The Understructure of Writing for Film and Television

by Ben Brady

  This brings us to an interesting point. The stage production of A Streetcar Named Desire did involve elements of spectacle. There was a constant play of different light and sound effects to suggest mood or feeling or heighten the sense of lyricism. But the stage is a bare area naked to imagination and suggestion, while the camera sees the surface of things we call reality. The spectacle appropriate to the screen, as with screen symbols, must seem natural to the story, to the surface of reality, and gather its extra weight through the force of the story. In the case of fantasy or science fiction, an entirely new surface of reality has to be constructed in which spaceships, genies, or talking animals appear logically.

  Silence is used three times in this scene crucially. First is the moment of silence as Mitch grabs and stares at Blanche in the light before she cries out and covers her face. It is a cruel and symbolic moment: he sees the truth. Blanche may once have been but is not now young or a lady.

  Second, look at the sequence in which Mitch reveals what he knows from Kiefaber and Shaw. Blanche resists a moment, then reveals her past in order to assert that they are both people who need someone, and a second or a last chance. As Blanche makes her plea, the business indicates: “There is a pause. Mitch stares at her dumbly.” Then he says: “You lied to me, Blanche.” That silence dramatizes more effectively than a debate could Mitch’s inability to cope with the idea that the past could mean many things and perhaps be overcome. The past can only be what it seems to be to Mitch, just as Southern Comfort can only be whiskey.

  Last, there is a long moment as the Mexican Woman’s cry becomes inaudible and Blanche leans on her dresser, lost in thought. Mitch ends it by reaching for her—as a whore. Not even her final revelation could touch him.

  This is not a silent scene, however: music plays an important role and in a way that you as a writer can use in your own scenes. No one expects you to write a score; that is one of the collaborative elements of screenwriting that enter in the production phase. But you can use musical elements and insist on the function of any score. For instance, one of the characteristics of Ingmar Bergman’s screenplays is the absence of any sort of “Hollywood” musical score. The natural sounds of the environment fill his films, and a moment of silence means real silence. A film like The Emerald Forest is flawed by the constant presence of a musical score that eliminates much of the feel of the jungle with its natural sounds. A much older Hollywood film, the popular King Solomon’s Mines, was unusual and surprisingly effective, in part because so much of the sound in it was natural or native.

  Some movies use their scores to give the film a coherency it would otherwise lack. A score may link scenes in an action-adventure film or serve as part of an epic effect, as it did in Lawrence of Arabia, which had the London Philharmonic seemingly behind every sand dune, or Star Wars. Scores can set a mood, prepare the audience for a moment of action, emphasize a dramatic moment: think of all the detective movies you have seen with foreboding scores.

  Williams’s scene does not begin with a silent shot like the CLOSE-UP of Joanna at the start of Kramer vs. Kramer, though something of the same sense of desperation is being communicated: instead, we hear the “Varsouviana Polka.” It is present only in Blanche’s mind. Moreover, she doesn’t hear rock and roll or something from Oklahoma. What she hears is specific to her, triggered by something in the present: her unhappiness. She also hears it when it is inconvenient: its presence dramatizes her precarious grip on reality. She just barely controls herself with Mitch, who thinks she is “boxed.” Events will eventually so loosen her grip on the present that she will be taken to an asylum. You can use musical elements also within your own scenes to set mood or characterize a moment or character or even, like Williams, as a symbol.

  Crisis and Climax

  The scene is also enriched by the way Williams varies the structure we have been emphasizing. Nonetheless, we can break this scene down in terms of BEGINNING, MIDDLE, and END.

  BEGINNING. From the opening up to the point at which Mitch admits he wasn’t going to see Blanche anymore is the first part.

  MIDDLE. This sequence carries us from Blanche’s fending off Mitch’s attempts to leave or expose her to Mitch’s revealing that he has discovered her past. She’s not “straight,” and he has Kiefaber, Shaw, and Kowalski to prove it. The relationship seems about to fail for good: crisis.

  END. The final sequence is made up of Blanche’s efforts to overcome the revelation about her past until his advance signals that she has failed and she drives Mitch away. Climax—and failure.

  This is an accurate summary, but also deceptive. Actually, the scene approaches the crisis several times but is forced away each time by Blanche’s ingenuity in confusing the linear, unimaginative Mitch. The crisis nearly arrives immediately when Mitch declares “I wasn’t going to see you anymore,” but Blanche deflects the moment by diving into the closet to search for drink, pretending not to hear him while insisting she wants to catch every word. An argument over liquor or even, next, over light is far more to her purpose than over his not wanting to see her and why. That initial deflection makes Mitch search for a way to deal with her, instead of moving straight to Kiefaber and Shaw as he might have if Blanche had asked him Why? instead of diving into her closet. Even the crisis of holding Blanche’s face in the light is deflected in part by Blanche’s tears, in part because the light he wants to shed isn’t really on her lack of youth. But that at last leads him to the issue of whether she is “straight.” This does lead to the crisis, yet even now with a twist as Blanche deflects Mitch from the issue by playing for pity and by being straight about what she did. She wants to underscore why she behaved as she did in the past. She hopes to change both the meaning of what she did and what Mitch should think about it. As in On the Waterfront, the truth of the past emerges as a critical issue in the crisis. But in Terry’s case the argument is more over who did what (or who ratted); with Blanche, what was done is conceded but not its meaning. This makes motivation itself the issue, not some event, just as it ties suspense to meaning instead of overt action.

  Suspense itself is heightened by this way of handling the crisis: nothing more is needed to involve us more deeply than the sense of imminent disaster Blanche fends off with increasing ineffectiveness. The heightened suspense and deferred crisis let Williams accomplish something more. We can imagine a scene in which Mitch tells Blanche much earlier that he isn’t going to see her again because she lied and immediately reveals his information from Kiefaber and Shaw. This action would have taken almost all the suspense out of the scene and would have made her use of motivation seem like a desperate attempt to deny the truth rather than reach it. We would have been baffled as she told Mitch more than he knew, revealing her behavior with the soldiers, for instance. She would seem a dishonest woman who just couldn’t say no, not one who never lied in her heart. But the author gives himself time to reveal more about Blanche through her immediate efforts to deflect the conflict from reaching crisis, most lightly with the liquor and then with increasing weight to the revelation that she is haunted by death. Blanche’s reckless promiscuity appears as an attempt to bury death in life, namely, through desire: “The opposite is desire.”

  How is this compelling and suspenseful scene made possible? By making several reverses potentially the crisis. The need for ingenuity on the part of the protagonist to avert the crisis provides a constant challenge to the author through his character for ever more invention and insight. Characters cannot arbitrarily shy away from the crisis: they can only if they find an immediate ability to do so. What they have to find at such moments is something more substantial, however, if the weight of crisis is about to fall on them, as it is on Blanche.

  Writing with a constant sense of crisis is writing on the edge and offers the most opportunity. Any meaning reached through this process will be at a profounder level than otherwise possible. Here Blanche’s confrontation with death touches something fundamental in all experience. It transcends a tale
of corruption and decay or of the replacement of the old South by the new, yet it fits easily into the other strands of meaning in the play. Mitch’s reaction is painfully appropriate to him: all he can do is dumbly try to treat her like a whore and get chased out. Blanche wins, and loses.

  Note the greater realism involved this way. Terry can march directly from discontent to resolve to the docks and overcome Johnny Friendly, but Blanche and Mitch create a more compelling reality because they have to search and struggle their way to their moment of truth. Reality isn’t linear, except in our wishes. A playwright can dramatize reality through how he handles the pattern of reverses in a scene as well as through how he tries to simplify it (as Williams does with Mitch). Developing a character and conflict through complication and reverse means sustaining this back-and-forth struggle toward the truth between the characters. That is the movement Williams catches and that is the problem with which all the best writing wrestles. Why?

  The idea that there is a division between pleasure and instruction in drama is profoundly false: few things give an audience a deeper thrill of delight than the sense they have arrived at the final truth about a man or a woman. The desire to know, to know truly, is deep in human nature. One of the roots of creativity is the urge to imagine a life and its problems so clearly that the audience is utterly convinced of the reality and meaning of those imagined lives. These are things a drama must face because it is centered on conflict, and conflict forces the audience to explore motivation, which hardly makes sense unless the past as well as the present is examined in the light of the immediate, urgent needs of the characters. You will succeed or fail as a screenwriter to the degree that that sense of knowledge and truth is evoked in the audience through empathy and identification with your characters.

  The old cliché that runs to the effect that art lies and only reality is true consequently misses the truth. Truth is exactly what so often eludes us in our lives. The truth that the imagination finds by working on the substance of our experience is not less true for being visionary. It is often all we have and why certain dramas, as well as other works, hold a perennial interest. No one goes anywhere to be lied to. When we speak of the appearance of the past in drama, it is a way of emphasizing the way in which an entire life finally is envisioned through conflict. Blanche’s struggle with Mitch involves the nature of her life: that is what is at stake in the argument over the past. Is there still room for life for her? Is there still hope? Or must the past swallow everything now? What sort of issues should we write about other than those as central to our experience as we can reach? All our craft is nothing unless it brings us to ourselves.

  A Word on What’s at Stake

  We use the phrase “what’s at stake” often. We use it to draw attention to the importance of the immediate outcome of the conflict for a character, as we use “what’s ultimately at stake” to draw attention to the importance of the final outcome to a character. By now you may realize that what is at stake in strong writing is always the same thing, however different it appears in specific circumstances: the protagonist’s survival, either directly or through whatever it is he sees as most important. Michael in The Godfather intervenes in the family at the point its survival is called into question after promising his father he would be with him from now on. Ted is faced with the survival of his father-and-son family unit that has become all-important to him in Kramer vs. Kramer. Terry in On the Waterfront fights for survival on a literal level. Blanche struggles for survival in the new world of Mitch and Stanley. Michael in Tootsie fights for survival first as an actor and then as a man in love. Julie in Private Benjamin is faced with a choice of living a life of self-betrayal by marrying the philandering Henri or of defying everyone by standing up for herself. What the truth is; how to take, finally, a character’s motivation; and what the past really was and means hang on the outcome of the protagonist’s struggle for survival, whether in comedy or drama. An audience may laugh helplessly in a farce, but few characters take their situation as desperately.

  If you can’t conceive your story in terms of survival for your protagonist, then you will be left to write in the shallows. We as writers court suffering for our characters out of our sense that they will find truth in its rifts and upheavals. We drive our characters to the breaking point because it is only there that the Blanches and Terrys can show their ultimate nature in a moment suddenly luminescent with truth.

  Your Fourth Assignment

  Write a scene in which you bring your crisis—your moment of imminent failure—and your climax—your final, resolving effort—into sharp relief. See if you can conceive what’s at stake in terms of survival. Use either Williams’s technique of having your protagonist defer the crisis or Schulberg’s technique of using a moment of real failure (Terry’s beating) to heighten suspense and deepen the challenge to your protagonist’s capacity. Make overcoming the crisis as hard as you can for your protagonist.

  Don’t turn any consideration of motivation, the past, or the truth into an abstraction. Ask yourself specific questions: Why does my character do this or that now? How does one action grow immediately out of the preceding? Actions must be in response to immediate needs. Ask yourself, Can my character avert this disaster staring him in the face? As long as he can, let him. The crisis doesn’t arrive out of your convenience, but from unavoidable necessity. That tests your character and your imagination. If you have not put your character in a situation in which survival in some sense is at stake, your imagination is going to have little to respond to.

  Be clear about the nature of the actual failure seeming to face your protagonist in the crisis. He or she does not face absolute failure, but this particular failure or that particular failure. You cannot dramatize survival either, only a particular threat at a particular moment in a particular context. What, specifically, does your character do to succeed, or try to, climactically?

  Do a draft of your scene. Write that draft with complete freedom—don’t hesitate to change your mind in its middle, follow sudden inspirations, reconceive your characters, or do whatever else may occur to you.

  Then revise it. Pay attention to three areas: First, look at your structure. Have you made the march to crisis and climax too predictable and straightforward? Does it work the way you have it? Examine your reverses. Does each contribute to the development of your characters and conflict? Is more than one reverse capable of being the crisis your protagonist is trying to avoid? Are there any complications beyond the initial problem? What are they? Are they necessary or irrelevant?

  Second, do your characters speak when silence would be more eloquent? Are there moments of action you cloud with dialogue? Have suggestive or symbolic elements appeared as part of the natural context of your action? Could you make more use of them? Can you use music or any other nonverbal element within the scene? Is spectacle involved? Could it be? Should it be removed?

  Last, ask yourself how the past appears and what it means. How is not reality but the reality of your story finally defined by your characters’, especially your protagonist’s, response to your crisis and climax? What is revealed? Are these things clear, or have you failed to think through the consequences of your characters’ ultimate responses?

  We emphasize this immediate, layered process of revision. Remember that what cannot be dramatized is not believed or experienced and consequently diminishes your story’s force. Only through your success with the immediate requirements of structure, conflict, and character can you reach any larger issue.

  Sometimes we assign a murder scene to our students at this point. Someone must be killed in the scene. Survival is ultimately at stake, but as a consequence of some immediate needs. It’s more fun if the murder is not premeditated but provoked by the action of the scene. What could lead a character to such behavior? What has made him resentful to begin with? What brings on the crisis? What does the turn toward murder reveal about the character in terms of the past and motivation? How does the murder resolve
anything? What does it finally make clear?

  Whether you use an idea of your own or the one we suggest, write this scene with gusto!

  Notes

  1. Puzo and Coppola, The Godfather, pp. 69–72.

  2. Benton, Kramer vs. Kramer, pp. 121–123.

  3. Schulberg, On the Waterfront, pp. 126–140.

  4. Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire, Best American Plays, 3d series (New York: Crown Publishers, 1952), pp. 83–86. Copyright © 1947 by Tennessee Williams; reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation and the Tennessee Williams Foundation. Please note that the screenplay was not accessible to the authors; camera directions, screenplay format, and all bracketed material have been added by the authors.

  9. Handling Dialogue, Theme, Values, and Moral Urgency

  We need to consider three final aspects of successful screenwriting: first, the proper handling of dialogue; second, the proper handling of thematic material, for a writer always writes from some point of view; and third, the related issues of values and moral urgency in good writing.

  DIALOGUE

  Once a drama had to be in verse, and sometimes that verse rose to poetry to express the depth of a character’s suffering or joy. Some movie adaptations of such dramas still succeed with general audiences, whether Romeo and Juliet or Euripides’ unsurpassed antiwar drama The Trojan Women. Even when verse died out as the received mode for dialogue, emphasis continued to be placed on how well characters spoke; it was believed that the urgency of a character’s needs or passions should spill over into stirring, electrifying speech.