Archive for April 2011

The Hauteur of the Auteur

By on April 28, 2011
This entry is filed under Miscellaneous Grumbles, War Stories.

In Sunset Boulevard William Holden’s screenwriter complains that ‘audiences think the actors make the words up as they go along’.   In time audiences became more sophisticated and dropped that silly idea – only, it seemed, to start believing the director made it up as he went along (and it usually was a ‘he’ back then.)

Few things irk writers more than the Cult of the Director.  William Goldman in his second volume of memoirs, Which Lie Did I Tell? has a good moan about it.  As I recall he blames Truffaut for spreading the rumour that Alfred Hitchcock was God, and blames Alfred Hitchcock for believing it.   Goldman cites North by Northwest as an example: apparently Hitchcock proposed the baddies should try and kill the hero with a tornado.  When screenwriter William Lehman pointed out that humans can’t control tornadoes, and came up with the famous cropduster sequence, Hitchcock used that instead and took all the credit.

The ‘director as auteur’ nonsense gained credence because it made the critic’s job easier if they could pretend every idea on the screen came from one person rather than from a team.   Even though critics and audiences are a little better informed these days, and understand that film drama is a collaborative rather than a solo effort, directors still sometimes get the credit for your good ideas. But then, sometimes you get the credit for theirs.

Directors have an enormously stressful job.  They have to marshal a huge and incredibly expensive army to create, within a limited time, a film where everything appears to happen spontaneously.  Often this is the result of long and careful planning, and sometimes it’s the result of a desperate scrabble to get something into the can before the light goes.  (There’s a great story about Orson Welles’s version of Othello, where the murder of Roderigo takes place in a Turkish bath.  Reviewers raved about the clouds of steam symbolising the passion and intrigue that impairs human judgement.  Asked how he came up with the idea, Welles explained that shoot had run so short of money by then they’d been forced to send all the costumes back to the hire company.)

Anyway… what directors don’t do is make up the words and the story as they go along.  The cheapest stage of any film shoot is the period the writer, or writers, spend in one room with a heap of paper, constructing, writing, and revising the screenplay so that every scene has a function and the story makes sense.  You can try to make a movie without a solid script, but you’ll usually end up with an extremely expensive mess.

Sometimes directors merely execute what the writer has put on the page, in which case you’d better hope your writing is as good as you thought it was. Sometimes they utterly mangle your work, because they didn’t understand it, or because they resented the fact that they didn’t write it.  Or indeed both.

And sometimes a director will add visions you never saw, evoke meaning and resonance you’d sort of hoped was there, and draw performances from the actors that make your story come alive in ways you never expected, to the extent that you feel surprised and proud to see your name on the finished work.  And if you’re lucky, and the director’s really good, it will look as if the actors are making it up as they go along.

Whatever happens, remember there’s one thing worse than your script being realised badly: it’s your script never being realised at all.

The Rules of Art

By on April 22, 2011
This entry is filed under Notes from the Coalface.

Recently I came across a style guide for aspiring novelists. ‘Avoid adverbs’, it thundered authoritatively.  ‘Use no more than two every three hundred words,’ it continued dogmatically.

I wince when anyone tries to lay down the law about what makes good and bad art.  I mean, yes, there is good and bad art, but good art is not created simply by adhering to accepted laws or following approved formulas.  Adverbs (you know, the words ending in -ly) can be lame and redundant, but rationing lame redundancies to 0.66% of the text isn’t going to fix the problem.  Better to understand what adverbs do so you can decide when you should use them and the benefits of doing without them.

In all forms of art there are rules.  Once you know what the rules are, you can choose to bend them or break them to achieve a certain effect.  When I wrote the script Synchronicity for the cop show Wire In The Blood I deliberately broke a cardinal rule of narrative, and resolved the story with a coincidence.

Now this in most cases is a mortal sin, for which the original Greek term is Deus Ex Machina.   The lazy or inept playwright, having placed his characters a dramatic dilemma, would resolve it by having a God lowered into the action on a wire (ie by a mechanism, geddit?)  This God would decree an arbitrary ending for the characters.  “Audiences hated that shit two thousand years ago,” screenwriting guru Robert McKee likes to declare*, “and they hate it now!”

I used a coincidence to resolve the story because the theme of Synchronicity was accident and chance.  In a normal episode of Wire In The Blood, a series of murders would occur that appeared random at first, until Tony Hill, our eccentric psychologist hero, would put the clues together, identify a pattern and profile the killer for the detective.  In this episode, encouraged by script editor Claire Hirsch, I tried to tell the story the other way round: the murders appear at first to have a pattern, but in time our hero realises the pattern is an illusion, and the killer is truly operating at random.  Hill comes close to despair until, in a pivotal scene, he sees that there is no such thing as a truly random act, and that no-one has an infinite number of choices.   He identifies six paths the killer might take, and invites the detective to cast a die…

I thought it was clever, myself.  Everyone who read the script seemed to agree it was frightfully clever.  The one person who didn’t, unfortunately, was the director.  He cut that pivotal scene and substituted some garbled, voiced-over moment that made no sense whatsoever in any terms.  He’s not on my Christmas Card list, I’ll tell you that for nowt.

I still believe it was a valid artistic choice, even though it broke the rules of conventional narrative.  I knew what I was doing.  I just failed, I suppose, to convince the director.  I forget what his name was now, and I can’t be arsed to look it up.

As for adverbs… yes, they can often be lame and redundant.

”’Welcome to Buckingham Palace!” the Prince smiled, politely.’

What’s the word ‘politely’ adding there?  If the Prince says “Welcome” and smiles, we can see he’s being polite – we don’t have to be told.

”’Welcome to Buckingham Palace!” the Prince smiled, coldly.’

Now that’s more interesting.  The adverb offers information that wasn’t obvious, and very economically, which is always good.  But this device is like a certain sort of joke – even if you change the punchline it’s still the same joke, and with repetition the humour can soon wear thin.

I suppose that’s why it’s a good idea to ration adverbs: they’re usually telling the reader something he or she can infer from the context – the author is rubbing the reader’s nose in it.  Used ironically the adverb can be effective, but that effect will wear off from overuse.  Best to keep adverbs to a minimum… say, two every three hundred words.

*The Curse Of Robert McKee is worth a blog all to itself.  “Where’s your Act Three Climax?”

Bum Notes

By on April 21, 2011
This entry is filed under War Stories.

There’s another TV writer in my neighbourhood – there’s a few, actually, but we generally avoid each other (why is that?  To avoid the impulse to compare careers?  Bit like actors, I imagine…)   Anyway, we bumped into each other on neutral territory about a year ago, and started to compare notes about Notes.

On any TV show there is a large hierarchy of people involved in getting it made.  These Executives, sitting in offices rather far away from the coalface, often feel obliged to demonstrate their usefulness by making Helpful Observations on your show. And while some Executives are intelligent, media-literate types with long experience and a deep understanding of TV drama, some aren’t.  And the latter sometimes give out notes so awful they’re funny… sometimes… afterwards.

Anyway this writer friend told me he’d once written a scene with no dialogue.  His characters entered, wordlessly went about their business, and moved off again.   And he got a critical note on his script from an Executive which read:  “If it wasn’t for the stage directions, I would have had no idea what was happening in this scene!”

My mate was flabbergasted.  ‘It’s television!’ he said.  ‘You know – it’s got the word VISION in it?”  Apparently this Executive had worked in radio before moving over to television, and nobody had explained to her the rules had changed.

One of the worst notes I ever got was on the show Sea Of Souls.  Heroine psychic has scary visions of a murdered woman.  Heroine becomes convinced strange little man living alone in big house killed the reclusive woman who used to live there.  Heroine and her friend harass the lonely little man who finally blurts out that he IS the reclusive woman who used to live there – she’d had a sex change and told no-one.  Psychic heroine’s friend is angry – her visions were clearly a morbid fantasy.  Of course it turns out heroine’s visions were not of the past, but of the future – cue tingly music…  The ‘sex change revelation’ was a pivotal twist designed to leave the audience guessing.

The note I got from an Executive read:  ‘This business about the sex change is confusing.  Can we take it out?’  Yes, that’s right – take out the pivotal twist of the story.  I nearly blew a gasket.

The point of this blog entry is not ‘Executives are idiots’.  Many of them aren’t.  Many executives keep their observations sharp and focused, and generally just let you do your job.  The real victim of the idiotic note is not the Writer, but the Script Editor.

The Script Editor’s job is to collate notes from all the Executives involved and pass them on to the Writer, keeping the Writer feeling happy and positive so that he or she goes back to work feeling good about making the requested changes.  Yes, some script notes are asinine, but the Script Editor is still obliged to pass them on.  As a Writer you must remember that these stupid notes are not the Script Editor’s fault.  Script Editors are merely messengers.

As Writer you are not there to write something clever that will impress your mum (though obviously that’s a bonus.)  You are there to write a script that is entertaining, coherent, affordable, and the right length.  The Writer is there, in fact, to solve problems, and a note is a Problem that has to be solved.  If you are professional and sensible, you will undertake to try to comprehend the note and the logic behind it (presuming there is some) and solve the problem if you can.  If it’s a really daft note, like the ones listed above, you can try laughing it off or pointing out the absurdity.

It’s like directing insects on camera (I did that once.)  Insects are stupid and don’t do what they are told – we know that, get on with it.  Execs sometimes make daft suggestions – we know that, get on with it.  Don’t make life hard for the Script Editor.

Rather, make it so they look forward to ringing you.  Be the person who offers Solutions instead of more Problems.  Be a Little Ray of Sunshine into their gloomy basement office.  Remember, Script Editors – if they don’t kill themselves or go mad – grow up to become Producers, the ones who give out Commissions.   And if, when they were Script Editors, one writer cheerfully sorted out their problems, while another pissed and moaned and made their lives more difficult, who are they going to call when they grow up?

That’s right.  Not Gigantic Pain in the Arse.  Little Ray of Sunshine who Solves Problems.

Make sure that’s you.

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