The Understructure of Writing for Film and Television

by Ben Brady

  The opening miniscenes and images from Tootsie underscore this difference between surface realism and dramatic realism. Experiences don’t flash by like the miniscenes or alternate with shots of a scrapbook. We accept all of this as a stylistic convention. Some conventions look very much like what we call reality. Some don’t. But there’s no difference formally between the opening scenes of Tootsie and those of Star Wars that culminate in Luke’s decision to become a Jedi warrior after his adoptive family is slaughtered. What counts is that a character, who is caught in a particular situation and must act because of what has happened to him, arouses our emotions through our empathy and the accessibility of those feelings. What would not be real would have been Dobbs’s pulling a hundred dollar bill out of his pocket, or Luke’s laughing over his adoptive parents’ skeletons, or Don Corleone’s beginning a war against the established system for Bonasera’s sake. If Dobbs, Michael, or Bonasera were real we might never want to invite them to dinner, but as far as they make us feel for their situation they make us live with them intimately for the brief duration of their lives in a darkened auditorium.

  Now, perhaps, you can understand better why the specificity of detail and description in a given scene is praiseworthy, as is the writer’s economy in choosing and giving these. You aren’t asked to write this way for some abstract reason or because some rule says, “You must be specific and economic in detail and description.” You show instead of tell because seeing just this person doing just this thing in just this place and at just this time is essential to our being able to empathize with that character.

  Dramatic reality is emotional reality.

  Character

  Determining Sources

  Characters can come from anywhere.

  What are characters? They are people you invent—even if they’re robots like those in Star Wars who show more fear, uncertainty, indomitability, and resourcefulness than the human characters around them.

  The source for a character can simply be someone you read about in the newspapers or someone you see on television. Maybe the character is based on an actor who fascinates you. Perhaps she is like a friend or someone you heard about. He may arise from the “What if . . .” technique or may be created from separate observations you jot down in your notebook. She can be a family member or someone you have loved or hated for a long time. Your characters will only arouse emotion, hold interest, and generate the progress of your story as they are driven to action by their problem and the opposition they encounter trying to solve it, revealing themselves as they stretch to their limits—the limits of your, the writer’s, imagination.

  Some characters may wake you up from a dream or daydream, demanding that you learn more about them. Remember that there is more to your mind than you know and you need that “more” as a writer. Put those unexpected characters down on paper. Sort out who is the protagonist and who, the antagonist. Find out what they will do with the problem they very likely drag in their wake. You won’t know everything about a character until you take him through an action, no matter how systematic and thorough you become (and you need to become systematic) in planning your story.

  Characters can so obsess a writer that they spill out from one drama to another and flow into everyday life. Sophocles needed three plays to get rid of Oedipus and wrote the last play, Oedipus at Colonus, at age 94, confounding his children who were trying to have him judged senile. Jolly, fat, cowardly Falstaff was a nuisance in Shakespeare’s imagination once invented: he wrote a special play for him, and when Falstaff threatened to take over yet another play, Henry V, Shakespeare had to kill him off. George Lucas needed three screenplays for Luke, Han Solo, and Darth Vader and originally had nine in mind! Spock of the Starship Enterprise became so popular his death and resurrection took up two of the first three Star Trek films. Superman has been reincarnated in four films after an absence from television for some years and isn’t done yet, nor is his rival as the contemporary Heracles, Tarzan.

  When a character is fully alive in your imagination, all of your mind’s levels will have been called into play and through your character, ours. You may sometimes have the sensation your character is leading you, instead of the reverse. That is one of the problems and delights of a writer’s experience. Be happy when your characters refuse to stay in the leaden mold you thought to fix them in: take a risk, and see where they want to lead you. You own the blue pencil.

  Certain characters and dramatic situations seem less invented than perennial inhabitants of our hearts. The loss of the beloved and attempts to revive her stretch from the days of Orpheus to the present. The rebellious son, the abandoned woman or child, the fallen father (hero, athlete, politician) given a second chance, the too-faithful daughter, the young lover, the ingenue, the villain not beyond hope, the proud man cast down, the lowly man who rises to heroism and justice are only a few that are renewed generation by generation. They have this staying power because they touch central portions of our experience. Their wrestling with their problems renews our experience. A character trying to comprehend his experience, to the extent he has maintained our belief in his emotional realism, represents us in our own attempt to comprehend our experience. This is the true meaning of empathy. Never hesitate to use such a given character (or situation), but look always for your particular version. They’re raw material to be worked with freshly, not finished givens.

  Defining Your Character

  Let us say your character has put in his appearance. Now is the time to get methodical. Start making a very specific list.

  Is the character a man? A woman?

  What does your character look like?

  How old is your character?

  What does he or she wear?

  What is his race? If not human, then what?

  Does he have any special physical characteristics?

  Is he a hunchback with a withered hand, and does he walk onto the stage saying, “Now is the winter of our discontent,” as Richard III does? Or do we discover him as he feeds a collection of pigeons and see from his face that he has been in a few fights. Will we be able to guess he is going to get thoroughly beaten up again at the climax, as Terry does in On the Waterfront?

  How does your character talk? In dialect? Which one? Or does he talk as you do?

  What is the social class of your character?

  Is she poor? Is he nouveau riche? Is theirs inherited wealth? Is he just middle-class, but she an Alsatian princess?

  Is she well educated? Did he never finish grade school? Is he an illiterate from a slum working his way up? As what?

  Is she a professional? Or does she clean homes for a living?

  For each character there is a well-defined answer to each question. And these are just basics. Consider these:

  Is your character moody or gay? Sharp or dull witted?

  Dream up a list of opposites: which terms fit your character?

  Has life dealt him a good hand? How? If not, how? What has he done with that hand? Despaired? Or has she never given up despite everything? Despite—what?

  Just where is this character now? In an office? What kind of office? Is she in a park? Is he making dinner? What does the kitchen look like? Maybe he’s working out on a gymnast’s vault? Or is he flying a jet? Is she pasting up a layout? Modeling? Committing a crime? Which one?

  Does he drink? Is he lying unconscious on a dock? How is it he came to be that way on the dock? Was he beaten up? Is it from drink? What will his wife say when she hears? To whom is he married? Is he just living with someone instead?

  Does she take drugs? Is it the first time? Has she shot up so often there’s hardly a place left for the needle?

  If these aren’t enough to start you thinking, add some of the following:

  What’s wrong with your character? Does he want something that he can’t have? What? What is she going to do about that? Who else is involved? Husband? Family? Friends? Professional colleagues? Gang members? Who is opposed to what your chara
cter wants?

  Above all:

  What’s your character’s problem? How much does it matter to him emotionally?

  What’s your character’s obstacle? A person or circumstance? Or himself?

  What’s at stake for your character? What dramatic issue are you raising? What does it matter how his struggle comes out?

  Clearly, as character occurs to you, you must:

  1. Begin to visualize that character clearly.

  2. Consider what kind of character you’ve got on your hands; meaning, what are his traits?

  3. Think-about the nexus of relationships that character is in, the life situation in which the character finds himself.

  4. Start defining what the character’s problem is, and why the character can’t solve it easily; that is, start imagining the root of the conflict.

  Take out a sheet of paper. Take the first character that pops into mind and subject him or her to some of the questions just asked. See what kind of character that first, sketchy person becomes. What’s the problem that character has? If she hasn’t brought one with her, imagine one to yourself: “What if. . . .” For it is by stress aroused through conflict, by the feeling aroused in your character and the feeling that he consequently arouses in us, by which your character becomes real to us and is able to show what he or she is. There’s no other way to break through the surfaces, to reveal and surprise and discover. The kind of mirror you will hold up to human behavior will reflect a process of struggle that defines a person’s reality.

  Conflict

  Sources of Conflict

  The sources of conflict can be as various as those for character.

  We are assaulted with stories of conflict in the papers, on television, in our daily lives. There is such a wealth of material it can feel almost impossible to make a choice. In a perfect world, there might not be conflict: in ours, it seems the nature of reality. What seems important to you? Or funny? What obsesses you? What must you write about? You must pick what moves you, what jars your interest, rouses your excitement or indignation. Why else would you want to write about something?

  Be specific. Are you going to write of a wife about to leave her husband? A young man about to go out on the street into a gang fight despite his girlfriend’s pleas? A man about to pit himself against a better fighter, an established politician, a crime figure? A district attorney confronted with admitting an error in the middle of a political campaign? A young couple divided over abortion? A madman on a murderous spree? A killer trying to kill another in cold blood? A family trying to cope with a child’s injury when circumstances seem against them? A man confronted with the need to take revenge and too divided in himself to act? Another man trying to survive in the wilds with too little experience? The list can go on and on.

  You may dream of a story as well as a character. Your character probably will bring his conflict in tow with him when he occurs to you and you define him.

  Define your conflict just as you define your character. It will fall into one of the three categories mentioned above:

  Man versus a physical obstacle or a circumstance

  Man versus man

  Man versus himself

  If it is man versus an obstacle, is it Jeremiah Johnson trying to light a fire beneath a snow-laden tree, a tinhorn almost too inexperienced to learn to survive as a mountain man in the nineteenth-century American West? Is it the biologist in Never Cry Wolf who was set down in the contemporary Canadian arctic to study wolves and was as raw and ignorant as Jeremiah Johnson? Or is your character Oedipus in Sophocles’ play who, after being told he would kill his father and marry his mother, flees his home to defy such a fate, only to bring it about?

  If it is man versus man, is it Michael-Dorothy trying to fend off Les’s advances? Or Bonasera trying to get vengeance through the Godfather? Is it Ted denying Joanna her son? Or something as simple as Dobbs’s begging the American for money?

  If it is man versus himself, is it Hamlet wondering whether to commit suicide or Clint Eastwood’s character in Tightrope who starts to behave like the sex-killer he’s trying to find?

  It is always some particular character, not any character, dealing with some particular problem. That is why you must imagine your character clearly and imagine your problem clearly. It is close to being a chicken-and-the-egg dilemma. No character in conflict—no action; no character in action—no play.

  When you define your problem, make it simple for yourself: my character must take revenge, must get an abortion, must win an election or beg for money or refuse a marriage proposal. The more specific and clear your conflict, the more you free your imagination to fill out your character and action.

  The Issue of Conflict

  So far we have talked about conflict very simply, as a collision of wills involving the character in some immediate problem in which he believes he has to overcome some immediate obstacle in order to survive. That kind of conflict must be present in every scene if you are going to generate action. But in a full screenplay you will have many scenes full of such conflict without any one of them being the same as the overall conflict of the screenplay. You need to differentiate between the immediate, necessary conflict of any given scene and the bearing of that scene on the central conflict of your play—the issue of conflict.

  For example, Bonasera’s immediate problem is to enlist the Godfather’s help. But his asking for such help raises an issue that goes to the heart of the play, namely, the role of the Mafia in our conventional society that Bonasera feels has let him down. His action also prompts the closely allied question of whether someone involved with the Mafia can remain free of it.

  Or take Star Wars. Over and over Luke has to confront and try to solve immediate problems—whether to seek help from some mysterious figure in the desert, whether to become a Jedi knight, whether to join Obi when his family is killed. Each scene has its own local conflict: cumulatively the scenes flesh out forcefully the issue of conflict of the play—whether Luke and the forces of good can prevail over evil.

  Or consider Tootsie. However well the opening miniscenes define Michael, they are only preparation for the fateful moment when he chooses to impersonate a woman, which he must do in order to survive as an actor. That is a much larger issue of conflict than his much simpler, immediate problem of auditioning for a job.

  In other words, when you write your play you do so with a structure of dramatic scenes that have their own immediate conflicts, but which together explore the larger issue of conflict that is central to the entire story. We end by experiencing that conflict as a totality by living it dramatic moment by dramatic moment, aspect by aspect, as does your character. That is, in fact, how any experience is lived, so that later we say, Ah, that’s what it was all about!

  Two questions will help you to keep clear the relation between a scene’s immediate conflict and the larger issue of conflict.

  First, What is immediately at stake in your scene? If nothing is, your character has no problem: he has no need to act, and there is no drama.

  Second, What is ultimately at stake in your scene? What larger issues are raised by the consequences of the immediate action? And how does that relate to the entire story you are trying to tell, to your play’s objective?

  You will be writing the dramatic essence of the immediate conflict when you write the premise for your assigned scenes. You will link both the immediate with the overriding issue of conflict when you write the premise for your miniscreenplay later. For present purposes, they will tend to coincide in your self-contained scenes.

  Example: Opening of Kramer vs. Kramer

  Let’s take a look at a scene, with some preparatory miniscenes, that successfully establishes character and conflict in a more substantial way than we have seen so far.

  Let’s try and recreate the writer’s process of imagination that culminated in the opening of Kramer vs. Kramer. We’ll use the “What if . . .” game to help.

  Imagine that you want to write s
omething about families, about the changing roles of men and women as parents. It seems a relevant issue to you. What if . . . it is the wife who feels a deep need to find herself, while the husband is completely preoccupied with his career?

  What’s stopping the wife from finding herself? What if . . . she is not only married, but a mother? What if . . . the child is young, and she loves him (we don’t want things to be easy for her)? What if . . . we put the wife in crisis and have her walk out on her husband and child who will then be at the center of the story, an abandoned man and child instead of an abandoned woman and child?

  Is she attractive? In this case, beautiful. How long has she been suffering? What if . . . for years, since being a teenager?

  Who is her husband? He’s . . . modestly successful in his field (What field? He’s an artist. Long hair? No, he’s a commercial artist.) and so busy he just doesn’t see her. He’s insensitive to her needs and his son’s.

  We have certainly given her a problem! Is she going to act, act now? Yes. We’ll have her pack her bags to go without her husband’s even being aware of her state of mind as he comes home. What’s more, we’ll make this day a very successful one for him up to the moment he comes home in order to dramatize as strongly as possible the revolution in their lives that results from her action.

  Finally, what if . . . her husband fights to have her stay?

  After you read the scene, jot down your ideas for its structure, immediate premise, and what is immediately and ultimately at stake.

  FADE IN:

  CLOSE-UP: JOANNA KRAMER

  She is staring into CAMERA. Her face is a mask, completely impassive. There is no sound. HOLD FOR A BEAT, then