Paul Hackett

First impressions are just as important in screenwriting as they are in life. A good screenplay needs a likable hero that gets trapped in a compelling situation; someone the reader can relate to and root for as they turn the pages of your script. How you go about introducing your hero is something that should be given a lot of thought. A helpful approach is to watch how directors introduce their main characters. Rather than introducing a hero, a good director will reveal the hero to the audience. The reveal usually tells us something important about the character right off the bat and alerts us to their significance. More often than not, the hero is revealed through some kind of action.

An excellent example of a reveal is John Milius’ Conan The Barbarian (1982). Anyone who has seen the film is unlikely to forget the “Wheel of Pain” sequence. Conan is introduced through a montage sequence that follows his torturous passage to manhood. A young Conan is chained to a punishing device and made to walk in circles through all seasons. As weaker men die Conan presses on. His muscles grow. We see his feet plod on as the years pass. Finally, the full grown Conan looks up and stares into the camera. He’s already a hero in our minds because he has survived an ordeal that finished off weaker men. He’s now ready to embark on any journey.

It’s generally best to reveal characters by having them doing something when we first meet them. The first glimpse we get is going to tell us almost everything we need to know about them. I call it a reveal because it should share something about both the inner and outer life of the hero.

Imagine your protagonist is a taxi driver. The scene opens inside the taxi dispatch. We see someone fastidiously cleaning a taxi at the start of their shift. A person who begins their shift in this way is probably honest, hard working and perhaps has dreams of doing something greater. This sounds a lot like the reveal from Collateral (Stuart Beattie, 2004).

• INT. TAXI DISPATCH – L.A. – DAY
• ORANGE and YELLOW FORD CROWN VICTORIAS are wiping screen. We find ourselves in a busy garage at change of shift. A balletic convergence of arriving and departing cars. One’s door’s flung open…
• INT. ONE CAB – MAX’S HANDS
• enter. They wipe the seats with paper towels and 409…a DMV LICENSE fitted into the small Lexan holder. On it is a picture of Max.

  Lights being checked. Indicators. Hazards. Switches. Similar to a pilot doing an aircraft check list. Fast. All fine.

• REVEAL NOW: MAX’S BRIEFCASE
• He opens it, preparing for his workday. CD caddy of personal mixes goes on a visor. Spreadsheet peaks out a worn Mercedes S500 brochure, clipped open. A submarine sandwich from Subway.
• LONG LENS: OTHER CABBIES – OTHER FACES
• load-in. Southern California diversity – some unshaven, swapping stories, counting cash, one stands on the passenger seat to shout over the roof to his pal, spills his coffee, couldn’t care less…

  Not Max. His cab is fly. Among cabbies he is GQ.

  And as CAR HORNS BLARE. AD LIB BANTER. CABBIES SHOUT. Max gets behind the wheel, closes the door…

• INT. CAB – DAY
• …and WHAM! The noise evaporates. Welcome silence. Max takes a moment to savor it.

  He starts the engine. RAP MUSIC BLARES from the radio. Max turns it off.

  He dumps a CD into the changer. MOZART SONATA fills the cab.

  From the open briefcase, Max also pulls out one last thing…

  A TATTERED POSTCARD

  which depicts the whitest sand and bluest sea you can imagine. A dream place. An endorphin-releasing groove. Limitless horizon. It’s the Maldives Islands in the Indian Ocean.

  MAX

  slips the postcard under the rubber bands on the visor. He can see it whenever he wants to. But not now. He flips the visor up, puts the car in gear and pulls out.

This script is an excellent example of a reveal. We are already able to empathize with the hero. He’s doing his best while still dreaming of something greater for himself. That’s something we can respect.

Reveals can be humorous, endearing and insightful all at the same time. Check out the classic reveal from Cool Hand Luke (Donn Pearce and Frank Pierson, 1967):

• FADE IN:
• EXT. SOUTHERN CITY STREET EXTREME CLOSEUP PARKING METER (NIGHT)
• Its irritating head opens a glaring red eye: the red flag pops across the entire screen:
• VIOLATION
• INSERT: PARKING METER SUPPORT (NIGHT)
• CLOSEUP of a pipe cutter attached to the meter neck, metal slivers curling out. From o.s. we HEAR — LUCAS JACKSON cheerfully humming and mumbling Auld Lang Syne and then:
• LUKE
• Okay, Mister General, you son of a bitch. Sir. Think you can put things right with a piece of tin with a ribbon hangin’ on it? Gonna put you right.
• CLOSEUP PARKING METER (NIGHT)
• as the meter head falls out of FRAME.
• NEW ANGLE ON METER (NIGHT)
• as it falls to the ground amidst a forest of meter stands and Luke’s hand comes into the FRAME to pick it up and we SEE him in CLOSEUP for the first time. He is cheerful, drunk, wearing a faded GI Field jacket. A bottle opener hangs on a silver chain around his neck. He addresses the next meter.
• LUKE
• All right. Helen, honey. I lost my head over you. Now its your turn.

Today’s screenwriter generally pays a lot of attention to white space. The opening lines from Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up (2007) reveals entire character personalities:

• EXT. BEN’S HOUSE – DAY
• BEN STONE, 23, cute in a chunky Jewish guy sort of way, boxes one of his roommates, MARTIN. His other roommates, JAY and JASON fight with broom sticks. JONAH drinks beer on the couch spectating.

Half of the characters in this movie are set up in just a few lines. We already have a sense of who our hero is and what is in store for him. Taking into account the film’s title we already have a pretty good idea where this story is going.

When putting characters on the page for the first time, it’s not just important to describe them in a way that makes them memorable. You also need to reveal something about them. Show them at work or play in such a way that the reader can see much more than what’s on the page – their inner and outer lives intertwined.

When writing dialog it’s important to give each character their own voice. What often happens is we begin writing before our characters are sufficiently developed and they all end up sounding alike. This can be worked out in rewriting, but until each character comes to life they usually all sound the same.

For me, characters start to come to life as soon as they have a name. It’s a starting point. And while it is possible to write a script referring to the main characters as GUY and GIRL, giving them names makes them appear more realistic. But this raises an immediate problem for writers: where do you come up with good names?

Over thinking names can get you into trouble. It’s tempting to go for something with a lot of meaning. But when you take a movie like The Legend of Bagger Vance (2000), which has character names derived from The Bhagavad Gita you are lining yourself up to alienate a lot of readers. Good names are ones that sound like real people and can actually tell you something about them. A good example of simple yet symbolic names can be found in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street (1987): Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen) and Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas). Their names suit their relative social statuses, but watch the film again with the names in mind and Fox and Gekko take on a deeper layer of meaning.

Sometimes choosing names quickly can help you get started quickly. There is a cool random name generator at http://www.unled.net/ that gathers names from the U.S. Census Bureau. It never fails to spit out believable and interesting sounding names. I only have a couple problems with it. It’s somewhat limited to American sounding names and it’s based on census data from 1990. So it’s not exactly up to date.

Recently I’ve been working on a new script that has a lot of characters. Fortunately, I found a great new place to explore randomly generated names. It’s the junk mail folder. Most of the names there are pieced together from software that tries to make the names sound real and believable. And that’s exactly what I am looking for. Now there is actually a reason to reread the headers on junk mail.

It’s been a tough year for working writers, but a fairly decent one for aspiring writers. Studios posted more scripts online in an effort to grab more award nominations. Aside from writing, the most important thing aspiring screenwriters should be doing is reading a lot of scripts.

The Thinking Writer tracked down and shared links to the studios that were basically giving scripts away for free. The links are More Scripts and More Scripts, Pt. 2.

Being earnest, I read all of them. In fact, I printed them all and what a mountain of paper it made.

I was not at all surprised that Cody Diablo’s Juno won the Academy Award award for Best Original Screenplay. I was quite happy with the choice, in fact. As I pored over every script I could find from the past year, Juno is the one that struck me as the most original. It is written with a unique voice. As I read, I could see the movie playing in my mind. It hooked me from the first page. And by the last page I was feeling jealous that my writing isn’t nearly as good.

It stands head and shoulders above the other original scripts I read this year. And those were good scripts too.

As for the Best Adapated Screenplay, I did enjoy reading No Country For Old Men. But it wasn’t my favorite. Of those nominated, I think The Diving Bell and The Butterfly is the one I’d rather read again.

Entrances are for playwrights. They should be used much more sparingly by screenwriters.

In a play, the author typically has to devise several ways of getting the actors on and off the stage. The action occurs in only a few locations. In a screenplay, however, the action takes place over several locations. The heightened pace of film also makes entrances and exits seem staged. They are best avoided unless there is a dramatic reason for them.

When I’m writing a scene, I like to build the four walls first. The scratch scene, my first pass at writing, often has both an entrance and exit. Then I very quickly begin to rework the scene, cutting it down until only the bare essentials are left. It’s almost like a director giving lines for actors to speak before the actual scene begins. They won’t appear in the film, but still help bring the performance up to speed. I find this also works well in writing.

In his memoirs, Elia Kazan compared the difference between directing for stage and screen:

A film director can choose to leap into the “meat” of a scene or from high moment to high moment, leaving out what, in his opinion, is not worth the attention of the audience. Entrances and exits – unless they’re freighted with dramatic substance – mean nothing. It doesn’t matter how the character got there. He’s there. Cut to the heart of the scene.

Good screenplays also cut straight to the heart of the scene.

Take a screenplay like Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (1977). There are very few entrances in the entire script, even though the story jumps from location to location. There is an excellent party scene at a Beverly Hills mansion. It begins with two men chatting. This cuts to a wider shot and another man joins the conversation. Another cut, and Alvy (Woody Allen) and Rob (Tony Roberts) are at the center of the scene. They arrive at the party without actually making an entrance. It’s economical. It’s also good writing.

Elaborating on my discussion of the moral center in films…

“The first casualty of war is innocence.” That’s the tagline for Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986), a film that’s different from other Viet Nam war stories because it’s not about two countries fighting each other. Rather, it’s a story about a country at war with itself. Although the story centers on the thoughts and fears of one soldier, everyone in the platoon faces similar moral choices, and must decide for themselves what is right and wrong.

The men in Chris Taylor’s (Charlie Sheen) platoon divide into two groups: the heavy drinkers loyal to Barnes (Tom Berenger) and the pot smokers who follow Elias (Willem Dafoe). The main difference between them is that Elias already believes the war can’t be won, but keeps fighting in it with honor. The audience roots for him because he’s a moral compass and mentor to the liberal minded members of the platoon. Barnes and his men, however, have a different take on the war. They lash out at the Vietnamese and each other; committing atrocities that turn them into the real bad guys.

With a story as multi-layered as this, it’s not surprising to find a moral center – someone who voices the author’s perspective. The moral center steers the theme, so that is not about surviving war, but surviving war with humanity still intact. The moral center of Platoon is King (Keith David), introduced early in the script:

• KING looks like a king. A lion of a black man but with a sleepy, gentle face, not to be roused, is painfully trying to scrawl a letter home with the pencil held awkwardly, mouthing the words.

He has many of the film’s key lines and entertains the platoon with his home-spun wisdom and sense of humor.

King wonders how an educated man like Chris wound up in Viet Nam. The boy’s idealistic view of the war makes him laugh. He calls Chris a crusader for thinking dropping out of school and signing up would make a difference. (Stone reportedly dropped out of Yale twice and based Platoon on his own experiences serving in Viet Nam.)

After the hero survives an injury, King – whose very name is symbolic – accepts him as part of the group. He takes Chris under his wing, shrugging off the possibility that he might have let the platoon down. King tells him there is “no such thing here as a coward,” a line that he repeats later in the film.

As an ally, King introduces Chris to the “head,” an underground world where Elias’ crew smoke pot and escape the war. He gets Chris high for the first time, which not only relieves the pain of his injury, but initiates him into the underworld. The symbolism of this occasion isn’t lost on King:

• KING
• (smiling)
• This ain’t Taylor. Taylor been shot. This man Chris been resurrected…

King is not the only moral guide in Platoon. The Christ like figure Elias is another strong force of good and the focal point of Chris’ admiration.

In my mind, the moral center is generally a less active participant in the story and more of an observer. Elias plays a big part; staying very involved in the plot. He helps the men prepare for missions and teaches them what he can about survival. When faced with difficult tasks he crusades for good. King is more of a witness and commentator on the action. His actions never influence the direction of the story.

When the platoon suspects that Barnes actually killed Elias they talk about getting revenge. Barnes turns up drunk and challenges them, giving them a chance to get even.

• King, the biggest one there, is about to say something, but the moment passes.

He knows that an eye for an eye is not justice; and remains an observer. As an observer King is also the only that notices Chris isn’t writing home anymore. In case the audience hasn’t noticed Chris’ transformation, King is there to point it out.

We don’t know what happens to Chris and the other members of the platoon at the end. King makes it out alive before the final battle and he gives Chris some final advice:

• KING
• Make it outta here, it’s all gravy, every day of the rest of your life man – gravy.

If anything, this is the delivery of the film’s real message. War is a terrible experience for everyone involved. Surviving it is one thing, but surviving it and still remaining human is another.

For King, to have another chance at life, and to live life to the fullest, every day is gravy. It’s an extra gift that is worth staying alive for.

In most American films, the moral high ground is the domain of the hero. To conquer the villain he has to undergo some sort of change within himself. A general template for this transformation might be overcoming selfishness and putting the needs of others ahead of his own. Through his apprenticeship and growth, the hero learns something essential that will allow him to defeat the villain.

I’ve found that many screenplays contain a special character type that is somewhere between a stock character and an archetypal character. This figure is someone who will help the hero on his journey, and I call him or her: the moral center. It’s possible that the moral center also doubles as one of the archetypal roles such as the mentor or shapeshifter. This may be less common though, otherwise all stories would have moral centers and I don’t think that’s the case.

Aside from helping the hero in some small way, the true job of the moral center is to introduce the film’s theme, and clue us in to what the movie is all about. The voice of the moral center illustrates the writer’s perspective.

While the hero may be the moral compass of the film – the one who will strive to right the wrongs and reestablish the status quo – he is never the moral center. The hero is too busy with his quest, battling the villain, driving the story forward and facing obstacles. As the audience roots for him, he will make a series of choices – some of them will turn out to be right, others wrong. If he were also the story’s moral center, the film would assume a tone of preaching, and be of little interest to most audiences.

The moral center is almost always a minor character; someone often allied with the hero, but corrupted neither by him nor the villain. He brings to the story a voice of wisdom; shedding light on what the story is really about. With a few key lines, this enlightened individual will represent understanding and insight in a nearly godlike way.

If you really want to know who the moral center is: he’s the one dude in the film that you’d really want to hang out with.

I’ll elaborate more on the moral center in my next post with a few examples from popular films.

Whether we admit it or not, a lot of us wannabe screenwriters with blogs are in awe of John August. He is to screenwriting what Robert Plant is to singing, or Humphrey Bogart to acting: one of those artists that possesses a complete understanding and awareness of his own abilities.

John has posted to his site the text of a recent speech he gave at Drake University, The Challenge of Writing in a Digital Age. Sometimes all it takes is an expert to say something obvious for it to resonate clearly. John offers up the following definition:

Writing is how we demonstrate that we understand something.

For the screenwriter that means your story. If you’re going to write a movie you should have something important to say. You can’t tell a good story if you don’t understand it yourself. A good script should adhere to a certain structure and follow a logical plan. There are as many books as there are blogs on screenwriting, but real insight and understanding only comes through hard work. This is the day to day routine of writing.

This applies equally to other kinds of writing. A songwriter needs to understand the mechanics of emotion. Songs may tell stories too, but if anything, the true purpose of music is to stir an emotional response. What remains true to all kinds writing is not only what you say, but how you say it. As John said at the end of his speech, we should all write like our lives depend on it.

For me, there is something almost as important as keeping a daily writing routine – it is knowing when to break the routine. Creative work is probably the hardest to finish when you’re trying to force yourself. My standard three hours a day, six days a week of writing can at times feel like an attempt to manufacture the goods on an assembly line. A well timed day off works wonders.

Lately it seems as if I’ve been traveling as much as I’ve been working. Travel is the greatest of escapes. It sure beats that other favorite writer’s excuse for not working – cleaning the fridge!

Not only does a trip take me outside the box, it also stimulates me with new ideas and experiences. It’s more likely that a real life situation I wouldn’t get in my regular writing space will produce that key line that transforms a scene and saves the story. Whatever I’m working on, inevitably, turns out better for a little time spent on the road. It’s not always possible to go away mid-project, so I make a point of going somewhere after completing each draft, and again before starting a new one.

I see why the writers from the classic Hollywood era did a lot of their work in hotels. I’m thinking of Robert Riskin writing for Frank Capra in Palm Springs, or Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur churning out scripts for Howard Hawks in Manhattan hotel rooms. For some reason, it’s just easier for me to get work done in hotel rooms. (Yeah I know, the above writers were all notorious for partying it up – but they completed some of their most famous work under those conditions.)

This advice, if it can be termed advice, should come with a warning. Travel can offer some great inspiration; but inspiration only accounts for two percent of a great story. The rest is perspiration – hard work!

When I settle into the hotel room after a long day of activity, I can do a whole day’s work in less time than usual. Most of the time the work is better too. If I had to guess, I’d say it has to do with the fact that while my mind was busy doing other things, the subconscious had all day to work on the story by itself. We writers carry our stories around with us for a long time, sometimes years. The mind simply can’t put it to rest because you’ve gone into escape mode. As Graham Greene wrote in Ways of Escape, “the unconscious collaborates in all our work.” I think I’ll have more to say about this later.