The Understructure of Writing for Film and Television

by Ben Brady

  VALUES AND MORAL URGENCY

  A dramatist creates, affirms or denies, values. He can’t help himself. Creating, affirming, or denying values is built into the art form. A scene and story always affirm some values and deny others.

  Look at the two scenes we’ve just evaluated. Torvald and Nora struggle over values. He offers her the values of religion, propriety, morals, or just caution before the world when ignorant. He interprets them in particular ways; each time Nora reinterprets them or asserts a counter value. Joanna asks if a woman doesn’t have a right to a life of her own. Never mind how we would ordinarily, unthinkingly answer such a question: the scene makes us agree—Yes, of course!—enough to forgive at least a temporary abandonment of her child, both creating and affirming through the conflict the value of self-realization. Suppose Shaunessy had proved the opposite? Then self-realization for a woman would be experienced in the scene as having little or no value.

  Values are often what are ultimately at stake in a scene. Bonasera in The Godfather forsakes one set of values for another motivated by vengeance. His change lends credibility to the Godfather’s values: we feel that in some circumstances there is more justice in them than in conventional justice. Bishop Vergérus in Fanny and Alexander makes us feel the hollowness of conventional belief and of the attempt to maintain the form of a belief in order to maintain power. There is no doubt Bishop Vergérus revolts us with his treatment of Alexander. Through that, the value of what he stands for is both revealed and spurned by the author.

  Although values and theme obviously overlap, values emerge primarily from the outcome of the conflict, and theme is embodied in the on-going action. There are no techniques for handling values—they are the natural outcome of your story.

  Here is the core of the final exchange between Michael and Julie in Tootsie after he has given up his female impersonation as Dorothy in a spectacular public unveiling. Julie is the girl he fell in love with while disguised as Dorothy. They have not seen each other since his unveiling.

  JULIE

  I read your reviews from Syracuse.

  Surprised you went up there—you were pretty hot after your “unveiling.” You didn’t have to go up there to work.

  MICHAEL

  I didn’t have to . . . but I wanted to.

  (then)

  It’s a good play. It deserves to be seen.

  (beat)

  Besides, I made a promise.

  Julie slows, stops, and then turns to him.

  JULIE

  (soberly)

  I miss Dorothy.

  MICHAEL

  You don’t have to. She’s right here.

  I’m Dorothy.

  He takes her hands in his.

  MICHAEL (CONT’D)

  Listen . . . The hard part’s over—we were already best friends. Don’t hold it against me that I wear pants.13

  This is very simple but value and theme rich. First, Michael, despite being a hot ticket after revealing his brilliant performance as Dorothy, hasn’t capitalized on it, but gone to Syracuse to do a friend’s play. Friendship and a promise are affirmed as higher values than grabbing fame and fortune, which was available to him and what he thought he wanted at first. Second, Julie frankly admits she misses the woman Michael played, who had become—impossibly, for Michael—Julie’s best friend. His assertion that “she’s right here” carries layers of meaning. She is right there: Michael was Dorothy. But Dorothy is there, too: Michael is still Dorothy in the sense that what we are able to create remains a part of us. Third, it is possible for a man to develop a “feminine” empathy. Julie’s choice to stay with Michael affirms the value of that transformation in Michael.

  There is more to values than this. We said survival is what is often ultimately at stake in a scene or story. That survival is always an attempt to survive in some particular way at some particular time in some particular place by some particular character. His or her survival—or failure—affirms some values, denies others, and creates perhaps yet others. Alexander tries to protect his individuality, Nora and Terry to gain their rights, Blanche to affirm her right to a new chance. Their success or failure comes as the final outcome of struggle—urgent, desperate, deeply felt. We are made to feel those values, their rightness or wrongness, passionately. Every writer worth his salt communicates a sense of moral urgency about the values involved in his story. Values emerge through the story’s outcome, but that outcome emerges in the white heat of the characters’ passionate, ultimate efforts in the crisis and climax.

  Moral urgency is the opposite of a writer’s pushing some conventional set of morals. A writer may give little attention to any abstract presentation of whatever moral system might be implicit in his treatment of conflict: he is a playwright, not a minister. What a dramatist does communicate, if he is successful, is the truth of the conflict in each story. Something is true and right in this particular instance; something else, perhaps, in another. A dramatist must be free of preconceived ideas about the possibilities of human behavior and meaning: he must remain free to see the truth of any imagined conflict, however conservative or liberal he may be as a man. This, too, is not a technique to be mastered, but a fundamental observation: any belief that appears in any drama must be tested through the conflict in some particular character. We come full circle here: we stress that a writer creates truth more than finds it and that such a creation is a matter of vision—craft and vision. What is a vision without a sense of urgency and rightness?

  Your Fifth Assignment

  Review the last three assignments. Any scene you write for this assignment must fulfill their requirements successfully. Next, develop some simply stated theme like crime doesn’t pay, the truth sets us free, alcoholism is a bad thing, or abortion can never be (or can be) justified. Don’t just grab at anything: what has aroused your passions recently? What ideas have triggered the most thought? Then write a scene in which no one speaks the theme but the action embodies it. Have the theme emerge from how your conflict develops and turns out. Consider what value you want us to feel about your theme. Suppose you write a psychological study of a character suffering from some personal misconception and the action of your scene is the gradual revelation of the truth. If that truth resolves your protagonist’s conflict we will think: the truth sets us free. If not, we will think: truth does not set us free.

  Remember we must care about your characters—they must arouse our feelings—or we will not think about their situation. Remember what is immediately at stake must be something immediate and personal, not your theme. Remember to let your characters struggle, discover, and reveal themselves. Let them grow because what they must do to resolve their conflict changes them. Let them care passionately about solving their immediate problem.

  Don’t hesitate to use Ibsen’s technique of using reverses to dramatize particular aspects of your theme. Don’t let that technique lure you into becoming too schematic. Feel free to use the courtroom procedure of Kramer vs. Kramer if it fits your story naturally. Don’t let that lure you into a mere recitation of information.

  Pay attention to how your characters speak, too: is their speech appropriate to them? Can you define them further through how they talk? Does their speech reflect their process of discovery as they grope for the solution to their conflict? Or do they speak with such certainty that they lose credibility? Is there an immediate need for any information they divulge? Does that information influence the immediate action?

  Give yourself the freedom of a first draft to explore your characters, conflict, and particular thematic material, and then go back and examine it as we suggested in your last assignment. Make sure you haven’t missed the point, that your characters don’t debate, that the thought you want to leave us with is triggered by the action. Just what values are you communicating to us with moral urgency? Are they what you intended?

  Then rewrite your scene, the more passionately felt by your characters and the more thoroughly thought out by you, the more ente
rtaining and exciting for your audience.

  Notes

  1. Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire, pp. 85–86.

  2. Ibid., p. 84.

  3. Benton, Kramer vs. Kramer, p. 122.

  4. William Shakespeare, Richard III, act 1, sc. 1, line 1.

  5. Benton, Kramer vs. Kramer, pp. 72–74

  6. Puzo and Coppola, The Godfather, p. 1.

  7. Schulberg, On the Waterfront, pp. 127–128.

  8. Ibid., pp. 103–104.

  9. Bergman, Fanny and Alexander, pp. 136–137.

  10. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman K. Smith (New York: Modern Library, 1958), p. 25.

  11. Henrik Ibsen, A Doll House, from Four Major Plays, trans. Rolf Fjelde (New York: New American Library, 1978), pp. 190–196. Copyright © 1965 by Rolf Fjelde; reprinted by arrangement with NAL Penguin Inc., New York, NY. 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.

  12. Benton, Kramer vs. Kramer, pp. 101–111.

  13. Gelbart, Tootsie, pp. 143–144.

  10. Writing the Miniscreenplay

  It is time to undertake a longer project, a miniscreenplay of 15–25 pages. Although all writers have individual ways of working, a very specific story development process is expected of a writer professionally when he attempts to sell a story to a studio or network. Such potential buyers first expect to see some brief statement of a story, variously referred to as an “idea” or a “premise.” If the writer succeeds in making a sale, he will be asked to write a treatment before being allowed to write the script. You should prepare both a premise and treatment for your miniscreenplay as a way of developing your own dramatic thinking for a story and of familiarizing yourself with forms expected from you professionally.

  A Word on Superstructure

  We stressed that the same dramatic structure applies to both individual scenes and entire screenplays. Both scenes and screenplays must establish character and conflict, develop these to some point of crisis, and reach a climax and resolution. A story contained within a scene accomplishes all of these within that concentrated space; a story told in a screenplay places such scenes within a larger application of the same structure.

  Thus the same dramatic structure exists on two levels:

  1. The dramatic structure within each scene.

  2. The dramatic structure of the entire screenplay, which is in turn primarily made up of scenes. The plot is the dramatic structure of such scenes developed to tell your story.

  We also stressed that structural terms are not abstractions but reflections of particular sequences of action. A reverse is one moment of action-reaction within a scene; a complication is a scene-causing additional problem that leads to action on the part of your protagonist. Now, for a screenplay, you must think of acts. Acts reflect particular sequences of action already familiar to you through our association of BEGINNING with establishing character and conflict, MIDDLE with developing character and conflict to the crisis, END with climax and resolution. Let’s look at how these apply to acts in a little more detail.

  Act 1 (BEGINNING): Establishing Character and Conflict

  Typically, Act 1 introduces your characters, their initial situation, the problem that will disrupt their lives, and their first efforts to deal with that problem. Because their efforts are opposed, an antagonist or obstacle also is introduced and conflict generated. Your protagonist may try several ways of dealing with the conflict, without, at first, having any clear focus for achieving a solution.

  Kramer vs. Kramer begins with Joanna’s abandonment of Ted. But Act 1 does not end there: it continues through a series of scenes as Ted and Billy struggle to survive as a family unit. Ted and Billy succeed, growing together and changing their values. Then Joanna reappears and demands Billy back. The threat to the family takes on a new and more serious form. Ted decides to resist. We saw the scene in which he storms out on Joanna after meeting her in the restaurant. That is the end of the first act.

  The effort that the protagonist must make to succeed in ending the conflict is defined at the end of Act 1. In Ted’s case, he must fight and win a custody battle. In Places in the Heart, the wife must plant and harvest a cotton crop. Another way of putting it is that the type of conflict (man versus man, Joanna versus Ted in Kramer vs. Kramer) joins with the immediate problem (defending the family unit of Ted and Billy).

  Act 2 (MIDDLE): Developing Character and Conflict to Crisis

  Act 2 develops the action that the protagonist realizes he must take at the end of Act 1 to the crisis where it seems his or her effort is going to fail. In Kramer vs. Kramer Act 2 centers around the vivid courtroom struggle for Billy, which reaches the crisis when Ted loses. In On the Waterfront Terry tries to find a reasonable way to deal with his situation until his brother is killed.

  Typically, Act 2 takes less time than Act 1 because of the greater focus of the action. There may be many twists and turns to the action in Act 2, yet they are all generally related to the particular effort on the part of the protagonist now the focus of the action. But the crisis provokes a sharper focus, for at the end of Act 2 the protagonist discovers the final form the obstacle to ending the conflict takes: Ted faces the loss of Billy; Terry knows he must personally confront Johnny Friendly.

  Act 3 (END): Handling the Climax and Resolution

  We saw earlier how the dramatic obstacle changes constantly in effective writing, whether in Mrs. Robinson’s artful manipulations of Ben in The Graduate or in the bishop’s moral terrorism with Alexander in Fanny and Alexander. The final form of that obstacle appears at the end of Act 2 and is acted on decisively in Act 3. Terry strikes against Johnny Friendly. Ted accommodates himself and Billy to the court’s decree. Michael “destroys” Dorothy in Tootsie. Michael, in The Godfather, assassinates all his enemies after Don Corleone’s death.

  Just as crisis and climax lead to revelation and resolution in a scene, they do in a screenplay. Ted rises to the challenge of losing Billy (the final obstacle) with deep feeling and humanity, while Joanna discovers she can’t take Billy away from Ted (revelation and resolution). Terry discovers testifying against Johnny Friendly (the final obstacle) isn’t enough and finds it in himself to confront and overcome him directly (revelation and resolution).

  Don’t write your screenplay with act breaks: acts are a way of organizing your dramatic thinking about particular sequences of the necessary, dramatic action your protagonist takes to overcome the problem facing him in order to end the conflict. Teleplays for series are often written with act breaks, however. If the miniscreenplay you undertake is conceived as a teleplay, then you should include actual act breaks. Those breaks are not the ones a viewer sees, however: those are determined by commercial breaks. You might want to anticipate those (there are, minimally, four for an hour, two for a half-hour show). Try to use curtain lines in the appropriate scenes.

  Remember two simple points. First, though every scene is dramatically structured, not every scene has equal weight. Some are more obviously transitional than others, as the scene in which Terry struggles with Edie to decide his next step in On the Waterfront or the earlier scene in which Johnny Friendly sends Charley to get Terry under control. The scene between Alexander and Bishop Vergérus is obviously one of the major moments of the story’s conflict, as is the scene between Terry and Charley in the cab in On the Waterfront. Length and importance aren’t always linked. Important as the scene between Ted and Shaunessy is when Ted learns the court’s verdict, it is not a long scene.

  Second, remember the camera offers you great fluidity and economy in moving from place to place, setting mood, or conveying information. Use individual shots or miniscenes to give information, establish mood, or help link and develop your scenes. Kramer vs. Kramer begins with alternating shots of Joanna and Ted at home and at work. In On the Waterfront we saw the simple shot of the cab driving Charley into the River Street ga
rage where Gerry G. is waiting. Tootsie starts with alternating highly compressed miniscenes and insert shots of Michael’s scrapbook. Some scenes take place in one setting; others are more fluid, as is the climax from On the Waterfront. Even the simple scene between Michael-as-Dorothy and Les in Tootsie moves back and forth from a restaurant table and a dance floor.

  The Premise

  The premise is the brief initial statement of your story and its dramatic structure. It shouldn’t run more than two typewritten pages doublespaced. A premise starts with an indication of your main characters, the kind of conflict, the theme or themes that may be involved, and the point of departure—what problem sets off the conflict. This is written in clear summary statements, act by act, in three paragraphs.

  Because the form is so brief, mention only the most significant actions, not the many details or transitions that would appear in an actual script. Done properly, a premise gives you a first opportunity to define the nature of your story and to test yourself for a cohesive view of the development of the conflict.

  Before you write your premise, write a brief overview of the story like the following sample overview for Kramer vs. Kramer:

  Kramer vs. Kramer is a contemporary marital and family drama about the changing roles of men and women in the American family. It is centered around Ted, a hard-working but initially insensitive husband; his wife Joanna, an attractive but confused woman; and their young son, Billy. Joanna, suffering from years of neglect and insensitivity, with a deep need to find herself as an individual, abandons both Ted and Billy. Ted and his values are transformed as he becomes a devoted father. He struggles to keep Billy with him when Joanna reappears and demands Billy for herself after she and Ted have been divorced. A tough custody battle is fought, with a surprise ending from its victor, Joanna, who is unable to take Billy from Ted.