Screenwriting Seminar - December 4th

Hello, screenwriters! I will be putting on a brand-new seminar called "How to Start Your Screenplay Perfectly" on December 4th at 660 Alabama Street, from 1-5 pm. The topics will include:

• Creating a compelling protagonist and antagonist
• The most interesting kinds of external goals
• How to create a great internal flaw for your protagonist
• The best way for the supporting characters to contribute to your story
• The ideal structural framework for your script

PLEASE CLICK HERE for more details on the seminar. Space is almost completely full now, so contact me quickly if you want to attend!

Screenwriting Mistake #50: No helper character

One character that you will find in nearly every movie is the protagonist’s helper. Where would Luke Skywalker be without Han Solo? Could Harry Potter have stopped Voldemort without Ron Weasley? (Or Neville either, technically, though the movie really didn’t do justice to that element from the books. Besides, that doesn’t support my point here, so I’m really not sure why I brought it up in the first place. Moving on.) What kind of story would “The Shawshank Redemption” have been if Red were not there to help Andy acquire certain items? And I can guarantee that Owen Wilson wouldn’t have crashed nearly as many weddings if Vince Vaughn weren’t there to egg him on. Without a good helper to accompany your protagonist on his quest, he will not be able to live up to his full potential, so make sure to have one in your script.

Here’s a good list of traits for your helper character:

-       Believes in the protagonist, even when the protagonist doesn’t believe in himself.

-       Pushes the protagonist to confront his fear/flaw and to accomplish his external goal.

-       Doesn’t have the same internal flaw as the protagonist, so he can see how good the protagonist’s life would be if he were to overcome that flaw.

-       Provides a sounding board for the protagonist.

-       Spends more time onscreen with the protagonist than any other character does.

Even the movie “Castaway,” which featured Tom Hanks as a man stranded alone on a desert island, needed someone for him to talk to, so they made up the inanimate character of Wilson, his volleyball. Without Wilson, Tom Hanks would have just been ranting to himself, which would not have made him a very sympathetic protagonist. If your script doesn’t have a single character dedicated to the role of helping your protagonist to accomplish his goal, then add one and see how much your story improves.

Screenwriting Seminars: July 30

I'll be putting on two screenwriting seminars here in San Francisco on Saturday, July 30. The first is on structuring screenplays the way the pros do and the second is my new "Top Ten Tips" seminar that will help you cut your rewriting time in half. Click here for more information.

Screenwriting Mistake #49: Slug line overload

After reading hundreds of screenplays, it's clear that there is a lot of confusion about how to end slug lines. This is the place where you should write “DAY” or “NIGHT” to let the director of photography know how to light the scene. However, I’ve seen a lot of scripts where the screenwriter tries to fill the slug lines with important story information, such as what day it is, what time it is, how much time has elapsed since the last scene, etc. The problem is that the audience won’t be reading your slug lines, so you have to let them know this kind of information in some other way.

For example, if the audience needs to know that approximately eight years has elapsed since your last scene, then you can have one of your characters approach another and say, “Golly, Bob, I haven’t seen you for approximately eight years.” Okay, don’t do that, but it is possible to reveal that information (subtly!) through dialogue, perhaps by saying, “Golly, Bob, you haven’t changed at all in the past four congressional elections,” or, “Golly, Bob, it seems like it was just two summer Olympics ago when we last got together.” The most important points are that all exposition of this kind must begin with the words, “Golly, Bob,” and that you shouldn't just come right out and have one character tell another how much time has elapsed. Reveal this information subtly and/or through conflict.

Another way to reveal this kind of information is to show it in your description. For example, if the audience needs to know what time it is, you can do something as simple as showing a clock, though I bet you could come up with a more creative way to reveal the time. If they need to know that a year has passed, you can do one of those cool seasonal montages where you show a flower growing, then dying, then being covered by snow, and then growing again, because that sort of device has never been used in movies. </sarcasm> But seriously, you should come up with an original way to demonstrate that time has elapsed, such as maybe the protagonist’s hair is longer or shorter, or she’s now visibly pregnant, or she has a full beard, though that last one might be better for male leads. If all else fails, you can always resort to using a "SUPER:" to display some text onscreen that spells out this information to the audience.

A good rule of thumb is that you can pretty much never go wrong by writing “DAY” or “NIGHT” at the end of your slug lines. If you ever write anything else there, first confirm that it’s the kind of information that should go in a slug line, and then make sure to reveal that information to the audience in a subtle and creative way. 

Most Common Screenwriting Problems

This is my first post in about a month because it's the end of the semester and I've been reviewing so many student screenplays that my eyes are bleeding like poorly placed stigmata. I'm so exhausted that I've even lost the ability to craft a compelling opening sentence.

I thought this might be a good time for me to make a list of the most common problems that I saw in all of this semester's scripts while they're still fresh in my mind. Here's a categorized list:

Dialogue
- Too many ellipses. (Also in descriptions.)
- Using parentheticals to tell the actors how to deliver their lines.
- Having a character say how he's feeling instead of using subtext.
- Meaningless words, such as "uh" or "well" or "anyway."
- Writing about conversations in description, instead of writing the words in dialogue.
- Emphasizing words in dialogue with caps, bold, underline, Italics, etc.
- Expositional or on-the-nose dialogue.

Formatting/Presentation
- Following a slug line with dialogue instead of description.
- Putting dates or times in the slug lines instead of in description or dialogue.
- Not writing a new slug line when the action moves to a new location.
- Too many typos.

Descriptions
- Descriptions too wordy.
- Using anything other than active, present-tense verbs.
- Using too many adverbs.
- Writing what the characters are thinking.

Character
- Protagonist doesn't have a clear, tangible external goal.
- Protagonist doesn't have an internal flaw that makes his goal difficult for him to achieve.
- No antagonist.
- No helper character.
- Supporting characters have nothing to do with the central conflict.
- Protagonist not sympathetic.

Structure
- Setup: Doesn't establish clear protagonist with an internal flaw that affects his daily life.
- First act: No catalysts that push the protagonist to begin pursuing his external goal, or that aren't effective at doing so.
- Second act: No point of no return event at the mid-point. End of second act low point doesn't relate to protagonist's external goal.
- Third act: No resolution for protagonist's external story and/or internal story. Protagonist doesn't demonstrate any internal growth.

I hope these are helpful!

Screenwriting Mistake #48: Comedies that aren’t funny

There is nothing worse than reading a script that is supposed to be funny, but just isn’t. If I’m reading a comedy and I haven’t at least chuckled a bit by page two or three, I know that I’m in for a long read. If you want your comedy script to be passed up the food chain, the only way to do it is to make sure that it’s genuinely laugh-out-loud funny from start to finish. Or you could just sleep with a studio executive – your choice.

If you are writing a comedy, the first thing you need to do is decide if it’s going to be the kind of comedy that has fart jokes, or the kind that doesn’t. There's not a thing wrong with either of those comedic styles, but you just want to be sure not to intermingle them since they don’t get along at all. You are either Farrelly brothers or Woody Allen, but not both. Slip a fart joke into “Bullets Over Broadway” and you would lose the audience instantly. Try to shoehorn an existential diatribe into “Dumb and Dumberer” and the audience would revolt by directing actual fart noises at the screen. Pick one comedic style and stick with it.

Once you have decided what kind of comedy you want to write, then you need to start making the audience laugh right away and keep the laughs coming at least every one or two minutes throughout the entire script. That’s a lot of laughs and at least one out of every four of those needs to be a big belly laugh. The only way to generate that many laughs is through a combination of funny dialogue, visuals, character traits and plot line. You need to take full advantage of all of those comedic options in order to fill your comedy with enough laughs to get it past the first reader. If you can do that, Hollywood will beat a path to your door because good comedies are far too rare in this industry.

Words of Inspiration

As my friend, Leo Maselli, commented in a previous post, every aspiring screenwriter should check out the documentary "Tales from the Script," (available on Netflix) which includes many illuminating interviews with actual working screenwriters. I wanted to share my favorite quote from that movie by screenwriter Billy Ray, author of "Color of Night," "Volcano," "Hart's War," and many other fine scripts:


"If you can survive while people are kicking you in the head, eventually their leg will get tired."


If that doesn't sum up what it's like to be a professional screenwriter, then nothing does. :-)