novelist. Consequently, once Mackendrick’s writings on cinema
and storytelling have been absorbed and digested, there can be
no excuses for not putting this book down and pushing forward
with your projects. It is here that the ideas will cohere, the mis¬
takes will be made, and the real work done.
Mackendrick rewrote his most important notes every year to
make them as clear as possible, and because of this there are
sometimes three or four different versions of a single handout.
My own work involved selecting for this collection from notes,
interview transcripts, notebook entries and drawings contained
in the many filing-cabinet drawers of material in Mackendrick’s
archive. Inevitably this means that the texts presented here have
been assembled from a variety of different sources. I am appre¬
ciative of the assistance given by former students and col¬
leagues of Sandy Mackendrick in the preparation of this mass of
paperwork: Thom Andersen, Martha Baxton, John Brice, David
Brisbin, Doug Campbell, Roger Crittenden, Terence Davies,
Myron Emery, the late Jules Engel, Gill Dennis, F. X. Feeney,
Lou Florimonte, John Gianvito, Ed Harris, Mark Jonathan
Harris, Mamoun Hassan, John Hawk, David Irving, Bill
Jackson, Richard Jefferies, Rachelle Katz, Kris Malkiewicz,
James Mangold, Chris Meeks, Francisco Menendez, Thom
Mount, Michael Pressman, Terry Sanders, Conny Templeman,
Antonio Tibaldi, Andrew Tsao, Jack Valero and Colin Young.
Thanks to Denis Cannan, Bernard Gribble, Ronald Harwood,
Philip Kemp, Douglas Slocombe and David Thompson, and Dr
Howard Gotlieb and Sean Noel of Special Collections at Boston
INTRODUCTION XXXlil
University (home of the Alexander Mackendrick Collection).
Thanks also to Richard Kelly and Walter Donohue at Faber and
Faber for their guidance, Marcel Fitzmaurice and Jeremy Freeson
for their counsel, Lesley Shaw for her support, and especially
Hilary Mackendrick for her trust and generosity.
Paul Cronin
London, July 2003
xxxiv
Prologue
PROLOGUE xxxv
a complicated sequence of mechanical processes, always involv¬
ing a number of technicians who make important contributions.
But it must finally end as it began: a response in the mind of
a single viewer. Initially and in the eventual effect, the thing
is intangible, existing only in the realm of imagination. It is an
illusion.
At this early stage, let me explain that it is somewhat mislead¬
ing to call one of the classes I teach ‘Film Grammar’. The word
‘grammar’ suggests there is some kind of language of cinema,
when it is probably more useful to consider the basic ideas in
these notes as nothing more than a series of visual conventions
based on the contract that exists between film-maker and audi¬
ence. The trouble is I have not found another name that is as
simple yet accurate enough. (The semiotics professors use terms
like ‘syntactic articulations’ to describe the way shots and cam¬
era angles can be organised to represent a coherent, though
imaginary, space/time continuum, but it’s rather a mouthful.)
The key to the Film Grammar class is the common-sense
notion that if we are living in the era in which children - before
they can spell or read - are exposed to the moving-picture image
on television, then what we should be doing is teaching people
about the images they are reading and instruct them how to
speak back in this visual language that is the literacy of today. In
short, it is important that citizens become consciously aware of
cinema’s conditioning influences. It is not, however, enough to
be merely receptive to its codes of communication. To be literate
in a medium is to be able to write as well as read. To know how
film and video communicate (and, in turn, manipulate), one
should also be able to speak the ‘language’ and have some idea
of how a film is made. The only true way to reach such an under¬
standing is, of course, through practice.
But before the student film-maker runs out and starts making
films, he should make a detailed analysis of particular examples
of stories told through the cinematic medium. Exposure to such
dramatic structures will help the young director explore the vari¬
ety of options he himself might choose to use, according to his
own needs, as he tackles new problems and explores his own
inevitably individual approach to film-making. This is some¬
thing we will undertake in class with the use of these notes and
xxxvi
prints of specific films. But it is also something you should do at
home as you sit watching any film, whether good or bad. The
medium of cinema communicates fast - we ‘read’ it at consider¬
able speed. This is why one of the best ways to learn about film
grammar is first by watching a film at regular speed so as to take
in the initial rush of dramatic emotions, then by studying it
slowly. By stopping and starting you will be able to analyse the
dynamics of image-to-image, shot-to-shot and scene-to-scene in
more depth. Your involvement in the story will soon drop away,
revealing those individual structural elements that, when pieced
together, create the narrative.
Now to the question so often asked about film-making: is it a
craft that can be taught? Absolutely not, no more than anything
else that is an ‘art’ can be taught. On the other hand, it may just
be possible to call to the attention of the beginner the usages of
the ‘language’ of cinema that have so far developed (and con¬
tinue to evolve). The best thing I can do as a teacher is to provide
an environment within which those who have imagination and
sensibility (and the essential energy, concentration and self-
discipline) can learn, teaching themselves. Remember: no ‘rule’
is worth anything until you have discovered it afresh for your¬
self. Originality consists in taking existing conventions, studying
how they govern the medium, and finding utterly new ways to
use them. There are no concrete formulas available to the
film-maker, or at least none that should not be immediately
abandoned if another arises that suits the circumstances. Indeed,
it may be fair to say that you will not understand the value of the
traditional use of convention until you have experimented with
ways in which it can be effectively disregarded. The value of any
‘rule’ is not apparent until you have studied the exception to it.
Just as Picasso demonstrated his complete command of figu¬
rative and illusionist painting before he went on to reinvent the
language of visual art, so it is that the artist or craftsman, with
each new innovation he instigates, should begin by ensuring he
has complete command over all the so-called principles he then
subverts. (After all, a demolition expert has to understand every
principle of architecture before he can do his job.) Your only
mistake, as you work in this medium of communication, is to
produce in your audience an effect you didn’t intend, or fail to
PROLOGUE XXXV11
i. Lev Kuleshov produce the effect you did. If a film works it is never simply
(1898-1970, Russia) because it followed the rules. If it fails, however, it is almost cer¬
was a theorist, teacher
tainly that the breaking of one or more rule is the root cause.
and film-maker who
played an important
So just how is the knack of film-directing acquired? Allow me
role in the development to make two general points at this juncture. First, it has been
of montage theory, and said that the director is like the orchestra conductor, a maestro
is perhaps best known
who must be able to play every instrument competently.
today for the so-called
‘Kuleshov Experiment’ Unlikely as it is that you will ever discover real ability in all three
(see Pudovkin’s Film fields of directing, writing and acting, I believe you will not be
Technique, George
even competent in any single one without a basic comprehension
Newnes, 1935, p. 140).
of the other two. Second, it is important to understand that
every art form has evolved different histories, conventions and
traditions, clearly identifiable aesthetics, values and procedures.
Russian film theorist Lev Kuleshov wrote, ‘That which is a “work
of art” before it is photographed and recorded will not be a work
of art when it is put on the screen.’1 From this we can conclude
that when students choose to film, for example, a dance per¬
formance, though the result may be a record of a fine piece of
dancing, it will most probably be unsatisfactory when presented
as a substitute for the experience of the live and present dancers’
performance. And it will also probably be dull as film or video,
for it makes no real use of the unique qualities film has to offer.
As a student of cinema, it is the particular characteristics of the
medium you have chosen to work in that you should consider at
every stage of the process.
There are also three practical suggestions I can give. The first
is intimately related to Kuleshov’s ideas. I am often confronted
by students who, when practising shooting set-ups, want to use
theatre scripts by established writers rather than their own orig¬
inal screenplays. This can be good practice for beginners as it
means concentrating solely 'on exploring the possibilities of film
grammar as you use the camera and editing bench. The potential
problem in working on a more original piece of writing is that if
the resulting film is unsatisfactory, you won’t know whether it
was your understanding of the grammar (your direction of the
film) that was at fault, or whether the writing was inherently
unsatisfactory. By saving up for an ambitious project, by delay¬
ing your production experience until you have your own dra¬
matic ideas to work with, you are robbing yourself of a valuable
xxxviii
learning experience. Get some experience of directing from
existing (and trusted) script material before you try to direct
something you’ve written yourself (though as Kuleshov has sug¬
gested, repeatedly using only existing material - especially the¬
atre scripts reliant on the spoken word - is plainly not a good
idea).
Second, work for an experienced director, doing some job
where you are close enough to watch the process. The editor’s
job is traditionally regarded as the best experience, the assis¬
tant’s job is a close second, as you will get a chance to keep
watching how the other guy does it, what his problems are, and
how much better you will do it when you get your break.
Third, write. By planning on your own, then rewriting over
and over, even if this is the part of the process you find most dif¬
ficult (even intolerable), you will learn an incalculable amount.
Having established that teaching the rules of film-making is
not possible, I will now, with the help of these notes, attempt to
do just that. What this really means is that I will explain to you
as best I can my own method of film-making, the one that suits
me. If I bully you into trying things my way, it is not because
mine is the only way, or even the best way. Certainly it will prob¬
ably, in the end, not be your way. But I suggest you make a real
effort to follow my formulas as a temporary exercise. Not to
‘express yourself’. Not yet. You can do that as much as you like,
later. So put aside your hunger for instant gratification and cre¬
ativity, at least for long enough to understand some basic ideas
and practical pieces of advice that you are perfectly entitled to
discard later.
Anybody who wants out please say so now.
PROLOGUE XXXIX
.
'
■
PART ONE
Dramatic Construction
The Pre-Verbal Language of Cinema
4 DRAMATIC CONSTRUCTION
so well equipped to explore action and movement, together with 3. Hitchcock, p. 17.
the emotions behind the words (those physical impulses and
reactions that both anticipate speech and are a response to dia¬
logue), it is not so dependent on what is actually being said. As
Truffaut writes in his interview book with Alfred Hitchcock,
‘Whatever is said instead of being shown is lost on the viewer.”
Truffaut’s cardinal ‘rule’ does not mean that a film’s cinematog¬
raphy is the only medium of communication in cinema. He is not
suggesting that speech has no value or that dialogue does not
contribute. But he is pointing out that in cinema, mute action
supplies the most basic information, while verbal information
adds another, secondary dimension.
Though a gift for lively and playable dialogue is perhaps the
skill most likely to assure you of a professional career as a
scriptwriter, the dialogue-driven screenplay is actually a wholly
misguided blueprint for a film. Simply, dialogue is almost always
less effective than visible activity in cinema, and not until the
screenwriter understands that good characterisation can be
made visible through physical behaviour and the riches film
grammar has to offer is he truly writing for the medium. This is
one of the first things the screenwriter needs to understand
before studying the craft of dramatic construction, for it is the
job of the writer, not the director, to decide whether his film
story will be built with images or merely decorated with them.
The film camera and cutting bench, able to manipulate both
space and time so efficiently (just as the novelist can vary point
of view, to say nothing of his ability to describe and explain
internal feelings and thoughts), can do much to express those
things unsaid by the characters. Between internal thought (the
uncensored and unselfconscious impulse) and deliberately deliv¬
ered words there may be some contradiction. What we say inside
our heads is private, and by putting it into words and addressing
it to others we often rationalise and even distort our original
impulses and intentions. The best lines of film dialogue are
sometimes those in which the real meanings lie between the
words, where the spoken lines mask the true and unadulterated
feelings of the speaker.
Such emotions are often visible to the camera, just as they are
to an observant human being, because the spoken words frame
6 DRAMATIC CONSTRUCTION
The senior writers at the film studio in London where I
worked for many years used to delight in collecting examples of
bad dialogue in screenplays. One of their favourites was ‘Look,
Highland cattle!’ This was a quote from a particularly amateur¬
ish travelogue in which a character pointed off-screen, said this
line, and the film cut to guess what? Those three words became
shorthand for a piece of wholly unnecessary and redundant
exposition used when the story was being told perfectly well
solely through visual means. A good director will go out of his
way, often in the editing process when he has both words and
images in front of him, to gradually eliminate all lines that are
not absolutely necessary. In the final film, many pieces of dia¬
logue are apt to become redundant because the on-screen action
is telling the story with more clarity without them. A scene that
on paper might seem to be more effective when full of witty and
clever dialogue can often play far more meaningfully and effec¬
tively through subtle moments of silent interaction between
characters (moments that are, inevitably, not so easy to appreci¬
ate when in script form only).
In fact, cinema can be at its most interesting and forceful when
images play against the literal sense of the dialogue. When what
is spoken by the screen actor acts as counterpoint to what is
being seen by the audience, dialogue is able to express much
more than the literal meaning of the words and so has extra
force. In such cases, the uniqueness of the cinematic medium is
most apparent. Through this sometimes extremely subtle juxta¬
position of words and images, the writer and director are able to
focus attention on the rhythm of a scene s subtext. By doing so,
and by making use of the fact that the camera is able to relate
things to audiences subliminally rather than literally, it is possi¬
ble to tell more than one story at once.
. Consider this simple example from Truffaut, who writes of
the ‘mundane occasions [such] as dinner and cocktail parties, or
of any meeting between casual acquaintances’:
8 DRAMATIC CONSTRUCTION
What Is a Story?
Can we define the nature of what we call a story? What are the i. S. H. Butcher
translation (Dover,
distinguishing characteristics of a story? Is it content or form?
1997), p. 51. Richard
Must a story be a work of fiction? Surely not, since there have Janko’s translation
been documentaries, biographical and historical, that carefully makes this point
most clearly:
represent only factual material but nevertheless have as gripping
‘Impossible [incidents]
a narrative structure as any work of complete invention. Are that are believable
there characteristic elements? Does, for instance, a story, should be preferred to
whether it presents factual reality or imitations of real life, have possible ones that are
unbelievable.’
to be structured in a particular way? And if so, what are the nec¬
essary elements of this structure?
One way to tackle these questions is to explore the origins of the
impulses of storytelling as they are seen in the earliest human civili¬
sations and then echoed in the psychology of infants emerging
into childhood. It has been pointed out that when a child begins to
ask a question like ‘Where do babies come from?’ and the mother
explains about the stork that flies over rooftops, carrying a swad¬
dled bundle that it brings as a present to Mummy and Daddy, this
is a much more acceptable reply than information about the
semen from Daddy that fertilise the ovum inside Mummy. The tale
about the stork (told to a child who has never even seen such a
bird) is believable. He or she can handle it, while the stuff about
fertility is unacceptable because it raises a lot more unanswered
questions. Incomprehensible, it becomes implausible and unbe¬
lievable. Note that this point was made a few hundred years
before Christ by the man who first tried to set down some laws
about drama, Aristotle. He wrote that ‘a poet should prefer prob¬
able impossibilities to improbable possibilities.”
The child, with its limited experience and simplistic compre¬
hension of life, is trying to make coherent sense out of profound
mysteries, and needs any explanations to be satisfying at the
WHAT IS A STORY? 9
2. Claude Levi-Strauss, level of his or her understanding. While the stork story is usable,
The Savage Mind the biological data must wait till the child can cope with it. One
(Oxford, 1972), p. 22.
can argue, therefore, that such a tale - like the myths of prehis¬
toric times - functions as a ‘poetic’ explanation of concepts that
are beyond the limited intellectual capacities of the listeners to
) deal with. This may be how drama began. In his book The
Savage Mind, anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss says that ‘art
lies halfway between scientific knowledge and magical or mysti¬
cal thought.’1
The Greek mind of Homeric days personified all its beliefs.
Science was conceived in parable form, with abstract concepts
symbolised in the semi-human forms of the gods. This is surely
how the imagination of every one of us functions when we are
small children. Indeed, it is the way we dream, for dreams are the
unconscious mind at work and they have their own language.
Psychotherapists will warn you that a figure in a dream should not
always be thought of as a person in the same way that the waking
mind conceives individuals. Dream-figures are more often person¬
ifications of some aspect of the dreamer’s psyche. This could be a
clue to the psychological purpose of all stories. A story that has
fictional characters may be using these figments of the imagina¬
tion or unconscious in order to act out an abstract thought, an
idea, a theme (the underlying dramatic point of the story).
It can be argued that form, in all of the arts, has a mnemonic
purpose. A mnemonic is, in popular terms, a device like a piece
of doggerel verse that helps you remember some information
you might otherwise forget if you could not rattle off the rhyme
without thinking. The scansion and rhymes of poetry, whether
vulgar limericks or Shakespearean blank verse, have this much
in common: they come easily to the lips because the sounds of
the words, their formal qualities, make them easy to recall. In a
way, a story does this too. The pattern of its dramatic unities, an
articulation of connected incidents that function as the plot,
makes it easier to memorise. The contrasts of the characters and
their patterns of antagonism or of affection are the design of a
closed system, the unifying theme of which is, thinking of
Aristotle, ‘unity of action’.
Anthropologists argue that this was one of the original func¬
tions of rites and myths. Primitive magical rituals use rhythmic
10
DRAMATIC CONSTRUCTION
movement, repetitive gesture and musical noise to give sensory
unity and comprehension to some otherwise disturbing and fear¬
some mystery. A myth, it is said, is the verbal equivalent of a rite
that serves the same archaic need: to help the primitive mind
take hold of a mystery. Stories, even in the contemporary con¬
text of mass entertainment, would seem to be successful when
they, too, fulfil such a need, something audiences need not even
be aware of.
WHAT IS A STORY? 11
presented in active terms. This imperative need for positive
action to produce tension towards crisis is not (or not quite) as
necessary in the literary media. It is generally easier for a literary
work than a film to describe non-happenings. A novelist can
write several pages about the motives of a character who, in the
end, decides to take no action. He can explore the characteristics
of his hero and heroine, analyse their feelings past and present,
explain their psychology to readers, and act as historian and
critic as he interprets the influences that contribute to certain
states of mind. A novel or short story can have, in a sense, no
story or dramatic progression, no conflict or crisis. Maybe some
forms of experimental and personal cinema have little need for
dramatic tension, but a narrative fiction film is (more often than
not) something else.
Dramatic tension generally requires an element of conflict.
The nineteenth-century theorists suggested that conflict requires
the presentation of an onstage clash of wills between the hero
and his antagonists. Later critics pointed out that in many cases,
when a story is really rewarding, the tension may be a matter not
of what happens, but how it happens. This is the effect of ten¬
sion arising out of aspects of character rather than plot (which
we can define, rather untidily, as the sequential progression of
incidents with the cause-and-effect connections that have a for¬
ward momentum). For example, the suspense in de Sica’s The
Bicycle Thief is really much less the problem of Ricci’s stolen
bicycle than about his relationship with his son.
With Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex - a play that can be studied as
the first of all whodunnits - we are pretty sure at a very early
stage of the solution to the mystery of Laius’s murder, and are
not surprised to find out that the guilty man is Oedipus himself.
The plot consists in the piecemeal unravelling of a mystery upon
which tension is built. Pieces of information and narrative expo¬
sition are fed to us in very carefully contrived sequences. Piece by
piece, the jigsaw builds the picture of Oedipus’s crime. The thing
to note is that Sophocles was writing of events that Athenian
audiences knew by heart. They knew how it was all going to
turn out. But to think that surprise is not a factor when audi¬
ences are watching or listening to stories they know the ending
of is to misunderstand the very nature of drama. In the case of
12 DRAMATIC CONSTRUCTION
Oedipus, the real surprise (to the extent that there is one) is in
the reaction of Oedipus himself, something the audience looks
forward to no matter how many times it has seen the story told
in previous productions. Any parent who tells bedtime stories to
infants will recognise something similar in the way their child
insists on hearing the exact same story over and over again, as if
each new turn of events were quite unexpected. Indeed, there is
apt to be emotional protest if the narrator takes undue liberty
with the yarn. When finally Oedipus’s reaction is presented to
us, tension is resolved and the story ended.
When characters are presented in a static relationship, dra¬
matic tension is apt to be weak (remember: ‘drama’ means the
‘thing done’). The beginner is apt to think of character in terms
of outward physical appearance, the age, sex, social class or pro¬
fession of the person in the story. But this matters very little in
the sense of the drama. A dramatic character is definable only in
relation to other characters or situations that involve tension. A
dramatic scene is usually one in which something happens: an
incident or an event takes place, the situation between the char¬
acters is different at the end of the scene from what it was at the
beginning. The equilibrium has been altered and there is some
narrative momentum that drives the characters (and us the audi¬
ence) to a new situation in the next scene.
Many successful screenwriters have a gift for duologues, two-
handed scenes that have the vigour of a singles match between
two strong players. There may be one character who is more
important to the story, but the other (even if he or she is acting
as a foil in order to provoke exposition) is kept in play to sustain
the other end of the dramatic tension. An all-too-common weak¬
ness of the inept dramatist is to write a scene between two char¬
acters who are so much in agreement that there is no real conflict
or cause-and-effect dramatic progression. When this happens
the result is apt to be that their positions are quite interchange¬
able, an almost certain indication that the scene will have little
tension. As a great deal of television drama seems to prove,
two-handed scenes can become so much the ping-pong game
of service and return that monotony sets in. Note, however, that
for characters to create dramatic tension, they need not always
e clash. Romeo and Juliet’s balcony scene, for example, is a
WHAT IS A STORY? 13
3. Mackendrick was concordance of wills and yet is certainly dramatic. There is ten¬
impressed by adept use sion not because of any struggle between the characters, but
of the foil in all forms
because the audience understands that the relationship between
of storytelling. He
would hand out to boy and girl is going to lead to some later crisis. The powerful
students a selection suspense in Shakespeare’s story may be absent from the emoting
of cartoons from the
of the boy and girl, but it is very well established in our minds as
pages of The New
Yorker as examples of we watch the scene.
how to tell stories Students often exclaim they are uninterested in on-screen con¬
purely in images, and in flict, that the most interesting kind of tension is internal, within
particular commended
Charles Addams’s use
the mind of the hero. Why, they ask, is it necessary to have an
of ‘the foil, the figure antagonist at all? The answer is that a state of mind is something
which has been added static. In terms of the camera it is passive, dramatically inopera¬
to the scene as the
tive and not easy to dramatise in active cinematic terms. When
straight man to the
comic absurdity’. on-screen characters are frustrated, bored or alienated, the situ¬
ation is not yet dramatic. A bored character becomes dramati¬
cally interesting only in the context of the possibility of some
escape from his frustration, when his state of mind becomes a
catalyst for positive story action. For example, when contrasted
with active characters or placed in certain situations, an inactive
character is liable to create certain tensions. Simply, if your pro¬
tagonist is passive it may be necessary to create strongly aggres¬
sive antagonists or antagonistic circumstances.
The most effective way of doing this is to think of the antago¬
nist as a foil character, a figure who - like the audience - is igno¬
rant of essential information and therefore asks the questions to
which the audience needs to know the answer.3 These characters
are confidants or interlocutors created especially for the purpose
of contrasting with other on-screen personalities in order to
reveal certain things to the audience (for example Horatio in
Hamlet and the Fool in King Lear). In many examples they
externalise the conflicts of the hero, bringing them out into the
open, thus creating active on-screen situations. A good example
is in Oedipus Rex where Creon is antagonist to Oedipus. If you
consider that Oedipus’s real battle is not with his brother-in-law
but with the Gods who punish him (somewhat unfairly) for
crimes committed in ignorance, then Creon is simply a dramatic
foil. In the Western High Noon, the sheriff’s crisis of confidence
is externalised not through an antagonist but through his newly
married Quaker wife.
i4 DRAMATIC CONSTRUCTION
It is sometimes necessary to create dramatic situations that 4. Constantin
counteract a character’s inaction. How, for example, do you Stanislavsky
(1863-1938), Russian
show a man torn between the natural instinct to run away from
theatre director and
his responsibility and his reluctant sense of duty? In High Noon theorist, founder of the
the sheriff bolts from town and then discovers he simply has to Moscow Art Theatre.
WHAT IS A STORY? 15
brown markings as it poses on a Navaho rug of intricate design?
Or is it a black tabby squatting on a rubber doormat? Words,
whether spoken or printed, can communicate relatively abstract
and intellectual generalisations. Not so cinema, for though a pic¬
ture is (so it’s said) worth a thousand words, photography cannot
help but communicate to the mind’s eye a great quantity of very
specific data about precisely how things look and move.
What we might call interpretations and editorial comment
should also be viewed with suspicion by the screenwriter.
Drama, historians tell us, probably originated from ceremonies
that centred on choral recitations of narratives about the Gods.
As the first Greek playwrights devised the earliest patterns of
dramatic presentations, the choral commentary became a stan¬
dard device. Within a few centuries the function of the chorus
was progressively diminished in favour of exposition through
interaction and explanations by characters within the story, until
nowadays dramatic exposition has come to mean essentially all
explanation made through dialogue.
A novelist might not use the first-person pronoun ‘I’ but will
still allow himself total liberty to describe to his readers all man¬
ner of things that belong only to his imagination and not neces¬
sarily the characters in his story. By describing the internal
feelings and thoughts of a character, the novelist becomes omnis¬
cient, with an all-seeing godlike mind that can look into the
souls of men and interpret them for the benefit of the reader. But
the film and theatre writer - regardless of how often his creative-
writing teacher encouraged him to express his ideas, thoughts
and feelings directly, as ‘the voice of the author’ - does not have
this privilege. His task is to give expression to all his narrative
ideas through action and reaction, things done and said. In
effect, when translating into dramatic form a story that has been
written only for reading, the first character to be removed is
often the author himself. The screenwriter will work through the
original text and ruthlessly eliminate all editorial comment,
every phrase, adjective or adverb added by the author as a clue
to how he himself wishes the action to be interpreted by the
reader. He will retain only those adjectives, adverbs, similes and
metaphors that are of immediate practical value to the actor,
cameraman, editor or any of the other craftsmen whose media of
16 DRAMATIC CONSTRUCTION
expression are images, gestures and sounds - those things that
can be represented on screen.
A narrative is driven by character progression, something that
can take more than one form. It can, for instance, be the kind of
progression where changes do not take place within a character
but rather in the audience’s increased understanding of him or her.
Or it might be the kind of development in which the protagonist’s
personality is changed through his or her experiences. The
change-of-heart formula is an old one (example: Scrooge in A
Christmas Carol), though it is often too simplistic and not really
believable. It has been pointed out that when character changes
are convincing they are likely to be the eventual resolving of two
conflicting elements that exist within a single personality. An obvi¬
ous suggestion, therefore, when you are devising characters: look
not only for interesting qualities in their personalities but also for
those social masks that hide other dramatically exploitable tem¬
peraments. Think of characters who may at first appear in a sym¬
pathetic light but are then revealed, thanks to certain active
developments in the story, to have uglier traits - or vice versa.
Student film-makers are often uncomfortable with the task of
inventing characters not as individual entities but as interactive
personages. One suspects this is because in the early stages of
experimenting with storytelling, the beginner chooses a protago¬
nist that in psychological terms is something of a projection of
his own point of view, someone who clearly represents his own
attitudes, feelings and thoughts, a thinly disguised or idealised
version of themselves. There are two potential problems that
need to be considered here.
First, there is a tendency to surround this protagonist with
characters who are not nearly as fully realised. Every protago¬
nist needs an agon, a struggle with surrounding antagonists, and
the nature of this struggle is rather misunderstood among many
student writers. So misunderstood, indeed, that the student will
insist it is not necessary to have such conflict (or even a plot).
Second, changes of personality are not envisaged, which
means such characters may have nowhere to go in the story. Or,
to put it another way, the writer might not be able to envisage
the direction his protagonist should move because he cannot
conceive of such changes of attitude and emotion taking place
WHAT IS A STORY? 17
5. The Third Man within himself. But classic patterns work in a very different way.
(Faber and Faber, 1988; Oedipus comes onstage as proud, noble and more than a little
first published Lorrimer,
arrogant to open a story that will lead to his disgrace and humil¬
1968), pp. 7-9.
iation. So when planning a character reversal it is important to
6. See ‘Exercises for the begin at a different place from the one you want to end up at. If
Student of Dramatic
you have in mind as your protagonist a figure with whom you
Construction’ below.
identify, it makes good sense when you start writing to look for
(and even accentuate) those aspects in him or her that you would
like to see completely abandoned by the story’s end.
In a well-told story, every fictional character functions within a
network or nexus, a cat’s cradle of character interactions. Certain
characteristics of the protagonist and antagonist are revealed
often only through relationships with each other or with circum¬
stances (either external or internal) and events played out in action
and reaction. Under the pressure of situations, conflicts, clashes of
will or story tension, the ideas that lie behind a story’s themes
cease to be merely abstract and become people actually doing
things to each other or reacting to the action. As has been already
explained, film dialogue is best when it has an immediate purpose
and produces visible reactions in others. This is the essence of
drama. Because character is not a static quality that belongs to a
specific figure, rather than thinking of individual characters in the
world it is far more useful for the writer to consider the notion of
character-in-action-and-reaction. A story’s energy comes from the
degree to which its characters are warring elements, complemen¬
tary aspects that illuminate each other by contrast and conflict.
The only practical reason for a particular character’s existence, in
fact, is to interact with other characters.
The published screenplay of Graham Greene’s film script The
Third Man contains descriptions (presumably written by Greene
after the film was completed) of the story’s four principal char¬
acters, followed by notes on subsidiary characters, those neces¬
sary as foils or for the development of the incidental action.5
These are worth your study because they serve as a good model
for the kind of thing I have asked you to attach to your efforts at
writing Step Outlines.6 When outlining character relationships it
is important to be able to distinguish between those characters
indispensable to the central theme and those needed only for the
smooth mechanical running of the plot and its exposition.
18 DRAMATIC CONSTRUCTION
One reason why Greene’s descriptions are interesting is that 7. Mackendrick was
he defines his characters not as individual figures or separate aware that the director
Peter Brook had
elements but strictly in terms of their connections with the
written something
other principals. The main roles are envisaged as a web of ten¬ similar when discussing
sions. Indeed, the pattern is very often a push-pull tug of war, King Lear in his book
The Empty Space:
one that takes triangular patterns where character A is torn
‘Experimentally, we can
between opposing connections represented by character B and approach Lear not as a
character C. The pattern is built by successive steps that estab¬ linear narrative, but as
a cluster of relation¬
lish the dramatic interactions and tensions as they grow in
ships.’ (Penguin, 1990,
force, making for ironies and surprise reversals that lead, by first published 1968)
stages, to a final denouement of the main lines of tension. When p. ioz.
called on to write similar descriptions of characters for your
Below: Character
own story, you should do so as though you were looking from
relationship map: The
the point of view of the final resolution of their conflicts and Third Man.
relationships.7
WHAT IS A STORY? 19
In any project that you have already worked on or that you
have scripted and might be planning to make, can you answer
these questions? It helps if you can be as specific as possible. (It
is also useful to ask these questions of your favourite films.)
zo DRAMATIC CONSTRUCTION
the protagonist). Note that the existence of an antagonist in
the story does not mean there is not also conflict within the
central figure (where, for example, he is being pulled in con¬
flicting directions by certain emotions or beliefs). There is, in
fact, conflict within all well-defined protagonists, and many
characters who seem tame when it comes to extroverted
action will have clearly defined introverted tensions brought
into the open at times by the antagonist for the audience to
observe. Note too that in the buddy movie there is always
some thread of conflict between the twin protagonists, one
that typically climaxes somewhere in the third act. But what¬
ever tension develops between these two characters, it will
usually take second place to the dramatic conflict in which the
twin heroes confront some third antagonistic faction. Their
conflict is a subplot (often vaguely comical), a secondary case
of character-in-action that runs parallel to the main narrative
tension.
4 How does the conflict lead to crisis? What is at stake for the
main characters? Is there a confrontation scene? In a well-
constructed story the audience is held in expectation of what
is called an obligatory scene brought about by a reversal (or,
indeed, a series of reversals). Note that the obligatory scene,
usually the denouement of a story, classically expresses the
theme. It is an expression of the story’s central moral, the
point expressed as a generalisation as seen in character-in¬
action. (A good way of defining this moment, in fact many
moments in a dramatic narrative, is to ask: ‘Who does what
with which to whom and why?’)
WHAT IS A STORY? 21
Exposition
22 DRAMATIC CONSTRUCTION
opens with a scene of exposition not untypical of the way many
plays of his era began. It says something of the changes in theatri¬
cal fashion and the craft of writing for the stage that the scene -
which involves a manservant and a couple of hired waiters in a
study, behind the scenes at a dinner party - was obviously quite
acceptable technique for exposition of that period. In fact, for
many decades the typical opening of a play was an exchange
between servants who exchanged gossip about their employers
and, in the course of this, gave the audience necessary informa¬
tion about the background of the principal characters before
they made their entrances. It has no doubt been a great loss to
the novice playwright that dramas cannot be so easily set in the
kind of household where the servants are available in supporting
roles to perform this ever so useful narrative function.
With due respect to the great Ibsen I suggest you study the scene
as an example of very weak craftsmanship by today’s standards,
and certainly by the standards of the very best contemporary
screenwriting. The reason is simple: the two primary characters
who appear in this opening scene are not important characters. In
fact, they never again appear in the play and have been devised for
no other purpose than to provide background to the story and
characters we have yet to see. Though they may be said to be foils,
they are utterly uninteresting since neither has any real relation¬
ship with the main action of the plot, or any particularly revealing
relationship with the main characters. And even in this exchange,
one that takes place between two figures who are essentially irrel¬
evant to the subsequent drama, there is very little tension or con¬
flict. Nothing is at stake and nothing really happens. The
probable result is that the audience is likely to remember very
little about what the characters are saying. It’s just all talk.
As an antidote to Ibsen, here are the opening lines of a very
different piece of writing, one that shows how exposition can be
illuminating of essential plot points and also useful in terms of
exploring character motivations and feelings.
EXPOSITION 23
i. From My Friend
‘A grey sports car stopped for a moment and a man got out, with a
Maigret, translated by flying leap almost, that’s what you said, isn’t it?’
Nigel Ryan, Hamish
‘Yes, officer.’
Hamilton, 1956, p. x.
‘To get into your club he must have passed close to you and even
brushed against you. Now there’s a luminous neon sign above the door.’
‘It’s purple, officer.’
‘So what?’
‘So nothing.'
‘Just because your sign is purple you are incapable of recognizing
the individual who a moment later tore aside the velvet curtain and
emptied his revolver into your barman?’1
This seems to me an excellent example of effective exposition.
Naturally a somewhat different approach to storytelling is nec¬
essary when writing a film script, but Georges Simenon (who
produced a series of novels featuring Inspector Maigret) demon¬
strates here a solid understanding of what we might call ‘active
exposition’, and students of dramatic construction have much to
learn from him.
You can see why exposition is dramatic - often quite powerfully
so - only where it is presented in the context of a scene that has
strong conflict, suspense and action (hence reaction). Your task in
establishing exposition is likely to involve the invention of some
situation that produces a vigorous clash of wills between charac¬
ters and requires one or other of those characters to make expla¬
nations. When exposition is absolutely necessary (when you have
to establish information as a preliminary to certain narrative
developments), it is frequently the foil figure who will ask of the
protagonist those questions that provoke the necessary informa¬
tion and thus satisfy the audience (albeit, most probably, tem¬
porarily). This is, all too often, a technical problem for beginning
writers: how to ‘feed’ the protagonist neatly, economically and
through action. As explained, talk for the sake of talk (because the
writer needs to convey certain pieces of information to the audi¬
ence) is the antithesis of drama, whether on stage or screen
(though, as you will have by now guessed, much more so on the
screen). Thus the trick of inventing a scene with effective exposition
is to devise supporting characters who are involved in a dramatic
situation where specific questions have to be asked or certain
pieces of information offered in order that the tension is (per-
24 DRAMATIC CONSTRUCTION
haps temporarily) resolved and the audience dramatically satiated. 2. See ‘Activity Versus
Occasionally a screenwriter will fall back on the expository Action’ below.
device of the flashback, the argument being that it saves the film¬
maker from having to shoot lengthy scenes that might be driven
solely by dialogue. In practice, however, the device of the flash¬
back, though it may appear to be thoroughly cinematic, can be
disappointing. It is, in fact, inherently undramatic. While drama
is action now and onstage, the flashback may be more activity
because it shows events that do not have immediate results in the
here-and-now.1 Because a flashback is a description of past (and
already resolved) tensions, it often lacks the force of immediate
narrative impetus and can all too easily become an interlude that
interrupts the flow of the story, even if it has values that, though
not so dramatic, are still rewarding in other ways. (The ‘remem¬
brance of things past’ often has a reflective and poetic quality
that, while lacking suspenseful qualities of plot-laden narrative,
can lend much lyric feeling to a film.)
Another point that needs to be made about exposition is
related to what we might call the whodunnit, the detective story
or private-eye yarn. Such stories tend to be constructed as a sys¬
tem of unravelling past events about which we, the audience,
and often certain characters in the story know nothing. This
unravelling pattern might continue all the way to the final scene,
as for instance where the detective assembles all the suspects to
deliver an interminable and barely comprehensible review of all
that has gone before, holding back the announcement of the
murderer’s name in a singularly unnecessary and unconvincing
way. Equally silly formulas are the ones where the unmasked vil¬
lain holds the hero at the end of a pistol while he delivers a dan¬
gerously long monologue that is supposed to explain everything
that went before, or where the Austrian psychologist (speaking
in a barely comprehensible accent) carefully explains to the anx¬
ious crowd sitting before him the psychological malady of the
now safely straitjacketed serial killer. When these scenes work, it
is not usually because they are in any way credible - we enjoy
them only if they are sufficiently ingenious. Having been
branded as cliches, such formulas are now generally discredited.
But, as always, it is worth remembering that a cliche became a
cliche for good reason: it worked when first invented.
EXPOSITION 2-5
There are a few cases where this kind of exposition is done so
well that it works very effectively. The last scene of The Maltese
Falcon is such a case, a classic example of ravelling and unravel¬
ling at the same time. The long dialogue scene in which Sam
Spade manipulates all the villains into mutual betrayals is pres¬
ent conflict, tension here-and-now onstage while simultaneously
proving to be exposition of all the mayhem that has happened,
not only during the story, but even before it began. The film The
Third Man is another example, though with a slight difference.
For the first two thirds of Graham Greene’s story the action
takes the form of a search into the past, an investigation of the
mysterious death of the controversial figure (Harry Lime) who is
best friend of the protagonist (Holly Martins) and lover of the
girl with whom the protagonist is becoming involved. Then, at
what might be considered the end of act two in conventional
dramatic structure, comes the climactic revelation: Lime is very
much alive. Up until Lime’s appearance the story is in effect a
whodunnit with Martins investigating the possible murder and
the British military policeman (Calloway) and Harry’s aban¬
doned girl (Anna) as classic figures of the formula. The revela¬
tion creates what Aristotle called a peripeteia, a turning of the
tables, a point in the story where certain discoveries produce a
reversal of the current narrative situation. This might be an
upset in the characters’ relationships, like a role reversal, or a sit¬
uation where something hidden is revealed, something pursued
is captured or escapes, or conversely, a secret thing - revealed
only to us the audience - remains secret.
In The Third Man, following the peripeteia that Harry is still
alive, the narrative becomes a drive toward future events through
both direct suspense and character conflict. It is no longer an
unravelling of the past but now cause-to-effect momentum
towards events in the present. In this sense the story becomes sim¬
pler: all secondary and supporting roles are dropped from the
action as it now centres on the tensions between the four princi¬
pals. No more mystery, nothing but the hero caught in the middle
between his devotion to his old friend, his moral repugnance over
the racket that has brought him into reluctant collaboration with
the authorities (and against his friend) and his unrequited feelings
for the girl that his friend has betrayed.
26 DRAMATIC CONSTRUCTION
Modernist Trends
30 DRAMATIC CONSTRUCTION
dramatist discovers that actually it has been present from the
beginning.
One hears much talk about the value of improvisation among
students of acting, many of whom automatically equate the tech¬
nique with spontaneity. It is as if any performance based on
words written down in advance can never be as ‘true’ as when
improvised. Of course improvisation can be an invaluable
instrument of the director (in particular) and of actors, as well as
the writer. Improvisation exercises during the rehearsal process
are sometimes the only way for a director to deal with the actor
who has begun to pay more attention to the delivery of lines
than to the impulses and motivations underlying them.
Particularly when working with ‘poetic’ material, it can be
important for a director to insist that actors ignore the text com¬
pletely, improvising a new language of their own in order to get
at the character intentions, before they return to the text itself at
a later stage. In this sense, improvisation in acting is, up to a
point, similar to the process of writing. But the fallacy of assum¬
ing that an actor’s improvised dialogue can wholly substitute for
the work of a director and writer is evident in many improvisa-
tional efforts I have seen, where the scenes initially appear to
have exhilarating freshness and realism but presently become
boring because there seems to be an essential element missing.
There is no real point to them, no drama, no structure. They just
don’t go anywhere.
Between planning and inspiration there is no contradiction. In
fact, one can go further: neither is really valuable without the
other. Meticulous preparation of outlines, sketched scenarios
and notes can even become a handicap and an inhibition unless,
through judicious forgetting, they still leave great freedom for
spontaneity within the scope and integrity of the central theme.
(It has been said that the genius of the human imagination is that
as we find use for those apparently forgotten things buried deep
on the back shelves of our consciousness, they can be trans¬
formed as they are brought back to conscious mind.)
Improvisation is truly valuable only when it has its roots in the
highly disciplined and often exhausting work that has gone
before. In place of such efforts, it is likely to be thin stuff, weak
- and trivial.
MODERNIST TRENDS 31
‘Clarity’ and ‘Ambiguity’
z. Hitchcock, p. 17. Obscurity is seldom a virtue. If the point you want to make has
any significance, then there is no harm in making it clearly. ‘To
those who question whether clarity is all that important, I can
only say that it is the most important quality in the making of a
film,’ wrote Truffaut.1 Indeed, failing to make an important
point clearly is likely to confuse and irritate the audience.
A problem for many beginning writers is that they underesti¬
mate their story’s need for expository background. Knowing the
information himself, the writer tends to assume that it is all quite
obvious, even though, all too often, it isn’t. Why does the writer
need to explain everything? Because if the audience needs exposi¬
tory information in order to appreciate and understand an impor¬
tant situation or a character, then the author’s failure to prepare
for this may disastrously weaken his audience’s enjoyment of the
story as a whole. Clarity is the communication of essentials and
the exclusion of the non-essential, no simple matter at all, since it
can be tricky to decide what is not really essential and then find a
way to reduce emphasis on such things. It can take great ingenu¬
ity and considerable insight to isolate what is important (and,
therefore, must be retained, even accentuated) in material that is
confused or overcomplicated by irrelevancies and banalities.
In ensuring his script is as clear as possible, the inexperienced
dramatist often lives in terror of obviousness, believing that to
be obvious is not only to be boring, it is to be banal. What this
really amounts to is anxiety (frequently justified) due to the fact
that he does not actually know how to explain things without
being dull. Such anxiety prompts him to believe that certain
things are more interesting if left implicit. Thinks the writer: why
is it so important that everything is clearly explained? Isn’t it
much more intriguing if there is some ambiguity?
There is, I sense, a feeling among many who regard themselves
as creative artists that there is something rather boring about
having to study the craftsmanship necessary for clear communi¬
cation, and conversely, something much more exciting and
‘artistic’ about work that isn’t very clear, that is ambiguous.
Simplicity and clarity are, in the minds of such writers, some¬
how the same as banal and dull. And it is true, of course, that
32 DRAMATIC CONSTRUCTION
dull work is often obvious. But the feeling that obscure or con¬ 3. So concerned was
fusing exposition is somehow more aesthetically interesting is a Mackendrick to ensure
his students were able
terrible trap. Is ‘obvious’ the same thing as ‘clearly stated’? Does to articulate themselves
the absence of clarity make a story more interesting because it is clearly on paper that he
harder to comprehend? Plainly, I don’t think so. Nobody ever reproduced for them in
a handout these lines
got despised by the critics for being blazingly clear in terms of
from George Orwell’s
setting up exposition. Such film-makers might be accused of 1946 essay ‘Politics and
lacking subtlety in their storytelling, but subtlety and clarity are English Language’: ‘(i)
Never use a metaphor,
very different things. There is no danger in being obvious if what
simile or other figure of
you are being obvious about is also exciting. Just as the virtues speech which you are
of good journalism are economy and clarity, telling the story as used to seeing in print,
swiftly as possible with minimum waste of effort, the same can (ii) Never use a long
word where a short one
be said for scriptwriting and directing.3 will do. (iii) If it is
Incidentally, ‘ambiguity’ is a term that the novice often uses too possible to cut a word
loosely. It should not be regarded as the same thing as confusion out, always cut it out.
(iv) Never use the
or obscurity. The word means having two alternative meanings,
passive where you can
which can be very interesting in dramatic terms if both meanings use the active, (v)
are clearly made and wholly valid at the same time. The key to Never use a foreign
phrase, a scientific
ambiguity in this context is that unanswered questions seem to
word or a jargon word
have more impact when they are clearly posed by a character if you can think of an
within the story. Audiences are not so concerned about uncer¬ everyday English
equivalent, (vi) Break
tainty over answers to unclear situations or issues so long as the
any of these rules
dramatist has made clear that the ambiguity is deliberate. sooner than say
anything outright
barbarous.’ (Orwell,
Issues as against characters ‘Politics and the English
Language’, from The
I have, on occasion, claimed that many of our film students Collected Essays,
should think less and use their imaginations more. Intelligence is Journalism and Letters:
Volume 4 (Penguin,
often equated with the capacity to criticise and analyse. But film,
1970), p. 169.
in my opinion, is not the best medium for directly stimulating
thought. It is too richly loaded with sensory, emotional, and
intuitive informational data, while most intellectual issues are
best directly explored when abstracted from the complexities
and contradictions of human psychology. In this sense, even
drama itself - where emotions and sensory impressions are liable
to get in the way - may be somewhat incompatible with our
rational and intellectual faculties.
A fully rounded character is one that, by definition, cannot be
- conceived in two-dimensional terms. In comedy, as in some other
MODERNIST TRENDS 33
dramatic forms, a stereotype is enough to tell the story (indeed,
broad comedy often requires that the comic figure is a caricature
who cannot feel too much pain and whose emotions are simplified
to the point of absurdity). Similarly, a story that concentrates on
ideas and issues is also less likely to require characterisation that
has real emotional depth. One thinks of George Bernard Shaw, a
didact whose plays were felt to be more like verbal debates than
human dramas and whose characters were not much more than
mouthpieces for his own political and social opinions.
‘Alienation’
34 DRAMATIC CONSTRUCTION
Of course, stories that deal with alienation (those that deal
with highly subjective, introverted and private matters, thoughts
and feelings that are not generally communicated to others) are,
by their very nature, problematic in dramatic terms. The alien¬
ated figure (often a thinly disguised projection of the student
writer himself) is either unwilling, or more often unable, to make
the positive act of connection through active, and hence dra¬
matic, communication. Therefore the student interested in
exploring the theme of alienation must determine how best to
make dramatic the non-doing and non-communicating charac¬
ter, a not inconsiderable task.
‘Symbolic figures’
Symbolism tends to be more effective in theatre than on the
screen. One of the limitations of cinematography is that it can be
too real in the sense that it supplies more visual information than
we may actually want. Any cinematographic image shows us so
much that it is extremely hard to depersonalise it. It signifies a
particular and individual creature, not an abstraction like
Mankind or Motherhood. It is the very nature of film to be spe¬
cific and concrete. On the other hand, this is why cinema can
make use of something like Surrealism, because the unreality of
a Surrealist image is created by the disturbing juxtaposition of
incompatible but utterly real elements, something that cine¬
matography can do brilliantly.
MODERNIST TRENDS 35
A Technique for Having Ideas
1. Collecting Data
36 DRAMATIC CONSTRUCTION
spend time and energy in acquiring experience - direct and per¬
sonal - of the raw materials.
The activity of collecting data should not be confused with the
stages that follow. The characteristic of the good researcher is
that he is not only thorough but has an open mind. A good
researcher does not make up his mind about the value of the
data he is collecting before it has been collected. Inevitably he
will have some idea of what may or may not be useful and rele¬
vant, but he refrains from the kind of prejudice that might pre¬
vent him from discovering useful material just because it does
not immediately appear to fit his needs.
It is astonishing to me that, among students at CalArts, so few
recognise the value of this data-collecting period. Of course it is
the kind of work where one deliberately postpones what every
student thinks is the most vital moment: the actual invention of
something original. The great temptation at this stage is to grab
at a gimmick that catches the imagination and at once leap into
the business of writing a script, or even start shooting film.
38 DRAMATIC CONSTRUCTION
gestation before the birth of the infant work. There are two
mistakes that can be made here. On the one hand there is the
individual who has too little patience and humility to wait for
the spark and so embraces an idea that has not been incubated
long enough. On the other is the individual who has waited,
perhaps too passively, for the spark of inspiration, and is subse¬
quently confronted by the inadequacies of his skills, his lack of
practical experience (often compounded by the delusion that
were he only to start work, his first efforts would be of excep¬
tional quality). Between these two stools many fall, and in many
cases the imaginative energy required to keep the spark alive is
lost. The proficient hack seizes too soon on an idea that expertly
renders immature and superficial ideas. The inspired amateur
has a brilliant concept that dies through incompetence of expres¬
sion.
For many students, the unwelcome news is that the only way
to maintain creative talent at the right level is through practice.
Lots and lots of practice. Expressive skills ought to become
automatic, and only when technique becomes a kind of reflex,
responding instantly without inhibition, is the imagination left
free to supply continuous energy. This is the energy that fuels
inspiration. When that energy runs low, there is the danger of
technique taking over and the creator settling for the easier
cliche in order to avoid the difficulties a work of true originality
entails. Technical competence and craftsmanship have, in recent
years, been seen as an alternative to originality. Students must,
of course, make up their own minds about this. But it is worth
me explaining here and now that if you appreciate the virtues of
technical inexperience and incompetence, there is no point what¬
soever in you attending any more classes, since you will be less
corrupted by craft if you rent your own equipment and misuse it
without the distractions of your teacher’s instruction, however
earnest.
40 DRAMATIC CONSTRUCTION
If it can be cut out, then CUT IT OUT.
Everything non-essential that you can Screenplays aren't written
eliminate strengthens what’s left.
-WITTEN
Exposition is BORING unless it is in the
context of some present dramatic tension
and-.||I>WRITTEiy
or crisis. So start with an action that and - BE-TTOTim1
creates tension, then provide the exposition aw^to-WHlTTElV
O.: : / l-V W* ' " /
in terms of the present developments.
If you’ve got a Beginning, but you don’t yet have an end, then
you’re mistaken. You don’t have the right Beginning.
What happens just before the END of your story defines the
CENTRAL THEME, the SPINE of the plot, the POINT OF
VIEW and the best POINT OF ATTACK.
42 DRAMATIC CONSTRUCTION
ACTION speaks louder than words.
44 DRAMATIC CONSTRUCTION
I suspect it is probably not possible to teach the capacity to
create vivid characters and deal with resonant and meaningful
themes. These are talents a writer is born with and that no
teacher can supply. Plotting, on the other hand, is a matter of
craft. It is a knack developed by lots of practice, and in such mat¬
ters a good instructor can provide guidance. Important to under¬
stand is that plot is apt to be the aspect of a story that emerges
at a quite secondary stage of the creative process. Let me
rephrase this: of course plot is important, it just is not the most
promising place at which to begin. Character and situation seem
to be the most fruitful thing to dream up first. They are, of
course, the same thing, for a character is not a static thing. A
character, inseparable from action, is revealed through transac¬
tions with other characters, rarely in isolation.
When teaching the Dramatic Construction course, I have tried
to describe a system that was used for many years in the script
departments of major studios. It was a method used most fre¬
quently only after a draft screenplay had already been com¬
pleted, but before a revised draft was authorised. It is a system I
wholeheartedly recommend to you. The writer takes upwards of
a hundred blank postcards, writing on each of them the mini¬
mum number of words that describe a step in the narrative (for
example, the important character interactions in a scene). All
that is needed is a phrase to signify in the simplest possible way
the action that is taking place. The size of a postcard means there
is no room for anything but the most concrete and specific nar¬
rative steps (remember: who does what with which to whom and
why?), meaning every scene has to be noted down in its most ele¬
mentary fashion. This is the point of the exercise. Each card will
represent something like a minute of screen time and a page of
the screenplay. And, if the lettering is large and the words few,
one is able to stand back from the notice board where these
cards are pinned up and see an entire Step Outline (described
below) laid out.
In this form there is, all too obviously, nothing but the bare
bones of the story. This is really the point, because within this
scaffolding it will often become all too evident what structural
flaws exist. Though best done in a small team you can use the
- method on your own. Just the doing of it may prompt you to see
46 DRAMATIC CONSTRUCTION
Construction class we shall make use of the Step Outline form to
analyse completed films. By doing so we will retrace the history
of some of our favourite stories and uncover the skeletons under
the skin and flesh of these completed works.
So what exactly is a Step Outline? It is a brief analysis of plot
structure of an already existing feature film, a bare synopsis of
the steps of a story, a tool with which to dismantle and expose
the dramatic narrative structure and mechanisms at work. It is a
list of the basic steps in the progression of a film narrative as one
scene (meaning an episode that often has its own internal struc¬
ture, minor crisis and peripeteia) moves to the next. It is nothing
but plot mechanics, the bones of the narrative stripped of flesh
and nerve, and should be as short as possible while still contain¬
ing everything essential to the structure of the story. Length will
vary according to how dense the plot in question is. An outline
may be only three or four pages in length, or it may take up to
fifty pages if it is important to explain a complex plot.
It is useful to set down the steps in numbered paragraphs.
These usually represent scenes, a unit of dramatic action. One is
apt to think of a scene as being an event that takes place in a sin¬
gle geographical location, but a more useful way is to consider it
as an incident or confrontation that contains within it the
action/objective dialectic of narrative progression (the dramatic
event) as seen in the larger shape of the story as a whole. A scene
is a section of a narrative in which there is one clearly defined
purpose and intention, the space occupied by a single predomi¬
nant episode of dramatic tension, though contained within the
scene might be a series of smaller steps or story beats. The idea
is that each character is likely to have not only a central objec¬
tive to his or her behaviour but also minor and incidental activ¬
ities that are necessary to achieve en route to this main objective.
Analogies with literature are not always accurate, but you
might think of the way a writer breaks up a book into chapters,
a chapter into paragraphs, paragraphs into sentences, sentences
into clauses or phrases, each having individual structure and
meaning. Thus a story beat might be a sequence of several lines
of dialogue or certain actions prompted by a single identifiable
intention. It might even be something as simple as the articula¬
tion of discrete feelings and thoughts. When a story is looked at
48 DRAMATIC CONSTRUCTION
only in so far as this defines their motivations and hence actions.
This might mean putting down something about their past his¬
tory, information that provides the character with a purpose and
dramatic intention in their present action.
An outline contains no unnecessary descriptions written for
atmospheric purposes. It will also generally ignore aesthetic
qualities of the work. Hamlet, for example, has a plot that, when
read in the Step Outline form, is not all that interesting com¬
pared with the extraordinary depth and resonance of the true
genius of the work expressed through its poetic language. The
outline is concerned only with action, which means there should
be no explicit explanation of character or motive, no intrusion
of the writer’s opinion. Inevitably, because an outline concen¬
trates on plot, it has no space for exploration of nuances of
meaning and provides little comment on the story’s theme or the
characterisation developing within that structure. However,
when writing a Step Outline, a good writer can, in the minimum
of words, set down the beats of a story that will describe the
character-in-action with utmost clarity and that will in turn
imply character and theme.
A Step Outline need not be tedious to read. Though it is a
working document, it should be interesting and exciting. The
need for economy and simplicity does not mean it should be
merely a list of incidents and events full of abbreviations and dis¬
connected phrases. It should have its own narrative drive and
momentum. Expert journalists are apt to have this knack, the
ability to set down information that has force and clarity in its
emphasis on cause-and-effect momentum. Be sure to write in
sentences with subjects, verbs and objects. This has the advan¬
tage of disciplining you to write in the language of action and
reaction rather than static conditions and ongoing, continuous
activities that do not involve much tension and that tend to be
overly descriptive and explanatory. It has been interesting for me
to appreciate that from the very grammar of the sentence struc¬
ture in which an outline is written, I can sense whether or not the
student has got the hang of cinematic narrative progression.
It is a good idea to pick for your first Step Outline a film you
find interesting and dramatically rewarding. At the same time do
mot forget that some of the films particularly exciting to students
50 DRAMATIC CONSTRUCTION
work of someone who is boiling down a story that is already in
a more elaborate and richer form, for example a story editor or
a director analysing the plot structure of an existing script that
requires structural work.
The problem with using the outline form as a blueprint for an
original story idea is that though it may provide an idea of the
structure, it is a skeleton without flesh and blood. It is a dead
thing. Plot in itself (when divorced from character and theme) is
lifeless material, mechanical narrative with no creative vitality.
So use the Step Outline (which is, in the context of narrative
structure, a purely analytical approach) for study purposes only.
Use it as an instrument for dismantling, vivisecting and explor¬
ing the structure and engine of an already existing dramatic
structure. As my workshop ran into these problems, I realised I
had to make an agonising reappraisal. I confessed my error and
explained that I had made a mistake in suggesting the Step
Outline as suitable for exploring story ideas. Instead, I suggested
that a story is best investigated in terms of character.
Though it has been said that writing is acting in your head,
few students of film-making have experience of acting, least of
all improvisational acting. Yet I know of no better way to
develop a sense of character than this kind of exercise, the prac¬
tice of make-believe that involves pretending to be an imagined
character. Inhibitions against this practice are many. To start
with, students who have no experience of public performance
are shy. There is no cure for shyness except the brutal experience
of making a fool of yourself. Some consolation may be offered to
you: the fact is that people who are instinctively shy are, para¬
doxically, often the best actors when they have learned to over¬
come their inhibitions. Conversely, it is the personality so
lacking in shyness that he is without self-consciousness who may
find it is impossible to be anyone but himself.
The same is true for writing. The dramatic writer ought to
have an ear for dialogue, an ability to hear inside his head the
speech rhythms and intonations of his characters, in just the
same way a good mimic does. It is one more reason why a
screenwriter is at an advantage if he has at least the imagination
of an actor, even if he does not have the technique necessary for
' performance. When I realised that the exploration of character
1. When you find you have a good premise for a story, an open¬
ing situation, but then discover that the story bogs down and
doesn’t seem to provide a good third act, lay aside the plot.
Ignore the problem of narrative for the moment and concentrate
on the characters.
2. In particular, think about the antagonist. Sometimes it is easy
to identify this figure, on other occasions quite difficult. Your
first idea may not be the correct one. (Who, for example, is the
antagonist in Oedipus Rex}) The best clue to the antagonist is
that he/she is the figure who personifies the obstacle to the pur¬
poses of the hero/heroine.
3. Now imagine yourself in the role of this antagonist. Begin to
write an interior monologue in the first person, an account of
the story as seen through the eyes of this antagonist. Don’t
worry too much about the sequence of events, just improvise
freely on how the antagonist would describe, if he were writing
in some private diary, all his thoughts, secret impulses and self¬
justifications for whatever he does, or wants to do. Invent what¬
ever back-story is necessary to explain the antagonist’s attitudes
and behaviour.
4. When writing, try to remain more or less consistent with the
actions, situations and characters you have established, or have
already envisaged. Though you (as antagonist) will be writing
mostly about your relationship with your story’s protagonist,
you may find that to make your behaviour believable, you have
to elaborate on matters of which the protagonist is ignorant.
Conversely, in your role as antagonist, you will almost certainly
be ignorant of situations that are known to the protagonist (and
even to yourself as author). Through this split-mind process, you
should find that you are inventing opportunities for dramatic
irony when you return to the task of constructing the plot.
5. Write all this in retrospect, as if you were recapitulating the
Like I told them, I’ll remember every damn one of these bastards.
I won’t forget. That little weasel, Pop Doyle, the one that pushed
me off the gang plank into the mud, I’ll take care of him. They all
thought that was funny. Well, they’ll be laughing outa the other
side of their mouths by the time I get through with them.
I can wait. Right now the heat’s on and I may have to watch
my step. Might have to get out of town for a while, too. Florida,
maybe. I got good connections and some things going for me in
the docks down there. It’s not like here, of course, because up
here we really got it all sewed up tight. I mean we had it all sewed
up till that dumb little ex-tanker turned cheese-eater on me.
After all I did for the little bastard. Jeezus! I found that little
jerk when he was nuthin’! Really nuthin’! I got him fixed up
with a trainer an’ we brought him on real good. Just because we
wouldn’t give him a shot at the title, you think that’s what got
him sore? He wasn’t ready for it. We wasn’t ready for it! We
woulda given him a chance later when we got the right odds. I’m
tellin’ ya, I loved that kid. I loved him like he was a son. And
what does he do to me?
Not just to me either. Because all the rest of them are gonna be
in trouble. Oh, sure, the Crime Commission is gonna put on a
big show how they cleaned up the rackets, but that’ll blow over
and that’s when the Mob will move in and take over. I know the
guys that’ll do it. Same guys that I had to go up against when I
made my move.
Everybody knows that story. Three guys with shivs and I had
to hold my hand over my throat to keep from bleeding to death.
But I still took care of them.
You gotta let them knovy you’re tough. You don’t last around
here if you don’t. All the same, I don’t like it when you gotta
waste a guy. Shouldn’t be necessary. You just lean on ’em a little.
That’s what I told those goons when they had to take care of the
Doyle kid. Don’t bump him. Not unless you have to. Just lean on
him. I guess he must’ve given them an argument.
I guess the Doyle kid was a friend of Malloy. Okay, so maybe
we made a mistake using him to get the Doyle kid up on the
roof. Yeah. Maybe that was a mistake.
54 DRAMATIC CONSTRUCTION
Harry Lime
I’ve decided I’ll risk it. It’s a small cafe on a corner of one of the
badly bombed out old squares. I used to meet Anna there. It’s got
a back entrance as well as a front and it’s near to several of the
manholes down into the sewer system I know by heart. The mes¬
sage I’ve sent back to Holly is that he should be there at about ten
o’clock, so there won’t be many people about. Vienna goes to bed
early these days and I’ll have a chance to reconnoitre to see that
he’s come alone. If it is a trap, I should be able to get away fast.
There is a risk, of course. It could be a trap. Popescu is con¬
vinced that Holly has betrayed us to Calloway. He was here an
hour ago, in a panic because both Kurtz and Winkel were
arrested today. I’ve been expecting it, of course, because ever
since Calloway dug up my coffin and found Harbin’s body, he’s
known that I’m alive. And, in any event, Holly probably told
him he’d met with me.
The real question is how much the police have told Holly. If
it’s a trap, like Popescu says, then Holly is working for the
police. That’s hard to believe. Ridiculous, of course, but the
truth is that I’m fond of him. He’s been useful in the past and in
these circumstances might be even more useful. Popescu has
panicked, and if I have to get across the borders to the West,
that’s where Holly could be valuable.
I don’t think Popescu is right: I don’t believe Holly would let
Calloway use him. Why should he? What kind of pressure
would they put on him? A reward of some kind? That’s not like
Holly. I’ve been thinking about him. He’s really a very trusting
soul, as unsophisticated as the dumb characters in those pulp
Westerns he writes. I’ve never been able to finish any of his
books, but they have helped me understand how his mind
works. An extraordinary capacity for sentimental loyalty. It used
to astonish me even when we were at school together.
On occasion, I admit that I’ve had an occasional twinge of
conscience about the way I used to take advantage of Holly. It
was just too easy. The truth is, of course, that he has a desperate
need for hero-worship. He always needed me more than I
needed him, so I don’t see how I can blame myself. I’ve never
'really needed anyone. In a way one envies people like Anna and
56 DRAMATIC CONSTRUCTION
missing. We had to dispose of the corpse. And I had somehow to
disappear. Put like that it was too obvious what we had to do.
My driver was the only other person we needed in order to stage
my tragic end, with Winkel just happening to be passing by so
that Harbin’s corpse could be identified as mine.
Under the pressure of the inquest, the burial and so on, I actu¬
ally forgot all about Holly. I suppose, if I had thought of it in
time, I could have got Kurtz to send him a wire, telling him that
I was dead. But I forgot until it was too late. Poor, pathetic Holly
arrived just in time to attend my funeral, and then couldn’t be
persuaded to go home.
Should I go to meet him or not? Will I be walking into a trap?
How does one calculate the odds? Though it’s true that Holly
could be a real help to me in wrapping up all the business here
so that I collect all the money that we’ve been making - enough
for both Holly and I to live the rest of our lives on - the truth is
that I could cut my losses and get out on my own. I’m just not
sure. Oddly, the real reason I’ve decided to take the risk is that
I’m curious. Is Holly double-crossing me or not? I need to know.
58 DRAMATIC CONSTRUCTION
ues you find important. (One other thing to note: a contempo¬
rary story, in these days when we seem somewhat uncomfortable
about ‘heroism’, may well be more dependent on the defeat of
the antagonist than on the victory of the protagonist.)
A number of years ago I attended some meetings in London
where psychologists were experimenting with a therapeutic
process called ‘psychodrama’. A typical example would be diffi¬
culties in communication between, say, a daughter and her
mother. The psychologist would begin by inviting the patient
(the daughter) to act out an argument with someone playing the
role of the mother. (On occasion, a professional would be
recruited to help with these improvisations.) This in itself was
often helpful to the patient. Just the opportunity to act out, in
the presence of some sympathetic onlookers, the pain of the
unhappy relationship would bring some relief of tension. But it
was the next stage that was extraordinary. When some progress
had been made in this game of make-believe aggression, the psy¬
chologist would ask that the daughter and the ‘mother’ switch
roles. Results varied. For some patients, the challenge was
impossible. But in other cases the game was sensational in its
effect, creating theatrical moments of incredible impact.
It was the memory of this experience that prompted me to cre¬
ate an exercise that I have found useful when working with stu¬
dents who are encountering problems with formulating original
story ideas. The first step is often easy. The student invents an
effective first-act situation, a premise to a potential drama, one
involving a protagonist conceived in some convincing situation.
For most students the difficulty lies up ahead. As soon as this sit¬
uation has been presented, students’ stories often begin to lose
narrative momentum. Tension slackens and there is no feeling of
a build towards the kind of crisis that will provide a coherent
third act. The solution, which has proved effective in many
cases, is to ask the author temporarily to play the game of role
reversal by improvising a new version of the story as it might be
seen from the point of view of the antagonist, a figure with
whom it is not so easy for the author to identify, but who, when
identified, proves to be the crucial missing element. (This is a
technique that can also be applied equally effectively to existing
"stories and films.)
60 DRAMATIC CONSTRUCTION
at which to start. This is something demonstrated by the experi¬ i. See‘When Not to
ence of writers who have discovered that, in writing a novel, Write a Shooting
Script’.
they have to sweat through many pages before they arrive at the
situation that turns out to be the beginning of the story they
actually want to tell. The material that gets thrown away is
never lost, however, for it either reappears, perhaps as back-
story to the final story, or forms an essential rehearsal of the
character relationships and situations that give depth and
dimension to the emerging story.
When writing a scene, ask yourself: what element of the back-
story might have been a rehearsal for this moment? Stanislavsky
always urged that the actor concentrate on three questions con¬
cerning the past, present and future of character-in-action:
‘Where have I come from?’, ‘What am I doing here?’ and ‘What
is it that I mean to achieve?’ This is the point of back-story. In
order to determine what a character’s motives are you have to
know what has happened to him or her up till this moment. What
we do now, and how we react to the things and people around us,
is affected by what has been done to us, or by what we ourselves
have done, on some previous occasion. (This is similar to the
world of the director when he is on the film set. In preparation
for the task of putting a scene on screen, he must be able to imag¬
ine, with absolute clarity and solidity, the world of the whole
story at hand, a universe of which the scene he is currently work¬
ing at is merely a small and perhaps relatively unimportant part.)
An interesting example of this is Graham Greene’s work on
The Third Man. Greene felt that his first draft had to be written
not in screenplay form but as a short novel.1 From some experi¬
ences of my own as a director working with writers on wholly
original material I can support his view that a screenplay is, for
many authors, not the best format in which to explore the begin¬
nings of a story. A more literary form frequently allows the imag¬
inative writer more freedom to explore, often apparently at
random, the subtleties and complexities of potentially rich char¬
acter relationships, moods, and those editorial thoughts and
comments that will perhaps never make it into the screenplay.
Early drafts are freer in structure. It is in rewrites that this struc¬
ture is boiled down into the stark economy of a tightly structured
screenplay.
62 DRAMATIC CONSTRUCTION
3. Aristotle uses terms like ‘diction’ and ‘melody’. Study the scene
for characteristic language (as expressed in a particular way by
the actors) that illustrates personality. As you have marked the
moves or the beats of the scene, so also distinguish the variety of
contrasting emotions and mood changes in the character-action
that might not be immediately apparent in the text, but which
might be articulated by the actors. These are the unexpected
colours of a performance, and exploring them is a good way to
encourage freshness and vitality in the actor. Through phrasing
and intonation, the pitch of the voice and the timing of the lines,
good actors are able to communicate with far more subtlety and
feeling. As contrasted with silent cinema (which inevitably has
more of a two-dimensional and primitive quality to it), this is
one of the most important elements of sound films.
4. Drama is at its most effective when there is foreshadowing of
the events ahead. Look for the moment in the story when it
becomes absolutely clear that the final resolution is about to be
played out, and consider which characters will be involved.
Note exactly what the resolution means in terms of conflict and
role reversals. At the same time, take time to look back at the
story as a whole, and find those incidents that have irrevocably
brought the characters to this climatic moment.
Follow these stories through, and write down what the obliga¬
tory scene of each could be.
1 The attractive but prudish protagonist constantly repri¬
mands two delightful old friends of her father for taking a
drink. She becomes engaged to a fine, lively young man, the
proprietor of a tavern.
2 Two women are close friends. One of them discovers that
her husband is ruining the husband of the other and forcing
him into bankruptcy.
3 One of the guests at a dinner party, a newcomer to the town,
is particularly jumpy. Another guest seems to recall meeting
him before. Still another finds that he makes her nervous.
4 After a hard day at the office, Jack plans to lounge with the
papers all evening. Ffe does not know that his wife has asked
her parents to dinner.
5 A woman in love with her husband does not know him to be
a criminal.
64 DRAMATIC CONSTRUCTION
Follow these stories through, this time using the ‘Once upon a
time . . format.
1 Start with the ending of a crime story. Regard the murdered
individual as the objective, the murder as the obstacle. Find
a protagonist and plan a course of action.
2 Start with a news story: a prize fighter discovered that his
wife, a former chorus girl, was being unfaithful with his
manager. In the divorce court he asked for custody of their
son on the grounds that his wife was unfit to rear the boy.
Find protagonist, objective and course of action.
3 Starting with a character of your acquaintance, find or invent
an objective that would place him in clearer harmony with
his universe. Assume he recognises the need for this objective,
or for a substitute he thinks he needs. Explain what might
stand in his way and let these constitute the obstacles. Plan a
course of action in which he gets the objective, another where
he fails to get it.
66 DRAMATIC CONSTRUCTION
most talented are former actors. The great strength of the writer
who has a good understanding of acting is an ear for playable
dialogue, because words always need to be more effective in the
mouth of the actor than on the page. But more important than
this is that even before they invent any dialogue, many writers act
out the physical behaviour of their characters in their imagina¬
tion. By doing so, non-verbal actions (as well as any dialogue
deemed absolutely necessary) as written on the page emerge as a
direct expression of impulses, feelings and thoughts. In this sense,
the screenplay becomes a point of departure for the interpretive
actor from which he has to work backwards so as to retrace the
writer’s imaginative ideas and impulses that originally gave birth
to the scene. Writing, it is said, is acting in your head.
In a sense, writing, acting, directing and editing are all per¬
forming skills. The competent director follows the same process
as the actor: he goes back to the creative origins that the writer
has supplied, collaborating with the actor in rediscovery of the
characters and situations that were originally images and voices
in the mind of the writer. And the editor, who is presented with
very tangible visible and audible records of these images and
voices must capture all over again the evolved and still evolving
make-believe. One of the best editors I ever worked with was a
former actor. I used to watch him as he sat at the editing bench,
running the unedited footage over and over again. While he did
this you could see on his face that he was absorbing the actions
and words of the actors, instinctively acting along with their per¬
formances until he found the precise frame where the actor was,
essentially, telling him to make the cut. A good editor will even
rediscover magical elements of the footage that the writer, actor
and director didn’t know they had put there.
I have never directed a film on which I did not myself function
as- close collaborator of the writer or writers. In the majority of
instances I assisted in the construction of the story and also
helped write drafts of dialogue, or for various reasons spent time
rewriting dialogue during the shooting when the screenwriter
was not available. I have, in fact, never made a film in which the
dialogue did not require some degree of editing either at the
shooting stage or in the post-production period. But this is no
more than a natural part of the group process of film-making.
68 DRAMATIC CONSTRUCTION
The overwhelming temptation of many students when faced
with problems of dramatic construction in the scripting stage is
to dodge the real challenges by fantasising about the much
more pleasurable (and indeed easier) problems involved in
actually shooting the film. As such, the particular passion of
many students is to work, from the start, on their own stories
in shooting-script form (those containing precise shot, fram¬
ing, and editing details, including the staging of actors and
camera angles) before putting their ideas on paper as either a
screenplay (dialogue with basic expository explanations), or
even a treatment (the bare bones: plot and essential action of a
story). Do not fall for any of this. Get your screenplay right as
a story before you let yourself off the hook by indulging in the
delights of being a director.
Every year I try to persuade students that at the early stages
of devising a story for the screen, even the dialogue-based
screenplay format can be a mistake. I regularly fail in this effort.
Let me explain my bias. It is common practice that in the early
stages, your story is in some other form. It might be a novel or
a short story, it might even be a series of newspaper articles (for
example On the Waterfront). On occasion, what might be
required is an adaptation of a play written for the stage, though
many writers will tell you that when this is so the task of writ¬
ing a coherent screen version is particularly difficult. It may
even be necessary to throw the original theatrical script away
and start again from scratch. In such circumstances, a writer
may find that before embarking on a screenplay full of dialogue
it is better first to prepare a sketch in the form of a story treat¬
ment. Written in prose form, a good treatment might be as long
as the intended screenplay, though will always be more literary
in form, even reading like a short novel. It can reveal very
clearly the potential of a story with as yet undeveloped dra¬
matic structure or characterisations, and can be a very useful
overview of problems that will have to be faced at a subsequent
point of the process. Moreover, starting in prose means focus¬
ing on two crucial elements of screenwriting. First, the final
work will inevitably contain less dialogue. Second, the themes
of the story are more likely to rise to the surface of your mind
as you write.
70
DRAMATIC CONSTRUCTION
given to a single writer. When, after a number of years, I gradu¬
ated to the position of director, I began working on projects the
studio assigned to me. Quite soon I yearned to be the initiator of
my own work. When this was the case, I realised it was wiser to
begin my original ideas in a loosely structured treatment form.
Why? Just as few directors relish the idea of writing a script for
somebody else to direct, many writers are not enthusiastic about
writing a screenplay based on somebody else’s carefully plotted
treatment of a story idea. Writers prefer to work on their own
ideas and generally find it harder to get enthusiastic about char¬
acters and situations that are not of their own invention.
Through experience of writing revised versions of other peo¬
ple’s screenplays I learned how important it is for the writer to
make the subject his own, but at the same time knew that a
director can often persuade a good writer to work as his collab¬
orator if he offers him a project in a form that is, to a great
degree, not yet frozen in its fully dialogued form. A treatment
written by a would-be director might give strong indications as
to the ideas behind the plot and even contain details of the story
itself, but leaves the hired screenwriter with much difficult and
demanding work still to do. If it is understood, as I believe is
proper, that the director is not expecting a screenplay credit
(which means the writer will have a chance to get the coveted
solo screen credit), many writers will seize the chance to take
over a story in such an inchoate form and successfully make it
their own. The director has thus achieved his aim of fashioning
the structure of the subject in its earliest form and then handing
the story over to a writer who can bring his own ideas and vision
to the project. When this works the ideal situation is that both
writer and director believe that everything effective in the
completed film was their own contribution. (One thing to note
here is that at a later stage, through camera coverage and edit¬
ing, a director who knows his craft can essentially rewrite
without altering a single word. Providing there is sufficient cov¬
erage of a scene, it is usually possible to edit the footage so it
even plays against the spoken text, emphasising subtext instead.
Curiously, when the director manages this trick successfully,
the screenwriter may be hardly aware of how it has been
C1
achieved.)
74 DRAMATIC CONSTRUCTION
For the sake of those producers who have limited ability to
imagine an actor’s delivery of a line, many writers will add
adverbs in to the dialogue passages (‘angrily’, ‘quietly’). But
producers and directors heartily dislike this. It is not only
another unwarranted attempt by the writer to influence the
direction, but like the description of the actor’s physique it is
often an indication that the screenwriter is relying on the actor
to give emotional impact to the words, and is dodging his real
task: to create feeling and emotion in the language itself. Simply,
the good screenwriter recognises that interpretation of this kind
on the page is an indulgence by someone who has failed to make
his words, or the context in which they are played, interesting
and dramatic of themselves. The legitimate use of the adverb
instruction is only when the intonation, or the reading of the
line, may be a contradiction of the words as written, as in:
‘(coldly) How nice!’ But even here it is better left out wherever
it is clearly implicit to the intelligent reader.
One hopes that there are still some mothers and fathers who tell
bedtime stories to their children. In the long-lost days before tel¬
evision, it was something every parent did. It would be depress¬
ing if television had destroyed that ritual of infancy for ever.
One hopes, indeed, that storytelling is still alive not only
because of its value to listeners. The gifts of the raconteur, the
verbal storyteller face to face with his audience, are of immense
value to anyone with ambitions to work in the narrative/
dramatic media, cinema or theatre. As soon as passages are read
aloud and performed, certain important questions are immedi¬
ately brought to the surface of the storyteller’s mind. ‘To whom
am I addressing this tale? And to what purpose?’ I am, frankly, a
little uneasy every time I confront the fact that such skills (and
also such questions) do not come nearly so easily to CalArts stu¬
dents as I recall they did to young people of my generation. This
is one reason why I feel that students of dramatic construction
should get as much experience of acting as possible, something
that can help develop that essential component of the writer’s
imagination: an ear for dialogue.
The face-to-face experience involved in the art of the racon¬
teur is invaluable to an understanding of what a story is. Writing
a story down on paper logically ought to involve the same
processes as reciting it out loud to an audience, but it doesn’t.
Storytelling is, plain and simple, a performing art. Essential is
the sense of tension between storyteller and listener, an under¬
standing on the part of the writer of when tension is holding up
and when it has slackened, of the build towards a crisis and the
curious feeling of satisfaction when a promised climax is deliv¬
ered. The solitary author who is communicating with an imagi¬
nary reader is all too apt to fall into the kind of self-indulgence
76 DRAMATIC CONSTRUCTION
that comes from assuming his reader is as interested in the sub¬
ject as the writer is. The raconteur will discover soon enough
that his listeners are likely to be less patient and less interested
than he is, that their attention spans are inevitably shorter than
he expected.
Storytelling is the knack of swiftly seizing the imagination of
the audience and never letting it go. Digressions and elaborations
are permissible, but only when the audience is already hooked by
the promise of some satisfaction to come. The tension to that
hook may be slackened now and again, but the line must be
snapped tight at any moment when the dramatist senses the dan¬
ger of losing his catch. This is why I confess that, in the past, I
found it enormously useful during pre-production of a film to
select someone whose instincts I respected and, rather than giving
them the screenplay to read, tell the story out loud to them, even
if only in synopsis. By doing this I could get a palpable sense of
just where the momentum was sagging, where the action could be
telescoped, and how the climaxes should be timed.
For a listener to attend with genuine interest and appreciation
is to provide a powerful control over a performer. Feedback of
any kind tells the storyteller where there is a need for more expo¬
sition or (more often) where there should be less. The raconteur
will instinctively find himself learning where suspense is strong
enough to provide opportunities for expansion, elaboration and
restructuring, or where there is a need to accelerate the pace by
simplifying and skipping over the inessentials to get to the point
faster. Even if the listener is silent there emerges invaluable feed¬
back. In fact, the right kind of attention from listeners is almost
always silent, as they will hopefully be so taken with the story
being told that they will, at every step of the way, want to know
what happens next.
Dramatic structure is, you might say, the craft of keeping an
audience excited, of avoiding boredom in your listeners. In fact,
I find it useful to think of the audience as the enemy, to try to tell
the story while always remembering that the audience has some¬
where better to go and something better to do. Assume that as a
storyteller you have to keep your audience buttonholed at all
times by curiosity, expectation and some kind of suspense. With
' this in mind, I advise you to examine a few of the stock phrases
‘who ...’
‘but..:
78 DRAMATIC CONSTRUCTION
and all that went before was exposition (establishing the back-
story). But in tightly knit contemporary story structures it is
often preferable to begin the story with some dramatic event and
only then retrace its origins through exposition, since exposition
is more dramatic as soon as there is something at stake.
80 DRAMATIC CONSTRUCTION
and magic spells. Characters are simplistic. The stuff of fables,
folk stories and childhood. The tone is also of nineteenth-century
moral tales.
Hamlet: The locality is Denmark, the castle of Elsinore. The
period is the sixteenth century, a time of violence, of wars and
murders, and rival claims to thrones. Again the values are feu¬
dal, with emphasis on revenge motivations.
The Bicycle Thief: The city of Rome as it was in the aftermath of
the Second World War. A period of great poverty, but also a time
of communities struggling to re-establish human values. The city
is rife with disillusion, petty crime and the black market. The
tone is of a desperate search for decency and dignity after the
years of fascism (hence a political dimension).
‘who . . .’
Cinderella: Is forced by her two stepsisters to slave in the kitchen
in soot-stained clothes.
Hamlet: Is unhappy because his father has died and his mother
has married his uncle, the dead king’s brother, very soon after.
The Bicycle Thief: Is desperate to get a job to support his young
wife and their little boy.
Observe how each character is equipped with the dynamics of
character-in-action, a built-in interior struggle.
Cinderella: Dreams of romance and escape from the mistreat¬
ment by her stepsisters.
Hamlet: Torn apart by his feelings of indecision and inadequacy,
contrasting with the heroism of his warlike father.
The Bicycle Thief: Struggles to maintain his dignity and job
which is the basis of his self-respect, as well as the respect of his
wife and son.
Note also that the protagonists, as well as the antagonists, and
even other characters with whom the central figure is involved in
‘but. .
Cinderella: Cinderella is left at home by the fire and her stepsis¬
ters live in luxury.
Hamlet: Hamlet mourns his dead father, hates his uncle and is
tortured by the ambivalence of feelings for the Queen (his
mother). He also is tormented to the point of suicidal despair by
his low self-esteem, his inability to take heroic action.
The Bicycle Thief: The bill-poster, who has recently pawned his
bicycle, waits amongst the other unemployed standing in line
every day for the chance of a government j<pb while his wife and
children wait at home.
Thus are established the elements of struggle, the circum¬
stances of the characters who personify the forces that stand in
the way of the protagonist’s desires or intentions. In effect, the
protagonist sets the story in motion, and through interactions
with foils will illustrate the story’s root-idea and theme.
8z DRAMATIC CONSTRUCTION
‘so then, as a result of which ..
84 DRAMATIC CONSTRUCTION
within which you should be as impromptu and as spontaneous
as possible. Invention, it has been said (by William Archer), is
apt to be ‘memory in disguise’, and invention is often at its most
fertile when it comes directly from unconscious associations.
The unconscious works at high speed, while writing is suffi¬
ciently deliberate to allow internal censors to work and inhibit
spontaneity (after all, talented raconteurs generally perform best
when under the pressure of an audience).
The two great virtues in the game are tension and surprise.
The storyteller manipulates an audience that is hopefully always
impatient. ‘So what happens next?’ is the question an audience
quite understandably wants to be constantly asking itself (and
the storyteller). If ‘what happens next’ has been foreseeable,
tension will inevitably drop. Narrative momentum hopes to
keep its audience off-balance at all times, either through sus¬
pense, anxiety or fear of the next event.
86 DRAMATIC CONSTRUCTION
dramatic sense, implies the intention of making something happen
and accomplishing a result. This is a concept that can be seen in
the simplest and most basic of cinematic structures: animated
cartoons. Animation remains one of the most direct forms of
cinematic storytelling that exists. To understand this you really
ought to examine a good cartoon frame by frame, something I
did long before I became a fully fledged member of the movie
industry. What I learned from it was not just the principles of
animation, but also those of dramatic construction and film
grammar.
One of the first exercises required of the student of animation
is to draw a cartoon figure of a man walking. I make no apolo¬
gies for using childish comic drawings as illustrations of the
principles of narrative/dramatic structures. The value of carica¬
tures is that they exaggerate and simplify some of the so-called
principles with which we are concerned in this course, principles
we are apt to take for granted.
When these, or similar drawings, are put under the camera, pho¬
tographed, and then projected, the result may indeed be contin¬
uous and smooth motion, a flowing progression. But it may look
a little too smooth - it has no momentum and does not really
look like walking. The body appears to float along and there is
no sense of weight. These images represent merely an activity
with no real force of action or energy. But then this is not really
what walking is. It is merely a sequence of phased images of a
couple of steps, a cycle that can be repeated. The animator has
intentionally tried to space the drawings out at equal intervals so
the movement will flow and seem smooth.
Your instructor demonstrates what walking really is. It is
rather more complicated than you may at first realise. He starts
88 DRAMATIC CONSTRUCTION
context: the dynamics of drama, for we find a similar kind of
dynamism in an effective dramatic narrative. A story that truly
excites has momentum and drive (‘What happens next?’), the
progression of which is more than ongoing activity - it is action,
movement with purpose that is confronted by certain obstacles
(whether physical or not). In a sense, it is similar to the mechan¬
ics of the internal combustion engine. In an effective story, each
scene will have its own build: it is a mini-drama in itself. Tension
is increased and pressure builds (much as the piston in the cylin¬
der will compress the gas), then comes the flashpoint, the explo¬
sion that drives the piston in a contrary direction. The audience
should know when a story is reaching its climax, for it should be
clear when certain tensions have been (or are about to be)
resolved or relaxed, even though there may be yet more uncer¬
tainties and important dramatic structures that remain unre¬
solved. Note that it is usual to resolve secondary tensions before
primary ones, and that an ability to pinpoint primary tensions
between characters is likely to lead to the definition of a story’s
central theme(s).
Returning to the example of animated cartoons, compare the
versions here of a man walking through a door. Here is the
smooth movement. The figure progresses in the direction of
the door in a sequence of equally spaced phases. It is movement,
not action.
9° DRAMATIC CONSTRUCTION
happen next and the uncertainty of the outcome. In dynamic
terms, this means that as a film-maker (a writer and director),
you should spend just as much time (if not more) emphasising
and exploring the preparations and after-effects of an event as
you do the actual happening itself. The practised cartoonist is
much less interested in the actual moment of action than in the
before and after. He caricatures the gathering of energy that pre¬
cedes the explosive act (the wind-up), while the action itself is
often barely visible or is even off-screen. But its reverberations
are exhaustively explored.
Theorists of dramatic structure point out that drama is the art
of preparing crises. A series of interesting incidents or events
may indeed be as entertaining as a complete narrative. But real
drama is created by the continuous and very real involvement of
the audience as its emotions are engaged both in advance of a
crisis and then in the repercussions of what they have just wit¬
nessed. Every dramatic writer knows this, or soon learns it. To
reiterate an important point: screenwriting has been called the
task of exploring not action, but reaction.
i. Hitchcock, p. 73. The director Alfred Hitchcock was once asked if he had a for¬
mula for creating dramatic stories. Hitch gave an answer that is
simplistic to the point of being a cartoon image. He said:
92 DRAMATIC CONSTRUCTION
Peter has a half-brother, Joseph Surface, who is a devious and
malicious character. Feigning sympathy and friendship with Sir
Peter, Joseph is really trying to seduce Lady Teazle, who is suffi¬
ciently exasperated by her husband to be open to his advances.
The scene takes place when Lady Teazle keeps an assignation
with Joseph in his private rooms. Joseph has started his attempt
to seduce Lady Teazle when a servant appears to announce that
Sir Peter has arrived and is on his way upstairs. Joseph has time
to hide Sir Peter’s wife behind a screen in the corner of the room
before Sir Peter enters.
The scene, which you should look at in detail, is quite com¬
plex, involving several other characters and a situation in which
Joseph, in order to prevent them from exposing the woman
behind the screen, has to pretend he has been entertaining
another woman, obviously for immoral purposes. The incon¬
gruities are elaborate. We, the audience, are held in a state of
comic tension while we wait for the inevitable moment when the
screen collapses and all is revealed. One of the ironies, of course,
is that in the course of the dialogue between Sir Peter and
Joseph, Lady Teazle learns of her husband’s real feelings about
her, feelings that drastically alter her attitude to both men.
It occurs to me that the device of dramatic irony is so standard
a formula of dramatic construction that, in truth, it is quite rare
to find any really well-structured story that does not make use of
it. Think of the stories you have encountered where we, the audi¬
ence, are aware of circumstances of which one or more of the
onstage characters are ignorant and are thus kept in a state of
‘anticipation mingled with uncertainty’ as we wait for some turn
of events (peripeteia) in which the suspenseful situation is
resolved. Can you think of any dramatic work that does not
make use of this structure, however indirectly? It seems to me
that as students’ projects are offered to me, it is the absence of
clearly structured dramatic irony (especially in visual terms) that
is their weakness.
There is a sense in which the most basic elements of film gram¬
mar have potential for dramatic irony. The standard pattern of
editing starts with a master-shot, the angle within which all dra¬
matic elements are visible. It is an objective God’s-eye-view that
.makes the audience aware of the situation as a whole. It allows
DRAMATIC IRONY 93
us to locate ourselves spatially within the shot, to see exactly
where the characters are in relation to each other and their envi¬
ronment, and to observe these interactions from the outside. The
master-shot is often followed by closer angles, for example close-
ups of individual characters. A close-up, depending on a number
of factors, invites us to concentrate on the thoughts and feelings
of one particular character. A reverse angle that follows a close-
up will often seem to be the point of view of the preceding close-
up character. This choice of screen sizes and pattern of shot
juxtapositions encourage audiences to switch from His view¬
point of Her to Her viewpoint of Him, and then, in the master-
shot, to the audience’s viewpoint of the two of them, of their
interactions.
Consider the scene in Sheridan’s play. A film version would
almost certainly be covered in a master-shot that shows most of
the room, Joseph and his visitors, while the hidden Lady Teazle
would perhaps be visible to us, but to no one else. Then there
would be closer shots, including cutaways to the reaction of
Lady Teazle listening behind the screen. Even in a scene where
dramatic irony is not so obviously staged, one can see the prin¬
ciple at work. The camera set-ups and editing might be designed
to reveal private thoughts and feelings of one of the characters,
of which everyone else is ignorant.
As you explore some of the great classics of stage and screen,
you will see that most have a ‘bomb under the table’. The first
scene of Oedipus Rex shows the young King swearing an oath
that he will investigate the murder of the man who was previ¬
ously King of Thebes, husband of Jocasta to whom Oedpius is
now married. The audiences for whom this great play was first
performed were well aware of the irony here, for the murderer
that Oedipus has sworn to find and punish is Oedipus himself.
Not until the story’s final confrontations will he be forced to
recognise the awful truth, though the bomb has been ticking
away all throughout the play. Eventually Tiresias spells it out for
him in full: Oedipus has killed his own father and committed
incest with his mother. Likewise, the very first scene of Hamlet
sets the fuse for the bomb: the Ghost has been seen on the castle
battlements. A couple of scenes later Hamlet is told by the Ghost
that the present King, Claudius, murdered Hamlet’s father.
94 DRAMATIC CONSTRUCTION
Hamlet’s dilemma is that he has no real proof of the crime and is
disturbed that the Ghost might be a figment of his own paranoid
state of anxiety and indecision. The trap of the play-within-a-
play solves that issue, but a new obstacle arises when Hamlet
mistakenly kills Polonius.
In a farcical film I directed, The Ladykillers, the comedy is
based entirely on ironies. We are certain that the figure who fol¬
lows Mrs Wilberforce back from the police station is up to no
good, but the little old lady has no suspicions about Professor
Marcus. Nor does she realise that the five men apparently
rehearsing a string quintet in her upstairs room are, in fact, crim¬
inals planning a dastardly robbery. And when she does find out,
she is innocent of the fact that they are trying to decide which of
them will do her in.
Hitchcock’s example is, of course, a perfect example of dra¬
matic irony. With a bomb under the table, the tension may or
may not be present in the mind of one of the characters in the
scene. But it is certainly in our minds, and this is what is impor¬
tant. Well aware of the danger that awaits them, we are appre¬
hensive about whether the characters on screen will become
aware of it too. If you extend Hitchcock’s illustration in its cari¬
cature form, you have an encapsulation of several of the classic
elements found in dramatic structures.
DRAMATIC IRONY 95
REACTION/ACTION
William Archer Revisited
1. Play-making,
A Manual of
William Archer was a British drama critic and playwright whose
Craftsmanship
book Play-making was published in 19iz.1 Archer was a friend (originally published by
of playwright George Bernard Shaw. He had met GBS in the Small, Maynard and
Co., 1912; all citations
reading room of the British Museum and, explaining to Shaw
in Mackendrick’s notes
that he felt he was quite good at inventing plots, admitted that refer to the Dover
he lacked talent in writing dialogue. Shaw, already with an reprint, i960). Archer
established reputation for debate, was supremely confident in (1856-1924) was a
noted journalist and
his skill for lively dialogue, and suggested they collaborate. Thus
drama critic whose
it was that William Archer supplied the skeleton of the dramatic translation of Ibsen’s
structure of Shaw’s first play.1 Though Shaw went on to write Pillars of Society was the
first of the Norwegian
many plays, while Archer on his own produced only a series of
playwright’s works to be
deservedly forgotten melodramas, the two remained close produced in England.
friends all their lives. To speak personally, Archer’s book on dra¬ See William Archer by
C. Archer (Yale
matic structure is the best text I know on the subject of dramatic
University Press, 1931)
construction. and William Archer by
Having said that, I do understand why some people find Play¬ Peter Whitebrook
making hard-going. The examples Archer uses to illustrate his (Methuen, 1993).
ideas are from playwrights of the late nineteenth century. While 2. In 1884 Archer and
he does also cite Wilde, Shaw and Ibsen, Archer generally deals Shaw started collaboration
with writers who seem very dated today. In addition to this, stu¬ on The Way to a
Woman's Heart, the
dents argue that because the book is so old, Archer’s theories
title of which was later
must be out of date. Dramatic style has changed a great deal changed to Rhinegold.
since 19iz, not only in content, but also in form. One relevant See Michael Holroyd’s
Bernard Shaw, Volume
question, then, is whether Archer’s commentary applies, for
One: The Search for
instance, to more modern forms of theatrical writing (the plays Love (Chatto and
of Beckett and Ionesco, for example), and, of course, to cinema, Windus, 1988), pp.
274-7. See also Shaw’s
a medium that was in its absolute infancy when Archer wrote his
foreword to Archer’s
book. volume Three Plays
It is perhaps understandable that a film student of today (Constable and
„ finds it hard to translate the concepts Archer is writing about to Company, 1927).
There are no rules for writing a play. It is easy, indeed, to lay down
5. Archer, Play-making,
p. 3. negative recommendations - to instruct the beginner how not to do
it. But most of these ‘don’ts’ are rather obvious; and those which are
not obvious are apt to be questionable . . . There are no absolute
rules, in fact, except such as are dictated by the plainest common
sense. Aristotle himself did not so much dogmatise as analyse, clas¬
sify, and generalize from, the practise of Attic dramatists. He said,
‘you had better’ rather than ‘you must.’5
98 DRAMATIC CONSTRUCTION
One thing is certain, and must be emphasised from the outset: . Archer, Play-making,
namely, that if any part of the dramatist’s art can be taught, it is only a '• 7-
To be honest, I’m not sure even this isn’t overstating the case.
I would rather say that it is possible to examine how certain
dramatists have constructed material in a way that at times has
seized the interest of the audience. If they have also succeeded in
seizing and retaining your interest, you should take a closer look
at just how they did this. Though drama cannot be taught as
such, it can most definitely be learned the way most skills are
learned: by examination of others whose work you admire.
On Choosing a Theme
The theme of a story is usually established only in the final cli¬
max during the obligatory scene where the confrontations
dramatise the point of the narrative. This is the part of the story
the audience has been waiting for and that the author is obliged
to deliver. It is also where character, plot and theme are most
clearly integrated. This confrontation is likely to be a high point
in the mechanics of the action, where principal characters are
placed in situations designed to reveal their most significant
qualities, their moral weaknesses or strengths, their sympathetic
or unsympathetic traits, their true feelings about others. Such
showdowns also serve to demonstrate the author’s underlying
preoccupations, those themes that give unity and meaning to the
story. Without characters, a theme is an abstract and generalised
statement of conflict or tension - it describes rather than drama¬
tises. What the student needs to learn, therefore, is how to con¬
vey the theme of his story through the creation of characters
who interact within the scenes he creates, and not just imbue a
single character (the protagonist) with that theme. Archer
„ writes: ‘“Theme” may mean either of two things: either the sub-
102
DRAMATIC CONSTRUCTION
Myth, according to anthropologists, is a magical working out 12.. ‘The sun sinks
slowly on the western’,
of the conflicts felt by a society. Claude Levi-Strauss has argued
New Society, 6 May
that the social purpose of the earliest forms of religion, mythic 1976, an article
rituals and magic ceremonials was to provide communities with which Mackendrick
a means of ‘resolving contradictions’ within their society. And in reproduced in its
entirety for his
a recent article on the decline of the Western, sociologist Will
students. Mackendrick
Wright has written that ‘All stories are one means by which soci¬ was also impressed
eties explain themselves to themselves.’11 According to psycho¬ with Wright’s book Six
Guns and Society: A
analysts and psychotherapists, a ‘personal’ myth may have a
Structural Study of the
similar function. Like some dreams, it may be an effort by the Western (University of
creative subconscious to send to the author a message (theme) in California Press, 1977),
writing a lengthy precis
the form of a parable. What evidence is there to support this?
of the book that
The best that I can offer is another highly personal example included Wright’s
related to a film I directed some years ago, one I was intimately analysis of the three
basic formulae of the
involved with from its conception.
Western: the ‘Classical’
The Ladykillers, written by William Rose, was in fact a dream.
Formula (pp. 48-9
Bill woke up one night with the idea complete in his head. He had of the book), the
dreamed of a gang of criminals who commit a successful robbery ‘Vengeance’ Formula
(p. 69) and the
while living in a little house belonging to a sweetly innocent little
‘Professional’ Formula
old lady. Belatedly, she discovers their crime. A highly moral and (p. 113).
simple-minded soul, she insists they all go to the police and give
themselves up. Gradually the five men realise that they will have
to kill her. But villainous as they are, they cannot bring them¬
selves to murder such a benign and helpless figure. So, quarrelling
over which of them should do the deed, they one by one kill each
other, leaving the little old lady with the money. The story
amused all of us who worked with Bill at the studio where we
were under contract. But it was only several weeks later that I
began to realise it could serve as the basis for a film script. 1 went
to Bill and we agreed on the project.
Work on the screenplay involved much argument between the
two of us, but curiously enough there was never any departure
from the simple basic structure of the idea that had come from
Bill Rose’s unconscious imagination. The fable remained,
though a great deal more invention was necessary to develop the
deliberately grotesque figures of the criminals, a quintet of ras¬
cally types who were dedicated to villainy but not quite wicked
enough to take the inevitable step necessary to avoid their own
ruin. Bill once declared that the moral of the story was: ‘In the
XO3
WILLIAM ARCHER REVISITED
Worst of All Men there is a Little Bit of Good that can Destroy
Them.’
As director I worked daily with Bill and the associate pro¬
ducer, though the screenplay was essentially the work of Bill
Rose alone. As a fine writer often does, he used his collaborators
only as a kind of sounding board. We were his audience during
the long sessions of improvisation during which the story was
worked out in considerable detail. But one of my most satisfying
discoveries was one I did not make until the film had been com¬
pleted and exhibited. Bill and I were both expatriates in Britain.
Though we were both American-born, because my family was
Scots I was sent to Scotland to be educated, while Bill volun¬
teered to join the Canadian forces during the Second World War
and then, having married an English girl, decided to remain in
Britain after the war. With such backgrounds both of us see
Britain in a slightly different way than do the British.
The fable of The Ladykillers is a comic and ironic joke about
the condition of post-war England. After the war, the country
was going through a kind of quiet, typically British but never¬
theless historically fundamental revolution. Though few people
were prepared to face up to it, the great days of the Empire were
gone for ever. British society was shattered with the same kind of
conflicts appearing in many other countries: an impoverished
and disillusioned upper class, a brutalised working class, juve¬
nile delinquency among the Mods and Rockers, an influx of for-
eign and potentially criminal elements, and a collapse of
intellectual leadership. All of these threatened the stability of
the national character.
Though at no time did Bill Rose or I ever spell this out, look
at the characters in the film. The Major (played by Cecil Parker),
a conman, is a caricature of the decadent military ruling class.
One Round (Danny Green) is the oafish representative of the
British masses. Harry (Peter Sellers) is the spiv, the worthless
younger generation. Louis (Herbert Lorn) is the dangerously
unassimilated foreigner. They are a composite cartoon of
Britain’s corruption. The tiny figure of Mrs Wilberforce
(Wilberforce was the name of the nineteenth-century idealist
who called for the abolition of slavery) is plainly a much dimin¬
ished Britannia. Her house is in a cul-de-sac. Shabby and clut-
104
DRAMATIC CONSTRUCTION
tered with memories of the days when Britain’s navy ruled the 13. Archer, Play-
world and captains gallantly stayed on the bridge as their ship making, p. 11.
106
DRAMATIC CONSTRUCTION
motion. Implied is that the protagonist is active (after all, the
word ‘drama’ is derived from the Greek work for ‘doing’).
We live, however, in times that are less ‘heroic’. In many con¬
temporary dramas, whether in theatre or cinema, the central fig¬
ure does not have (or does not seem to have) much positive will.
This does not contradict the principles Archer is discussing; it
only inverts the protagonist’s relationship with the situation that
surrounds him. As the protagonist becomes less active and more
passive, less certain of his positive purposes, so it is ‘the ambi¬
tions, the interests, the prejudices, the folly, the malevolence of
those who surround him’ that take on a more active character. A
common compromise is achieved when the protagonist appears
passive, inactive, uncertain and undecided for the first three
quarters of the piece. Then, in the final confrontation, he or she
is forced into a definitive commitment, a positive action.
We can turn to our usual examples. In On the Waterfront, the
punch-drunk ex-fighter that Brando plays is torn between his com¬
mitment to his brother and the corrupt union racketeers on the one
side, and the pressure from the priest and the girl on the other. It
takes the murder of his brother to force him into a positive act, tes¬
tifying against the racketeers and then confronting the dockers and
Johnny Friendly. In The Hustler, Paul Newman is torn between
George C. Scott’s view of life and that which he shares with the
girl, until her suicide provokes him into the final confrontation
with the gambler, and with himself. In The Third Man, Holly
Martins tries to maintain his loyalty to Harry Lime until the evi¬
dence supplied by the British military major and the predicament
of the girl force him to betray, and finally shoot, his oldest friend.
More complex is the kind of story where the completely pas¬
sive, undecided and purposeless central figure does not have any
final change of heart. There is always a danger that a story with
a conclusion that does not seem to resolve anything, and that
lacks a peripeteia towards the final crises, will feel unsatisfac¬
tory. ‘Unsophisticated’ audiences often resent this lack of resolu¬
tion, while avant-garde types admire it as innovation because it
manages to avoid the obvious. My personal view is that when the
inversion of the classic principles do work for me (as they do, for
instance, in a film like Antonioni’s L’Avventura and Beckett’s
° play Waiting for Godot), it is only because the same old prin-
108
DRAMATIC CONSTRUCTION
In an attempt to define what drama is. Archer arrives at a view 18. Archer, Play-making,
so sensible that one wonders why his predecessors didn’t think p. 125.
of it:
19. Ibid. p. 148
A great part of the secret of dramatic architecture lies in the one word
‘tension’. To engender, maintain, suspect, heighten and resolve a
state of tension - that is the main object of the dramatist’s craft.18
no DRAMATIC CONSTRUCTION
Plausibility and Willing Suspension of
Disbelief
It would seem a paradox that the cinema is said to be, in one
sense, the most real of all media, but that it is also an enor¬
mously effective medium for the unreal, the fantastic and the
dream-like. The problem for the film-maker is that he must
establish a tone in his work that so captivates audiences that
they are not simply willing but in fact eager to believe in the
unbelievable. This is a crucial element of the practice of dramatic
construction and film-making. The task, in a sense, is technical,
for it involves the craft of exposition and the ingenious manipu¬
lation of audience expectations. How does one persuade an
audience to put aside its normally critical approach to subject
matter and willingly collaborate with the storyteller in accepting
as logical what is plainly incredible, nonsensical and/or absurd?
The phrase ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ comes to mind.
Consider: how is the technique of achieving a ‘willing sense of
disbelief’ different from ‘creating a sense of belief’?
Aristotle defined the plausible as that which is possible in the
eyes of common opinion. By this definition, plausibility quickly
and quietly conforms to the stylistic conventions of a cinematic
genre, those ‘laws’ to which audiences (or at least those full of
regular filmgoers) have generally been conditioned and feel com¬
fortable with. In this sense, anything is potentially acceptable
once the tone of a film has been adequately established. With
comedy, for example, it is acceptable that a character possess a
single official vice and that all the misadventure that inevitably
befalls him should be the direct consequence of that vice.
Moreover, it is rare that we do not sense the genre of a film and
its emotional tone and atmosphere within a few moments of it
beginning. Just think of the standard opening of a fairy tale:
°‘Once Upon a Time . . .’ The words are the established signal
112,
DRAMATIC CONSTRUCTION
‘willing suspension of disbelief’ may lie, as the audience is able
to congratulate itself on guessing what the game is to be and on
preparing for whatever it is that will be disclosed as incredible,
irrational and absurd. In this fashion, the audience becomes a
co-conspirator.
Third, introduce characters into the story who are plainly
unbelievers, as this develops tension between belief and disbelief.
If your audience has reasonable grounds to find your premise
unbelievable, create an onstage character who gives early expres¬
sion to their scepticism. Disbelief is now personified in the
action. A key character in a ghost story is the figure playing the
part of the cynic, the one who declares, ‘There’s no such thing as
a ghost.’ Needless to say, however much the audience might
agree with him, this produces a mischievous desire to see the
unbeliever discomfited (savaged by a ghost), especially if the
director has taken care to give him a pompous, narrow-minded
and unsympathetic personality.
Fourth, as an elaboration or extension of this process, it is
often effective to devise a domino effect in the exposition.
Choose a point of attack in the construction where there are
already some characters secretly aware of the ‘thing-that-is-
unbelievable’ but who conceal this knowledge. Set up a conflict
with a protagonist who through these knowing characters
comes very gradually to the point of confronting the unbeliev¬
able. This will set him or her in conflict with a larger circle of
secondary sceptics who are as disbelieving as the protagonist
was at the earlier stages.
Fifth, introduce disappointments. It is effective to create a sit¬
uation in which, having loaded the dice against the sceptic, he is
then proved correct (for the moment at least). This should pro¬
duce in the audience an increase in the perverse desire to believe
in the unbelievable.
Them!, a 1954 American science-fiction film, is absolute and
unashamed hokum. It is simple-minded to the point of absurd¬
ity, and nobody is likely to regard it as a work of serious cinema.
It is also, at another level, a classic. If there had been an attempt
to treat its subject matter with any subtlety, the result would
have been a certain disaster. But Them! is worth some study, I
suggest, because it demonstrates how our ‘disbelief’ can be easily
114
DRAMATIC CONSTRUCTION
duced by an atomic bomb test) is the single impossibly fantastic
element to the story. All other elements of implausibility are
merely unlikely. A rule of the genre seems to be that we are
allowed only one major Incredible Thing. Given this, everything
else will, surprisingly enough, seem to be logical (if still wholly
improbable). Two elements of suspense are apt to be half as sus¬
penseful as one, and several examples of things incredible, mag¬
ical, fantastic or even just plain nonsensical, are not nearly as
satisfying as a single impossibility from which all others flow.
Given this one Incredible Thing, everything else in the story
should actually be logical, even over-logical. This is what pro¬
duces tension: because all of the associated circumstances are
strictly rational, we the audience cannot reject the nonsensical
elements without rejecting everything else.
This ‘rule’ may be a reflection of the point often noted by
doctors who study psychotic behaviour. They say that the most
thoroughly deranged people are those who act in an utterly log¬
ical way, except that this logic is based on one insane premise.
The madman behaves in a way that would be totally acceptable
and realistic if he really were Napoleon. By extension, it is sound
practice when devising an incredible story to do a great deal of
research on all other associated aspects of the situation. Them!
actually devotes quite a lot of footage to earnestly real, and
entirely accurate, explanations of how ant colonies function.
Everything except the initial premise is logical and real. A
comparison can be found in the paintings of Rene Magritte and
Salvador Dali (and even Tenniel’s illustrations to Alice in
Wonderland). While the techniques of these artists are naturalistic,
even meticulous in their representational realism, their subjects
are a long way from reality.
116
DRAMATIC CONSTRUCTION
were so happy with this formula. I think they believed it pro- Mackendrick directs
vided the opportunity for not only more variety of characters ^^success™6**
but also a lively pacing that could be achieved by intercutting (I957).
the progression of the subplots. After one film of this kind I
began to dislike the structure because I felt it weakened the
drive of the narrative rather than strengthened it. All of the
characters essentially became cameo roles that couldn’t be
developed in any depth, and the multiplicity of minor tensions
was apt to reduce the tension of the main theme. This is why I
am not sure if the comment of the story-editor about subplots is
really sound. Or at least, I think there is a danger of it being
misunderstood by students. I suspect, however, that the story-
editor was really complaining of something a little different: a
118
DRAMATIC CONSTRUCTION
from a first-draft script by Ernest Lehman,3 it starred Burt 3. Ernest Lehman
Lancaster and Tony Curtis. It is a film I have mixed feelings (b.1915) scripted The
King and I, North by
about today, and I am writing about it here to illustrate some Northwest, West Side
problems in the structuring of a screenplay, not because I mean Story, The Sound of
to claim that it is an important work. It isn’t. Among other Music, Who’s Afraid of
Virginia Woolf and
things, the film was a big flop at the box office, though the rea¬
Hello Dolly! Lehman’s
sons for this are perhaps rather complicated. It was much too original script was
costly, chiefly because it was made under rather chaotic circum¬ based on his
fifty-four-page
stances: Odets had so badly underestimated the time he would
novelette entitled
need for revisions of Lehman’s script that I had to start shooting Sweet Smell of Success,
while he was still working on scenes to come, and on a couple of published in a
collection of his short
occasions filming had to be halted.
fiction in 1957
Moreover, most of the critics in the popular press (with con¬ (reprinted in 2000 by
siderable justification) resented the savagely unflattering picture The Overlook Press).
that the film presented of their profession, or at least of that sub¬
4. Walter Winchell
section of it: the New York gossip columnists and their associ¬
(1897-1972), legendary
ates, the press agents. At the time Sweet Smell of Success was American columnist
made, a number of people assumed that the character Burt and radio broadcaster.
Lancaster plays (J. J. Hunsecker) was based on the famous See Neal Gabler’s
Winchell: Gossip,
Broadway gossip columnist Walter Winchell.4 Lor obvious rea¬ Power and the Culture
sons, since the story presents both the columnist and his profes¬ of Celebrity (Vintage,
sion in an unflattering light, the producers denied this. But it 1994)-
should be stated that Ernest Lehman (who also wrote the origi¬
nal story upon which the script was based) had once worked in
the offices of a Broadway press agent who was a close associate
of Winchell. Winchell had also been the subject of a series of
expose newspaper articles that do bear some vague resemblance
to incidents in the story.
There were other problems to deal with. The production
department had used Lehman’s draft for its scheduling and
budgeting, so to say the film went over schedule is not really
accurate because there never really was a schedule or a definitive
budget. I am ashamed to admit that from the point of view of the
director, chaos can have some advantages. It forces him to think
fast and improvise, seizing on unforeseen opportunities. There is
the exhilaration at the fact that the whole elaborate superstruc¬
ture of executives - whose job it is to look over the shoulder of
the director - are at his mercy, because nobody else knows what
is going on. On the other hand, it is a wholly disastrous way to
12,0
DRAMATIC CONSTRUCTION
recognised that not only is the whole plot of Sweet Smell of 5. Runyon’s work
Success somewhat exaggerated, it also deals with an environ¬ served as the basis for
the musical Guys and
ment and characters who seem to enjoy quite grotesquely
Dolls.
colourful forms of speech. (On another level, Damon Runyon’s
stories of the same environment have a similarly preposterous 6. Lehman’s version of
the story is different. ‘I
style.5) Clifford sensed, I think, that I was concerned about the
went on a location¬
problem of style and explained to me: ‘My dialogue may seem hunting trip, and when
somewhat overwritten, too wordy, too contrived. Don’t let it I returned, Harold
Hecht called me into
worry you. You’ll find that it works if you don’t bother too
his office and told me
much about the lines themselves. Play the situations, not the that United Artists had
words. And play them fast.’ When it came to the highly stylized, gotten cold feet about
almost preposterous, lines the actors had to speak, I found this the idea of a first-time
director directing this
to be a marvellous piece of advice. Indeed, it reinforced my
picture because they
understanding of dialogue in film: the spoken word is often at its hadn’t had such good
most effective when the actors concentrate not on the words and luck with Burt
Lancaster directing The
their literal meaning but on the actions that underlie them, the
Kentuckian, his first
real intentions and motivations of the characters. A line that and for all I know only
reads quite implausibly on the printed page can be quite con¬ attempt at directing. I
was very upset - and
vincing and effective when spoken in a throwaway or incidental
very lucky, because I
fashion by the actor. am sure I couldn’t have
Ernie Lehman and I had become friends during a period when brought it off at all, not
we were both under contract to Hecht-Hill-Lancaster. I had been the way Sandy
Mackendrick
preparing a project that was cancelled because of casting prob¬ eventually did. I
lems, while Ernie had been assigned as not only the writer of don’t know what
Sweet Smell of Success but also as director. He began, however, made me think at that
stage of my life that
to have second thoughts about choosing it as his first directing
I was capable of
assignment and decided he would be safer if he remained as directing’ (John Brady,
writer/producer.6 He asked me if I would like to direct it. I liked The Craft of the
Screenwriter, Simon
the material for several reasons. One was that I had always han¬
and Schuster, 1981,
kered to make a melodrama, a film noir as it has been called, and p. 206).
felt this was a chance to get out of a reputation I had for small,
cute British comedies. Another was that, though it was in
England, I’d had some experience of the world of tabloid jour¬
nalism and was both repelled and fascinated by some of its grub¬
bier aspects. A third was that I liked the idea of trying to capture
on screen the atmosphere of Manhattan. (It has been done many
times since, of course, but Sweet Smell of Success was actually
one of the first attempts to shoot night scenes on location in the
Pity.) I also appreciated the themes of the story and felt I could
12.2
DRAMATIC CONSTRUCTION
challenges that allow him to escape from things that are more
important. The truth, perhaps, was that I was uncomfortable
about characters and situations that I did not really believe in
and hoped to conceal these fundamental flaws by the fancy foot¬
work of visual effects. A common fallacy is that you can make a
piece of writing conceived in theatrical terms more cinematic by
‘opening it out’. This usually means keeping the same dialogue,
but playing the scene against backgrounds of more pictorial inter¬
est. Though this may indeed help to provide more atmosphere, it
does not necessarily make the scenes any more interesting.
At this point came a major disaster: Ernie Lehman fell ill.
With only a month or so before shooting was due to start, a date
that could not be postponed because of contracts to the princi¬
pal actors, we were faced with the task of finding a new screen¬
writer to solve a number of the problems we had identified in the
script. By enormous good fortune Hecht-Hill-Lancaster had just
put Clifford Odets under contract to work on another project
and we were able to persuade him to do what, at that juncture,
seemed a relatively simple job of story doctoring: polishing the
dialogue and making some minor adjustments to the scene struc¬
ture. We could not have been more wrong. It is, of course, well
known that few writers are able to resist the temptation of
changing the work of another screenwriter, but none of us
realised how much work Clifford found that he had to do. Very
little of Ernie’s script was left in the end, though the basic themes
remain in the film we know today, and with the exception of the
final scenes, the plot was substantially as originally conceived.
What Clifford did, in effect, was to dismantle the structure of
every single sequence in order to rebuild situations and relation¬
ships into scenes that were more complex and had much greater
tension and dramatic energy. Disastrous as this process was
from the point of view of the production, the truth is that for me
personally it was an experience that taught me a staggering
amount. I can make no claims for the completed film, but what
I can say is that without this work done by Odets, it would have
had none of the vitality you see up on the screen.
It is not easy to explain Clifford’s process. It took place mostly
in story conferences, daily meetings between three people:
Odets, producer Jim Hill and myself. Much of the discussion
128
DRAMATIC CONSTRUCTION
with such little respect. Thus the character, theme and plot are 8. See the published
all functioning at once in the scene.8) script of Sweet Smell of
Success by Odets and
Clifford promised to work on these ideas. Then he began to
Lehman (Faber and
focus on the scene he felt needed most work: the introduction, in Faber, 1998), pp. 5-11.
the Twenty-One Club, of the figure central to the whole subject,
9. See James Mangold’s
J. J. Hunsecker.9 Lehman’s original version contained three char¬
piece in the published
acters sitting at the newspaper columnist’s table, but very little script, which uses
use was made of them. They were merely extras to the scene, Mackendrick’s
teachings to analyse
while in Odets’s version each of the five characters are continu¬
this scene.
ously in play throughout. For purposes of exposition, Odets had
considerably expanded their parts, making them foil figures and
effectively providing a compact subplot for them. Like Odets, I
felt the scene was not really as powerful as it ought to be, but
having no positive suggestions, I had made no complaint. Odets
proceeded to give us a demonstration of the way a practised dra¬
maturge, a man with long experience of such difficulties,
explores for ideas to solve them.
‘I don’t understand!’ he declared with force. ‘This man
Hunsecker is a newspaper columnist. I know what that means.
What I don’t understand is why everybody seems so terrified of
him. Why?’ Jim Hill protested to Odets, ‘Oh, come on, Clifford,
he’s not just any columnist. Everybody knows how he behaves.’
‘No they don’t,’ said Clifford. ‘Some people might know. Maybe
you and I know, but most people have no idea. This is a man who
treats one of his associates as if he were dirt. But Sidney just sits
there and takes it. Why does he need it? Why doesn’t he just get
up and walk away?’ Jim protested again: ‘He can’t walk away. It’s
his living.’ ‘How?’ asked Clifford. ‘How? Because a Press Agent
has to get his clients’ names into the paper. That’s what they pay
him for. And besides that...’ Jim, in some exasperation, went on
to elaborate on the relationship between Sidney and Hunsecker.
While he was doing so Odets scribbled notes on his memo pad,
then switched his attack. ‘But why is everybody else so much in
awe of this creature? He insults everybody but nobody talks back
to him. I just don’t believe in this man.’ Once more Hill insisted,
‘Don’t you understand! This guy Hunsecker is a man who can tell
Presidents what to do!’ Scribbling again, Clifford said more qui¬
etly, ‘Oh, sure. But where does it say that? And even if somebody
-says it, I don’t believe it. You’ve got to show me.’
Before we look at various scenes from the film, here are the char¬
acters involved:
130
DRAMATIC CONSTRUCTION
Sidney Falco
A press agent, he has a very small list of clients, nightclub owners,
band leaders, entertainers of any kind who pay him up to a
hundred dollars a week to get their names mentioned in the
gossip columns of New York newspapers. Fiercely ambitious, it is
Sidney’s business to toady up to all of the Broadway columnists.
He supplies them with jokes or scandalous titbits, but is also ready
to do them any other kind of favour, from supplying them with
girls to more devious and malicious chicaneries on their behalf.
J. J. Hunsecker
The most successful of Broadway newspaper columnists. In
addition to a daily column in a major newspaper he also has a
regular television show. A thoroughly unpleasant character
whose sense of his own importance verges on paranoia,
Hunsecker has used and continues to use his power over Sidney.
The relationship between them is an ugly one, for while
Hunsecker takes sadistic pleasure in Sidney’s dependence on
him, Sidney desperately needs the columnist and conceals his
contempt and hatred for the man whose ‘sweet smelling success’
he covets.
Susan Hunsecker
Younger sister of J. J. She has lived with her brother since the
death of their parents and is psychologically and financially
dependent upon him. Hunsecker’s attitude to her is possessive to
a degree that hints at an incestuous obsession. While insisting on
his affection for her, Hunsecker has actually managed to drive
her to the edge of a nervous breakdown. He sees her interest in
any young men as a threat to her dependence on himself and has
so far managed to discourage the attentions of anyone who has
showed an interest in her. Sidney has been useful in this, since it
is essential to Hunsecker that Susan should not realise that her
brother is the source of the problems she has with finding a
boyfriend. Susan is, however, not nearly as naive as J. J. assumes
her to be.
10. From Lehman’s A jazz guitarist who leads a quintet that plays in Broadway
script entitled The clubs. He is in love with Susan. He is also aware that her
Sweet Smell of Success
pathetic insecurity and low self-esteem are the direct result of her
(pp. 18-25). The
unpublished screenplay, older brother’s dominance of the girl. Steve has concealed his
marked ‘First Draft’, is own private repugnance of Hunsecker’s muckraking newspaper
dated 30 March 1956.
column in the hopes of persuading Susan to leave her brother
and marry him. Steve is also well aware of Sidney’s activities on
behalf of the columnist, though has more difficulty concealing
his contempt for the press agent.
Rita
Otis Elwell
132
DRAMATIC CONSTRUCTION
INT. ENTRANCE - CLUB FIFTY-SEVEN - NIGHT
RITA
Sidney . . . ?
Then we see Sidney, moving past her toward the dining room
without hearing, lost in his own troubles. A captain, george,
GEORGE
(coolly)
Yes, Mr Wallace?
SIDNEY
What do you mean, ‘Yes, Mr Wallace?’ I’m going in to
his table. I have to see him.
GEORGE
I’m sorry. I’ll have to find out if he . . . wishes to be
disturbed.
SIDNEY
(an unbelieving smile)
George! You’re kidding. This is me - Sidney.
GEORGE
(who isn’t kidding)
Will you wait here, please.
SIDNEY
(annoyed)
Yeah - I’ll wait here please.
RITA
Sidney . . .
(:without turning)
Hiya, honey.
RITA
SIDNEY
(,impatiently)
Sweetie, I’ve been up to here.
RITA
{low)
I’m in trouble, Sidney.
SIDNEY
RITA
SIDNEY
That point-killer.
(he turns away)
Go ahead. I’m listening.
But with only half an ear, because as Rita talks, he cranes his
neck, looking toward the dining room, looking for George.
RITA
SIDNEY
(bored)
Go on.
GEORGE
SIDNEY
(coldly)
Well, thank you, George.
He starts away.
RITA
But, Sidney . . .
SIDNEY
(stops, turns)
Honey - you worry too much.
He goes towards the main dining room, turns right and enters a
small private dining room.
HUNSECKER
(harshly)
. . . But what he didn’t say is that what you read in his
column was a denial of the whole thing! Sure he had it a
week before I did! But he had it all wrong. Like he
always does!
(wearily)
Ah, why do I let these garbage-peddlers bother me?
They’re nothing but fleas buzzing around a tiger. I waste
my strength, my energy, worrying about fleas, there’ll be
nothing left to fight the dragons with. Hunsecker has to
stay healthy. Hunsecker fights the world. And he does it
alone. Ask Sidney here. He knows. Don’t you, Sidney?
Most press agents are rag dolls. Press them and they say
mama. But not Sidney here. Press him and he says
Hunsecker. Sidney, say Hunsecker for the young lady.
(to one of the men)
What did you say her name was?
MAN
Linda Hall
HVNSECKER
MAN
HUNSECKER
(to Sidney)
Take her name down, Sidney. Linda Hall.
136
DRAMATIC CONSTRUCTION
GIRL
(quickly)
What for?
HUNSECKER
The girl and the two men laugh with embarrassment. Sidney
reaches for a glass of water. Quickly, Hunsecker places a ciga¬
rette between his own lips and snaps his fingers. Sidney puts the
water down untouched, and lights his cigarette for him.
HUNSECKER
(blowing smoke)
Doesn’t he do that beautifully?
HUNSECKER
HUNSECKER
MAN
Goodnight, Mr Hunsecker.
GIRL
Goodnight, Mr Hunsecker.
HUNSECKER
(,pointing at her)
You I like.
SIDNEY
(wearily)
All right, you’ve had your fun, Harvey. I don’t mind.
I’m used to it. But nobody’s listening now, so let’s not
play games, please -
HUNSECKER
SIDNEY
13 8 DRAMATIC CONSTRUCTION
HUNSECKER
(looking away)
Suppose you tell me.
SIDNEY
HUNSECKER
SIDNEY
(voice rising)
I already took the bows, Harvey! This afternoonl
Robard! Lilly Werner! Sam Weldon! I called Finn
Welbeck on the Coast and told him to expect a
whole paragraph on the picture! What am I going to say
to these people? How am I going to explain?
HUNSECKER
(turning on him)
Tell them you have a weakness for making promises you
can’t keep! Maybe they will forgive you this weakness,
Sidney! But not me\ Not any more! From this date on,
you’re out of the column until you keep your promises
to me\ Unless something is done about Susan and that
sickening boy!
SIDNEY
(quickly)
I told you, it’s just a summer romance. It’ll fade like the
autumn leaves.
HUNSECKER
(obsessed)
She smells of love! I can’t even go near her any more!
The stink of that lousy dago crooner is all over her like
cheap perfume!
SIDNEY
(uneasily)
You’re getting yourself all worked up over nothing.
SIDNEY
HUNSECKER
SIDNEY
HUNSECKER
SIDNEY
HUNSECKER
SIDNEY
(jfrightened)
No, Harvey! Not Kello!
HUNSECKER
SIDNEY
Look, Harvey -
Sidney, entering the club, threads his way through the crowded
foyer, coming up to camera near the foot of the staircase. There
he meets a Captain who turns to him.
CAPTAIN
CAPTAIN:
But of course . . .
SIDNEY
Alone or surrounded?
CAPTAIN
INT. LOUNGE
Sidney comes round the corner from the foyer and walks
through the lounge to the door into the alcove where the phone
booths are. Sidney moves briskly past the girl at the switch¬
board, instructing her:
SIDNEY
OPERATOR
SIDNEY
J. J., it’s Sidney. Can you come outside for one minute?
{tensely)
I have to talk to you, alone, J. J., that’s why.
hunsecker’s voice
SIDNEY
hunsecker’s voice
Sidney comes out of the door to the phone booths, walks through
the lounge to the hallway. He turns toward the dining room.
INT. HALLWAY
Sidney comes to the door into the dining room, camera tracking
with him. Here he pauses, looking towards hunsecker, who is
seated at a table which is clearly his habitual position. We see
him only in semi-back view, a broad and powerful back. He is
listening to a man who has paused at his table, stooping over
Hunsecker to whisper in his ear. As the columnist listens, his
hands play with an omnipresent pad and pencil which lie on the
dinner table amongst an assortment of envelopes, mimeo¬
graphed sheets and a telephone. Beyond Hunsecker and the man
talking to him are the Senator, the Agent, and an attractive, if
fatuous, Girl.
HUNSECKER
HUNSECKER
(softly)
Harvey, I often wish I were deaf and wore a hearing aid
. . . with a simply flick of a switch I could shut out the
greedy murmur of little men . . .
SIDNEY
HUNSECKER
SIDNEY
HUNSECKER
SENATOR
HUNSECKER
{nodding)
Yes, the Justice, that’s right. But I think I had it in the
column.
SIDNEY
{smoothly, casually)
Last July, the lead item . . .
SENATOR
(laughing)
And I believe that’s precisely where I read it, too. You
see, J. J., where I get my reputation from for being the
best-informed man in Washington.
HUNSECKER
The Girl looks again towards Sidney. The Senator again sees this,
addresses Sidney pleasantly.
SENATOR
SIDNEY
SIDNEY
I know Manny Davis.
HUNSECKER
(quietly)
Everyone knows Manny Davis . . .
(as the phone rings on the table)
. . . except Mrs Manny Davis.
The Senator, the Agent and the Girl are watching Hunsecker. The
Agent's reaction to Hunsecker's remark is a sickly smile. Hunsecker
repeats aloud a story which is told him over the telephone.
SIDNEY
Do you believe in capital punishment, Senator?
SENATOR
(amused)
Why?
SIDNEY
(pointing to the phone)
HUNSECKER
AGENT
GIRL
(by rote)
Manny’s faith in me is simply awe-inspiring, Mr
Hunsecker. Actually, I’m still studying, but -
HUNSECKER
What subject?
GIRL
HUNSECKER
GIRL
HUNSECKER
SENATOR
GIRL
HUNSECKER
GIRL
HUNSECKER
HUNSECKER
(quietly)
Match me, Sidney . . .
SIDNEY
(coolly)
Not just this minute, J. J. . . .
HUNSECKER
SENATOR
HUNSECKER
SIDNEY
What’s manna?
HUNSECKER
Heaven dust.
SENATOR
But don’t you help columnists by furnishing them with
items?
SIDNEY
Sure, columnists can’t get along without us. Only our
good and great friend, J. J., forgets to mention that. We
furnish him with items -
HUNSECKER
What, some cheap, gruesome gags?
SIDNEY
(to Hunsecker now)
You print them, don’t you?
HUNSECKER
Yes, with your client’s names attached. That’s the only
reason those poor slobs pay you - to see their names in
my column all over the world! Now, as I make it out,
you’re doing me a favour!
SIDNEY
I didn’t say that, J. J.
HUNSECKER
The day that I can’t get along without press agents’
AGENT
{nodding)
Sweep out my igloo, here I come.
HUNSECKER
(to the Agent)
Look Manny, you rode in here on the Senator’s shirt-
tails, so shut your mouth!
The Senator doesn’t like this treatment of others and his manner
and face show it.
SENATOR
(slowly)
Now, come J. J., that’s a little too harsh. Anyone seems
fair game for you tonight.
HUNSECKER
(not as harsh, but -)
This man is not for you, Harvey, and you shouldn’t be
seen with him in public. Because that’s another part of
the press agent’s life - he digs up scandal among promi¬
nent men and shovels it thin among the columnists who
give him space.
SENATOR
There is some allusion here that escapes me . . .
HUNSECKER
(an edge of threat)
We’re friends, Harvey - we go as far back as when you
were a fresh kid congressman, don’t we?
HUNSECKER
Maybe it’s a mannerism - because I don’t threaten
friends, Harvey. But why furnish your enemies with
ammunition? You’re a family man. Someday, with God
willing, you may wanna be President. Now here you
are, Harvey, out in the open where any hep person
knows that this one . . .
HUNSECKER
(to the Senator, affably)
Next time you come up, you might join me at my TV
show.
With Sidney making way for him, Hunsecker walks round the
end of the table to the Senator. The Senator faces Hunsecker
solemnly.
SENATOR
(quietly and cautiously)
Thank you, J. J., for what I consider sound advice.
There are many things to notice when comparing the two drafts.
For example, Sidney’s four-line interaction with the maitre d’
helps establish the characters of the two men and probably of
Hunsecker too, while the line ‘something - with - long - red -
hair’ tells us something about the character of the Girl. Sidney’s
rudeness to the telephone girl is in character, as he is apt to be as
impolite to his inferiors as he is flattering to those he needs. (It is
also an indication of his anxiousness at meeting J. J.). Sidney’s
decision that he would rather not speak to Hunsecker in the
company of others suggests what later emerges, that Sidney has
ammunition for the confrontation to come. As far as the audience
goes, hearing Hunsecker on the telephone before seeing him is a
tease in delaying the entrance of the chief antagonist of the story.
When the build-up of a confrontation has been this elaborate,
it is necessary to deliver some strong conflict immediately. Thus
the scene begins with a very direct skirmish between the two
men once Sidney starts talking to Hunsecker. Sidney is in danger
of being thrown out of the club when he decides to plays his ace
(the information concerning Susan). Note, however, that once
this card has been played (once a fuse has been lit and a show¬
down promised), Odets can take an extravagant amount of time
before coming to the point (Sidney telling Hunsecker about
Susan being engaged), something that comes only several script
pages later.
Think also about the joke that Hunsecker tells about sports
cars in California. In Lehman’s script, Hunsecker tells a joke
that is somewhat crude and not all that funny. The incident is
not meant as comedy, rather as characterisation: vulgar gags are
indeed part of the stock in trade of tabloid columnists. But
Odets takes the point a little further, for while the mildly dirty
joke is included in his draft for the same purpose, its unfunni¬
ness is emphasised by the fact that only the sycophantic agent
laughs.
Soon after comes a good example of triangulation. Sidney
addresses his line ‘A man has just been sentenced to death’ to the
SIDNEY
Jimmy! This is a coincidence. I am just going -
WELDON
(overlapping)
Yeah. A coincidence you should run into the very man
you’ve been ducking all week!
(to the girl)
This is my press agent, Joan.
Weldon, jibing at Sidney, plays his remarks off the girl, who is
amused; Sidney, of course, is not.
SIDNEY
(quickly)
I tried to reach you twice -
WELDON
(overlapping)
What do you do for that hundred a week. Fall out of
bed?
SIDNEY
Jimmy, I’m on my way inside right now to talk to
Hunsecker. I can promise you -
WELDON
(horsing)
Joan, call a cop! We’ll arrest this kid for larceny!
WELDON
(cutting in)
That was two months ago. Take your hand out of my
pocket, thief!
The girl tries to quiet Weldon, who has gone from horsing to
loud contempt.
THE GIRL
WELDON
(;indignantly)
Why? It’s a dirty job, but I pay clean money for it,
don’t I?
SIDNEY
WELDON
SIDNEY
WELDON
162
DRAMATIC CONSTRUCTION
doorway, looking round the room that clearly holds some mem¬
ories for her, music has begun to play, emphasising those recol¬
lections. The man moves over to her, saying nothing, and offers
to help her with her overcoat. With only the slightest of hesita¬
tions, the young wife lets him take it, and he deposits it in a chair
next to the side table on which he starts to mix a drink, again
without needing to ask her what she wants. Accepting it, she
obviously notes he has remembered her tastes. She smiles at him
and goes on listening to the gramophone record. But when he
joins her, carrying his own drink, he leans close to kiss her lightly
on the nape of the neck. She turns quickly, with a small shake of
her head.
YOUNG WIFE
(:negative inflection)
Mm-mm.
WOULD-BE SEDUCER
YOUNG WIFE
YOUNG WIFE
163
CUTTING DIALOGUE
tell if they would have played any better. The second was that
my contract was renewed and I was privately noted by the Chief
Executive of the studio as a youngster who might eventually be
better at directing than at writing. (Years later, I read that
Raymond Chandler felt that one of the best dialogue scenes he
had ever written in a Hollywood movie contained only one
word: ‘Uh-huh’, spoken three times with different intonations. It
is the same anecdote.)
It may be worth reminding students that such wordless scenes
are, in some respects, just as challenging to the screenwriter as
scenes of snappy and clear dialogue, since they depend on very
careful examination of the mute behaviour of the characters, the
use of props, and the staging of the action. Such scenes, of
course, must also take into account those situations that have
preceded it, as well as the entire dramatic structure underlying
the film as a whole, an understanding of which must always pre¬
cede the invention of dialogue. To a strong degree, in cutting
these twenty-five pages of dialogue to three non-verbal noises
and a single word, I had remained absolutely faithful to the play¬
wright’s original story.
In his book The Empty Space, the director Peter Brook writes 1. The Empty Space,
pp. 135-6.
about a scene in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Brook invites
the reader to consider how, if the scene had been written as a
screenplay, the dramatist might have replaced a large proportion
of the lines with cinematographic images, drastically cutting the
dialogue. In Brook’s words:
[The actors] were asked to select only those words that they could
play in a realistic situation, the words that they could use unselfcon¬
sciously in a film ... Then [they] played this as a genuine scene from
a modern play full of living pauses - speaking the selected words out
loud, but repeating the missing words silently to themselves to find
the uneven lengths of the silences. The fragment of scene that
emerged would have made good cinema, for the moments of dia¬
logue linked by a rhythm of silences of unequal duration in a film
would be sustained by close shots and other silent, related images.1
As I see it, this exercise relates closely to what every film direc¬
tor must do when confronted with any text. In making the
action playable, the director and his team of collaborators work
backwards from the words, retracing the work that the writer
has done before the lines of dialogue were even written. Though
screenwriters are apt to declare ‘In the Beginning Is the Word’,
the truth is that the first step in all dramatic writing is visual. The
film-writer’s literal sense of imagining is actually the process of
creating images in his head. It is the visualising of people, places
and activities, out of which comes the impulse for dialogue.
Here is a primitive effort at how I have used ideas taught in
the Dramatic Construction class to prepare a version of the bib¬
lical story of Solomon. You will recall the tale, found in I Kings,
chapter 3, verses 16-28. Two prostitutes come to see Solomon,
166
DRAMATIC CONSTRUCTION
that they rely on friendship, companionship and sometimes sex¬
ual intimacy with other women. Would this help explain the
venomous attitude of the girl who would prefer to see a child
dismembered than have it returned to its real mother?
I sense (at the emotional level, not the analytic) the ferocious
malice of this woman who wants a child dismembered. Why? It
can only be because she wants to inflict the most horrendous
agony and injury on the other prostitute with whom she has
shared a brothel. But why the jealousy? Because the other
woman is younger, more successful as a whore? Possibly, but I
reject this as dramatically undesirable (it’s just too obvious). I
suspect it might be better to work on the question of guilt at hav¬
ing killed her own baby through, perhaps, drunkenness. If it is
the false mother who smothered her own infant, is she project¬
ing her self-hatred onto the other innocent mother?
Again about that line (‘Let it be neither mine nor thine, but
divide it’). Certainly any woman saying this speech must recog¬
nise that it completely condemns her. It proves her guilt, and that
is why my first reaction was that it was not a playable line. But
now I see a possible solution: play the line as a savage admission
of guilt. Play it as a ferocious and defiant reaction to the fact that
not only Solomon, but all those present, have seen her for what
she is. As I began to sense the dramatic impact of this, I got my
first taste of the tone of how to construct the scene dramatically.
It began to make me think about the character of the innocent
mother, the real mother. How does she feel about her erstwhile
companion? They surely know each other well and, even in this
dreadful bitterness, the true mother must understand the false
mother only too well.
At this point I begin to see that for an effective peripeteia, the
scene has to be constructed so that, on the surface at least, the false
mother seems the more piteous. The performance of the guilty
woman, her show of distress and injury, has to be exceptional.
To produce the required shock and peripeteia, we should load
the situation so we are expecting and hoping that it is the guilty
woman who is the true mother. What will be the shock and rev¬
elation in the scene? It is that she is ready to see the infant dis¬
membered because this means revenge on the true mother. This
* works, and the image that springs to mind is the expression on
167
THE SOLOMON EXERCISE
the face of the guilty woman as she sees in Solomon’s eyes, and
then in the eyes of everybody else present, how the King has
unmasked her. The shock (and it has to be as forceful as we can
devise) has to cause a shift in our feelings about the two women.
Here again I see the false mother as the more appealing. The
more apparently vulnerable at the beginning, the more tragic
after the unmasking.
My next thoughts concern Solomon. I have seen him as a
stereotype, the all-knowing and all-powerful patriarch with a
flowing white beard. Experience warns me that if he is the pro¬
tagonist, then this characterisation is a mistake. But is he actu¬
ally the protagonist? If the women are more dramatically
interesting, why not tell the story from the point of view of one
of them? I reject this because Solomon is po very obviously the
principal activist at the climax: it is the trap he sets that provides
the main crisis.
I see immediately why I had started on the character of the
false mother: I was doing precisely what Solomon has to do - he
has to unravel the mystery of these female characters. So I begin
a process of thinking not of a character as a character-in-itself,
but of character interactions. I start by asking: What Does A
Think B Is Thinking About A? It sounds complicated (and it is),
but this is the very essence of giving some density to a character,
and in turn a scene. The simplest way to make Solomon more
interesting is to ask, Why does he have to be so all-powerful and
secure? What is at stake for him?’ Preliminary reaction: not much.
He’s the King, he’s secure, all he has to do is be wise. This is a lit¬
tle dull. I would like there to be something at stake from his
point of view. Going back to the text, something occurs to me. I
find it where it usually is, at the end: ‘And all Israel heard of the
judgement which the king had judged; and they feared the king:
for they saw that the wisdom of God was in him, to do judge¬
ment’ (verse 28).
This prompts me to follow through with another ‘rule’: when
searching for fresh insight into a text, it can be useful to do back¬
ground research. Don t limit yourself to the material within the
scene - make a study of the larger context. I put down the Bible
and pick up the encyclopaedia to find out more about King
Solomon. It seems there was considerable controversy about his
168
DRAMATIC CONSTRUCTION
ascension to the throne of David, and that Solomon had not actu¬
ally been regarded as the son most likely to succeed his father. This
idea gives an entirely different feel to the final lines of Solomon’s
story and at once produces a switch in my vision of the King.
In the Bible story, the incident of the judgement of the two
harlots is not placed at any particular moment of Solomon’s long
reign. As I said, I had originally seen him as a wise and all-
powerful priest-King. Quite abruptly it occurs to me that it
would be far more interesting if the scene took place when he
was much younger, new to the throne and its responsibilities,
surrounded by elders who are not until this moment convinced
that he deserves his royal authority. I realise again the validity of
looking to see what happens in the end for clues to what might
be the possible theme of the story, and what might happen at the
start. I get the idea for a further peripeteia after the unmasking
of the false mother: a turnabout of the attitude of these older
men as they sense not simply that the young man is shrewd, but
that his insight is from God. This is actually the more significant
peripeteia in the scene (providing that Solomon is the protago¬
nist). It is something of an axiom in dramatic construction that
the protagonist is the one whom we feel has most at stake and
for whom the obligatory moment is a confrontation with the
main dramatic tension holding up the scene.
I see Solomon being brought in to solve the problem that has,
up until this point, been confronted by three separate judges.
Why three? Because a trio seems to represent an abstract of a
larger community, and also because it presents a group figure
within which there can be represented two who are sceptical of
young Solomon and one ready to have faith in him. There can
therefore be a shift of balance as Solomon wins the admiration
of the majority. All this is still an unstructured exercise of the
imagination. I have not yet got down to the real work. And I
should emphasise that I have been thinking about the end situa¬
tion, ignoring the start. With this in mind, I begin to select the
dramatis personae of the short scene. They are:
169
THE SOLOMON EXERCISE
2. Solomon’s supporter, perhaps some kind of chamberlain or
functionary, probably one of the judges.
3. Two other foils: the sceptics who have failed to deliver judge¬
ment on the case.
4. The False Mother. The prettier and younger of the two har¬
lots, and a much better dissembler. Her very real tears are the
result of self-disgust and guilt. Guilt because she not only inad¬
vertently smothered her own baby, but also because she knows
that she could never have been a fit mother for her child. She is
smart and sees at once when and how Solomon has unmasked
her.
5. The True Mother. A woman of real feeling for her child, prob¬
ably with real understanding of the pain of the other woman and
the motive for her action. Not necessarily a wholly sweet char¬
acter. She might feel rage and anger against the judges, even
against Solomon for his suggestion of cutting the child in two
(Solomon’s trick is, after all, very sadistic).
CT
7■LMl's.
hr/rr fo-tni-fr".-'.'*•
’■ • "" !■■■■: .i.r .HURStr I i 1
VOICE
{very small, ‘interior’’)
Now when the days of David drew night that he should
die, he charged Solomon, his son, saying, ‘I go the way
of all the earth: be thou strong therefore, and show thy¬
self a man . .
VOICE
(continuing)
In Gideon the Lord appeared to Solomon in a dream by
night. And God said, ‘Ask what I shall give thee.’ And
Solomon said . . .
{close up on Solomon’s face, his lips move slightly,
as if speaking in a half-waking state)
‘Thou hast shewed unto thy servant, David my father,
great mercy, according as he walked before thee in truth.
Thou hast made thy servant king instead of David my
father, and I am but a little child. I do not know how to
go out or come in.’
Scene Two
CHIEF JUSTICE
COURT OFFICER
CHIEF JUSTICE
I see. But there are no witnesses, no others to give
evidence. Just the two women in the dispute.
The chief justice occupies the central chair behind the judge's
bench, clearly the position of authority. The second judge sits
beyond him. Of the other chairs, the one nearest the door is
unoccupied. Below the steps down from the judge's dais is a
small table with the large book. Here those who give testimony
stand as they address the judges. Behind the court officer, a
kind of constable or official, stand two women, the plaintiffs.
Between them is a guard who is armed with a short sword. In
the background is the nurse who has been referred to, carrying
the swaddled bundle, the child. The second judge has
noticed the arrival of solomon and indicates his presence by
getting from his chair. This prompts the chief justice to turn,
recognise solomon (reaction shot) and, after a barely notice¬
able hesitation, also get up, thus vacating his position of senior¬
ity. But solomon is already moving to sit at the chair at the
near end of the bench. (Shot that shows chief justice, second
judge and solomon sitting on judge's bench together.)
SOLOMON
You were right to do so. Sit, please.
CHIEF JUSTICE
You’ve been warned, both of you, of punishment for
those who, coming here for judgement, take in vain the
name of the Lord. You know of the statutes and the
commandments against the bearer of false witness?
YOUNGER WOMAN
(emotional but with great sincerity)
I - I and this woman live in the same house. I had a -
I was delivered of a child - while she was there in the
house. Then - afterwards - three days after - she had a
child.
OFFICER
No sir. Just the two women. They -
(he hesitates)
CHIEF JUSTICE
OFFICER
Yessir.
YOUNGER WOMAN
There was no one else, only this - this woman and myself.
(a beat)
And the child died.
SOLOMON
(gently)
How did it die?
YOUNGER WOMAN
I - I don’t know. It died - it died in the night. I don’t
know how, perhaps she — lay on it. She had been drink¬
ing and -
The older woman shifts on her feet and ive become aware that
her hands seem to be tied behind her back.
SOLOMON
OFFICER
She was violent. She would not come with us here. She
was very violent so we -
CHIEF JUSTICE
Sir, if you wish to question these women, or if you have
an opinion?
SOLOMON
Bring it closer, the baby.
solomon gets up, descends the steps into the court. At the sign
from the officer, the nurse comes forward. She is nervous, but
at a gesture from solomon lays the child on the small table.
solomon stoops to examine it. The judges watch, the chief
justice with some impatience (reaction shots).
SOLOMON
[smiling as he watches the infant)
It is asleep.
176
DRAMATIC CONSTRUCTION
SOLOMON
One of them is lying, that’s clear. And, as you say, that is
serious, intolerable. It demands punishment, the most
severe penalty. Excuse me -
(turns to the guard and indicates that he wishes
to be given the sword)
One women is lying. But which? Without other evidence
we must treat each of them equally and impartially.
Justice must be equal, and so we will divide. We shall
give half to one, and half to the other.
OLDER WOMAN
No! No! Let it - let her have it! It’s - it’s hers. I was the
one that lied before. It’s her child. Let it live.
YOUNGER WOMAN
(shaking her head, then savagely)
Kill it! Kill it!
(choking an admission)
It’s better dead! Like . . . like . . .
She turns to run. The guard goes after her, pinions her. But
Solomon, with authority, gives him an order.
SOLOMON
Get up. No one will punish you. You have been pun¬
ished enough.
Scene Three
VOICE
18 6 DRAMATIC CONSTRUCTION
without making it sound embarrassingly and unnecessarily sig¬
nificant. No amount of rehearsal helped the actor play his dia¬
logue in a throwaway fashion. The solution was finally found
when the director handed the man a floor mop, spilled some
water on the floor, and instructed him to mop up every drop of
water while the scene was shot. Concentrating on this bit of
business produced the desired effect: the actor was so absorbed
in the irrelevant activity that he hardly reacted at all to the pro¬
tagonist, delivering the line in a completely natural, casual and
convincing manner.
For a more ingenious example of the same device look at one
of the love scenes between Marlon Brando and Eva Marie Saint
in On the Waterfront. It is reasonably well written, but might
have seemed over-saturated if the actors had played it while
looking at each other directly. Instead, Brando uses a couple of
props, one of which is a child’s swing in the playground of the
park where the scene takes place. Incongruously he sits in the
swing, giving a slightly self-deprecating tone to his performance.
The other prop is a glove the girl has dropped. Brando picks it
up and does not return it, absent-mindedly trying it on his own
much larger hand. This purely incidental activity means that for
much of the dialogue he avoids eye contact with her. Because of
this the scene is less sentimental and creates an impression of
unpretentious and natural screen presence (though it is, needless
to say, just as contrived and premeditated as any other piece of
acting).
A brief aside. Few interesting situations are drawn in black and
white. Few well-drawn characters seem absolutely confident of
right and wrong. In too many scripts this is transformed into
phrases like ‘He’s angry, but a bit pitying’, or ‘She’s a bit resent¬
ful, but at the same time intrigued’. This is not much use to the
actor, as such compromise is likely to produce a drab and con¬
fused result. The character who is ‘almost angry but a bit pitying’
will achieve this effect with more vitality if he shows an impulse
to anger, quickly checked by a contradictory moment of pity, then
by another flash of annoyance. If the girl who is resentful but
intrigued alternates between moments of resentment and moments
of interest, it is much clearer for the audience. And clarity, of
course, is perhaps the key to efficient storytelling. An analogy
Film Grammar
'
■
The Invisible Imaginary Ubiquitous
Winged Witness
When on set or location, a film director is apt to have an absent
manner, as if his mind were in another place. In a way this is
true, for he is not really there. In spirit he has removed himself
into the future and is already sitting in the movie-house, watch¬
ing the screen as if it were a window into an imaginary world.
Already a member of the audience for his as yet unmade film, the
director is feeling what the future spectators of his work might
feel and reacting as they might react.
As someone who seeks to know what will ‘work’ for the audi¬
ence, the director becomes this audience whilst making his film.
He looks at the crowd of people surrounding him in the studio
in a strange way, blind and dead to much that is going on. Why?
Because his mind is fragmented. He is screening out everything
not relevant to the as yet not-present world of the story being
told. Concentrating only on what he can see, he is busy arrang¬
ing in his head the short, narrow segments, those disorientated
pieces of this soon-to-be-assembled reality that will be seen and
heard through that open window of the cinema screen. He is, in
his mind’s eye and ear, involved in make-believe just as complex
as that of the actors before him. He is living not only in the
future but also in the past, when, during the writing stage, he
was gradually constructing a fully focused concept of the film:
its atmosphere, its visual qualities, its characters’ appearance
and behaviour, their emotions and interactions.
Though nothing is fixed and finalised in his mind, standing on
location as the individual personification of his future audience,
he is able to run the film though in his mind’s eyes and ears. As
he looks through the viewfinder and puts the jigsaw together, he
is using his memory as a guide to the hundreds of decisions he
. has to make. His dream film is becoming progressively more
198
FILM GRAMMAR
shock for the audience. This is sometimes forgotten by the film¬
maker who thinks that all cuts in action must be smooth. The
way to make a cut seem smooth is to make the jump of the
mind’s eye one that the audience wants to make. Simply, the cut
to an image is accepted when it supplies to the viewer the satis¬
faction of some curiosity stimulated by the previous image, or
when the shock of the cut is a surprise presentation of something
that is interesting and stimulating, even if unexpected. To
answer a second complex question simply: when should the
director make a cut in the action? Answer: when the Witness
wants to see something it cannot yet see. As such, the motivation
for every cut should always be built into the preceding angle.
There should automatically be within every shot something that
creates in the audience a desire to move at the right moment,
along with the Witness, to the next angle. This is what the film
editor looks for: a motive for a move within space and time.
In this respect, the Witness is a strange disembodied and
mythic creature. It has magical faculties, living in an entirely fic¬
titious and imaginary world, oblivious to real space and time. It
is a being able to leap about with total freedom, taking up
impossible positions in space, as for instance when it hovers out¬
side a top-floor window of a skyscraper looking in to see the
action. The Witness is able to look not only through solid walls,
it can even take up a position inside a brick wall. It can fly in
close to enough to study the facial expressions (those secret and
private reactions) of a character who is sitting alone. Or it might
fly out to allow the audience an appreciation of the geography of
a crowded room. From this it will be clear where the characters
lie in relation to each other and where the objects that surround
them are standing.
The Witness can make leaps in time too. Intensely inquisitive
as well as somewhat impatient, and because it is in touch with
the desire of the audience, it tends to anticipate. Seeing what
may happen next, it jumps to the next interesting action, thus
telescoping time. Seeing an intention, it might even leap to the
conclusion, while on other occasions it will explore the realm of
memory by retracing time into the past.
201
HOW TO BE MEANINGLESS
by contrast. To stress one thing is to underplay and dismiss
something else.
When it comes to the relative rather than the absolute nature
of film grammar - how dramatic effects are achieved by compari¬
son and contrast - the scale of sound amplification is also of
great importance. The most important thing to remember, a
principle on which a whole philosophy of sound design can be
based, is that the absence of sound does not necessarily read as
silence. For example, in order to create the dramatic illusion of
quiet in an empty room, the sound designer might add in unnat¬
urally loud sound effects of things that the ear would not nor¬
mally pick up, like a dripping tap or ticking clock. Perhaps these
sounds might even be contrasted with the faraway barking of a
dog or distant traffic noise. (Experienced sound mixers will tell
you of directors who, hoping for powerful sound effects, keep
urging the mixer to turn up the controls. The effect is quite
unimpressive.)
Sound influences what you see. Images alter how you hear
things. The mind’s ear, like the mind’s eye, can select what it
chooses to hear and be deaf to what it considers irrelevant. The
brain is able to edit what the ear supplies to it, just as it inter¬
prets what information comes from the eye. At a dinner table
where there are many simultaneous conversations, for instance,
it is possible to focus your hearing attention on two people talk¬
ing across the table while at the same time tuning out the voice
of somebody beside you, even though that voice might be much
louder. It has also been noted that emotion can influence audi¬
tory perception: for example, the mother of a young child can be
quite oblivious to loud noises while at the same time acutely sen¬
sitive to the slightest whimper from her child in another room.
The microphone and audio' tape, however, have no such capac¬
ity, and this is why it may be necessary to think of sound in film
very differently.
Consider the story of a problem confronted by BBC radio pro¬
ducers who wanted to open a programme with a soundtrack of
street noises heard on a busy night. They sent a crew to record
those sounds for real but found that the track was unusable, a
mush of incomprehensible and indistinguishable noises. They
realised that to create the desired effect it was necessary to
202
FILM GRAMMAR
record each single sound effect quite separately (sounds of car
horns, squeaks of brakes, noise of gear changes and car engines,
chatter of passers-by, cries of newspaper boys, clang of bus bells,
the conductor’s shouts to a boarding passenger). When these
were all very carefully orchestrated on various tracks and mixed
in a clearly and carefully balanced design, the effect of what the
engineers had heard at the location was recreated. In this way,
the effect of a totally natural sound environment may need to be
contrived with a great deal of skill and artifice.
20 8 FILM GRAMMAR
Condensing Screen Time
GIRL
BOY
GIRL
BOY
GIRL
(on telephone)
May I have the Bell Captain, please.
(to boy)
BOY
Why not? The wedding’s not till tomorrow.
GIRL
You’ve got to be there this afternoon.
boy:
Why?
GIRL
There’s a rehearsal.
BOY
A what?
GIRL
A rehearsal, at your mother’s place. You promised her
you’d be there.
BOY
No I didn’t. Not for a rehearsal. What does she need a
rehearsal for? She’s been married twice already.
GIRL
I promised her we’d be there. You know how she feels
about these things.
BOY
And she knows how I feel.
1. the boy gets out of bed, puts on a dressing gown, goes across
to the door and opens it
4. he takes off his dressing gown and pyjama jacket, finds a shirt
and climbs into it
7. he sits on the bed, puts on one sock, then the other, one shoe,
then the other
Your problem is that when you time this dialogue, you find that
these actions have to be played at great speed. In fact, the dia¬
logue will be finished by the time his trouser fly is zipped. This is
even before you confront the next problem: who does the pack¬
ing? Or has he already packed? (It hardly seems in character.)
Somebody has to get the suitcase, open it, start to empty the con¬
tents of drawers into it, go to the bathroom for shaving things.
And how does the bellboy arrive? Your screenwriter hasn’t
thought it through.
The answer to this problem is pure film mechanics: planning the
action so it breaks down into shots that progressively jump the
continuity, thus drastically telescoping the action. The scenes
detailed below are present on-screen so that we don’t actually see
stages 1 to 9. Instead we see the start of every action, then cut away
and almost immediately reintroduce the action at a more advanced
stage. It will appear to the audience as though it is all one uninter¬
rupted process. Something like this, for example.
GIRL
What’s the matter? Aren’t you
ready?
BOY
When is the plane?
boy’s voice
{overscene, continuing)
I thought it was this afternoon.
GIRL
No. I told you I changed it. It’s at ten-
fifteen. We’ve got twenty minutes.
BOY
Why can’t we take the afternoon flight?
GIRL
{to phone)
May I have the Bell Captain, please.
{to the boy)
Because it won’t get there in time.
{to the phone again)
This is Room 304. Can you send a boy up
And order a taxi please.
BOY
Why not? The wedding’s not till tomor¬
row.
'girl
You’ve got to be there this afternoon.
BOY
Why?
GIRL
There’s a rehearsal.
BOY
A what?
214
FILM GRAMMAR
7. MEDIUM SHOT - GIRL
GIRL
A rehearsal, at your mother’s place.
(closing the case)
You promised her you’d be there.
BOY
No I didn’t.
8. INSERT SHOTS
BOY
(continuing)
Not for a rehearsal.
9. CLOSE-SHOT - GIRL
BOY
What does she need a rehearsal for? She’s
been married twice already.
GIRL
(as she goes)
I promised her we’d be there.
GIRL
(continuing)
You know how she feels about these things.
BOY
And she knows how I feel.
Z19
DRAWING LESSON
anyone who can, with reasonable effort, write legibly or draw
the lettering for a sign, has the requisite skill. As all of us are,
surely, meant to be studying skills of ‘communication’, there is
far less excuse for us to be wholly inept in these matters.
Draw an oval. Divide the depth The eye* have Bara are level For profile For backview
Make it* width into three.
one eye-width with the note., add cranium add neck under
two thirds of The nose le the in between. Heck two-third* which la e the cranium
the depth. middle-third. of the width circle about and shoulder*.
of■ the face. two third*
■of the face.
FULL
FACE
HEAR
| cross SHOT |
1 1
FULL
FACE
J MEDIUM
SHOT
|, DONG SHOT.
I-
BACKVIEW
(Expreealon
1* invisible
Some tips about drawing the human form. The face is very
roughly oval, about two thirds the width of its depth. If you
divide it vertically in three, the eyebrows are on the line of the
upper third, the nose is the middle third. Between the eyes, there
2ZO
FILM GRAMMAR
is the width of one eye. Ears are about the depth of the nose, the
neck is about two thirds of the width of the head. To complete
the head, add the cranium behind and slightly above the face, a
circle of about two thirds of the face. To indicate a backview,
show the neck under the cranium and ears.
The same formula for drawing the face and head can be used
to diagram, in very primitive fashion, the eye-line in close-ups.
Some sense of the expression of the face is still present in semi-
backview if we can see the curve of the cheek and eyelashes of
the eye. Backview leaves the expression to be imagined.
The head is very roughly one seventh of the height of the
whole body. Two sevenths cuts at the chest, i.e. at close-shot size;
three sevenths is waist-length, i.e. medium shot. Six sevenths,
cutting below the knee, is a medium long shot, and anything that
shows the full length counts as a long shot.
Z2I
DRAWING LESSON
Point of View
i. See Hall’s The At each particular moment of any given scene, the position of
Hidden Dimension:
the camera is a point in time and space from where the Invisible
an anthropologist
examines man's use Imaginary Ubiquitous Winged Witness, the observer to the
of space in public and action, implies a specific point of view. It is from this spot where
private (Anchor,
the audience views the story, from where the Witness prompts
1969) and The Silent
Language: an
the audience to feel sympathy for one character over another.
anthropologist reveals One of the most elementary decisions the director must make in
how we communicate this respect is about the size of shot. At each precise moment of
by our manners
a scene, how close is the subject to the lens? How much is
and behaviour
(Anchor, 1973). included in the frame? How much is left off-screen?
A popular psychologist, Edward T. Hall, has written a couple
of books about what he calls ‘proxemics’, a theory that purports
to be a study of how people’s behaviour and attitudes are affected
by the physical distances between them.1 Hall suggests that these
can be divided into certain categories: intimate, personal, social,
public and remote. According to Hall we all have a sense of ‘psy¬
chological territory’. He gives the example of how, in eras past, a
king would not allow his subjects to come too close, also insist¬
ing that subordinates were not permitted to sit in chairs higher
than his own. Watch strangers who are crowded together in an
elevator or a bus and you may notice the curiously frozen facial
expression they assume, a kfnd of mask protecting them from the
indignity of uncomfortable proximity to strangers.
As a science I think proxemics theory is probably not to be
taken too seriously. But it is quite useful when thinking about
film grammar: when and how to use long shots, close-ups and
such. The film industry has given names to the various shot sizes
you will see in many films.
Important to understand is that the most basic elements of
film grammar have the potential for dramatic irony. The camera
222
FILM GRAMMAR
REMOTE DISTANCE Closer still implies
The individual person that the relationship
is not identified as is 'one-on-one'. The
a particular person. presence of others is
Figure is recognised ignored. Speech will
only by costume or be impromptu and the
because of the communication more
situation or context. 'non-verbal'.
SOCIAL DISTANCES
At fifteen feet to
ten feet, deportment PROXEMICS THEORY
and dress are on
display. In a social A popular psychologist, Edward T
environment manners Hall, has written a couple of books,
223
POINT OF VIEW
EXTREME LONGSHOT MEDIUM SHOT
Example: the opening shot in Example: Third shot in the
the scene of the attack by 'North by Northwest'.
the crop-dusting plane in It cuts the figure off at
Hitchcock'8 'North by the hips. At this distance,
Northwest'. we read fully the 'body
It's an image of 'the language' of the actor's
environment'—little empha¬ stance, his way of holding
sis on the figures in it. himself—his 'overt' atti¬
It's generally consid^ered tudes and the extraverted
that if a figure is less behavior. The voice would
than one fifth of the height be projected as off talking
of the screen, you can use to someone across a room or
doubles for the actors. They a couple of yards away in a
are recognized only by the public place. Performance
clothes they wear. scales is projected to
'social distance'.
LONGSHOT
Example: the second shot in MEDIUM CLOSESHOT
the same scene. It's full Example: a few cuts later in
length figure or more. the sequence. Slightly closer
waist length.
As an image, it reads as
'The Landscape-with-Figure'. We get a slightly stronger
The figure in relation to impact of facial impression,
the surroundings. seeing enough to appreciate
Here the framing deliberately feeling and thought in the
emphasises the emptiness, the face. It's a 'social dis¬
surrounding 'nothing.' tance' with a little more
personal feeling.
CLOSE SHOT
MEDIUM TWO-SHOT
Example: this shot, coming
Example: a three guarter
at the moment when Cary
length shot of the two figures
Grant realizes that the
seen in profile. The shot is
plane is directly attack¬
distant enough to be more or
ing him..
less 'impersonal' and it is
The shots cuts off at the 'neutral' in emphases. It
chest leve, now excluding shows the spatial distance
much of the 'body language' between the characters.
of torso and arms to put
more emphasis of facial
reactions. It's 'personal OVERSHOULDER CLOSE-SHOT
distance.' Example: the cut following
which is a little closer,
CLOSE UP more full face on Grant,
Example: The shot where showing more of his thought
Grant stands waiting in and feeling and 'favoring'
the middle of the road in him at the expense of the
order to force the oil girl who is backview.
truck to stop.
224
FILM GRAMMAR
to detect rather obvious ‘attitudes’. First, an attitude of disin¬
terested, objective and neutral interest. Second, an attitude of
balanced sympathy alternating between two or more charac¬
ters in the scene. Third, a strong sense of empathy with one of
the characters whose point of view is seen subjectively, with
the other point of view seen merely in cutaway. There are,
needless to say, many variations on this. Within any given
scene there can be several shifts of sympathy and attitude.
There are also at least three interrelated factors that seem to
determine the audience’s degree of identification with one
character over another.
First, the relative screen sizes and placement of camera. If one
character is seen in close-up and the other in medium shot, our
feelings of sympathy and/or identification are with the figure
seen at the closer distance. Increase in shot sizes generally creates
a rise in tension, while a decrease relaxes our feelings of partici¬
pation. Camera movement not only directs the attention of audi¬
ences but indicates how we should be feeling. If the camera
follows a particular character, this encourages identification
with that person, while a tracking shot from a character’s point
of view underlines its subjective quality.
Second, the eye-line, the degree to which an off-screen gaze is
given either narrowly or wide to the lens. The narrower the eye¬
line, the more we seem to feel identification, because when con¬
fronting the face directly, we feel much more of the impact of the
subject’s personality. The feeling is one of greater involvement
and there is more sense of identification.
Third, the timing of the interactions. If one character is on¬
screen for longer than another, and especially if the edits are
timed to capture the thoughts of that character, then the scene
will often appear to be from his or her point of view.
2Z5
POINT OF VIEW
In this pattern there is equal sense of identification with two
people, and no clear point of view (except that of an uninvolved
third party).
Balanced Sympathy
22 6
FILM GRAMMAR
With this pattern, there is more sense of involvement with the
two characters, though the point of view is alternating, which
means there is no special identification with either person.
POINT OF VIEW 22 7
Mastershot* When Camera pans, it always keeps the Man
in center frame, following him not her/
but it breaks ollapsing Protesting, the LODGER tries the scullery door and locks
SIDNEY, defending himself
into the LODGER*s room as to escape to the back door. that as well. Both of them
with a wooden lid from a
boiler, grabs a balustrade- BERTHA locks the door. BERTHA pushes him through- are her prisoners.
She knew he was in court and was torn between the hunger to see
him again and the fear that her feelings would betray her. She was in
the anteroom with her women when he appeared. She struggled to
hold back tears. He looked thinner, under strain, as he saw her and
stopped. Her womenfolk, seeing him enter, had sensed the tension.
K was as careful as she, as formal in his manner. Aware that her
women were watching, she drew strength from him as she matched
him in discretion, equally formal. She was perfectly under control, dis¬
missing him as she turned to the women again. Then he was gone.
And it was then that she had to fight hardest for self-control, unable
to concentrate on the gossiping of her women friends.
'GEOMETRY'.' OF
EYELINES AND
SCRBENSIZES
Z3 6 FILM GRAMMAR
Note what happens when the shots cross the axis. Because both
characters are looking off-screen in the same direction, both
seem to be looking at the same thing, and if the two close-shots
need to be inter-cut, their eyes will not meet.
/
i /
- N(-
OF TOE EYELINES
Eyeline is narrowly to Eyeline is NARROW LEFT Eyeline is NARROWLY Eyeline is WIDE RIGHT
Left though the face though the face is RIGHT though face is though the face is
is turned to the Right turned slightly to the turned towards the turned narrowly to
of camera. Right of camera. Left of camera. the Left of camera.
I are not, in fact, looking possible to stage the scene as it mi gilt have
’A at each other at all.
Oddly, the principles
still seem to apply.
oocured 'in reality'
actually having met each
other will appear to make
eye-contact if the eyelines
are 'correct' and the edits
make good sense.
While the so-called ‘rule’ against crossing the axis is one that
you should understand, it is important to recognise that it
should not be regarded as some kind of law never to be broken.
A common problem for the student who is not yet experienced
in film is to become so involved in the actual geography of a
location that he does not realise that by intercutting shots that
might be taken anywhere but that seem to be connected by
matching eye-lines, it is possible to create an illusion of spatial
relationships. Like most things discussed in these classes, exam¬
ine the standard usage of certain techniques so you can deter¬
mine just how to break them most effectively to create the effect
you want.
THE AXIS
243
(D) Camera shooting very Images that are com¬
much along the axis.
The foreground figure posed in depth have cer¬
is in Medium Shot and
quite large in frame . tain advantages. The
The Girl is Medium frame can include a fig¬
Longshot beyond.
ure seen relatively close
in the foreground, as
well as others seen full-
length beyond. This may
make not only for a more
interesting composition
but also, through the
variation of sizes of char¬
acters, indicate point of
view in the scene, thus
increasing our dramatic
Camera much
involvement.
closer to the Further, it means that
axis, behind
the Man. lie the upstage character, if
is now Medium
Longshot and
he or she is looking at
the Girl is
the nearer figure, is seen
also larger.
more frontally, showing
Camera closer to the
Camerd at right angles
more facial expression.
axis, 'favoring the
to the axis between the Girl. The Man is seen Though the nearer figure
two characters. Both fulllength, but both
are seen in longshot figures are larger may be seen in either an
in the frame.
over-shoulder angle or in
a semi-profile, it is often
easy to devise some incidental business that gives him the excuse
to turn around and face more towards the camera so that you
present a close shot of one of the figures and a longer angle of
the other at the same time.
Now study this example. The scene calls for a woman to enter a
room, cross it to sit at a sofa, and begin a conversation with a
man sitting at a desk. The location or the set has all the necessary
furniture, the door, desk and sofa. Question: where do you put
the camera?
(1) HadLum Shot. Tha Han is seated W ' and camera follows the move
in a swivel chair behind the desk Pulling Back and Tracking to
in the window. He is facing Left. include the Woman who is seen
At the sound of a door opening, he full length in tha doorway in the
swivels the chair to look offscreen background. As she starts to cojim
to the Right - forward into the roost-
246
FILM GRAMMAR
(6) - moving to include the Women '7) - end cemere Pens to shoot over (B) - end cemere Pulls Beck to e longer
et the mirror. Cemere shoots over her Right shoulder on to the Men engle as the Men turns sway to look off
(5) Thm Woman crosses behind him, her shoulder *e e metching Close- egein. After e <nomont, the Women at the Women. She pauses in the doorway,
exiting lream Right. The Hen up of her with the Men seen beyond sterts towards the door, moving looks back before she exits. Cemere Pans
earns round into e Closeup. He her in beckgroand. She turns - pest him- with the Man as he returns to his desk.
rises from the desk end corners
Palls Beck with him -
The problem with the so-called ‘rule’ that forbids crossing the
axis is that in many cases the axis actually shifts as the actors
move about. To keep eye-lines consistent, the director will some¬
times design camera movements where the camera tracks across
the axis in order to reverse the eye-lines. In such a case, a direc¬
tor will prefer to shoot master-shots and long shots first, then
move in for closer coverage. In this way he can plot the moments
when closer angles are needed, those shots that punctuate the
master-shot. In (Ci) below, the man is seen on the right of
screen. When he walks off to the left, the camera tracks with
him, moving past the woman. When the man rejoins her, moving
left to right, the camera does not track, it pans, and the axis has
been crossed.
E) C.S. MAN
she is lOoking He looks off Right.
!creen Left r(Directions Reversed)
M7
THE AXIS
In a scene involving three characters, there are likely to be three
axes. In the diagram below, (A) to (B) is the axis of exchanges
between mother and son. The axis between mother and father is
(A) to (C), while (C) to (B) is the axis of father to son. During the
scene, the eye-lines will change according to these axes.
(6
~l9y
~ \& (12)
3 C.S.MOTOER
Hie M0THER7" SCN and FATHER The MOWER, in profile, the The iSlHER locks offscreen 'We MOWER looks offscreen
The SCN is in Backview. He FA2HER in backgoind beyond. to the Right. (Either to to the left. (Either to
lxoks Left to the MOTHER. They look offscreen Right. the Son or to the Father. the Sen or the Father)
i
i
THE AXIS
249
1 Establishing two shot Closer angle. Because* A matching shot. Aiso
Both of them are seen camera has moved but a profile since the
in profile. is on the some line camera is on the
it is still profile. 'same line.
fOM
A)
(a) Two-shot
A young woman hands to the seated man something she wants
him to read. The shot, since it holds two people, is an objective
1~
$-
J- *OT/
1 •
7
j
1 «• 7
•0
[/ ^
r v
M
Vv-y/\ H.
#k
(7> jA
JS^
r ’£*r
Vs-A^
Mi
n&snpk r^j
*+ 1
“tM?
"Jf
@g-
~i
& m
Is this way of telling the story, using seven cuts made out of
two shots, any better? Not necessarily. But it does supply the edi¬
tor many more opportunities of establishing a pace, even a dra¬
matic drive, to the scene (and, naturally, has contained within it
primitive elements of dramatic irony). Given this possible struc¬
ture of cutaways and intercuts, the scene could be edited so as to
give punctuation to specific points of view and performances.
(C)
FULL COVERAGE
The now classic scene between
Marlon Brando and Rod Steiger in
'On the Waterfront' is a scene
which has been shot to the formula
of 'full coverage'. There are five
angles; one master, two matching
'complementary' over-shoulder shots, CLOSE SHOT STEIGER
After the initial establishing shot of the scene, most of the dia¬
logue is played in alternating over-shoulder shots, favouring one
of the characters and then the other, timing the cuts to the inter¬
action of thought and feeling as much as to the exchange of
speeches. Close-ups are delayed until the later moments where
feelings are more intense and thoughts more interior. Music also
marks mood shifts. The remarkable thing is that this formula for
shooting, considered by many young directors to be so tradi¬
tional that it is a cliche, nevertheless turns out to be the simplest
and most effective method to cover a scene where performance
is very much more important than fancy camerawork.
There is no harm in experimenting as you plan camera cover¬
age. In fact, you are encouraged to experiment, to copy any
Another variation is
a move by an actor who is
given a reason to 'upstage'
the other by a walk away
from the camera. Moves
of this kind usually need
the 'motivation' of some
la) But. instead of corning
towards camera, she gets up 2) A reverse angle of
piece of incidental action
. , , , ,
31 useful to
make an extra take of the
and moves away from it and the Har. may be needed that involves a prop' - first see-up - without the
Shot of che Girl at the the camera zooms or cracks for intercutting as he I.E. the typewriter or camera move, holding both
typewriter. She is in a to follow her, excluding the turns ' upscage' co look , . of them in an overshoulder
profile, he is seen full
Han. Having 'upstaged' him, at the Girl. the filing cabinet . shot with the Han bsckview.
face over her shoulder.
she turns to look back at him.
props), that the actors can find ways of who have a little experience, the variations of the
making moves that combine the setups or 'choreography' of camera an performers are infinite.
suggest camera moves instead of cuts. The kind of 'waltz-step' by which you can achieve
alternating over-shoulder shots is a common formula.
271
CAMERA COVERAGE
i
Camera Movement
■"N,
There are three basic things to consider when dealing with how
a camera might move:
a) the (stable) environment
b) moving figure(s)
c) the camera’s point of view (moving or not)
EXT. U.N.LOUNGE
Cary Grant appears in the
doorway in longshot. As he
moves forward, reaching the
center of the screen, camera
starts to TRACK LEFT with
him, moving parallel to his
walk , holding him in the
same longshot distance.
2,77
CAMERA MOVEMENT
-inside which we now Cutting to inside the
In 'North by Northwest' phone booth we pick
interesting looking rediscover Cary Grant
one sequence opens with up the dialogue of a
MAN enters from behind who has been absent
a longshot of the Main phone call in which
camera Left, walking from the story during
Hall of Grand Central Grant is explaining
away towards background. the preceding sequence
Station in New York. his predicament to
Camera uses this move of exposition.
The people who stand his mother.
to 'motivate' a pan
about in groups are
which follows him and
turned away from camera
scans the scene until
so that there is no
it includes a row of
focus of attention. It BACKGROUND ACTION THAT 'MOTIVATES'
telephone booths - CAMERA MOVEMENT
is a shot of the
'anonymous crowd' Then-
279
CAMERA MOVEMENT
Citizen Kane
i. This scene can be As a way of bringing together our knowledge of screen sizes,
found in The Citizen
framing, editing and camera coverage, let’s use as an example
Kane Book (Methuen,
1985)pp.159-60. Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane, regarded by many as the most
important film ever made in Hollywood.
Arriving in Hollywood to direct his first film at the age of
twenty-five, Welles was extraordinarily lucky to have Gregg
Toland as his cameraman. Citizen Kane is Welles’s masterpiece,
but much of its astonishing visual style must be due to Toland’s
contributions. Welles was interested in staging in depth and in
the long take that was already being used by directors like Jean
Renoir in France. This may have prompted Toland and Welles to
explore elements of focus and depths of field.
Consider a scene that is not actually in Citizen Kane but
theoretically might have been. The shooting script, if it had
been prepared by another director, might have read something
like this.1
FADE IN
1. DETAIL
280
FILM GRAMMAR
2. ANOTHER ANGLE
3. CORRIDOR OUTSIDE
4. LONGER ANGLE
5. INT. BEDROOM
281
CITIZEN KANE
6. REVERSE ANGLE
7. CLOSE-SHOT - KANE
KANE
Get Dr Corey.
He moves past camera towards the bed.
SLOW DISSOLVE TO
9. INT. BEDROOM
DR COREY
She’ll be perfectly all right in a day or
two, Mr Kane.
n. REVERSE ANGLE
KANE
I can’t imagine how Mrs Kane came
to make such a foolish mistake. The
sedative Dr Wagner gave her is in a
somewhat larger bottle - I suppose the
strain of preparing for the new opera
has excited and confused her.
DR COREY
Yes, yes - I’m sure that’s it.
KANE
There are no objections to my staying
here with her, are there?
DR COREY
(glancing at the Nurse in the background)
No - not at all. But I’d like the nurse
to be here, too. Good night, Mr Kane.
FADE OUT
CITIZEN KANE
283
This scene might well have been covered in the set-ups seen
above. According to conventional and routine formulas of film
direction, each of these cuts is there for a purpose, to make a spe¬
cific story point. In fact, Welles shot it very differently, in two
quite rigid camera set-ups in place of the kind of cuts and move¬
ments outlined above. Welles and Toland used four primary ele¬
ments of film grammar to create the scene.
1 The film frame and its potential for directing the attention of
the audience through use of entrances and exits (the mask¬
ing of the screen as a pictorial proscenium).
2 Masking within the frames, placing one object or character
in front of another.
3 Patterning, in perspective depth, the design of the composition.
4 Chiaroscuro, the use of light and shadow, often in receding
planes of depth (part of which is Toland’s device of double
exposure to achieve extreme depths of sharp focus).
KANE
Get Dr Corey.
DISSOLVE TO:
CITIZEN KANE
285
DR COREY
[overscene)
She’ll be perfectly all right -
DR COREY
('overscene)
- in a day or two, Mr. Kane.
kane
I can’t imagine how Mrs. Kane came
to make such a foolish mistake.
KANE
(.continuing)
The sedative Dr Wagner gave her is in
a somewhat larger bottle - I suppose
the strain of preparing for the new
opera has excited and confused her.
DR COREY
Yes, yes - I’m sure that’s it.
KANE
There are no objections to my staying
here with her, are there?
DR COREY
Good night, Mr Kane.
287
CITIZEN KANE
bs*»»
Epilogue
EPILOGUE 289
function of traditional usages will leave you free to invent and
innovate as the need arises. I hope one of the underlying ideas
throughout everything I have written for you, as students of cin¬
ema, is just how malleable I believe these ideas to be. I have, in
the past, seen students go astray when they have buried them¬
selves in the world of concrete rules and conventions.
A while ago, I had a response from an executive in a TV stu¬
dio, a man in a position to offer career opportunities to gradu¬
ating students. I had asked him what he was looking for in those
people applying for a job, and he replied, ‘The fact is we’re not
all that interested in what a youngster may have learned techni¬
cally. It’s a beginning, of course. His efforts in college can indi¬
cate his aptitude. But we reckon it will always be necessary to
begin all over again, training our new employees in our own
methods, our equipment and our technology. We’re really much
more interested in your students’ imagination, their ideas, their
impulses and compulsions, their creative abilities.’
To tell the truth, I was somewhat relieved by this potential
employer’s response to my question, because it means that as a
faculty member of this institution, what I can most usefully
spend my time doing is attempting to discover where students’
real urges to make movies lie, and in turn how best to make the
most of such impulses. After all, when young high school grad¬
uates come to me and claim to know exactly what kind of cin¬
ema it is they want to produce, I’m always a little uneasy.
Perhaps all I can do in the negative sense is fail to encourage
some of your less admirable compulsions. This is a negative way
of putting it, but it seems a more constructive approach than
merely imposing my own values upon you. The best thing I can
do is to be a little less enthusiastic when you are too eager to do
something which I don’t think is very worthwhile.
Though I’m not really sure that one can ever teach anybody to
have talent, it is possible to create an environment for study, and
supply opportunities for the effort to learn. Occasionally a stu¬
dent has remarked that while the courses I preside over were (or
were not) interesting, ‘I didn’t learn anything that I didn’t
already know - even if I didn’t know that I knew it.’ This may be
as it should be. Weren’t there some early Greek philosophers
who believed that all knowledge and wisdom was already pres-
290
ent inside man, that the meaning of the word ‘education’ (‘e’ for
out, ‘ducare’ meaning to lead) was just a process of helping to
bring it out into conscious awareness? It might be declared thus:
as an instructor, the only things I can teach are what you already
know, those ideas and opinions that if you were to stop and con¬
sider for more than ten seconds, you would probably intuitively
understand at the most basic level. This is, I believe, what I have
respectfully sought to do in these classes and notes. I hope you
make the most of them.
EPILOGUE 291
'
■
-
'
A Note on the Editor
-
IU.
industry as
a screenwriter, storyboard editor, and director of such memorable films as Sweet Smell of Success and
the original The Ladykillers, Alexander Mackendrick turned his back on Hollywood and began a new
career as the dean of the California Institute of the Arts, one of the country's most demanding and
influential film schools. His absolute devotion to the craft of film-making, combined with a teaching
style that included prodigious notes, neatly crafted storyboards, and handouts containing excerpts of
works by Kierkegaard, Aristotle, and others, served as a powerful impetus to students. Yet at the core
of Mackendrick’s lessons lay a deceptively simple goal: to teach film-makers how to structure and
write the stories they want to tell, while using the devices particular to the medium of film to tell their
stories effectively.
In a priceless examination of the director’s craft, the materials that made Mackendrick’s rep¬
utation as an instructor are collected here for the first time, offering a chance for professionals as
well as students to discover a methodology of film-making that is challenging yet refreshing in its
clarity. Meticulously illustrated and rife with examples from such classic films as North by Northwest,
Citizen Kane, and Touch of Evil, Mackendrick’s elegant lessons are sure to provide inspiration for a
new generation of film-makers.
“Mr. Cronin’s provided a great service in his work on Mackendrick. Tight Little Island and
The Ladykillers are perfect films. Any director knows they are worthy of both study and
awe, and this book brings them, and Mackendrick, into contemporary focus beautifully.” •
—DAVID MAMET
“Mackendrick blows the theory merchants out of the picture with a blast of cool Scottish
sagacity ... He offers up the accumulated wisdom of a disciplined and productive ca¬
reer ... Whether you use this book to help you reflect on your working practice or see it
as an enjoyable insight into the development and execution of a film idea, there’s a great
deal packed into these pages.” —ZOE GREEN, THE GUARDIAN