Writing the short film 3th - Part 9

Who are you?
Why are you here?
What do you want at this moment?
Put this away with Exercise 7 and leave both in your portfolio for another
24 hours. At that time, go through both exercises, underlining the phrases or
sentences that best describe your characters and their interaction, especially
in light of your answers to the questions above.
If you already have a catalyst, make note of it. If not, find one before going
on to the next assignment.
EIGHTH ASSIGNMENT:
WRITING A CHARACTER-BASED OPENING
You are now going to revise Exercise 8, with the result put in proper screen-
play format. Use your thesaurus, if necessary, to find words that convey
what you see in your imagination, words that will make your characters
come alive for the reader. Once again, it would be helpful to have your
teacher, classmates, or knowledgeable friends respond to what you have
written—essentially the first draft of an opening for a possible short script.
NOTES
1. Callie Khouri, symposium on Thelma and Louise, Writers Guild of America West,
November 1991, unpublished.
2. Aristotle, Poetics, ed. Francis Fergusson, trans. and introduction by S. H. Butcher
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1961).
3. Callie Khouri, “Thelma and Louise,” unpublished screenplay.
4. Robert Towne, “Chinatown,” unpublished screenplay.
5. Christian Taylor, “Lady in Waiting,” unpublished screenplay.
6. Lisa Wood Shapiro, “Another Story,” unpublished screenplay.
7. Karyn Kusuma, “Sleeping Beauties,” unpublished screenplay; and Susan
Emerling, “The Wounding,” unpublished screenplay.
8. Anais Granofsky and Michael Swanhaus, “Dead Letters Don’t Lie,” unpublished
screenplay.
FILM DISCUSSED IN THIS CHAPTER

The Red Balloon, directed by Albert Lamorrisse, 1955.
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5


TELLING THE
DRAMATIC STORY
You judge films in the first place by their visual impact instead of
looking for content. This is a great disservice to the cinema. It is
like judging a novel only by the quality of its prose.
ORSON WELLES
Orson Welles undoubtedly would have agreed that the images of a narrative
film, whether visual or aural, should, like the language of a novel or short
story, serve to illuminate the tale. Rust Hills, in his excellent book on writing
the short story, elaborates on a similar point: “A successful short story will
thus necessarily show a more harmonious relationship of part to whole, and
part to part, than it is usual to find in a novel. Everything must work with
everything else. Everything enhances everything else, inter-relates with
everything else, is inseparable from everything else—and all this is done
with a necessary and perfect harmony.”
1
What he writes is as true for the short film in relation to the feature film as
it is for the short story in relation to the novel. But unlike novels and short
stories, which are meant to be read, narrative film and television are forms
of drama; if a story is to work as drama, its content needs to be organized in
terms of dramatic structure.
The word “drama” derives from the Greek word dran, which means to do

or to act. A drama, whether presented on a stage or on a screen, is the story
of an action, intended for presentation before an audience. In previous chap-
ters, we have been exploring storytelling in images; in this one, we will dis-
cuss storytelling in terms of drama.
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SOME BASIC DEFINITIONS
What follow are some of the important and widely used terms that we will
be using throughout this book:
Protagonist, meaning main character, is a word that comes from the Greek
words for “first” (protos) and “struggler” or “combatant” (agonistes). So the
protagonist is the main struggler in the story.
The word antagonist comes from the Greek words for “against” (anti) and,
once more, “struggler” or “combatant” (agonistes). The antagonist, whether
human, man-made, or a force of nature such as a mountain, desert, or rag-
ing storm, is the force or obstacle with which the protagonist must contend.
It is the story of that struggle that provides the plot. In some stories, the main
characteristics of the antagonist are virtually the direct opposites of those of
the protagonist; in others, the antagonist can seem almost a twin or second
self of the protagonist. That is not to say that the most engaging antagonist
of all can’t be the protagonist’s own nature, his or her own arrogance, fear,
or unadmitted needs.
It is also important to note that the stronger the antagonist, the stronger
the conflict, and the harder the protagonist must struggle to achieve his or
her goal. The decision as to who or what should be the antagonist in a film
script is always a crucial one; the designation sometimes shifts from one
character to another as a writer goes through revisions.
In any drama, the main conflict is the struggle between protagonist and
antagonist—again, whether the antagonist is another character, a man-made
disaster, a force of nature, or simply an aspect of the protagonist’s own charac-

ter. The more there is at stake, the more dramatic—in every sense of the word—
the conflict.
Dramatic action, or “movement of spirit,” as Aristotle defines it in the
Poetics, is the life force, the heartbeat, of any screenplay.
2
Psyche, the word he
uses for spirit, meant both “mind” and “soul” to the ancient Greeks—the
inner energy that fuels human thoughts and feelings, the underlying force
that motivates us.
The catalyst is the incident that calls the protagonist’s dramatic action to
life. It is sometimes called “the inciting incident,” e.g., the little boy rescuing
the magical balloon in The Red Balloon, or the breaking of the rope as the hero
is about to be hung in Incident at Owl Creek Bridge.
The climax is generally the moment of greatest intensity for the protagonist
and a major turning point in his or her dramatic action. Even in a fairly short
script, the climax is often the culmination of a series of lesser crises.
Recognition—according to Aristotle, “a change from ignorance to knowl-
edge”—usually, though not always, closely precedes or follows the climax
3
;
it is the point at which the protagonist realizes where the dramatic action has
taken him or her through the course of the events that have made up the
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story. In some forms of comedy, where the protagonist does not experience
any kind of illumination, recognition is often reserved for a character who is
an interested onlooker, or for the audience itself.
Scene is a word with many definitions. We will be using it primarily in the
sense of an episode that presents the working out of a single dramatic situa-

tion. The scene is the basic building block of any narrative screenplay. Every
scene in a short script should serve to forward the action.
ADAPTING A MYTH OR FAIRY TALE: A FIRST EXAMPLE
One of the interesting things that becomes apparent on reading a number of
myths—whatever tribe or culture they come from—is how soon after relat-
ing the birth of the cosmos storytellers found it necessary to introduce con-
flict. And no wonder! Generation after generation, people looked about
them and tried to make sense of what they had observed, what they knew
from their own experience: that human beings have needs and that these
needs bring them into conflict with one another, as well as with the gods.
In the Book of Genesis, we are told in a beautifully worded, carefully
detailed listing how God created all things, animate and inanimate, in six
days and rested on the seventh. We are told that He formed the first man out
of dust, breathed life into him, and planted a marvelous garden for him to
live in. Then God gave Adam and Eve a single prohibition: they could eat the
fruit of every tree in that garden except one—the Tree of the Knowledge of
Good and Evil. Also, most important for any kind of dramatic story, Adam
and Eve were left the freedom to choose: eat or don’t eat, obey or disobey—
it is up to you. Familiar as we are with our own curiosity, our own desire to
get to the bottom of things, as well as our own need to resist authority, we
recognize that the seed of conflict has been sown in Paradise. In that seed lies
the beginning of a dramatic situation, for Eve (and then Adam as well) wants
one thing, while God wants another. The serpent is God’s antagonist in all
things; the serpent’s initial approach to Eve serves as catalyst in this story of
the Fall.
Two questions often prove major stumbling blocks for film and video
students, as well as for filmmakers who have never written a narrative
script. What, specifically, do I write about? How, specifically, do I write
about it? In screenwriting, general ideas are of little or no use when you
sit down at a desk to write, and it is often difficult for those who are not

“natural” writers (in the way one may be a “natural” cinematographer or
director) to come up with fruitful story ideas. Yet, as anyone experienced
in the arts knows, learning a skill is a process, and that process has to start
somewhere.
Where?—In the case of a short script, with a simple adaptation.

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From the very beginning of the film industry, fiction and drama have
proved unending sources of film stories, and it has been our experience in
many years of teaching that adapting a myth or fairy tale offers the novice
screenwriter an immediate way to learn how to structure a short script.
Stories that began as oral narratives almost always are dramatic in struc-
ture and lend themselves easily to visualization. For these reasons, and
because such material is both readily available and in the public domain
(that is, not under copyright), we will be using examples of such adaptations
throughout the rest of this chapter. If you have a short story already in hand
that you would like to adapt, the working techniques we describe are much
the same.
STRUCTURING A FIRST ADAPTATION
What follows is an example of the process by which a myth can provide
source material for very different narratives, any one of which an audience
might enjoy without being familiar with the original story—which is not to
say that a viewer’s experience of the film wouldn’t gain in depth and reso-
nance if he or she were familiar with it.
The myth we have chosen to adapt is the Fall of Icarus. Briefly, the story
material we are working from is this: Daedalus (which means “cunning artif-
icer”) was both a renowned artist and a brilliant architect and inventor.
Jealous because his nephew and favorite pupil Perdix seemed likely to sur-
pass him in every way, he took the boy to the top of the Acropolis and hurled

him off. For this he was condemned by the authorities, but he managed to
flee to the island of Crete with his young son Icarus.
There the tyrant Minos gave him sanctuary and an almost impossible
assignment—to design and oversee the construction of a prison for the
Minotaur, a sacred monster with the head of a bull, the body of a man, and
an appetite for human flesh. Because the Cretans had to feed the Minotaur
youths and maidens chosen to be fed to him, the prison would have to be
designed so that the victims could be forced to enter but would not be able
to find a way out. Daedalus solved this problem by designing and oversee-
ing the building of the first labyrinth. Instead of rewarding him, however,
the tyrant Minos imprisoned both Daedalus and his son in a high tower
overlooking the sea. Determined to escape, Daedalus painstakingly fash-
ioned two pairs of wings from feathers dropped by seabirds, binding them
together with melted candle wax. When the wings were completed, father
and son each strapped on a pair. Daedalus warned Icarus not to fly too high
or Apollo, the sun god, would melt the wax of his wings. The boy promised
to be careful, and the two set off from the tower over the water. Everything
went well until Icarus, intoxicated by the glories of flight, began to climb
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