by Ben Brady
Turn again to the war council from The Godfather as Michael makes his offer to Sonny. The business reads: “Everyone in the room is astonished; they all look at Michael. Silence. Sonny suddenly breaks out in laughter.” Inserting that moment of silence after Michael’s offer is effective writing. Michael’s offer marks the turning point in his role with the family: how better to underscore it than with everyone’s speechless amazement? That silence also gives us and Sonny time to question Michael’s offer. Could Michael really do that? Could Michael do that? Could Michael do that? Sonny’s laughter answers in the negative. That silence and laughter are far more effective than some kind of extended debate. The actual debate that follows is exhausted in one exchange between Michael and his doubter.
Don’t use words when silence can carry the emotional impact and indicate the meaning of the action. Words, then, get in the way of your story’s forcefulness.
Moments of action without dialogue are often the most effective way to dramatize conflict if a moment’s dramatic issues are sharply enough drawn. The entire process of Terry’s making up his mind to go down to the docks in On the Waterfront happens in silence. All Terry does as Edie rails at him and offers alternatives is look at the cargo hook, take it from the wall, and then jab it into the floor, once, twice. Then he takes Joey’s coat. His actions speak louder than words until he goes beyond actions to motivation and tells Edie something new: why he is going down to the docks.
Once Terry is on the dock the gangs are chosen in silence until he stands alone. Once Mutt has been chosen, there is another moment of silence as Terry seethes and wonders what to do. The dockworkers stand in silence too, waiting on Terry’s action. The fight with Johnny Friendly is without dialogue, and the moment from Terry’s downfall, the longshoremen staring, until Edie and Father Barry appear. Finally, Terry’s walk is in silence. Schulberg can rely on physical acts to carry the weight of content because he has developed his story’s content so clearly to the climax. That’s how it should be done.
Look for the moments in your scenes when the use of silence and physical action without dialogue can show emotion, reveal decisions, and dramatize their impact on critical moments. They are as much a part of the art of dramatic writing as your words. You don’t want to find yourself writing a scene that is all talk: whenever you do, you have forgotten that a dramatist writes action, not words.
Spectacle
Spectacle is one of the original elements of drama delineated by Aristotle. Its use in drama extends from Aeschylus’ spectacular effects to Stephen Spielberg’s, from spaceships that occupy more space than can be shown on screen to, in a film like Never Cry Wolf, vast natural panoramas. Nature itself can be a character in survival and disaster films, films that usually take names like Earthquake or Hurricane. There are repeated moments in dramatic history when spectacle seems to become the primary dramatic value, whether in the eighteenth century panoramas that audiences went to the theatre to see exclusively in place of dramas, in the sets that sometimes have overwhelmed Wagnerian productions, or in the current taste for science fiction spectacles. The eye can be enchanted or horrified and in either case spellbound by the spectacular nature of what it sees. The heart can be carried away by large and sweeping effects. Ours has been a century full of torchlight parades and political rallies held in great stadiums, from Mussolini to the present, staged by men aware of the power of mass spectacles to sweep reason and the individual away.
Spectacle isn’t an important factor in the scenes quoted in this chapter from Kramer vs. Kramer or The Godfather, but it is an important element in On the Waterfront. Major urban docks are spectacles that are interesting in themselves and representative of one of our crucial economic areas. They fit into Terry’s story naturally, just as at the climax having hundreds of men hanging on the outcome of his actions is an appropriate spectacular effect. Action adventures and Westerns depend heavily on spectacle, in the former to fill the story out and in the latter to give the story the dimension of the beautiful, empty land over which the Good and the Bad struggle for control. However, spectacle must be appropriate to the story. It has no place in a film like Kramer vs. Kramer, except for the incidental glimpses of the New York skyline; no place in Ordinary People; and only limited place in Places in the Heart when the protagonist tries to bring in the harvest. A film like The River makes a natural use of spectacle (the river and farm versus the plant where Mel Gibson must work to survive). In films like The Emerald Forest panoramas of the jungle and of what man has done to it are central to the story.
There is nothing to bar you from writing a screenplay in which nature is, in effect, a character, protagonist or antagonist. You can use moments that depend on mass effects or contemporary spectacle, too. You may conceive of spectacular action, as in the christening scene in The Godfather that INTERCUTS between the church ceremony and the slaughter of Michael’s opponents. Or spectacle may be incidental, in which case don’t let it arbitrarily intrude.
Symbol
Our days and lives are structured around symbols. The cross, the dollar sign, the swastika instantly evoke complex responses. Our dreams fill our nights with symbols; our unconscious minds are a creative ferment of which only symbols give us some idea. Our waking thought is full of symbol and symbolic processes. Symbolic logic is a crucial area of philosophy and science.
Symbols fill screenplays. All good writing makes use of our natural tendency to invent new symbols or use those already familiar to us. How often in Westerns have we seen the hero on a white horse, as in Pale Rider and Silverado? Such heroes, or a character like Dirty Harry in the Clint Eastwood films, almost always have special guns, shinier or larger than anyone else’s. They are as necessary to a hero as his horse and equally symbolic of the potency that enables the hero to triumph and to get the girl. Indiana Jones would be as symbolically castrated without his whip as Samson without his hair. Dracula films use the cross as a symbol of power and as a characterizing element: only someone free of Dracula’s power can wield it or bear its touch.
Symbols can move the action swiftly and tellingly because nothing is as condensed and packed with meaning and emotion as an understood symbol. What a reasonable explanation would require a volume to make clear, a symbol can evoke in a moment. What we sometimes struggle to express without success can often be comprehended instantly if we can create a symbol whose meaning is made clear by the dramatic action of our story.
Turn back to the climax from On the Waterfront Terry looks at the cargo hook in the scene with Edie, takes it, and strikes it into the floor. The act shows his anger, but the cargo hook is also the tool of his trade: to give up his right to use it would mean surrendering his potency and signal his defeat. Terry must prove his right to use it. The hook, then, is as much a symbol as the Western hero’s gun. The same scene shows a second symbol created out of the action by Schulberg—Joey’s jacket. We know from earlier in the screenplay that Joey is the young man Terry naively set up for death at the start of the film. Joey was also Edie’s brother. When Terry dons Joey’s jacket, he engages in a symbolic act of identification and restitution that he then goes down to the docks to make good.
Schulberg calls our attention to some obvious symbols in On the Waterfront, like the suit the Boss Stevedore wears and its meaning. The bandage Michael wears in The Godfather’s war council is simultaneously a plain fact—that he was struck defending his father—and a symbol—representing the inner hurt he feels for his father and his changing role in the family. Michael’s bandaged jaw is a very mild version of Captain Ahab’s damaged leg in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Ahab’s wooden leg is also simultaneously a plain fact and a symbol of Ahab’s wounded nature. We find it irresistible to give things a symbolic weight.
Symbol has a way of spilling over into the ways stories take on mythical or archetypal patterns. Often the hero in a Western is presented as a nonviolent man, a dude, or a man who has given up violence. But the moment comes when violence can no longer be av
oided, and the hero has to put on a gun or retrieve one. Eastwood leaves the miners he has been helping as a minister in Pale Rider and returns to the town where he had left his gun in a safe deposit box. He gets it out, puts it on, and takes off his minister’s collar.
The action for both Terry in On the Waterfront and Michael in The Godfather is typical of hero-making scenes. Often a hero begins as an innocent, even an incompetent; is challenged and molded by events; and then reveals a climactic capacity to guide others and end conflict. These patterns seem almost to be instinctive in us: stories can’t help taking on their coloration, no matter how contemporary and unique they may seem at the start. These patterns, as they are made specific in particular characters in a particular story, give both a greater weight. We feel through characters like Terry or Michael, despite their different achievements, that a human being can overcome seemingly overwhelming odds. We want to believe that even when capacity and hope seem to have been lost, these can be regenerated by an urgent enough effort. Sometimes these things are true.
Examine your own scenes for symbol and symbolic action. Why use them unconsciously when you can martial them to great effect through conscious use? If your scene has no symbolic element, ask yourself if that is appropriate or if its absence is the source of your feeling that something is missing. If you write conflict with force, you will find your material suggests symbols to you. Use them, but remember you must always be sure any symbol, like the use of spectacle or any other detail or dramatic resource, is appropriate to your characters and story.
Suspense
All of the scenes we have looked at so far have generated suspense: scenes can’t be effective otherwise. To feel suspense we must be able to sympathize or empathize with the protagonist: then we can care about his fate. We feel suspense about the outcome of the trial for Ted in Kramer vs. Kramer and what he will do when the verdict goes against him because we care. If we didn’t care about Terry, what would it matter to us when he goes down to the docks or when he lies beaten senseless? Suspense is generated by our concern about some condition or event whose outcome is in doubt but is crucial to the well-being of a protagonist we care about.
The importance of what is at stake greatly affects our feelings of suspense and is another reason that what is at stake must be substantial and cared about deeply by the protagonist. Mrs. Robinson’s manipulation of Ben in The Graduate amuses us, but we respond more deeply to Bonasera begging the Godfather for help. In Rocky we wonder if Rocky will succeed in seducing Adrian, but feel tense over the outcome of Kramer vs. Kramer’s confrontations between Ted and Joanna. Who could keep his attention focused on a story of little consequence and less suspense?
In a sense, suspense grows naturally out of the writer’s success in establishing and developing character and conflict—creating a problem, generating conflict over solving that problem, and building the protagonist and story through complication and reverse to the moment of crisis. Each complication makes us wonder how the protagonist will handle its consequences. Each reverse involves us in a challenge to and response by the protagonist. Crisis and climax generate the most suspense as we wonder whether or not the protagonist will fail and then whether he will carry his ultimate response through the climax to final failure or success. The final revelation of capacity on the protagonist’s part must emerge in an atmosphere of great tension and suspense, or it will not matter to us.
The kind of suspense that relates directly to the protagonist’s survival is major suspense. If some secondary problem comes up, we are dealing with minor suspense. Rocky’s seduction of Adrian generates minor suspense; his fight with Apollo Creed, major. The ins and outs of Terry’s relationship with Edie in On the Waterfront generate minor suspense; his confrontation with Johnny Friendly, major. When we use writers’ lingo and speak of “the plot thickening,” we are referring to major suspense.
This is not the place to go into techniques of artificially adding to suspense by breaking scenes up; cutting away from the action before the outcome of a scene is known; or deliberately inventing a complication, which may or may not be organic with the conflict, out of a sense the action is flagging. These are common practices and often common weaknesses. You should concentrate on the clarity and force of your premise for your story and on the primacy of the conflict you structure in your plot (BEGINNING, MIDDLE, END) for the generation of suspense, just as Schulberg does in On the Waterfront or Bergman so effectively in the scene taken from Fanny and Alexander.
Few scenes develop suspense with as much economy or feeling as does the love scene between Blanche and Mitch that we will turn to now from Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire.
A Love Scene From A Streetcar Named Desire
Tennessee Williams’s play A Streetcar Named Desire caused a sensation with its mix of raw vigor and symbolism in Elia Kazan’s original Broadway production. The film production with the young Brando as the raw, abrasive Stanley Kowalski and Vivien Leigh as his wife’s corrupted, fragile sister Blanche has become a film classic. Ann-Margret and Treat Williams took up its challenge in a 1980s adaptation for prime-time television on ABC.
Three areas concern us in the scene that follows: first, the use of dramatic elements like silence and symbol; second, the use of motivation and revelation at the crisis and climax; last, the way Williams dramatizes a protagonist whose efforts fail.
Typically, the protagonist succeeds in American screenwriting, though the most probing and moving dramas more often than not are stories in which the protagonist’s supreme effort fails. One of the virtues of Tootsie and Kramer vs. Kramer is that their protagonists do not, at least, succeed easily. The happy ending in Kramer vs. Kramer comes as an unexpected gift from Joanna after she has won. Michael is at least chastened in Tootsie, even if he still gets the girl. Terry’s success is one of the weaknesses of On the Waterfront, exciting as its climax is, because we suspect that in real life a punch-drunk, naive, immature, and drifting young man is unlikely to unseat a real Johnny Friendly. The best screenwriting does not leave us with an uneasy question in the back of our minds about how things might really have worked out: it has the force to replace reality because its vision seems truer.
Blanche is no longer a young woman in A Streetcar Named Desire, though she is not old, either. Her past is loaded: it includes Allan, a lover she drove to suicide when she discovered he was a homosexual, and a long period of promiscuity as she flung herself at men trying to forget. That finally cost her her job as a teacher. She had no one to turn to but Stella and so has come to live with her and make a new start. But she is losing her mental balance: she hears things from the past (Allan’s gunshot, snatches of music). Neither her sister nor we know about her past as the scene begins.
Both Blanche and her sister belong to the dying culture of the old South—romantic, chivalrous, fantastic, and in its last manifestations exhausted and corrupt. Stella has made the transition to the new industrial world of the contemporary South through her marriage to Stanley Kowalski, a rough, uncultured, anti-intellectual factory worker, a proletarian. Blanche has clung to the mannerisms of the past and a lost affluence.
She and Stanley feel instant antipathy for each other. Blanche struggles with him for her sister’s affections and starts to date one of his chums, Mitch, hoping to start her new life with him despite their vast differences. She is succeeding before Stanley investigates her past, discovers what it was, and reveals it to Mitch. Mitch stands Blanche up on a date. The scene that follows begins later the same night:
FADE IN:
INT. BLANCHE’S BEDROOM (EST) NIGHT
[A poor room with cheap furniture and only Blanche’s superficial efforts to dress it up.] Blanche is seated in a tense hunched position in a bedroom chair she has re-covered with diagonal green and white stripes. She has on her scarlet satin robe. On the table beside chair is a bottle of liquor and a glass.
The rapid, feverish POLKA TUNE, the “Varsouviana,” is HEARD [OVER]. The music is i
n her mind; she is drinking to escape it and the sense of disaster closing in on her, and she seems to whisper the words of the song. An electric fan is turning back and forth across her.
EXT. STREET BEFORE KOWALSKI APARTMENT NIGHT
Mitch comes around the corner in work clothes: blue denim shirt and pants. He is unshaven. He climbs the steps to the door and rings.
INT. BLANCHE’S BEDROOM NIGHT
BLANCHE
(Blanche is startled)
Who is it, please?
MITCH, OS
(hoarsely)
Me. Mitch.
The POLKA TUNE STOPS.
BLANCHE
Mitch! Just a minute!
She rushes about frantically, hiding the bottle in a closet, crouching at the mirror and dabbing her face with cologne and powder. She is so excited her breath is audible as she dashes about. At last she rushes to the door in the kitchen and lets him in.
BY DOOR
BLANCHE
Mitch!—Y’know, I really shouldn’t let you in after the treatment I have received from you this evening! So utterly uncavalier. But hello, beautiful!
She offers him her lips. He ignores it and pushes past her into the flat. She looks fearfully after him as he stalks into her bedroom.
BLANCHE
My, my, what a cold shoulder! And such uncouth apparel! Why, you haven’t even shaved! The unforgiveable insult to a lady! But I forgive you. I forgive you because it’s such a relief to see you. You’ve stopped that polka tune I had caught in my head. Have you ever had anything caught in your head? No, of course you haven’t, you dumb angel-puss, you’d never get anything awful caught in your head!
He stares at her while she FOLLOWS him [into the bedroom] while she talks. It is obvious that he has had a few drinks on the way over.
TWO SHOT: MITCH & BLANCHE—BLANCHE’S BEDROOM
MITCH
