Tài liệu Writing the short film 3th - Part 4 docx

animals, or magical objects. In both, feelings and thoughts are externalized
and given substance, which is undoubtedly why mythmaking of a sort has
been an important part of narrative filmmaking from its early days until
the present.
Just as oral myths and fairy tales changed over the years in the process of
being passed from one storyteller to the next, so the myths in genre film have
gradually been transformed by writers and directors. It can be instructive to
trace the line of descent from a one-dimensional hero like Tom Mix in crude
early Westerns to the comical, reluctant hero played by Clint Eastwood in
Unforgiven; or the gradual transformation of the pint-sized innocent played
by Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, struggling with a machine as ruthless
and powerful as any giant, into the scrawny sophisticate played by Woody
Allen in Annie Hall, trying to master an evil-looking lobster; or the evolution
over the years of the rigorous, if unconventional, code of honor of private-
eye Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon to the code of resolute self-interest prac-
ticed by private investigator Jake Gittes in Chinatown. In most cases, the
archetypal form of the story remains, while the meaning of the underlying
myth changes in response to the pressure of changes in society.
To reflect such changes successfully, screenwriters need to be familiar with
the classic films of the genre in which they choose to work. This is as true of
writing parody—a favorite of film students—as it is of using any other style
that deals with inherited material.
It happens that the two structures that have proved most useful in shap-
ing material for a short screenplay are those considered by scholars to be the
very oldest of narrative forms: the journey, and what we call the ritual occa-
sion. If you have a main character clearly in mind, and a good idea of what
that character’s situation is and of what it is that he or she is after, you can
often get a script off to a good start simply by choosing one or the other of
these as a structure for your story line and seeing where it takes you.
EXAMPLES OF THE JOURNEY STRUCTURE
Two award-winning student shorts from New York University that use this

structure to very different ends are Going to Work in the Morning from
Brooklyn, written and directed by Phillip Messina, and Champion, written and
directed by Jeffrey D. Brown.
Going to Work in the Morning from Brooklyn tells the story of a man who
absolutely does not want to go to work, although he knows he must. We fol-
low him in his anguished, comical struggle to get out of bed, into a suit and
tie, out the door, and onto the Manhattan-bound subway. We feel his despair
while we laugh at his actions: the film successfully walks a fine line between
comedy and drama.

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At one point the main character, standing miserably in the packed train,
glances about him and meets the eyes of an attractive woman sitting oppo-
site. When she looks away, he surreptitiously studies her. She catches him at
it, tosses her head, and frowns; he shifts his eyes, muttering a protest to him-
self. They both get out at the next stop and wait on the subway platform to
change trains.
There the man finds a gum machine that accepts his coin but doesn’t
deliver; in frustration, he smacks it hard and is amazed and delighted when
a stick of gum drops into his hand. He smiles then for the first time and
unwraps the gum to pop it into his mouth. Looking at himself in the mirror
of the machine, he notices the woman behind him, watching with a little
smile. At that moment we feel, as we can see he feels, a lift of the heart:
maybe—just maybe—his luck will change.
The remainder of the film shows us his funny, clumsy failed pursuit of the
woman and his despairing arrival, at last, at the busy, factory-like office
where he puts in his daily eight hours. The story of an ordinary workday has
become a kind of archetypal journey.
Champion tells the story of a comical young man who falls in love with a

pretty jogger at the reservoir in New York City’s Central Park. In the begin-
ning of the film, we watch him debate hurtling a wooden barrier at the
entrance to the park, then decide to go around it instead. On an esplanade
overlooking the reservoir—clearly his regular warm-up place—he finds a
lithe young woman doing stretching exercises. Dazzled by her, he picks a
spot close by to do the same, mirroring her every move. When she sets off
around the reservoir at a leisurely jog, he follows at a discreet distance.
Obstacles are everywhere—a nasty child on a tricycle, a group of junior high
school students playing ferocious football, and so on. Eventually he falls
through a gaping hole in a pedestrian bridge and loses sight of her, although
he limps gallantly on, peering all around.
The next morning, the main character is at the warm-up place at (literally)
cock’s crow, waiting for her. At last the young woman arrives, warms up, and
once more sets off at an easy pace, with the shy hero lagging behind. Then,
completely unaware, she drops the scarf she is wearing; he picks it up, strokes
it tenderly, and begins to run flat out after her. But as he overtakes her, he
loses his nerve and continues on, scarf in hand, to become entangled with a
ragged group of runners heading toward the finish line in a race. In the end,
he finds a way to return the scarf without directly confronting her. When she
looks around and smiles to herself, we feel, as he feels, that she knows who
has put the scarf on her bike—and that there is always tomorrow. As the film
ends, the main character approaches the barricade once again, boldly leaps
over it, and jogs off to the sound of Irish martial music. The story of a couple
of ordinary runs has become an archetypal journey of the smitten lover pur-
suing his or her beloved.
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It is worth noting that Champion, while similar in structure to Going to Work
in the Morning from Brooklyn, and concerned with a similar theme, is com-

pletely different both in its main character and in what the philosopher
Susanne Langer has called “feeling” and “feeling-tone.”
Langer writes, “A work of art is an expressive form created for our percep-
tion through sense or imagination, and what it expresses is human feeling.
The word feeling must be taken here in its broadest sense, meaning every-
thing that can be felt . . . [including] the steady feeling-tones of human life.”
4
EXAMPLES OF THE RITUAL OCCASION STRUCTURE
Sleeping Beauties (see Appendix B for script) is the story of two sisters, aged
15 and 16, who find that the imaginary male dream-figure they have created
between them has come to life.
In this film, the arrival of a stranger who conforms to the imaginary lover
created by two sisters triggers the ritual occasion—in this case, a “coming of
age”—around which the film revolves. Unlike many such stories, the main
character in this one rejects the opportunity offered, suffering accordingly
when the younger sister seizes it.
Another film, Gare du Nord, written and directed by noted ethnographic
filmmaker Jean Rouch, uses the same structure to explore a very different
territory. It is one of an anthology of six short films made by European direc-
tors, each set in a different section of Paris.
Gare du Nord opens with a young couple squabbling as they get dressed
for work in a tiny apartment in a noisy high-rise. As they bicker their way
through breakfast, we learn that the attractive wife is unhappy with the
apartment; unhappy with her lumpish, complacent husband; and in despair
about the dull routine of their life together. We realize that she is a romantic
who dreams of adventure and luxury, while he is a dull, unimaginative man,
content with his lot in life.
Descending alone through almost total darkness in an elevator very much
like a coffin, the woman steps out onto the bright street below and is almost
hit by a sleek-looking car. A gaunt, elegant-looking man leaps from it, apol-

ogizing profusely. From this point on, the film—shot throughout in cinema-
verité style—takes on the quality of a fairy tale. The stranger asks if he can
drive her to wherever she is going. When she says no, she would rather
walk, he asks if he can accompany her, and she indifferently agrees. As they
walk along a bridge, high above a maze of railroad tracks, they talk. The man
asks about her life, and she responds by telling him her dreams of a very dif-
ferent sort of life. He passionately offers her everything she wants and begs
her to come away with him. The woman hesitates and then refuses, and the
man jumps to his death. Not every fairy tale ends happily.

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The ritual occasion in this case, as in Sleeping Beauties, is the arrival of a
stranger bringing change, here very probably representing the Angel of
Death. The ending is somewhat confusing, but Gare du Nord would seem to
offer its main character a choice between living in reality or continuing on
with her dreams intact.
Because the ritual-occasion structure (where adventure is not sought out,
but happens to the main character in his or her life) is so much more widely
used than the journey structure in short films, we will offer one more, very
different example. Grease Monkey, written and directed by Laurie Craig, is set
in a rural community in the United States just after World War II. Soldiers are
coming home. The key characters are in their late teens or early twenties. The
opening of the film, after a series of stationary shots of a small gas station on
a country road, shows a grease-stained mechanic working under a car while
listening to big-band swing music. A loudmouthed customer comes into the
garage and begins to complain: Why isn’t his car ready? The mechanic
wheels out from under the car, still on his back, and begins to defend him-
self vigorously. At this point, both the film audience and the stunned cus-
tomer realize that he is a she. The grease monkey’s father appears and tries

to placate the outraged customer. After he goes, the father tells his daughter
the good news: her brother is coming home any day now.
When next we see her, she is transformed into a stereotypical girl of the
1940s, vacuuming and baking with her mom as they prepare for the hero’s
return. She talks to her parents about going to a trade school, angering her
mother and causing her father to turn away.
A pickup truck arrives loaded with her brother’s friends, still in uniform.
Dressed up, though not as much as the other girls in the back of the truck,
she goes off with the gang to a picnic. From the start, she and one of the boys
are clearly attracted to one another. At the lake, she tells him that she’s been
working as a mechanic in her brother’s absence, and he responds that he
won’t hold it against her. After a heated exchange in which he grabs her and
kisses her hard, she pushes him into the lake, and he pulls her in with him.
When they are all ready to go home, the pickup won’t start. After several
boys fiddle around under the hood with no results, the main character
adjusts a loose wire with the skill of a crack surgeon. Her would-be lover
steps on the gas, the engine roars into life, and they all drive off.
The climax of the film comes when she overhears her brother talking with
a customer about his plans to expand the garage. “Atta boy! Once a fella
knows what he wants to do . . . ” the customer enthuses. The girl takes this
in, squares her shoulders, and goes off to fill out applications to the trade
schools. The rest of the action briefly develops both the love story and the
actions she takes toward her goal.
Because the main character’s objective throughout is very clear—to get to
trade school—the writer/director could have made a 15-minute film had she
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told only the primary story. But as this film is close to 30 minutes in length,
she was able to develop a secondary plot line—that of the love story.

In his essay “Readers, Writers and Literary Machines,” noted fiction writer
and critic Italo Calvino says,
“The storyteller of the tribe puts together phrases and
images. The younger son gets lost in the forest, he sees a
light in the distance. He walks and walks, and the fable
unwinds from sentence to sentence and where is it leading?
To the point at which something not yet said, something as
yet only darkly felt, suddenly appears and seizes us and
tears us to pieces like the fangs of a man-eating witch.
Through the forest of fairy tale the vibrancy of myth passes
like a shudder of wind.”
5
Male or female, we are all “younger sons” in one way or another, and
what seizes us as we read or listen to or watch a well-told story is that pow-
erful intermingling of feeling and thought that Aristotle called “recogni-
tion.” If you substitute the word “image” for “sentence” in the quotation
above, you will understand why it is that, as teachers, we have found
myths and fairy tales so useful to the novice short-screenplay writer (who
may well regard herself or himself as a filmmaker, and not a “real” writer
at all).
A FIRST ASSIGNMENT
Write brief descriptions, using the present tense, of two quite different main
characters as they go about their lives. Be sure to choose characters that
engage you and situations you know something about. End each description
with an encounter or incident that would make for a change in the charac-
ter’s situation. Set up one synopsis as if for a short script in which you
employ the journey structure, and the other for a screenplay in which you
use the ritual occasion. At this point, don’t concern yourself with plot,
although if ideas occur to you, be sure to jot them down for possible later
use. Here are a couple of examples to illustrate; we turned to the short films

described above for inspiration:
1. A crack bicycle messenger travels about a large city at reckless
speed, indifferent to pedestrians and unpleasant encounters with cab
drivers as he makes his way, and impatient at his various delivery stops.
Suddenly a car grazes him on a busy street and continues on without
stopping as he and his bike go flying. Dazed and bleeding, he huddles on

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the sidewalk as an indifferent crowd rushes by. Eventually a pedestrian
stops, picks up his mangled bicycle, and sits down next to him on the curb.
2. A nine-year-old girl lives with her bossy older brother and quarrel-
some parents in a small suburban house. She stubbornly refuses to be drawn
into the family’s mealtime squabbles, hurrying away from the table as soon
as she can to gaze out the window at the house next door, where a lively,
cheerful family is having its dinner. Although the house is some distance
away and she can’t follow much of what is going on, she watches happily.
Then one day, hunting for something in a closet, she comes upon a pair of
powerful field glasses belonging to her father, and makes off with them.
This assignment may take several days and a number of drafts to com-
plete. Because every assignment and exercise in this book is intended to lead
to your writing an original screenplay, it will be worth your while to keep
your notes, as well as any completed work, in a special folder.
NOTES
1. E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1927),
86.
2. Paul Zweig, The Adventurer (New York: Basic Books, 1974), pp. 84, 85.
3. Aristotle, Poetics, ed., Francis Fergusson, trans., and introduction by S. H. Butcher
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1961).
4. Susanne K. Langer, Problems of Art (New York: Scribner’s, 1953), 15.

5. Italo Calvino and Patrick Creagh, trans., The Uses of Literature (New York:
Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1986), 18.
FILMS DISCUSSED IN THIS CHAPTER
Annie Hall, directed by Woody Allen, 1977.
Champion, directed by Jeffrey D. Brown, 1978.
Chinatown, directed by Roman Polanski, 1974.
Gare du Nord, directed by Jean Rouch, from Six in Paris, 1965.
Going to Work in the Morning from Brooklyn, directed by Phillip Messina,
1967.
Grease Monkey, directed by Laurie Craig, 1982.
The Maltese Falcon, directed by John Huston, 1941.
Modern Times, directed by Charles Chaplin, 1936.
Sleeping Beauties, directed by Karyn Kusuma, 1991.
Unforgiven, directed by Clint Eastwood, 1993.
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2


TELLING A STORY IN
IMAGES
The cinema is still a form of graphic art. Through its mediation, I
write in pictures. . . . I show what others tell. In Orphée, for
example, I do not narrate the passing through mirrors; I show it,
and in some manner, I prove it.
JEAN COCTEAU
1
Perhaps no aspect of film and video is more powerful in terms of narrative

than the appearance of reality. Images on the screen have a validity, a weight
of their own, in a way that words do not. What follows is an excerpt from the
scene in Orpheus to which Cocteau refers. In the screenplay, based on the myth,
the poet Orpheus has lost his wife to Death. Heurtebise is the chauffeur of the
Princess of Death. The film takes place in 1950, the year in which it was made.
Note that the format is not proper screenplay format, which you will find
in the Appendices, but a compressed version favored by book publishers.
In this scene, the Princess’s gloves are on Orpheus’s bed.
HEURTEBISE
(removing the gloves)
Someone has left their gloves behind.
ORPHEUS
Gloves?
HEURTEBISE
Put them on . . . come on, come on. . . . Put them on.
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