This important struggle will be generated from what appears to be the normal, everyday things in life: Work? Love? Adventure? Or how about Fear? Greed? Loss? These are all human conditions and circumstances that allow us to identify with some common human value. Something that we all think about. Something that we may have actually struggled with ourselves. Some of us may have been successful in this struggle. Others failed. But whatever it is, it’s what the story is about. It’s why we came to see this movie (besides the thrills, the laughs, and the emotions).
In the end, there are only a few possible outcomes for your story:
• “Wow! The hero really did it!” (happy ending, Gravity)
• “Oh no, the hero really messed up. That’s too bad.” (sad ending, Chinatown)
• “Oh well, even though the hero didn’t succeed, I bet they learned something from this experience.”(ironic ending, The Sixth Sense)
Believe it or not, any of these three might be the “motor” of the movie you just liked or what’s inside the idea you’re trying to develop right now. Whatever the case, you will need to know this at some point in your process before you go ahead with that script.
What I mean is, you can write a script right now if it makes you happy. But you’ll still have to go through it and make it something of value. Something that tells us about your character’s problem, his/ her struggle and why you are putting your character through this ordeal.
This is what gets you and any other movie audience excited.
So, first big question:
Does your idea generate value?
A human value is simply something that we believe and we want to reaffirm by means of telling our story. That’s pretty simple. All decent movies, even the The Fast and the Furious series, generate a human value. How about the movies we’re watching today? Here, in one short statement each, is the dramatic and emotional value of these Oscar nominees:
Gravity: Under the worst kind of pressure, you can find within you the will to survive. She’s under time pressure, a threat to her life, and she has a problem in her head about her dead daughter. All are important in the story.
12 Years a Slave: A man’s freedom shouldn’t be taken for granted. Sometimes you have to fight for it! He’s trapped, can’t get out, and doesn’t want to die trying.
American Hustle: Friendship, trust, and love are much more important than money.
Blue Jasmine: Not facing the truth of your life is a disaster. People may lie in order to get the big score, but in fact they only need to empathize with and love each other to have what really matters.
Captain Phillips: We need to be prepared that on certain days, things can go horribly wrong. The routine of life is sometimes a dangerous experience.
Dallas Buyers Club: The path from selfishness to compassion is a worthwhile struggle. But first, you will have to face your mortality in order to see the truth of yourself.
EXERCISES
Fill in the value statements for the following other Oscar nominees:
Her
Nebraska
Philomena
The Wolf of Wall Street
Now make your own list of six movies (hopefully, movies you like!) and fill in the value statements.
Make the value statement about your current project. If you’re stumped, make it a longer list and see which statement is the strongest.
Chapter 2
SCREENPLAYS ARE NOT WRITTEN — THEY’RE BUILT
Stories Are Energy Machines
Stories — especially screenplays — are energy machines. All of the energy, time, effort, and passion you have written into your script is just sitting there on the page waiting to be unleashed on the world. All those hours and days and months and years you’ve spent working and worrying, all the frustration and thought that came out of your psyche has now been condensed into this code known as writing. With any luck, it will be interpreted by a whole group of other artists and craftspeople.
Hopefully, a studio, network, or company in the form of an executive producer will take up the project. They will plan to make money with your script. They will hire others — a vast creative team — who will translate your script into a photographed product.
Now even more energy is being expended on your story.
So it all gets reduced into this little frame — and wham — it all comes out for the audience, who then translate all of that invisible energy of thought and craft into some kind of experience.
That’s a movie!
Your story is like one of those rubber-band-powered toy airplanes. Over the time of your story, you’re going to wind that rubber band so tight that when you let it go — the climax of your story — it’s going to go zoom! (More on this later!)
But how do you do that on paper using a format so ugly and without the freedom of a novelist?
How do we create this energy?
We already understand that we are creating a system of “values.” The beliefs and truths that we find to be universal for all sentient beings. Anyone who can experience a complex story can experience and share these fundamental human values.
But how do we take these towering values and translate them into drama? How do we get this stuff on the page?
There Are No Rules in Screenwriting — But You Have to Obey Every Single One!
You’ll probably read other books on screenwriting. I actually know some of those writers and teachers. I can call them at home!
So, going under the premise that “Nobody knows anything” we can further extrapolate, “Everybody knows something.” You can credit that to me. Probably one of the stupidest things I’ve ever said. But I feel it opens the door to the very thing that scares or thwarts people when they sit down to write a script: “What am I supposed to do now?”
It’s funny, Robert McKee hates to call them “rules.” He prefers the term principles. It is satirized so wonderfully in Charlie Kaufman’s script Adaptation. Fundamentally, rather than follow a bunch of rules — like laws — let’s obey certain concepts because they’ve been shown to work. I like that.
But I would much rather be able to stop somebody on the street for spitting because it’s a rule rather than expect them to obey the “spirit” of the law and the principles of decency. Who’s kidding whom? You must have a minimum set of elements in a story or it’s not a story. That may have been based on the spirit of principles at one time, but I really accept it as a rule now. So here are some really fundamental rules that you must follow or you go to screenwriting jail:
1. “I will begin a story only with a single main character.”
That’s a rule. I obey that rule. I think you should too.
2. This character will take a journey or experience an ordeal that will deliver him/her to a new idea of him/herself and his/her life.
I obey that rule too.
3. I believe you should not place anything in the story that isn’t put there without careful thought and consideration and is a chosen part of the design of that story.
These are my primary rules. I believe if you simply obey — and never break — these