The Ten Commandos

My Ten Commandos of Screenwriting (a couple of people said they would be interested in a list of screenwriting “rules” — well, I don’t believe in rules, but the reality of commandos is there for all to see).

A Sonar Commando of the 32nd Century.

In order to populate this list at all, it’s necessary to point out that even the most amorphous of commandos apply only to traditional dramatic narratives (including, to large extent, comedies) — I should probably spend the next 10,000 words defining what those are, but I’m not going to.

Re-reading this, I still find it over-prescriptive, but if people want guidelines / thoughts, these are some that I’ve found sort of useful. None of them will actually GET YOU STARTED though.

Commando One: Battalion Leader Brewte Masterson.

Write something you would genuinely like to see. But not something you have already seen and enjoyed.

Commando Two: Major Dirk “Honey” Sharples.

Always, with the pleasure, a little malaise. There must be some uncomfortable material that the audience has to work through to get to the joy. This will accentuate the pleasure when it comes. Maybe this should be an end result rather than a goal from the outset, I don’t know. But I do think that pure fun tends to be uninteresting. Even Laurel and Hardy have those strange cartoony bits where Ollie’s neck gets stretched, or whatever, which always freaked me out as a kid.

Commando Three: Corporal Steve Punishment.

Dramatic tension = something is at stake and the audience is concerned about the outcome. That’s it. Conflict is not necessary for this. A man struggling to get a door open is a dramatic situation, and there is no antagonist involved. To say that the door is the antagonist is just being silly. And commandos are never EVER silly.

Commando Four: Private Burke “Silly” Beggar.

Question marks are shaped like hooks because questions are the hooks that snare us and drag us along with a story. The audience must want the answers to questions. They must also believe that some of these questions are GOING to be answered. So you can’t just accumulate mysteries as the story goes on, you have to clear some of them up as you go, while creating new ones. The TV show Lost is actually very successful at this — sometimes it might have seemed, especially early on, that nothing would ever be explained in a satisfactory way, but the creators have so far reassured their audience by providing satisfactory solutions to SOME of the big mysteries.

Commando Five: Private Baragon.

Surprising that Baragon hasn’t risen in rank, despite his obvious leadership qualities.

Character arcs are not always necessary in comedy. Typically, comic characters are funny because of flaws and intractable behaviour. A certain predictability is necessary to make their silly behaviour logical. For instance, Larry David’s character in Curb Your Enthusiasm has a tendency to fight for a principle even when the reasonable course would be to give in. His intransigence is a recognisable character trait which we grow to expect him to display, so while his behaviour is inappropriate and absurd, it is also grounded in character. This may be why the show improves as you watch more of it — we get to know the character, and his behaviour, while never less quixotic, is more credible.

But if Larry suddenly learned from his mistakes, he would cease to be funny.

An interesting example is GROUNDHOG DAY, a very successful comedy that’s so good, it gets away with turning into a drama partway through. As soon as Bill Murray resolves to use his situation to become a better person, the laughs start to dry up. There’s nothing intrinsically funny about watching somebody improve (I’m not sure disimproving would be funny either: could Macbeth, a play about the slow decay of the moral sense, translate into comedy?). But the film has hooked us in with its premise and its characters rather than purely with comedy, and so few even notice that they’ve stopped laughing. They’re still smiling very loudly.

But Buster Keaton made several great features where his character did not change (half of his films are about unworldly but hard-working fellows who succeed through perseverance or ingenuity, without changing who they are at all; the other half, which DO have character arcs, are about immature rich kids who have to acquire those traits) and Chaplin never changed. W.C. Fields and Mae West don’t change, and we love them for it. My God it would be AWFUL if they changed. Perhaps the ineffable unalterability of Laurel & Hardy made them better suited to shorts than features, but they did nevertheless make several terrific long-form films.

Comedy characters CAN change, and “learn important lessons,” it’s just that they needn’t ALWAYS.

Commando Six: Private Rocky Hemingway.

Films can do many things. Starting with a limited idea of what’s possible is not helpful. Expand your horizons beyond just a few types of commercial cinema before beginning. I want screenwriters to broaden the possibilities, at least a bit, with everything they write.

And: each element in a script should be multi-purpose. A scene does not justify its existence just by “Introducing a character,” or “showing that the bad guy has a human side.” Each scene should probably do several things: (1) move the action forward (2) create new questions (3) answer old questions (4) develop the characters (5) increase the tension (6) get a laugh — AT LEAST three of these. And every line of dialogue should justify its presence by (a) characterising the speaker (b) characterising the listener (c) advancing the plot (d) getting a laugh — AT LEAST two of these.

Commando Seven: Private Ernst “Gnasher” Mandibles.

Format and prose: learn how scripts are formatted and follow that. Nothing is gained by weird formatting. But the rules are simple, and need not be agonized over.

Develop good prose that evokes what you’re writing. If the scene is supposed to be exciting, use exciting, active language. If funny, be funny. But only while describing, as simply as possible, what the eventual audience will see and hear (while avoiding all constructions such as “we see” and “we hear”). Avoid technical descriptions of camerawork, but suggest the stylistic approach by language: a sentence equals a shot; “the hand turns the key” suggests a close-up. Rewriting: Remove excess words. Replace dull words with evocative ones.

Commando Eight: Private Gavin “Brick” Shithouse.

People obsess over structure without understanding it. Here’s what you need to know: introduce a narrative hook as soon as possible so that the audience is concerned about what happens next. If your first act gives us a character we like and a narrative problem for them to face, it can be five minutes long and that’s fine.

Don’t feed the audience a lot of exposition until they actually care. This is why people don’t really absorb the historical information in those crawls that go up the screen telling you who the Jacobites were.

In act two, things should get more complicated, with at least one major turning point. Usually the first half of act two builds up complications and the second half just keeps them in play. And often there’s a simplifying of issues so that the climax can be resolved in a straightforward dramatic way (often the dreaded “fight in a warehouse”).

At the end of act two, one aims for a moment when the conflict, or dramatic issue, becomes “locked”. The antagonistic characters are no longer able to back down, and must resolve their conflict. Or, the dramatic tension reaches a crisis point where it must be finally resolved. Often a countdown is introduced, so that we know this situation must be resolved WITHIN A GIVEN TIME-FRAME. It’s all about bringing the tension to maximum level.

Act three brings things to some kind of resolution: plot problems are resolved, character problems are worked through (important lessons can, if you really want, be learned) and the theme is brought into focus if it isn’t already.

Often the protagonist is going about things the wrong way until act three. Often there are three climactic problems to solve: an intellectual one, to give us the satisfaction of seeing something figured out, an emotional one (this is often very badly handled: moving conversations between people hanging from cliffs) to deliver the all-important character arc, and a physical one (the protagonist had better DO something).

Commando Nine: Private Bob Crunch.

The happiness graph: Kurt Vonnegut suggested you could plot the hero’s happiness on a graph. A popular form illustrates a character who is reasonably happy at the story’s beginning, becomes very unhappy due to testing circumstances, and emerges at the end very much happier than before. We could also plot the audience’s happiness, which might follow a similarly course in such a story. But part of the author’s task in a conventional drama is to create peaks and troughs on the graph, moments when the hero is very happy and very unhappy, or the audience is very happy or very unhappy.

“Oh good!” they cry, as the hero throws dust in his enemy’s eyes. “Oh no!” they cry, as the enemy calls in his three heavily-armed henchmen. In an exciting drama, the peaks get higher and the troughs get deeper as the story progresses, and they also get closer together, so that the graph of a third act should look like somebody having a heart attack. And it really applies to the audience more than the character. Observe how the darkest moment of THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION comes right before the most pleasing. And the darkest moment is one of audience perception: we THINK something terrible has happened, and a moment later we learn that really, something wonderful has happened, instead. I actually like that movie best for how it illustrates this principle.

Commando Ten: Mascot Archie G. Marauder.

Audience sympathy is a very complex thing and it’s generally talked about as if it were a very simple thing. There’s a screenwriting book called Save the Cat! which suggests that you should have your hero do something lovely early in act one (i.e. save a cat) so the audience will like him. I don’t despise that book or that idea, but I do think it’s better to have the character make a choice that makes us respect him/her, rather than just do an arbitrary good deed.

And OF COURSE there are fascinating and successful UNsympathetic lead characters. The “heroes” of SCARFACE and THE PUBLIC ENEMY aren’t “sympathetic” at all, but they are fascinating. I think this gets overlooked because, while it’s easy to see why a likeable character would draw the audience in, get them rooting for their success, it’s much harder to say why these films work. Muni and Cagney are remarkable in them. Does the Irish gangster film RESURRECTION MAN fail because Stuart Townsend isn’t as good (he’s certainly not bad) or because of some more complicated question of the way the films work? Where does SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS fit in? The “lethal innocence” of the nice characters makes them ultimately dangerous, like Tweetie Pie, and the protagonist is a ratfink from the get-go, but maybe we’re on his side because he’s trying not to be destroyed by an even bigger bastard. Like I say, it’s complicated, and we should remember that.

Bela Lugosi is a very scary fellow…

Don’t believe me? Try watching THIS with the lights out — to the END, mind you —

From THE INVISIBLE GHOST, a poverty row cheapie directed by Joseph H Lewis, who resourcefully shows the correct way to handle an appalling script*. Rather than attempting to impart dignity to it with classical mise-en-scene, as an older director might do, to little effect, he throws out the handbook and just goes nuts, filming from inside the fireplace (the dreaded Santa Claus POV shot) and from inside people’s heads (that Gothic Ozu frame at the end of the clip, with Bela looking RIGHT AT US). Note also the brilliant use of source music, an up-tempo romantic dance band, playing against the mood of the scene. Later, the girl’s corpse will be discovered with the radio still on, playing a keep-fit show.

The movie is seemingly out of copyright and thus available cheap all over the place. Well worth seeing, and I’m not sure that can be said for ANY of the other Poverty Row Lugosis (although GLEN OR GLENDA is of course a misunderstood avant-garde masterpiece).

Lugosi, as usual, is unintentionally amusing but also frightening. And SURPRISING — just when you think he’s committed wholeheartedly to ham, he’ll discover the joys of underplaying, and always at the worst possible moment. After witnessing a corpse in a mortuary come back to life, then die of shock at the sight of him, Lugosi sits at the dinner table with his daughter and remarks, mildly, “It was horrible,” as if he’s describing an unsatisfactory goulash.

*How bad is the script? Well, start with the fact that there’s no ghost, invisible or otherwise, in it. Leave aside the fact that the phantasmal woman is Lugosi’s wife, who lost her memory in an accident, and has been secretly kept in a shed by the gardener, who didn’t want to upset Lugosi — upset him with the knowledge that his wife’s alive? Notice that the police are aware that there have been quite a few murders in Lugosi’s house, but don’t seem to know how many. Notice also that they never suspect Lugosi, despite the fact that it’s his house and he’s known to be hopelessly insane (since his wife’s “death” — so much for not upsetting him). And revel in the fact that after the romantic male lead is executed for Lugosi’s crimes, his identical twin brother  turns up to solve the case. It sounds like hilarious fun, and it is, but only because of Lewis’ antic camerawork, Lugosi’s erratically superb performance, and able support from Clarence Muse.

The Anderson Tapes

“He looks like a young gnome.” ~ Screenwriter David Sherwin on first meeting Lindsay Anderson.

They said of director Lindsay Anderson (IF…) that he was a Scotsman when it suited him. That is, although born in colonial India, he was of Scottish descent and he sometimes liked to be proud of this, or use it in an argument. It’s quite handy to be able to stop someone who calls you an English filmmaker and before they’ve gotten to what they wanted to say about you, you can be correcting them. But I don’t think Anderson had a highly developed sense of Scottishness (whatever that might consist of) since he gave a speech in Edinburgh where he repeatedly referred to “English cinema” and called John Grierson an English documentarist. An irate Scot in the audience shouted corrections the first couple of times, but Anderson sailed on, oblivious.

But one time Anderson did remember his nationality was when discussing what he wanted done with his effects after he died — he was clear that they should “go to Scotland”. When Anderson did in fact meet his end (after a swim, on holiday in France — not too bad) somebody must have had to interpret what that actually meant.

Anderson’s writings, his annotated scripts, and his library (lots of cookery books, apparently) ended up going to Stirling University, where they can be consulted by film and theatre scholars (or cooks, presumably). The video collection went to the organisation for promoting the film industry in Scotland, Scottish Screen (also known as the S.S.).

This collection of mainly off-air recordings made by Anderson throughout the ’80s and early ’90s can be seen behind Anderson whenever you see him interviewed in his home. It’s kind of exciting to hold one of the tapes and read Anderson’s rather shaky, spidery handwriting on the label.

Anderson recorded almost anything — old Hollywood movies, all foreign movies, appearances by friends, documentaries and news footage of political events of the day, and a suspicious number of episodes of Spenser For Hire. I guess he just like Robert Urich. Because British television no longer shows the range of films it used to, Anderson’s tapes contain a lot of rare material.

Scottish Screen, having accepted delivery of about ten big boxes containing fifty VHS tapes each, then had to decide what to do with them. What they did with them was put them in a cupboard. And, because that didn’t seem quite enough, somehow, they told a few people that the tapes were there, and available. A catalogue listed the contents of the boxes.

I found out about the collection by chance and determined to have a rummage next time I was in Glasgow (and hour away by costly train). Scottish Screen has viewing rooms so I could watch the tapes if I booked in advance. What a treasure trove I discovered. James Whale’s “sophisticated” divorce drama ONE MORE RIVER, Julien Duvivier’s moving, emotionally epic LA FIN DU JOUR, Josef Von Sternberg’s THE SALVATION HUNTERS, Mitchell Leisen’s REMEMBER THE NIGHT – -things I have yet to find anywhere else.

Sadly, all Anderson’s own films were kept elsewhere (Stirling? I never knew) apart from a few odds and ends. A recording of the HBO mini-series Glory! Glory! which Anderson had directed, was partially taped over with a Beach Boys concert. But they did have this Anderson interview about pop promos —

The only problem was, it was going to be impossible for me to see all the films. If I lived in Glasgow it would be easy enough. Scottish Screen doesn’t charge for its screening rooms, so I could have gone along once a week and treated myself to a screening. But the distance and financial difficulty of getting to Glasgow regularly nixed that. Also, I wanted to share the films with friends and students. I particularly knew that my friend Lawrie Knight would enjoy many of them. Being about 80 years old and paralysed down one side, there was no way he could come to Glasgow with me. And since Lawrie once ran Films of Scotland, the organisation that preceeded Scottish Screen, I felt he had a right to some of this primo entertainment. Since Lawrie had a horrible time with that (“Worst job I ever had!”) and was in hiding from the Scottish film industry, I couldn’t use his name.

The S.S. maintained that they couldn’t allow tapes to leave the building. Even with strict book-keeping, the fear was that tapes would go missing. My argument was that this might not matter too much — after a year at Scottish Screen, the tapes had not been requested by anyone apart from myself. I asked if I could hook up two VCRs and make copies of films. The S.S. took the view that that would be copyright infringement. Which is true, but I can’t see how it’s worse that the infringement of recording the films off-air in the first place. As Anderson would say, “Your rules are too complicated for me.”

So I decided to use subterfuge. I would visit the “archive” and request several films to view. I would be carrying several blank tapes, glue, and a razor blade. Once alone in the little room with the TV, using the razor I would meticulously peal the original, tippex encrusted labels from Anderson’s tapes, then glue them to the blanks. At the end of the session I would leave with several Andersons, and the S.S. would hang onto the blanks. During my next trip I would replace the original tapes (this meant requesting the same films twice) and borrow some new ones.

After a while, my requests for five or ten tapes must have become wearisome, and my fondness for guddling through the boxes in search of uncatalogued treasures did not justify close supervision, so it was suggested that I should just carry a box through to the screening room and knock myself out. This I was more than happy to do.

Left alone with a whole box, or sometimes two or three boxes, I didn’t need to worry about removing labels. Nobody would notice if the box was slightly less full when I was done. And since I always returned all the tapes after pirating them, I felt I was unlikely to get into serious trouble if caught, so I grew ever bolder.

It was simply impossible to pass up a treat like Gregory LaCava’s STAGE DOOR or Anatole Litvak’s MAYERLING when I saw them before me, so the number of tapes borrowed kept increasing. My bag could hold about ten, and my coat and trousers had numerous deep pockets. Stuffed full of tapes, I came to resemble an articulated plastic manwith a Frankenstein monster walk, clunking internally with each step, but I somehow managed to make it out of the building undetected each time. I was usually the same bulk on departure as on arrival, because concealed about my person on entering the building would be the tapes from my previous depradations. I sometimes wondered if the staff had realised what I was up to, but also realised that it was fundamentally harmless, and partook of a recognisably Andersonian spirit.

After all, Anderson would have approved of a bit of film-buff anarchy.

(Also, Lawrie had a little bit of history with Anderson, having helped film MARCH TO ALDERMASTON, a documentary about the gigantic anti-nuclear protests of the ’50s: a high-angle shot taken from a moving car is Lawrie’s work. “I felt rather guilty about filming all these marchers from a car, with a big cigar in my mouth, but my partner, Morton Lewis, just said, ‘Shut up, we’re on the march, aren’t we?'”)