So, how is the best way to describe your characters in those first ten pages where your character has their initial introduction to the story? Right? So, you have to introduce them in a compelling way. In your novel you could and can take all the time you need. Went to boarding school in France, studied law – add little anecdotes. You don’t have that much time and space in a screenplay. You have to cut to the chase.
INTERIOR – LIBRARY – DAY
Professor Muldoon, a crusty but benign college professor, dressed in tweed and loafers, holds an old book tightly as he hobbles down a long oak stairway into the the living room of the old English manor.
You do it all in one to three lines not a page and a half. That’s it, you have to create the same impact that you would generate in a page and half description you might have in your novel. And Anthony Hopkins acts it out.
(Audience laughter)
Let’s talk about that. Shall we? In your novel you have every detail covered so that you know who the characters are in every detail. Now you’ve got a screenplay and its all got to be in there but at around 120 pages. So you cut, but you don’t want to strip everything out of it. You must capture the essence of your full character description that’s in your book. What I’m saying is that you must keep the soul of your book alive and you get that 50 or 100 word description and you boil it down to five or ten words and that’s the challenge. But, don’t be a good soldier that writes their screenplay in 100 pages but in doing so; the end product has no life in it. You must keep the soul of your book alive and so you struggle to make sure you get in those five or ten lines of description that you don’t lose any calories. It has to have the same fullness. The next element is ACTION.
Action is how your character moves in the space – the universe you have created for them. You don’t have to write “He walked slowly put one foot after another.” You don’t have to do that. Instead focus on something interesting about how your character does something. Some sort of interesting action that they do like the way they tie their tie (James Bond) pet a cat (The Godfather) or walk on a sidewalk (Jack Nicholson in (AS GOOD AS IT GETS). But you can create action as it happens “on the fly” as your character does it. Do you remember the old television series Columbo (1968)?
(Audience laughter)
I can’t believe you guys remember that? Okay, well you would want to put a little bit about that character’s actions in your set up. And Detective Columbo was interesting to us because we always enjoyed the way he seemed to physically fumble through each situation he was in. There was a “fumbling” almost inept quality about the character that made his adversaries not take him very seriously. They though “this guy is a total
dork.” But we loved to see Columbo fumble through and solve every crime despite how carefully it was planned. Sherlock Holmes is the flip side, the Victorian side. Holmes is very formal, scientific and he observes using his five senses everything intently. All his fastidious actions come into play, So action is important because it shows something about your character’s way of existing physically in their universe that makes them interesting and worthy of our time. And we can go through all sorts of things to achieve that.
(Off stage Voice)
Ten minutes? Are you sure?
(Audience laughter)
In the writing class we did yesterday, we were improvising about the “space between people.” Just the space can change the way your characters react to things within their universe. You know those people in New York City on the subway? The subway car is packed – standing room only – and they are this far away from one another.)
(Catalano moves very close to a male audience member – almost touches)
(Audience laughter)
Don’t worry, I won’t touch you…
(Audience laughter)
Unless you want me to?
(Audience laughter.)
They are this far away and it’s not a problem. Try that in Los Angeles. Try to move that close to someone and see what happens. I was on line the other day at a store (waiting to check out) and some guy (who was in a hurry) came up right behind me. He very close, I could feel him breathing on me and pressing up against my butt.
(Audience laughter)
No nothing like that… he was (I assume) trying to get the line to move faster. I turned to him and said pressing up against me is not going to make the checkout person or the line any faster. He just moved back… no comment. Now the definition of personal space in Los Angeles and now is different let’s say than riding the subway in New York City during the rush hour. This guy pressing up against me in line was a violation of my personal space while it might not have even been noticeable in another situation. Definition of space in Ohio, Los Angeles is different than in New York City, Tokyo or Paris. You can create visual element for your character before they even say one word. This really goes to my example of Meryl Streep in DOUBT. That kind of visual introduction says something about your character and how they move – that might take you several pages to achieve in a novel.
I recently attended a screening of the film Chef (2014) that (without giving anything away here) is about a chef. The opening sequence of the film (as music plays) is a series of visual shots our main character preparing food – doing the slicing, dicing – all the things a chef would do. But this action was not casual, he was preparing with a sense of purpose – so you knew right away, even before the first word of dialogue was spoken that the meal he was preparing was an important one. He wasn’t just cooking breakfast for himself… it was more than that – much more. You’ll have to see the film, because you’re not getting anything else out of me on CHEF. Have any of you seen it?
(Audience laughter)
Really, we should stop right now and all go to the movies!
(Audience laughter)
But we can’t can we? Can we? So you want to open with your characters up front and make them interesting and compelling within that first ten pages or ten minutes of screening. You want the reader/audience to want to know more about them and why they are doing what they are doing. So ACTION is very important tool for you to use to connect your characters to your audience. The other element that is important is of course DIALOGUE.
DIALOGUE is important because it is one the ways (probably one of the most important) a character communicates with an audience and other characters in your story. Dialogue is one of the primary ways your audience gets to know all the things they need to know to be connected to the story. Also, dialogue can reveal things about the character themselves; do they have a dialect, what do they say about themselves, what do they say about others, are they always telling the truth or do they lie? How do they speak? Do they speak in shortened phrases like?
(Catalano does Joe Pesci imitation from the film Good Fellas – 1990)
“You said I was funny? Funny like I’m a clown, I amuse you? I make you laugh? I’m here to amuse you? What do you mean funny, funny how? How am I funny?”
(Audience laughter)
That’s one way of doing it. Or does your character speak in long-winded speeches like let’s say Sherlock Holmes. Figure out how what they say and how they say it fits in to what you are trying to accomplish.
You can ask my brother just one simple question and he will go off for an hour or more on it. So, really, I don’t like asking him anything… you know.
(Audience laughter)
“Hey, Bro… “I call him “Bro” which is term of endearment. “How was your day?” Then he looks at me and smiles as if to say I so glad you asked. “Well, I got up this morning, brushed my teeth and then after that…” I think to myself… please just the highlights – do you have to tell me everything?
Is this your character? So, how they speak dialogue is just as important as exposition and content. When you finally finish the introduction of your main character, I am assuming that your main character is going to be there. Right? So your character walks in and I don’t know we were doing The Sopranos
yesterday. I kind of dressed for it today. Your character walks in on page two and speaks for the first time with a Jersey dialect: “How ya’doin?”
(Catalano moves)
And he moves within the space leading with chin and is hunched over a bit (like he’s going to whisper something important in your ear) or your main character could be an attorney with a physically that is more upright (morally driven)
(Catalano moves again this time more upright and driven.)
“How are you today?”
No chest, no chin. Little details like play strongly or should I say visually. You bring over the characteristics of your novel but with less stated. You keep your character’s quality; you don’t lose it with abbreviation. It’s just as detailed but the detail has been compressed into Description, Action and Dialogue. Guess what? All of these elements are visual and auditory. You have moved from an intellectual medium (your novel) where everything is happens and is created in your head (your imagination) to a primarily visual medium based in external stimuli.
So, you wouldn’t say your character enters leading with his chin and right foot. This type of physicality is too clinical. You might instead describe it using visual metaphors. Something like “Joey G walks in the room like a predator ready to strike with his eyes focused on the prize.” The metaphor compresses it all into one short section and you can come up with a much better metaphor than I just made up on the spot.
(Audience laughter)
Then, the cinematographer, actors and directors can see it as you see it (from your words) and use their own creative input to interpret it. You might be thinking, what if they interpret my writing in a way that is different than my interpretation? Interpretation is never going to be exact. You aren’t going to like this, but often the different interpretations make the impact of the work better. As we have said before, as long as the spirit of your original work is intact, you’re okay. And that’s what you want to set up in the first ten pages.
7
WRAPPING IT UP
Writing Great Characters in the First Ten Pages
ULTIMATELY, YOU WANT to introduce your characters in an interesting way and as soon as possible (that is a plot device) put them in some sort of peril or heighten the stakes.
This is what I liked so much about the film I won’t tell you about – you know The Chef (2014). The stakes are heightened right from the first minutes of the film. I was pulled into the main characters almost immediately. Also think about the other examples we’ve mentioned like JURASIC PARK – you know within the first three or four minutes of the film that this is going to be one rocket ride of a story and character. Make the reader
fall in love with your characters and then put them in peril. Threaten to take them away and then you have the whole script to get them out of it.
Never forget your audience. Pull them in as soon as possible and take them on a journey. Whatever you do, don’t save the best for last. Not going to work here. Don’t roll out the most compelling elements of your characters in the intermission or act break – do it up front. Remember, we live in a society where everyone wants it right away. Some writers even do it in the first page! Novelists do it as well. They create very compelling characters on the first page – so someone picking up the book for the first time will hesitate to put it down. Also, remember film and television are visual mediums – a director will want to show your story more than they will want to tell it. Your screenplay will be blocked into a series of visual setups – focused for a visual telling of the story on a screen.
In your first ten pages that, hook the reader right up front with a heightened reality. If you don’t get them up front – you may not be able to get them later.
Thank you very much.
(Audience applause)
WRITING ON YOUR FEET
Improvisational Techniques for Writers
Part 1
SAN DIEGO STATE UNIVERSITY
25th Annual Writers Conference
WORKSHOP TRANSCRIPT
HOW TO ADAPT YOUR NOVEL INTO A SCREENPLAY
BOOK 2
Frank Catalano
8
WRITING ON YOUR FEET
Writing on Your Feet
TODAY’S SEMINAR IS called WRITING ON YOUR FEET and it’s just a quick (you know) catchy title for utilizing improvisational techniques for writing or adaptation of your literary work (novel) into a screenplay. Many actors use improvisation to help them create characters and dialogue. However, many writers are reticent to get up out of their chairs and put their work “on its feet” because they are trained to do all of their creating mentally. This is fine. But as a writer I wanted to say that using the improvisational approach—I mean actually getting up and “doing” instead of “sitting” engages all of your senses. Why? To give you a better understanding of your story and the characters that live in the universe you have created.
Yesterday, we were having a discussion about a play that I had written. I had an offer to publish it but I hadn’t read it in a very long while and wanted to look at it one more time before I was going to put it in print. Why? Because time had passed, I wanted to see if the work still did what I thought it did for an audience when I first created it. So, my way of accomplishing this was to put it up on its feet. Of course, I could have sit down in my living room and read it again – but I want to engage all of my senses. This was my answer. It worked for me.
And it can work for you as well. This putting on its feet and read aloud can assist all of us whether you are a fiction writer or a screenwriter – it serves you to experience your work on multiple levels – and be on its feet, read aloud by actors And, we’re in Los Angeles (San Diego) there with so many actors available that would be glad to help you do just that.
So, I decided to have a staged reading and put my play up on its feet and watch and listen to it (instead of read it.) That’s what I did. And it was very helpful for me. I listened, watched, made notes and some revisions. I found it to be a short cut way of getting to the core of what the play was about and what I was trying to say to my audience. And so when we write, we engage our senses.
When you are sitting and you are writing on your laptop or perhaps a legal pad (everyone has their own method), you visualize your characters and hear their voices in your mind. Isn’t that true? Have you ever heard of the Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello? One of his most famous plays is Six Characters in Search of an Author… a very good play. Pirandello had the hardest time writing because of his jealous wife. When he wrote, he would like himself in his studio to write so his wife couldn’t disturb him. His way of writing was to speak his character’s voices out loud and when he did, his wife (hearing voices through the locked door) was convinced that he had a woman in the studio with him. She would often pound on the door while he was trying to write. Not an easy way to write, but Pirandello believed, as a writer, that this method was an effective way of creating characters and story for his plays. What about putting your characters on their feet?
What about putting your characters on their feet with little or no written material? Some of you are thinking, “I just have an idea, nothing else but an idea. How can my characters get up and talk? They are not fully developed. How can they or I say anything? I can’t do it.” I say, “yes you can” and that’s exactly what you are going to do today. I want to explore putting your characters on their feet and letting them talk (they could actually be sitting too – it doesn’t matter). I want you to be able to listen to them, watch them move and learning. No takers? So, even if I got two of you today and I place you within an improvisational scene within your idea – you provide the idea, the characters and we will let the characters play it out? What do you think? Remember, the writer doesn’t have to write down every single word his/her characters say – they may not all work. But what you can get is an understanding of your characters, how they might relate and how they move within their universe. Also, it is really helpful to improvise the same scenario (id
ea) several times? What happens then?
What happens is a magical little thing… truth. I don’t know if you can put your finger on it but the truth (of your idea) kind of floats to the top… and what I mean by that is that the underlying meaning starts to reveal itself as it is experienced by a larger number of people. We could have fifty or sixty people in this room form groups and send them to several corners of this hotel (so they can see or hear what is happening in here). Then bring them in one group at a time and have them improvise the same exact scenario (idea). The result? There will be repetition and there will be differences in each group’s improvisation. However, there will be certain qualities, themes, characteristics that will be evident in most or all. What comes out of the experiment is that the idea has a universal through line or truth that can be see in whole or part in all of the improvisations. If there is conflict within it with a certain kind of resolution and you say, “Okay, then, that’s the way it will be. I’m going to incorporate that element into my idea or maybe I’m not going in the right direction. None of the improvisations reflect my idea at all.”
Improvisation can be a tool that you can use to work within a framed scenario…
(Catalano hand an email list by audience member)
Thank you. ... or idea to take it to the next level. When you are under a lot of pressure to write, you know you have to have the project in by a certain deadline.
Book to Screen Page 4
