by The Anatomy of Story- 22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller (mobi)
Then look at the contrast of proportion and pacing. Does the next scene or section have the right importance and length compared to the previous scene or section?
A good rule of thumb is this: find the line and keep the line. There are some scenes—such as subplot scenes—that only set up the
narrative drive. Go ahead and put them in. But you can never get away from the narrative line tor too long without your story collapsing.
You can create powerful juxtapositions in all kinds of ways. One of the best, especially in film and television, is the juxtaposition between sight and sound. In this technique, you split these two communication tracks to create a third meaning.
M
(by Tbea von Harbou and Fritz Lang, 1931) A classic example of this technique occurs in the great German film M. In M, a child murderer buys a little girl a balloon. In the next scene, a woman prepares dinner and then calls for her child, Elsie. As she continues to call the little girl's name, the visual track splits from the sound track, and the audience sees an empty stairwell, a block of apartments, Elsie's empty chair, and her plate and spoon at the kitchen table, while the ever more desperate cries of the mother calling "Elsie!" are heard. The visual line ends with the shot of a balloon that catches in some electrical wires and then floats away. This contrast between the sound line and the visual line produces one of the most heartbreaking moments in the history of film.
Perhaps the most common technique of juxtaposition in scene weave is the crosscut. In the crosscut, you jump back and forth between two or more lines of action. This technique has two main effects:
1. It creates suspense, especially when you cut back and forth at an increasing pace, as when someone is rushing to save a victim in danger.
2. It compares two lines of action, two pieces of content, and makes them equal. This expands your thematic pattern. Anytime you jump back and forth between two lines of action, you go from a simple linear development of your story (usually of a single character) to show a deeper pattern present in the entire society.
An example of the content crosscut is a sequence in M in which the story goes back and forth between a group of cops and a group of criminals. Each is trying to figure out how to find the child murderer, so the crosscut shows the audience how two types of people they normally consider opposites are in many ways identical.
The Godfather
(novel by Mario Puzo, screenplay by Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola,
1972)
An even better example of a content crosscut occurs in the battle scene of The Godfather. The challenge is to create a battle scene that expresses Michael's character, what he has become as the new Godfather. By cross-cutting between a number of Michael's men as they assassinate the heads of the five crime families, the writers not only provide a dense series of plot punches but also express Michael's position as a kind of corporate boss of crime. He doesn't kill these men by himself in a crime of passion. He hires men in his company who are experts at killing.
To this the writers add another crosscut, between the mass murders and Michael's renouncing of Satan as he stands as godfather to a child whose father he is about to kill. Through this crosscut, the audience sees Michael become Satan at the same moment he gains the height of his power as the Godfather.
I'd like to compare the scene weave from an early draft of The Godfather with the final draft. You will see how proper juxtaposition of scenes—and in this case, whole sections—can make a huge difference in the quality of the story. The key difference between these two scene weaves comes just after Michael has shot Sollozzo and Captain McCluskey in the restaurant. In the early draft, notice that the writers list all the scenes pertaining to Sonny's death and the ending of the war between the families (underlined). Then they list all the scenes of Michael in Sicily, ending with the murder of his wife (in italics).
The Godfather: Early Draft
1. At a restaurant, Michael, Sollozzo, and McCluskey talk; Michael gets a gun and shoots them.
2. Montage of newspaper articles.
3. Sonny finishes sex with a girl and goes to his sister Connie's house.
4. Sonny finds Connie with a black eye.
5. Sonny beats up Connie's husband, Carlo, in the street.
6. Tom won't accept Kay's letter to Michael.
7. Don Corleone is brought home from the hospital.
8. Tom tells Don Corleone what happened; the Don is sad.
9. Sonny and Tom argue because Sonny wants to kill old Tattaglia.
10. A nasty fight breaks out between Connie and Carlo; Connie calls home; Sonny is mad.
11. Sonny is blasted in the tollbooth.
12. Tom tells Don Corleone that Sonny is dead—Don Corleone says to settle the war.
13. Don Corleone and Tom bring Sonny's body to undertaker Bonasera.
14. Don Corleone makes peace with the heads of the families.
15. Don Corleone knows it was Barzini who was the leader.
16. In Sicily, Michael sees a pretty girl on the road and tells her father he wants to meet her.
17. Michael meets Apollonia.
18. Michael and Apollonia are wed.
19. Wedding night.
20. Michael shows Apollonia how to drive; he learns Sonny is dead.
21. Michael's car blows up with Apollonia driving.
This scene sequence has a number of problems. It places the plot-heavy and more dramatic scenes of Sonny's killing and the revelation about Barzini first. So there is a big letdown when the plot moves to Sicily. Moreover, Michael in Sicily is a long and relatively slow sequence, so the overall story comes to a screeching halt, and the writers have tremendous difficulty getting the "train" started again after that section concludes. Putting all the scenes with Apollonia together also highlights the sudden and somewhat unbelievable nature of Michael's marrying a Sicilian peasant girl. The dialogue tries to gloss over this fact by saying Michael has been hit by a thunderbolt. But when the audience sees all these scenes at one time, the explanation is not convincing.
The Godfather: Final Draft
In the final script, the writers overcome this potentially fatal flaw in their scene weave by crosscutting between the Sonny line and the Michael line.
1. At a restaurant, Michael, Sollozzo, and McCluskey talk; Michael gets a gun and shoots them.
2. Montage of newspaper articles.
3. Don Corleone is brought home from the hospital.
4. Tom tells Don Corleone what happened; the Don is sad.
5. Sonny and Tom argue because Sonny wants to kill old Tattaglia.
6. In Sicily, Michael sees a pretty girl on the road and tells her father he wants to meet her.
7. Michael meets Apollonia.
8. Sonny finishes sex with a girl and goes to his sister Connie's house.
9. Sonny finds Connie with a black eye.
10. Sonny beats up Connie's husband, Carlo, in the street.
11. Michael and Apollonia are wed.
12. Wedding night.
13. Tom won't accept Kay's letter to Michael.
14. A nasty fight breaks out between Connie and Carlo; Connie calls home; Sonny is mad.
15. Sonny is blasted in the tollbooth.
16. Tom tells Don Corleone that Sonny is dead—Don Corleone says to settle the war.
17. Don Corleone and Tom bring Sonny's body to undertaker Bonasera.
18. Michael shows Apollonia how to drive; he learns Sonny is dead.
19. Michael's car blows up with Apollonia driving.
20. Don Corleone makes peace with the heads of the families.
21. Don Corleone knows it was Barzini who was the leader.
By crosscutting between these two story lines, the slower Sicilian line is never onscreen long enough to kill the narrative drive of the story. Also, both lines funnel to a single point, which is the hero's apparent defeat, his lowest point in the story (see Chapter 8, "Plot"), where Sonny's murder is followed almost immediately by Apollonia's. Th
is one-two punch is then trumped by the great reveal that Barzini was behind it all along. This revelation of Barzini as the true opponent hurtles the rest of the plot to its stunning conclusion.
Of all the techniques we've covered, scene weave is the one best understood by using a case study approach. Let's start with an easy example,
from TV's ER, because television drama is all about weaving a rich tapestry where multiple story lines are juxtaposed.
MUlTISTRAND PLOT SCENE WEAVE
The television multistrand plot crosscuts between three to five major story lines, each with its own hero. Telling this many stories in about forty-five minutes (sixty minutes minus commercials) means that no plotline can have much depth in any one episode. The writers hope to make up for that over the course of the entire season and the many seasons the show remains on the air.
KEY POINT: In a multistrand weave, the quality of the overall story comes primarily from the juxtaposition of the plotlines. You compare what a number of people in a minisociety are facing at the same time. The audience gets to see in compressed form how lead characters use different solutions when trying to solve generally the same problem.
KEY POINT: With three to five plots, you can't cover the twenty-two steps for any one line, but each must cover the seven major structure steps. Anything less than the seven steps means that that line isn't a complete story, and the audience will find it unnecessary and annoying.
KEY POINT: With multiple main characters and so many lines, you give shape to the overall story and maintain narrative drive by making the hero of one line the opponent of another. This keeps the story from exploding ever outward with, for example, five heroes, five opponents, myriad minor characters, and so on.
One of the reasons ER and other TV dramas use this multistrand crosscut is that it gives the episode dramatic density. There is no lull in these stories. The audience sees only the dramatic punch scenes of each plotline. In the case of ER, creator Michael Crichton, the greatest premise writer in Hollywood, figured out how to combine the benefits of the medical drama and the action genre in one show. To this mix, Crichton added
a character web that covers a broad range of classes, races, ethnic backgrounds, nationalities, and genders. That's a very potent and popular combination.
ER: "The Dance We Do"
(by Jack Orman, 2000) The episode we want to study has five plotlines, each of which extends back and builds on a number of previous episodes:
■ Plot 1 Abby's mother, Maggie, is visiting. She is bipolar and has a history of going off her medication, erupting, and then disappearing for long stretches.
■ Plot 2 Dr. Elizabeth Corday is being sued and must undergo a deposition. Opposing counsel contends she botched an operation that resulted in his client's paralysis.
■ Plot 3 Gangbangers killed Dr. Peter Benton's nephew in a previous episode. The boy's girlfriend, Kynesha, shows up at the hospital with her face badly beaten.
■ Plot 4 Dr. Mark Greene has been keeping a secret from his girlfriend, Elizabeth (Dr. Corday), and from the other doctors. Today he finds out if his brain tumor is fatal.
■ Plot 5 Because of a previous drug problem, Dr. Carter is required to undergo regular testing if he wants to continue working at the hospital.
The first thing you notice about this episode is that the plotlines have an underlying unity. They are all variations of the same problem. That makes the juxtapositions pay off. On the superficial level, many of these plots concern characters with a drug problem. More important, all five show different effects of lying and telling the truth.
The power of the weave of "The Dance We Do" comes from two principles of storytelling: how each plot is a variation on truth and lying and how all five stories funnel down to the most powerful revelation or self-revelation that the lead character and the plot are capable of.
Scene Weave—Writing Exercise 8
■ Scene List List every scene in your story. Try to describe the scene in one sentence.
■ Twenty-two-Step Tags Tag any scene that includes one of the
twenty-two structure steps. If your story has more than one plotline or subsection, label each scene with the appropriate plotline. ■ Ordering Scenes Study the order of scenes. Make sure the scene sequence builds by structure, not chronology.
1. See if you can cut scenes.
2. Look for opportunities to combine two scenes into one.
3. Add a scene wherever there are gaps in the story's development.
Because scene weave can best be understood by practicing it, I'd like to change our usual pattern of ending the chapter with a single example and look at the scene weaves of a number of stories. Of course, each scene weave is unique to that story and its requirements. But as you look at each example, notice how the different genres present various scene weave challenges that the writers must solve.
DETECTIVE OR CRIME SCENE WEAVE L.A. Confidential
(novel by James Ellroy, screenplay by Brian Helgeland & Curtis Hanson, 1997)
L.A. Confidential has one of the best and most advanced scene weaves in recent years. It is shaped like a huge funnel, starting with three cop heroes in the corrupt world of the Los Angeles Police Department. Over the course of the story, the writers weave these three distinct lines into one. They keep the narrative drive moving forward by making the heroes opponents to each other as they all seek the killer at the end of the funnel.
This setup lets the writers compare, through crosscutting, the three-heroes and their different approaches to crime solving and justice. It also allows them to create a dense set of reveals as the funnel tightens down to a single point.
In the following scene weave, Bud White is Hero I, Jack Vincennes is Hero 2, Ed Exley is Hero 3, and Captain Smith is the main opponent, though he appears to be an ally.
The Empire Strikes Back
(story by George Lucas, screenplay by Leigh Brackett and Lawrence Kasdan,
1980)
The Empire Strikes Back is a textbook example of the crosscut weave. To see why the writers might want to use this approach for such a large part of the plot (scenes 25-58), you have to look at the structural requirements of the story. First, The Empire Strikes Back is the middle episode of a trilogy that begins with Star Wars and ends with The Return of the Jedi, so it lacks the opening focus of the first episode, when the main character is introduced, and the closing focus of the third episode, when everything converges in the final battle. The crosscut strategy allows the writers to use the middle story to expand the trilogy to the widest possible scope, in this case, the universe. But they still have to keep narrative drive. And that's made even trickier by the fact that this is a middle episode of a trilogy that must somehow stand on its own.
The crosscut's deepest capability is to compare content, by juxtaposing characters or lines of action. That doesn't happen here. But the film does take advantage of the plot capabilities of the crosscut, which are to increase suspense, set up cliffhangers, and jam more action into the limited time a movie has.
The most important reason the writers use the crosscut scene weave here has to do with the hero's development, as it should. In The Empire Strikes Back, Luke must undergo extensive training in the ways of "the Force" if he is to become a Jedi Knight and defeat the evil Empire. But that poses a big problem for the writers. Training is only one structure step, and it isn't even one of the crucial twenty-two steps. So making the long training sequence part of a linear scene weave—tracking only Luke—would have stopped the plot in its tracks. By crosscutting Luke's training scenes (listed here in italics) with the big action scenes of Han Solo, Princess Leia, and Chewbacca escaping Darth Vader's men (listed here underlined), the writers are able to give Luke's training and his character development the time they need without the plot grinding to a halt.
1. Luke and Han patrol the ice planet of Hoth. An ice beast knocks Luke off his tauntaun and drags him away. Problem
2. Han returns to the rebel base. Chewbacca repair
s the Falcon. Allies
3. Han requests a dismissal to pay off a huge debt to Jabba the Hutt. Han says goodbye to Leia. Allies
4. Leia and Han argue about their imagined and true feelings for each other.
5. C-3PO and R2-D2 report that Luke is still missing. Han requests a report from the deck officer. Allies
6. Despite the deck officer's warnings of fatal freezing levels, Han vows to search for Luke.
7. Luke escapes from the ice beast's lair.
8. C-3PO and R2-D2 worry about Luke at the rebel base.
9. Luke struggles to stay alive in the freezing cold. Han searches for him. Visit to death
10. Leia reluctantly agrees to close the time-locked doors of the base. Chewbacca and the droids fear for Han and Luke.
11. Obi-Wan Kenobi instructs Luke to seek training from Yoda. Han arrives to save Luke. Inciting event
12. Small rebel fighter planes search for Luke and Han and find them.
13. Luke thanks Han for saving his life. Han and Leia continue their romantic sparring.
14. The general reports a strange signal coming from a new probe on the planet. Han decides to check it out.
15. Han and Chewbacca destroy the imperial probe droid. The general decides to evacuate the planet. Revelation
16. Darth Vader learns about the report from Hoth. He orders an invasion. Opponent
17. Han and Chewbacca repair the Falcon. Luke says goodbye to them.
18. The rebel general learns of approaching imperial forces. The general deploys an energy shield for protection.
19. Vader kills the hesitant admiral and orders a ground attack of Hoth. Opponent's plan and attack
20. Imperial forces attack the rebel base. Luke and his team of flyers fight back. Battle
21. Han and Chewbacca argue as they repair the Falcon. C-3PO says goodbye to R2-D2, who will accompany Luke.
