Writing the Character-Centered Screenplay, Updated and Expanded edition - Softcover

Horton, Andrew

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0520221656 ISBN 13: 9780520221659

Verlag: University of California Press, 2000

Inhaltsangabe

'We need good screenwriters who understand character'. Everywhere Andrew Horton traveled in researching this book - from Hollywood to Hungary - he heard the same refrain. Yet most of the standard how-to books on screenwriting follow the film industry's earlier lead in focusing almost exclusively on plot and formulaic structures. With this book, Horton, a film scholar and successful screenwriter, provides the definitive work on the character-based screenplay. Exceptionally wide-ranging - covering American, international, mainstream, and 'off-Hollywood' films, as well as television - the book offers creative strategies and essential practical information. Horton begins by placing screenwriting in the context of the storytelling tradition, arguing through literary and cultural analysis that all great stories revolve around a strong central character. He then suggests specific techniques and concepts to help any writer - whether new or experienced - build more vivid characters and screenplays. Centering his discussion around four film examples - including "Thelma & Louise" and "The Silence of the Lambs" - and the television series, "Northern Exposure", he takes the reader step-by-step through the screenwriting process, starting with the development of multi-dimensional characters and continuing through to rewrite. Finally, he includes a wealth of information about contests, fellowships, and film festivals. Espousing a new, character-based approach to screenwriting, this engaging, insightful work will prove an essential guide to all of those involved in the writing and development of film scripts.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Charlotte y Peter Fiell son dos autoridades en historia, teoría y crítica del diseño y han escrito más de sesenta libros sobre la materia, muchos de los cuales se han convertido en éxitos de ventas. También han impartido conferencias y cursos como profesores invitados, han comisariado exposiciones y asesorado a fabricantes, museos, salas de subastas y grandes coleccionistas privados de todo el mundo. Los Fiell han escrito numerosos libros para TASCHEN, entre los que se incluyen 1000 Chairs, Diseño del siglo XX, El diseño industrial de la A a la Z, Scandinavian Design y Diseño del siglo XXI.

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"I have been searching for a book such as Horton's for years—and finally it has arrived. Horton's penetrating analysis and graceful writing style open up the key topic of characterization as no other book has. . . . I recommend it highly."—Paul Lucey, University of Southern California

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"I have been searching for a book such as Horton's for yearsand finally it has arrived. Horton's penetrating analysis and graceful writing style open up the key topic of characterization as no other book has. . . . I recommend it highly."Paul Lucey, University of Southern California

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Writing the Character-Centered Screenplay, Updated-Expanded

By Andrew Horton

University of California Press

Copyright © 2000 Andrew Horton
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780520221659
Chapter One
The Feast of Becoming: Carnival and Character

What is going on in these pictures in my mind?
Joan Didion, "Why I Write"

A Process Theory of Character

Novelist William H. Gass writes, "A character, first of all, is the noise of his name , and all the sounds and rhythms that proceed from him" (1988, 272, emphasis my own). Seymour Chatman, on page 23, takes note of the endlessly receding nature of such "noise." For we all feel we KNOW what character is until we try to explain it. Yes, character is somehow everything that makes us who we are as individuals .

But what is that? And what is the difference between the way we see ourselves and how we are perceived by others? As the twentieth century winds down, perhaps we are too self-conscious in that we in the West have come to think of character (thus our "selves") in basically Freudian and post-Freudian psychological and psychoanalytic terms as opposed to other models (religious, historical, cultural). Yet in posing a question about the nature of character, I wish to go beyond the usual psychological labels and categories to offer a more open-ended view of character as process and discourse rather than product.

Roland Barthes (1974) comments that "character is a product of combinations" (67). As such, he continues, character is an ever-changing "adjective" rather than a thing or "noun": "Even though the connotation may be clear, the nomination of its [character] signified is uncertain, approximate, unstable" (190). Translation: character is never complete, set, finished but always glimpsed in motion from a certain perspective. "What is character?" thus leads to "Who is asking, how, why, when?"

Barthes is speaking of characters in written fiction. But his observations help start our investigation into the theory of character as we perceive it in "life" and as we create it on the page while imagining it for its

final destination: the screen. What we should focus on in Barthes's approach is his centering of character not in psychology per se, but in interactive language processes. "Characters are types of discourse," he adds (179). With such a basis, he builds his theory of character on the seme , the smallest unit of linguistic meaning, observing that a single seme is not complete in itself but is "only a departure , an avenue of meaning" (191). A complete character, therefore, is, in Barthes's view, "no more than a collection of semes ."

Anthropologist and cultural theorist Claude Livi-Strauss takes us a step farther. His study of myth suggests implications for a process theory of character as well. He points, like Barthes, to an ongoing, open-ended view of culture, personality, and narrative myth. "The evidence is never complete," writes Livi-Strauss (1969, 5). The "deep structure" he has sought in myth and culture and the "core characteristics" we have discussed in the introduction must be viewed against an ever-shifting context:

There is no real end to mythological analysis, no hidden unity to be grasped once the breaking down process has been completed. Themes can be split up ad infinitum . The unity of the myth is never more than tendential and projective. (5)

Such thoughts may seem very far from the actual work of writing a Raiders of the Lost Ark action/adventure movie under contract or even an off-Hollywood independent feature such as Just Another Girl on the IRT (written and directed by Leslie Harris, 1993).

But in actuality, the emphasis on process and discoursethe interaction of voices and languages through history and culturesthat both Barthes and Livi-Strauss suggest, should prove useful for all screenwriters. The message is clear: treat character as a complex network of "discourse" or "myths" that cannot be totally explored, explained, examined. The rub is to be able to create characters who have such resonance, even in what may appear to be a stereotypic genre film (western, musical, thriller) or a campy comedy, that they break out of any limiting stereotypes we are used to. Take one simple example: why does the Clint Eastwood figure in Unforgiven (screenplay by David Webb Peoples) leave his children, home, and farm and, after so many years of the "straight life," take up his guns again to become a hired gunman? No simple answer can be given. "For the money," "for the adventure," "because his life has become too boring," "for the cause of justice," "because a woman has been wronged and he remembers his own dear departed wife," and so forth. The motivation is perhaps all of these processes and discourses and more. But it doesn't matter . As created by screenwriter David Webb Peoples, the "evidence" of this film, which

won four Oscars, is "never complete" to quote Livi-Strauss once more. We thus have a double experience as audience members; first we enjoy the genre westernwith all its "set" codes, formulas, cliches. And then Peoples expands the experience by opening up his characters beyond what we have seen in traditional westerns. It is this very incompleteness that makes People's western what Premiere editor Peter Biskind called the only 1992 Hollywood film that "deserves to stand with the other great movies of the past" (1993, 51).

The sense of character as process leads us to the concept of the carnivalesque and to Mikhail Bakhtin's description of it. But it is not carnival per se that the Russian theoretician Bakhtin was initially concerned with. Thus we must look at Bakhtin's view of language and character. Years before Barthes and others were writing about character as discourse and process, Bakhtin (1981) wrote:

My voice gives the illusion of unity to what I say; I am, in fact, constantly expressing a plentitude of meanings, some intended, others of which I am unaware. (88)

This point is driven home even more clearly by Bakhtin in his elaboration of the "polyphonic." Bakhtin best explained his term in his discussion of Dostoyevsky's novels. He pointed out that what really distinguishes Dostoyevsky not only as a great novelist but as the father of the modern novel is the unresolved nature of his characters. Bakhtin (1984) puts it this way:

In none of Dostoyevsky's novels is there any evolution of a unified spirit. . . . Each novel presents an opposition which is never canceled out dialectically, of many consciousnesses , and they do not merge in the unity of an evolving spirit, just as souls and spirits do not merge in the formally polyphonic world of Dante. (26, emphasis my own)

What Bakhtin suggests is that the polyphonic character and thus the polyphonic novel is one in which the hero is not a "fixed image, but the sum total of his consciousness and self-consciousness " (1984, 48). The novel itself and Dostoyevsky's novels in particular, Bakhtin held, allowed for a polyphonic viewpoint and form because, unlike poetry and drama, it was the literary form that was most "formless" and thus more plastic, more capable of incorporating "a particular point of view on the world and on oneself" (47).

Bakhtin's comments are useful on a number of levels. His focus on the novel, for instance, helps us to move beyond the mindset of drama which has so thoroughly dominated the classical Hollywood script and those

industry-oriented books about screenwriting that emphasize an Aristotelian, cause and effect, plot-driven form of writing. Yes, a film is like a drama in that it uses actors and is limited to what the audience will endure within a two- to three-hour framework. But film resembles the novel in its ability to transcend time and space (film editing) and present a truly POLYPHONIC universe . In this sense far too much film and television is composed of an unimaginative use of the medium. On the one hand, much of what we see in either medium in terms of narrative programming consists of "talking heads": characters in medium close-up talking. On the other hand, we are aware that other programs and films focus much more on special effects and fast editing (montage) at the expense of character development.

But cinema and television have so much more potential to render character, action, human experience that we should feel free to explore. Of course when Hollywood moved from silent films to sound, playwrights were hired by the dozen to write for the screen with the result that many of those early talkies were quite "stagey." But the best of these East Coast dramatists, such as Preston Sturges and others, quickly saw the polyphonic possibilities of the medium which far exceeded the boundaries of theater both in terms of character and plot. Linda Seger (1990) underscores this sense of polyphony in her book, Creating Unforgettable Characters , when she notes that "the defining of character is a back-and-forth process" (22). We could add more: defining character is an always unfinalized process because character itself is never finalizedexcept by death itself, which merely wraps the mystery rather than exposes it .

Character as defined by Bakhtin involves the crossing of multiple traits/voices with a process that is one of becoming rather than that of stasis or "being." This calls to mind the notion of carnival. For it is carnival itself, Bakhtin points out, that is just such a festive embodiment or heightening of such a description.

Carnival is processbecomingin its purest form. It is the time when no rules hold or rather when one can become whatever he or she wishes. This is the true "feast of becoming." Nobody is stuck, static, passive within the world of carnival. There are only participants, Bakhtin notes, and all participants win because they can do and be anything, anybody. Bakhtin writes: "During carnival time life is subject only to its laws, that is, the laws of its own freedom. It has a universal spirit; it is a special condition of the entire world, of the world's revival and renewal, in which all take part" (1968, 7).

By extension, beyond a literal sense of carnival as a real event located in time and space (Bakhtin was especially interested in the thousand-year-old tradition of European carnival before the Industrial Revolu-

tion), the concept of the "carnivalesque" has several implications for a theory of character:

  Character as process (state of becoming)

  Character as polyphony (multiple voices interacting in different ways at different times)

  Character as a social discourse that belongs to and interacts with a culture and its many voices

By this latter comment, we suggest that although each of us is an "individual," there can be no completely "unique" character, for the languages within us have come down to us through time and from the culture in which we participate. Nevertheless, the nature of language and experience guarantees that no two people are exactly alike. Caryl Emerson, in writing on Bakhtin, puts it this way: "Because no two individuals ever entirely coincide in their experience or belong to precisely the same set of social groups, every act of understanding involves an act of translation and a negotiation of values" (1984, 24).

The embracing of the carnivalesque in creating characters could involve literal festivity and plot development centered on carefree actions. It is important to John Sayles's Passion Fish (1992) that the resolution of the relationships the two main womenMay-Alice (Mary McDonnell) the crippled soap opera star and Chantelle (Alfre Woodard), her black nursereach with their men takes place at a Cajun festival. The open air festivity of Louisiana blacks and whites mingling happily as they dance, laugh, feast, and sing literally embodies the sense of the carnivalesque each woman has needed in her life.

But the term as I will use it throughout the text is meant to embody the sense of both potentiality and of the unfinalizedness which carnival evokes for characters whether they are in a "festive" atmosphere/event/ location or not. And I employ the carnivalesque both as a description of the free play and fantasy needed to actually write a script and as the end result of the characters finally placed on the page in all of their "unfinalized" glory.

A sense of the carnivalesque becomes even clearer if one understands the difference Bakhtin sees between the traditions of the Epic and that of the Novel.

As I mentioned earlier, Bakhtin saw Dostoevsky as taking advantage of the open-endedness of the novel as a form to create polyphonic characters. In his essay "Epic and Novel," Bakhtin goes further. The point of epics such as those of Homer is that they are completed and set. "We encounter the epic," he writes, "as a genre that has not only long since

completed its development, but one that is already antiquated" (1981, 49).

The novel, however, Bakhtin argues, is still a genre without a canon, without a defined form. "The novel parodies other genres," he notes, because of its freedom to incorporate any material in any style/manner/language through any characters imagined. The strength of the novel is, therefore, a sense of the carnivalesque: "The novel inserts into other genres an indeterminacy, a certain semantic open-endedness, a living contact with unfinished, still-evolving contemporary reality (the open-ended present)" (53, emphasis my own).

The character-centered screenplay reflects the same capacity and potential for cinema that the novel holds for Bakhtin. And, as used in this text, "the carnivalesque" is the term we shall use to embody this sense of open-ended, multivoiced discourse and potential for character and for narrative. As Bakhtin writes, "The novel is, by its very nature, not canonic. It is plasticity itself."

Of course a sense of the carnivalesqueof plasticity itselfmay have its set limitations depending on the genre. George Lucas's Star Wars trilogy comes much closer to the realm of the epic as described by Bakhtin. But it is our premise that any script, no matter the genre, can develop more fully realized characters that break out of stereotypic genre patterns by making use of some of the advice and exercises suggested in this text.

In terms of the carnivalesque embracing "plasticity itself"that is, of a free play of the imagination, I do not mean to suggest that you will create characters that change radically from moment to moment dressed in carnival masks. What I do suggest, however, is that your characters must constantly be capable of surprising you even when you think you know them well because they and we are made up of so many voices that often do not have the chance or means to be expressed . Our opening quotation from the great Spanish surrealist filmmaker, Luis Buquel, celebrates personality/character trait contradictions that are not resolved . It is the spirit of carnival, as incorporated in your writing and attitude, that can free you to celebrate and thus explore a wider range of character possibilities that lie outside the realm of the clearly motivated script. This is not to suggest that you should do away with all motivation : rather it is to say that you should not be a slave to simple/obvious motivations. Woody Allen ends Husbands and Wives (1992) with the tellingly appropriate line as he himself faces the "documentary camera" and says "the human heart does not know from reason."

Finally our other termore characteristic or core experienceneeds further clarification. Such a description is not meant to suggest that any one characteristic or experience "determines" or sums up a character.

Far from it. But within an individual's experience of many voices constantly in the process of expressing themselves (or in the process of being repressed), there are those experiences, painful or pleasurable, and characteristics which tend to be repeated or which gain importance because they offer further insight into the complexity of a character . One such core experience for Louise in Thelma & Louise is whatever happened to her in Texas that was so extreme (and we assume it was a rape experience) that it had a direct bearing on her pulling the trigger when Thelma was being raped. That experience in and of itself (never named in the script or film) did not "determine" all. But the hint of it throughout the film suggests its strong influence on all of the "voices" within Louise.

These termsore experience and core characteristicsare not meant to be reductive in any simple psychological way. Rather, they are meant to suggest certain patterns of behavior and traits that help us "center" our understanding of that character.

How do you create or find such characters? Once again, start with those who come to you, those you can't forget, can't get out of your mind. Ask yourself why, what makes them tick, why are you drawn to them (as in the case of Hannibal Lecter, the draw might be a mixed one of sympathy and fear!). We don't understand ourselves, so why should we be able to understand our characters?

Beyond this capacity for growth and surprise, your character should be engaging . This does not mean that he or she is necessarily a "good" person with a winning personality. I choose "engaging" rather than "sympathetic," for if we consider Hannibal Lecter again, we see that what engages us is not covered by the concept of "sympathy." We are interested in him despite our better (conscious) judgment . Thus I suggest our characters, either by being honestly ordinary or arrestingly unusual, must pull us into their worlds.

Certainly part of the engaging element is vulnerability . Even in Henry, Portrait of a Serial Killer (John McNaughton and Richard Fire 1990), we see that Henry turns off the snuff video his partner has made because it is clearly "too much" even for a serial killer. If a character is 100 percent invulnerable, he or she is closed off, complete, DEAD. What makes even Terminator 2 more than just the plot-centered script it might otherwise be is the fact that the Terminator becomes fully "human" in his character and emotions. As a machine, the Terminator becomes increasingly vulnerable as be comes to love, share, care for those around him .

His last act is one of sacrificehis life (or is "existence" more accurate?!) given for that of a woman and sonan act of self-lessness we do not expect from a mere machine.

We should note that vulnerability does not equal "weakness." Vulnerability rather means your character is open to experienceat whatever leveland that even if he or she does exhibit self-confidence, she can be put in situations that test that confidence and which open new levels of awareness and response .

The concept of the carnivalesque is the best way I can think of to remind us that much of the time when a script is not working, the blame falls on the writer for not knowing more than one or two "voices" within his/her characters .

Let us express the carnivalesque one other way: what you see is not necessarily what you get. Rick in Casablanca seems a hardened, strong, silent type: he's not. He's a sensitive talker who has been wounded in love. The "core experience" that has strongly shaped his adult life is that sense of hurt he still bears. His challenge, which he meets, is to overcome his hurt, let go, and accept love on a higher level. We are not speaking of scientific formulas here, but there is a goodly percentage of character in any frame of the character-centered script which is outside the frame simply because of that sense of mystery and surprise that awaits us. If we do not feel that, we become bored in life as in film. Think how dull our own lives would be if we knew exactly what we would do and when in every circumstance . We could not stand life on these terms.

The crossing of the three "C"scharacter/circumstance/chanceallows for an endless range of "voices" to speak and express themselves, both verbally and visually. This is the realm of the carnivalesque. That which is totally known or known completely in advance is routine! Simply for the point of emphasis, if we can say that in a typical scene in a traditional Hollywood film, maybe (rough guess) 25 percent of what is going on is unknown to us (and thus a surprise), in the character-centered script, that can often approach 50 percent or more. This is particularly true, I think, in a production like Time of the Gypsies , since both the characters and plot seem very "foreign" (and thus exotic) to us. But it is also true of seemingly simple projects such as Jim Jarmusch's minimalist films including Night on Earth (1992), which is a series of five taxi rides in five cities of the worldLos Angeles/New York/Paris/ Rome/Helsinki. We are given so little to go on in each "ride" that at least 50 percent of what is going on is a delightful mystery to us to puzzle over and enjoy.

The dance between the twobetween the known and the unknowngives us character, that ongoing, never-ending feast of possibility and becoming, that carnival which is truly what human character is.

It is up to you to hear those voices, identify those traits, and place them, through this process, on paper. But begin with a question rather than a statement.

Creating the character-centered script means asking a continuous set of questions to and of yourself and others. Joan Didion, who writes screenplays as well as novels and essays, notes: "I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see, and what it means" (1976). Instead of imposing a structure or a set of characters, she begins with "pictures in my mind" which are "images that shimmer around the edges." She allows, therefore, the characters and story to become : this is, a true sense of the carnivalesque . The images in her mind have a resonance, a texture, a meaning that cannot be easily pinned down or identified. But the existence of the strong impression (in her mind) is the clue that there is an echo that cannot be ignored or forgotten, even if it is difficult to express.

Who's Carrying a Frog in His Pocket? Reality as Carnival

No one has ever created a more carnivalesque form of cinema than Yugoslav director Dusan Makavejev. In films ranging from Loves of a Switchboard Operator (1964), Innocence Unprotected (1966), W. R.: Mysteries of the Organism (1971), and Sweet Movie (1974), Makavejev celebrates the seemingly endless potential of cinema and life to be whatever it/they would want to be. Only partially scripted, his films became carnival in every sense, especially in the destruction of traditional narrative and psychological character "logic."

But Makavejev began as a documentary filmmaker and has always claimed that reality is stranger than any fiction (1989). His sense of the mystery of human character is likewise strong. In a recent speech in Holland, he illustrated this capacity for CHARACTER to outstrip even our wildest imagination with this tale:

While working on my first feature film, Man Is Not a Bird (1961), I wanted to have a man who eats snakes in the travelling circus scene. I found him actually performing for miners in the mine where we were shooting the film. We agreed to talk about him taking part in the film on Wednesday morning. He arrived for breakfast, impeccably dressed: white shirt and tie. In the middle of our breakfast it dawns on me that he must be keeping his beasts in his room. "What if the cleaning maid bumps into them?" I asked him. "Oh, no," he says, "they need a warm place. They sleep during the day." Then he

unbuttoned his shirt and there they were, two snakes sleeping under his armpit. I don't dare to ask the people in this hall if there is anybody who carries a frog in his pocket. Or a bomb. We have no way of knowing and we don't want to learn about it. Please don't throw out this frog. We are passionate about movies, because we are passionate about life . (1991, 33)

The character-centered script knows that each of us carries something under our shirt!

"Reality is there: why change it?" Vittorio De Sica, the Italian director who championed "neorealism" used to say.

Fiction grows out of the real world we each come to know in our own way. Thus the need in creating character to start with life, with the documentary self . Obvious? Perhaps, but as Washington Post critic Hal Hinson notes, "With rare exceptions, the lives we see portrayed on the screen are dim reflections of the lives we live. We sit in the dark hoping to see ourselves, our conflicts, our ecstasies, to see the true facts of our relationships and our struggles revealed. And we depart the cinemas in despair" (1992, G1).

Consider this scene:

Dan, a pudgy, middle-aged man with a moustache and a balding head in blue jeans and a sweatshirt, shoots baskets outside a Mental Health Clinic in Flint, Michigan in the slanting sunlight of a late afternoon winter day.

He pauses, looks at us, holds his pack of cigarettes, and begins to talk about why he went a bit crazy after being laid off five times in five years from the General Motors plant in Flint:

DAN

I just couldn't take it any more, so I told the guy next to me on the assembly line to tell the boss I was sick to my stomachI just didn't give a shit any more, and I flew out the door, pushed past the guard, jumped into my car and got onto Bristol Road and went back to my apartment, turned on the radio thinking that might cheer me up because I had like TEARS coming out of my eyes, and I strike into the middle of "Wouldn't It Be Nice" by The Beach Boys, and I think to myself, "What a horrible song to hear in the midst of this panic attack and I try to sing along . . . "Wouldn't it be nice if we were older . . . ", and I have this apple in my throat as I try to sing.

There is an engaging, boyish twinkle in his eyes, which also have the lines of troubled times around them.

The scene is not a monologue in an Elia Kazan On The Waterfront

dramatic saga. Rather, it's one of the many memorable moments in the most popular American documentary ever, Michael Moore's Roger & Me (1990), a funny and sad subjective look at what is happening to many of our cities as big industries such as General Motors pull out and begin to set up factories abroad. Moore and those who worked with him for three years to put this homegrown film together learned an important fact about character: real people are every bit as fascinating to us as fictional figures, if not more . Who could script a more telling, more moving auto worker than Dan himself? Look at how much character comes through in his speech alone: his sense of being able to construct a narrative out of his own pain, his colorful use of verbs that personalize his speech such as "strike into," or the slightly archaic "in the midst of," together with his otherwise very informal speech. His feel for telling details, especially the Beach Boys tune. He MOVES us with his pain as he recounts it.

And Michael Moore succeeds in his mission as filmmaker because he has allowed characters to speak for themselves, to be their own witnesses within the framework of his purpose : to document the disaster that Flint has become in large part at the hands of a large American corporation.

Every writer of fiction scripts would do well to begin with documentaries. Note that this is the approach I suggest in part 4 in the series of character exercises offered.

For Roger & Me also brings out another major point we should all remember: the line between documentary (that is, "real life") and fiction is always a thin one, a shifting one, a complex one . A book that is definitely useful in helping a writer understand how to draw honest fiction from real life is Erving Polster's Every Person's Life Is Worth a Novel . Polster notes, "All people start with a journey through the uterine canal to enter a foreign world" (1987, 3). That journey, that life, guarantees, as he remarks, that "no one can escape being interesting" even if people do "ignore the profusion of influences" on them. According to Polster:

Whether realizing it at the time or not, each person is recurrently party to mystery, violence, suspense, sex, ambition, and the uncertainty of personal resolutions. And eventually, there is death for all! Like a mountain stream that carves out a river bed, these and many other experiences cut through people's lives, engraving character. (3)

Thus the call to the writer to live fully, observe accurately, to discover more than impose shapes, shades, gestures, actions, meaning itself.

"A film is a documentary fairy tale," says director Srdjan Karanovic with whom I have worked on a number of projects, "and that goes

double for my films: begin with something very real and move out." Virgina , the 1991 film we had worked on together, started with Karanovic's fascination for an old custom in parts of the former Yugoslavia where villagers could raise a girl as a boy if they had too many daughters. It's not hard to come up with a fictional story given this strange a reality!

Documentary fairy tale. Karanovic's phrase suggests the double effect of narrative: on one hand, as writers and as viewers/readers, we enjoy the pleasure of fictionthat is, make believe. On the other hand, narratives that move us to tears or laughter or deep involvement do so because they connect with elements or characters we recognize as "real." We know that deer don't speak. But we recognize that part of the "documentary" power of a children's film such as Bambi is that it treats the very real pain of losing a mother at an early age. In this sense, "documentary" suggests not just newspaper/CNN and a photographic reality but emotional truth. But I emphasize that the importance of the "documentary" in creative writing is not an attempt to minimalize the significance of the imagination. It is rather to say that in an age in which so many filmmakers/writers recycle previous narratives from television and film rather than from personal life experiences, there is clearly a danger of screenplays being produced that fail to involve us beyond a surface plot level.

Of course the documentary glance begins or ends or both with a closer look at yourself, whether you feel you are writing highly autobiographical projects or not. Shakespeare did not leave a very detailed record of his personal life, but it doesn't matter. The richly drawn carnival of characters he created is the testimony to a self that documented a wide spectrum of human existence. Those characters did not come from imagination alone. They come from life deeply observed, felt, transformed.

Charlie Chaplin felt this strongly, too. He knew that most comedy comes from pain and that the pain he portrayed is based on his experience and observation. His Tramp became popular when millions were (as they still are) homeless. He often said he would spend days observing peopledrunks, crazies, high society types, street peoplebefore making a film, and the enduring quality of his work testifies that he lived life fully and observed it accurately. Note that it is the distillation of the real that reveals the deep structure, the motivations and details upon which you can more successfully construct character.

Chaplin is not remembered so much for particular bits of slapstick, comic moments, farcical routines as he is for being the Tramp. He knew that the close-up he so often employed with those sad eyes and boyish

smile expressed the Tramp's deep structural need: the need to be loved, embraced, taken in, respected. He needs these things because the Tramp is the eternal Outsider. Thus the ending of most Chaplin films: the Tramp alone, back to camera, going down the road doing his awkward, funny walk.

What Chaplin knew how to do was to bring out the "truth" of the reality around him. A recent article by Constance Brown Kuriyama (1992) points out how much of Chaplin's response to his real life actually wound up in his films, especially his manic-depressive response to his alcoholic father and his at times insane mother.

It is this process, this locating of the deep structure within reality that the screenwriter must do as well. Critic Hal Hinson points this out in his 1992 essay on "Screening Out Life: How the Movies Lost Their Grip on Reality" when he concludes, "Facts aren't enough, as even the garishly authentic court cases of William Kennedy Smith and Jeffrey Dahmer numbingly proved. Issues and facts, without the designing hand of the artist, are only part of the story. The artist provides the essential context, the emotions behind the facts; without them, the truth in these 'true' stories is without meaning, a mere sketch without dimension or resonance" (G-5).

Character and Context

Consider the degree to which character is influenced and determined by context: by the times and places in which we live. An example:

A plain twelve-year-old girl holds her eight-year-old brother's hand. They stand by a deserted highway in the rainy mist hitchhiking. The way they are framed, they are engulfed by the immensity of the misty sky that surrounds them. They are the main figures in the Oscar-nominated film by Greek director Theo Angelopoulos, Landscape in the Mist (1990). And even if you did not know that the film concerns their running away from their mother to undertake a fruitless search for a father "who doesn't exist," Angelopoulos's use of place would suggest all the "character" you need to understand his film.

We are all "children of accident," as Luis Buquel has said (1983, 170). We are a crossroad of inherited, biological traits and psychological potentialities, but also of environmental "voices" of PLACE AND TIME mixed by CHANCE.

Place and timeCONTEXThave much to do with determining character. We begin our investigation of character by recognizing this power.

Your script will concern characters and actions. But your script takes place somewhere, at some time, either specific to history or purposely ahistorical and mythic. Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (script by Welles & Herman J. Mankiewitz 1939) is defined to a large extent by the foreboding castle framed in the opening shot by the threatening fence with the sign "NO TRESPASSING." We are not meant to identify any specific time, but we do feel this space is one that is quite removed from our world and full of darkness and gloom. Think how much of the dying Kane's character is set by this use of place. It would not be the same film had Welles begun with the scene of Kane dropping the snow-filled paperweight and muttering "Rosebud," for we would have missed the "character" established through the opening "trespassing" shot.

To create characters for the screen is to search for individual voices to whom you wish to give life. But we begin with a realization that such individuality is centered in a particular location, society, era. This goes for films with a studio look as well as those that strike us in their realism. Casablanca is a Hollywood creation of North Africa during the war, but its psychological "place" is very much of the times, of an America that was turning from noninvolvement to a full commitment to fighting. To see Rick and his cafi merely as movie entertainment is to miss the resonance and deeper structure the film conveys.

In contrast, some scripts make it clear that place and time are really central characters: Boyz N the Hood with its focus on black Los Angeles, Time of the Gypsies and its world of Yugoslav gypsies, Thelma & Louise and its celebration of the landscape of the Southwest all lead us to feel as well as think of how time and place reflect, act upon, shape character.

I am speaking of individual shots/scenes as well as a dominant sense of a whole script/film. Writer-director Alan Pakula likes to speak about the "architecture" of his films. Both The Parallax View (Lorenzo Semple 1974) and Presumed Innocent (Frank Pierson & Alan J. Pakula 1990) open and close with shots of courtrooms, using a slow tracking forward for the openings and a slow tracking back for the closing shots. Of course such a framing establishes the world of the law as the main protagonists of these narratives. In The Parallax View it is the paranoid world of injustice as a Kennedy-styled assassination is hushed up in court, and in Presumed Innocent we encounter a personal story of a lawyer who is himself caught up in a web of murder and deceit. The empty courtroom used in Presumed Innocent becomes the space filled with characters. But even in its empty state, it presents itself as a force to be considered.

Knowing the place and times makes knowing the character much easier.

Core Characteristics and Character

You should know your characters well enough to know to what level you can know no more . Luis Buquel put it this way: "All this compulsion to understand everything fills me with horror" (1983, 175). You should not oversimplify your presentation of character. If you are, as director Robert Bresson says, discovering only what can be explained, then your characters will not resonate as they will if you can suggest what cannot be totally shown, explained, captured. Take an action genre film such as Walter Hill's directorial debut, Hard Times (1975), starring Charles Bronson as Jean, a tough street boxer who passes through New Orleans during the Depression. What we do know is that Jean is an unbeatable boxer who is tough but fair in all his relationships with those around him. And we also learn that, finally, he is not in the ring for the money as he at first says he is, for by film's end, he gives away all the prize money and walks off into the dark from whence he came at the beginning of the narrative. Thus what we never come to know is where he came from, where he is going, and why he is the way he is. Hill deepens the effect of his film by not explaining away Jean's behavior with some simplistic flashback to a troubled past or a direct discussion of some specific wrong done that accounts for his character .

Robert Bresson has always been a particular purist in his films to the degree that he preferred to work with nonprofessionals in order to capture a nontheatrical level of character. In one of his most affecting films, Mouchette (1966, based on the novel by Georges Bernanos), he used a fourteen-year-old French village girl (Nadine Nortier) to play a French village girl who "expresses" little and experiences more in terms of gestures of rejection and abuse than anyone should experience. She does not tell us what she is thinking and, in fact, we come to feel she most likely could not or at least would not articulate exactly what it is and how she feels. In part, her inability to express herself and her lack of anyone to turn to is the point of the film.

Thus the ending when, in what looks like a simple childish game of rolling down a hill into a pond, she finally falls into the water and fails to surface, becomes both a shock and a nonshock. On the immediate level her suicide is totally unexpected. And yet the "aftershock" we the audience feel is one of realizing what Bresson has prepared us for all along: that Mouchette's core characteristic is one of a deep inner strength that does not want to compromise and live in a world as cruel as the only world she knows: provincial patriarchal French society. Bresson's character centeredness is further seen in his remark, "Your imagination will aim less at events than at feelings while wanting these latter to be as documentary as possible" (1977, 8).

Actions and the visible, in other words, lead us to that deeper level of character and feeling that can be glimpsed without being explained away. Without that, we have a cinema of surfaces only. This is true to a large degree of many Hollywood films that are motivated on a simple psychological level that can be explained. Batman Returns (Daniel Waters 1992) failed to satisfy many beyond the level of spectacle in part because the psychology offered is explained far too well. The Penguin (Danny De Vito) is the way he is, we are blatantly made to know, because his parents threw him into a stream, rejecting him because of his deformity (he was born with webbed hands and feet). A core experience so clearly set forth is not deep structure at all . It is more a plot device than a character trait.

Think of Shakespeare's Iago in Othello . Iago is one of the purest examples of evil ever to walk the stage. "I am not what I am," (I,i,62) he says in full awareness of his complete duplicity. But why is he out to destroy Othello? We are given an immediate reason: Cassio was chosen over Iago to be Othello's lieutenant. But this action is not sufficient to explain Iago's core need to destroy. Thus by the tragedy's end, just when you might expect some explanation in a lesser work, Iago is carried off without saying a word. Shakespeare leaves us haunted by this man who is captured but not defeated, exposed but not explained. A large part of the effect of Othello is Shakespeare's ability to create a character who so totally understands human nature that he can manipulate those around him at his pleasure. And yet be himself never reveals his innermost feelings and motivations . We are thus left with a sense of evil and ill will which cannot be explained away. What we can name, we can deal with. But the Iagos of the world are so dangerous precisely because they are not what they are.

We can think of character as including both personal (inner) and interpersonal (social, public, professional) elements. We should also be aware that there is the level of self-consciousness that the character himself or herself possesses and there is the viewer's/reader's level of awareness which is most often greater than that of the characters. Traditionally in the classical Hollywood narrative, the viewer has a "privileged position" and thus knows more than the characters involved . Rick in Casablanca does not see all that we see in the opening montage sequence as the various characters with their particular problems begin to gravitate toward Rick's Cafi. Similarly, the opening crosscutting between

Thelma and Louise in Thelma & Louise allows us to know what each character is doing, a point of view that Thelma and Louise do not share.

All characters have inner needs and goals, as well as interpersonal desires (romance, friendship, and so forth), and professional ambitions that help characterize them and impose their own requirements, restrictions, and privileges. To what degree the personal, public, and professional blend, separate, and are accented is up to you and your particular concept of that character.

Note, however, that there may be a large difference between a character's concept of himself/herself and a true deep structural reality. As writers, we deal not with certainties, but with pregnant ambiguities. Too much certainty and we are in danger of falling into clichis once again. Too much ambiguity, of course, can lead in the opposite direction: chaos and boredom. In the middle is the writer as mediator between such opposites.

Comedy, Caricature, and Character

CHARLES

Men, that is lots of men, are more careful in choosing a tailor than they are in choosing a wife.

THE LADY EVE

That's probably why they look so funny.
from Preston Sturges's The Lady Eve (1941)

Comedy in all of its variations offers the fullest opportunity for carnival and thus for as many voices as possible to have their playful say.

Creating comic characters is a particular talent. The veteran television writer Milt Josefsberg has written most revealingly about the subject in his practical Comedy Writing : "Successful comedy is built around solid characters interacting in humorous situations, not just jokes" (1987, 20). He is a firm believer that in comedy as in other genres, we must be able to identify in some way with the characters: "The jokes have been fitted specifically to the person, which helps you identify with the character."

The writer of comedy should begin with the realization that there is nothing inherently funny, sad, tragic, or farcical. It is all a matter of context and perspective (Horton 1991, 3). It is one of the marvels of "Northern Exposure," for instance, that topics that many would consider quite "serious" are treated with wry sympathetic humor: race relations, lesbianism, democracy, death, and aging to mention but a few.

Comedy may well be America's strong suit in cinema. French critic Andre Bazin was fond of saying so whenever he discussed Chaplin, Keaton, Capra, Sturges, Hawks, and many more filmmakers and entertainers who have made the world laugh since the silent period. Yes, comedy can be simply pie-throwing farce on one hand. But as George McFadden has noted, "The great works of comic writing [and we can add 'film'] have extended the range of our feelings" (1982, 243). Put another way, Hollywood of course entertains through comedy, but comedy may also be the way we say some of the most important things we want to say.

In terms of characterization, the writer of comedy most often treads a particular line between stereotypes and fully drawn characters, that is, between caricatures and realistic characters. The secret is to make sure you have written your figures so that the audience has no trouble in distinguishing on what level to take your world of comedy. In Naked Gun 2 1/2 (David Zucker & Pat Proff 1991), for instance, we open with a scene in which a very dotty "Barbara Bush" winds up hanging from a White House balcony in her bra. A case for a libel suit from the President's lawyers? Not at all. Because even though this was one of the strongest uses of political humor in recent American cinema, Zucker has clearly (and boldly!) set up the Barbara character as a caricature : there is no way we are asked to take her seriously or as a copy of the real person. Remember that caricatures are purposeful distortions of character. By nature the art of caricature is one of being "unfair" to the people being caricatured .

There are two main divisions of film comedy: the anarchistic, which embraces the satirical in particular, and the romantic. Anarchistic comedy has to do with determining characters with a crazy urge/desire/idea who try to act out that desire with or without success. It is important that they do not compromise themselves. Included under this heading would be all the works of Aristophanes down to the Marx Brothers, Monty Python, "Saturday Night Live," standup comedians and comediennes, and even Home Alone and Sister Act (1992). Note that real romance has nothing to do with the world of anarchistic comedy, though sex is often central.

Romantic comedy involves a coming together of lovers to form a new partnership after overcoming obstacles. At the center of such comedy is the need to compromise one's own impulses in order to fit in harmony with those of another. Romantic comedy is thus usually prosocial because it suggests a sense of continuity with no basic threats to society. In Freudian terms, you can think of anarchistic comedy as "pre-Oedipal" since it is about a stage of development when the individual is all appetite and no compromise. Romantic comedy, however, is "Oedipal" for it recognizes the need to sublimate one's own desires to work together with

those of your partner. The tradition from Roman comedy to Shakespeare and down to our own screwball comedy tradition of the 1930s and 1940s lives on in altered contemporary versions such as Pretty Woman (J. F. Lawton 1990) and All of Me (1984). And although anarchistic comedy tends toward caricature, romantic comedy has always embodied a fuller view of character because of the emotions evoked in romance.

There are, of course, in-between narratives as seen especially in "Northern Exposure." The hints of romance are everywhere, but the characters are also very much their own individuals, leery of compromising at all, and thus happy to be citizens of Cicely, Alaska.

Impostors, Innocents, and Ironic Figures

The two basic divisions of comedy also mean that characters tend to fall into three types: the Impostor, called the alazon in ancient Greece; the "innocent," naive figure who, like Buster Keaton in his persona, learns to weather and triumph over adversity; and the "ironic," worldly, and manipulative figure, called the eiron in Greek. Twins (Herschel Weigrod, Timothy Harris, William J. Davies, and William Osborne 1988) assumes that Danny DeVito and Arnold Schwarzenegger were twins separated at birth. It is classic in its comic structure and characterization as DeVito plays the eiron and Schwarzenegger the innocent, "good-hearted" figure at odds with a cynical world. And in Preston Sturges's classic comedy, The Lady Eve , it is the Lady Eve (Barbara Stanwyck) who is both eiron and imposter out to "get" Charles (Henry Fonda), one of the richest and most naive men in America who has spent years in the jungle hunting snakes.

Of course much of film comedy is built around comedians who have their own personas ranging from Woody Allen, Groucho Marx, Richard Pryor, and Steve Martin on one hand and Goldie Hawn, Mae West, Bette Midler, and Whoopie Goldberg on the other. Note that the most common main character in American comedy is an eiron: a worldly wise, cynical on the outside, soft in the center kind of character . It is less common to construct a film around an innocent, a victim, a blank page, as was so successfully done in Being There (1979, based on the book and screenplay by Jerzy Kosinski), as Peter Sellers plays a total innocent who has no experience of "the world" other than through allusions to the two areas he does know: television and gardening.

Or, in the spirit of the carnivalesque, there may be any combination of these figures. Woody Allen builds on both traditions and, though he is most often at heart a romantic, trying to find THE woman, even that

urge is often undercut by an anarchistic element. Remember that the conclusion of Bananas (1971) is that he does indeed marry Louise Lasser. But instead of fading out with the wedding, we go to their first night of the honeymoon in which their bedroom activities are broadcast live on television with Howard Cosel as the sportscaster giving a "blow by blow" account.

A final note: Since the borders between comedy and drama often cross over and break down, part of thinking of character from a carnivalesque perspective is to think of its "comic" dimensions, even if you are writing a drama . Think how often these days we describe a film as a comic drama or a dramatic comedy. Is War of the Roses (Michael Leeson 1989) really a comedy as all the paperback reference books on movies say it is? And despite the overall seriousness of The Silence of the Lambs , don't we delight in Lecter's devilish humor as he plays, in comic terms, a deadly eiron to Clarice's naive figure? Thelma & Louise seems to mix both comedy and drama equally but with the overall effect centering on drama since the jokes mask or express deeper needs that are serious and, finally, deadly at the same time that they are life affirming.

Continues...

Excerpted from Writing the Character-Centered Screenplay, Updated-Expandedby Andrew Horton Copyright © 2000 by Andrew Horton. Excerpted by permission.
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Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of California Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2000
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0520221656
• ISBN 13: 9780520221659
• Einband: Tapa blanda
• Anzahl der Seiten: 254
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