Originally sent Sun, 28 Dec 1997 to Chia
Belatedly, after I've talked with y'all, here's my roundup on our most recent trip to LA.
Greetings from Mirabelle's on Sunset where the waiters are so fucking obsequious, nay, patronizing, that they assume you don't know why they'd switch your glasses after you'd order your wine.
Not that they really expect it matters, since, after all, I ordered a wine which didn't cost $80, but this is LA, where image is everything and the residents are, generally, gauche poseurs.
I thank whatever deities that may be involved that I at least live near San Francisco, where we aren't some sick parody of middle America, dressing up to be seen in overpriced restaurants which serve passable food, rather we can wear T-shirts to places that have the remotest idea of what they're serving, and don't say "If sir would tell me what sort of grape he's interested in, I could suggest a wine."
I didn't want to burst his bubble by asking "Only French wines? You know they actually killed all their vines and had to replenish their stock from California? How about some originals? What have you got from Sonoma?"
Alas, I'm afraid his tedious arrogance would back up and cause his head to explode. I also wasn't interested in paying $55 for 750ml of a Robert Mondavi that's normally served out of a 5 litre jug.
It was all we could do to keep from laughing in his smug little face. Or saying "Look, I know you're really an actor, but for this evening could you just try doing a waiter for me? Improvise." Or rather "If this is your idea of playing a waiter no wonder you can't get work as an actor."
So, you may ask, why do Catherine and I and several other northern California folks subject ourselves to this? The arrogant little toadies in suits that are too big? The guys with cell phones who feel compelled to dictate the blow-by-blow of their lives to somewhere on the other end?
Well, it has to do with a guy named Robert McKee (http://www.mckeestory.com) who's got some insights into the nature of story. And from John Cleese to Jordan Mechner (now there's a name I don't expect too many of you to recognize), this is the mecca of how story is done.
We're here for 3 days of hell, "EST for film buffs", 9:30 A.M. to 8:30 P.M. in auditorium seating, scribbling pages of notes and hoping that some small amount of what we've heard sinks in, and for this we're willing to suffer through the small amount of LA we can limit ourselves to; where pedestrians are more likely to be ticketed than drivers, where cabs are piloted by guys who barely speak english and aren't afraid to die (no, wait, that's everywhere), and where the waiters are... well... I guess if I were dealing with rubes from the countryside who'd just fallen into far too much money I'd be condescending too.
If you've got any interest at all in the nature of story, budget the thousand bucks or so it would take you to go and take the course. Or shell out the $27.50 for "Story" by Robert McKee, ISBN 0-06-039168-5. Everything else that follows here is a quick distillation, if you're only interested in Dan's attempt at amusing travelogue, quit now. Anything further about LA would just be too depressing.
So, let's talk about story. What follows is random notes, no particular order, that'll be gradually put together into a larger web page. But like most larger inclusive web page this may be a long time coming.
A story is made up of acts, acts of sequences, sequences of scenes, scenes of beats. In each scene, the characters have a goal and take actions towards that goal.
When they take an action and the world responds as they expect, we don't have a story. Taking an action towards a goal and having the world respond as expected is what happens when we go to work, not what happens when we go to be entertained. If I intend to leave the house, get up, walk to the door and open it, and step out into the sunshine, we've got extremely boring narrative.
If, however, I get up out of my chair and trip over the cat, or the doorbell rings, or someone knocks on the door before I get there, then I've got story. If all of those things happen I may have compelling story.
Every time the world responds in a different way than the character takes an action, that's a beat. And in many stories that beat happens as densely as every interchange in a conversation.
Every scene has a turning point event. This is where the motivations of a character change. The family sits down to dinner, intending to eat, but one of them is so insulted he stands up, knocks over his chair and storms out of the house. She goes to dinner with the charming man, again, expecting to eat, and at some point agrees to go see his etchings. No, I don't know where this preoccupation with food is coming from.
Each event also shifts a value from positive to negative. Excitement to boredom, trust to deceit, hope to despair, love to hate. So when you look at a scene you look at what values are at stake, how those values are charged at the beginning and how they're charged at the end. If they haven't changed, then there's no purpose for the scene, because although it may have shown you beautiful scenery there's been no exposition, the story hasn't gone anywhere.
Sequences tie together the various plots into an act. There should be a main plot, a central story, and then various sub plots which expose information about the various characters, show their true nature, or which provide reinforcement or counterpoint to the main plot.
Acts are major reversals; when an act happens a door closes on the character and the character can no longer go back. For instance, Young Luke Skywalker prevaricates over staying on the farm and fixing the condenser and going and becoming a Jedi knight, but when he goes off to visit Obi Wan and the stormtroopers come and kill his aunt and uncle, there's no going back to the farm, his path is firmly pointed to the Jedi.
Put a couple of acts together and you've got a story.
So when you're writing a story, you start with a premise, and a controlling idea. The controlling idea is something like "Justice triumphs because the protagonist is smarter than the criminal." Then you create a protagonist who's willing to go to the end of the line for the sake of the controlling idea, and with whom the audience will empathize.
The protagonist can be one person, multiple people (both Thelma and Louise) or even non-human (Babe), as long as they all share the same desire and all suffer and benefit equally. But if you've got multiple protagonists with separate values and goals then you've got separate plots.
Making sure the audience empathizes with the protagonist doesn't necessarily mean that the protagonist has to be "good" or share values with the audience, just that we can understand the actions of the character in the situation. However, if you want cheap and easy audience empathy for a character, give that character a love for animals, I think it's "Predator" in which the good guy who machine-guns every human he can versus the bad guy who machine-guns every human he can is that the good guy is shown feeding deer somewhere in the beginning of the movie. Killing humans is okay, show cruelty to animals and we know this character is evil.
And sociopaths are charming, they don't have waxed handlebar moustaches and evil cackles. Real evil looks like Oliver North.
For the rest of the cast, you want to create characters who can sit down at a table, have a glass of wine spill, and everybody reacts differently. Make them all as polar as possible, show as many different people reacting to the controlling idea of the story as possible.
The key to creating audience involvement is empathy, but the key to keeping the attention of the audience is authenticity. This doesn't mean that the world is authentic to the world of the audience, but that the story needs to be consistent intenrally, every action we see a character take must have a motivation which was explained earlier.
So when we take all of these characters, put them in the world, and then somehow we throw life out of balance, radically upset the balance of forces in the life of these characters. The remainder of the story is the protagonist's struggle to put the world back in balance, to find some sort of equilibrium.
We show this struggle by watching take actions to put the world back in balance, and seeing how the world responds differently. Every beat, every time the world responds differently, the audience will look back into the structure of the film to see why. So we set up reasons why the world won't react the way the characters expect, then we pay off by pushing back at the character in the unexpected way, this closes the gap between expectation and reality.
If there's no reason for this gap happening then the audience will be confused at first, then bored. It's okay to have accidents and coincidences at the beginning of the film, because these can be the inciting incidents which throw the lives of the protagonist out of balance, but if they happen later on in the film they'll at best be farcical. Some comedians do make this work, few dramatists.
When a character is attempting to put their life back in balance, they've usually got a choice as to which path they take to do that. A pacifist will be continually tempted to take arms against their oppressors, a lover looking for a relationship may be asked to decide between someone warm, caring, loving and dull, or someone cold cruel and exciting.
Each decision they make as they struggle towards their goal should progressively complicate the story. It can do this buy making the character's actions affect more and more people, have more ramifications into the society; by beating up the character, emotionally, physically or economically to expose more and more about the character; or by presenting imagery which has symbolic meaning revealed later.
The protagonist, and therefore the story is only as interesting as the forces of antagonism make it. The protagonist wants to do the absolute minimum to acheive the goals, therefore the forces of antagonism have to be strong enough to force the protagonist to action.
Dialogue is not what's really being said. When the candles over dinner come out and the people start purring "You know I love you", we know the relationship is in trouble. So melodrama comes from the writer not understanding the motivations of the characters, therefore the characters are expressing emotions which aren't truly there.
Dialogue also often underscores action. If you're writing a soap opera, where your audience is probably doing housework or otherwise distracted and more listening to the action, this might be acceptable. But don't make the dialogue redundant, don't tell the audience one character's offering another a cup of coffee if the audience can see the hand and the cup.
All characters pursue their desires at risk to themselves. Dramatic characters are aware of this, comedic characters aren't. The more conflicting desires the character has, the more depth the character has. James Bond isn't a terribly deep character, he's pursuing the bad guy for the sake of Her Majesty. Macbeth, on the other hand, has conscience in conflict with his ambition, leading to a contradiction in character and a much more interesting protagonist.
And that's the nickel tour.
Sunday, February 28th, 1998 danlyke@flutterby.com