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A somewhat derivative challenge

Following up on my article about How to Explain Quantum Mechanics, I think it’s high time for the third-ever Scene Challenge.

For the first one, Masturbating to Star Trek, you had to write an entire scene. For the second one, Make Your Introduction, you had to introduce one character. This time, it’s both simpler and more difficult:

Have a character explain derivatives, as used in the financial industry. (The thing that’s like a stock, not the thing that you learned in calculus.)

The speaker should be knowledgeable, and the listener should be a layman, i.e. a proxy for the audience. What are their names? What’s the story? What’s the genre? You decide, to the degree it matters. My suggestion would be to create a scenario in which the term needs to be explained — but only to the degree necessary. Metaphors and similes are powerful tools.

You’re welcome to write as much of the scene as you want, but the focus is on the explanation. The winning entry might be one sentence long. I strongly recommend you look at the original article for helpful suggestions.

Here are the rules:

1. Post your entry in the comments thread of this article. Please don’t attempt fancy formatting. It usually just screws up the margins.
2. All entries must be submitted by 8 a.m. PST on Thursday, May 8th, 2008. Remember that comments are sometimes held in moderation. Don’t submit twice. It will show up. Promise.
3. I’ll pick a winner later that day.
4. Winner receives hearty congratulations and a brief moment in the spotlight.

And…begin.

UPDATE: A reader asks a fair question: What if two explanations are very similar, and both great? Answer: The earlier entry wins. So there’s no benefit to waiting for the last minute, worrying that someone’s going to read your entry and do a knock-off version.

To summarize: Best entry first wins.

Secret history of the Kleinhardt Gambit

In the second Charlie’s Angels, where did the phrase “Kleinhardt gambit” come from?

– Duane
Mount Pleasant

Duane is referring to this scene, near the end of the movie:

• EXT. HIGH ROOF - NIGHT
• Madison finds herself alone on a high, empty roof. Reeling, confused. A giant, blinking “LOS ANGELES” SIGN flashes.
• A single telescope has been set up near the edge. Madison walks to it. Leans down to the eyepiece.
• HER P.O.V.
• On a distant rooftop, all of her gangster clients are being arrested by the F.B.I.
• CLOSE ON MADISON
• as she looks up from the eyepiece. Furious, but smiling. She speaks to the only ones who could be behind this:
• MADISON
• The Kleinhardt Gambit. Classic. Well done.
• WIDEN TO REVEAL the Angels, approaching behind her.
• NATALIE
• Thanks.
• SMASHCUT to a series of FAST FLASHBACKS:
• - THE SOUVENIR STORE. THE OLD SHOPKEEPER PEELS OFF HIS WIG AND LATEX MASK. REVEALING…ALEX.
• - MUSSO AND FRANK’S. SNAP ZOOM TO THE COAT CHECK ROOM. THE COAT CHECKER IS NATALIE, WITH BLACK HAIR AND SLINKY BLACK DRESS.
• - ROOSEVELT HOTEL, BATHROOM. THE HISPANIC DOORMAN QUICKLY RIPS OFF HIS LATEX FACE, REVEALING DYLAN.

(Those last three are separate scene numbers, by the way.)

Here, the “Kleinhardt Gambit” refers to the way the angels sent Madison’s buyers to the wrong rooftop through elaborate misdirection. The telescope is apparently not a key part of the gambit, but rather just to piss off Madison.

The action is pretty standard for Charlie’s Angels (or Mission: Impossible), so it makes sense that a fallen angel would recognize how she was duped, and would have a term for it. The term itself is completely invented, a ridiculous neologism. And believe me, there wasn’t a lot of deep thought going into it. The first combination of syllables that seemed reasonable got typed.

Science fiction does this constantly. What’s a flux capacitor? How did Kirk prevail in the un-winnable Kobayashi Maru? What are midi-chlorians, and how can we pretend we never heard of them?

Don’t be afraid to invent terms you think would exist in your fictional world. Done just right, jargon helps ground characters in their setting, much the way medical-ese makes you think those pretty people on TV could actually be doctors.

Off-topic tweaks

I’ve made some tweaks to Off-Topic, including adding comments. For those who never click over there, Off-Topic is largely a list of things I find amusing and/or interesting, including a lot of videos.

The section is experimental, with the explicit goal of trying new things that are prone to failure. It’s not even hosted on the same server as the rest of the site. It’s a Tumblr blog with a lot of CSS hackery to make it resemble the rest of the site, and now a comment system powered by Disqus.

The new comment system is actually a lot slicker than the built-in comments used in the main site. But slick often equates with trouble-prone, so we’ll see if it’s useful and stable.

Screenwriting 101

Following a reader’s suggestion, I added a 101 section to the sidebar to highlight some of the introductory how-to articles on screenwriting.

This site houses about 950 posts, of which more than 500 are of the non-expiring educational variety. I’d love to find a way to guide new visitors (and aspiring screenwriters) through them without annoying longtime readers. So consider this a call for advice. I’d especially welcome links to sites that do a great job walking readers through a lot of related articles.

Currently, archives are broken down by category, a listing of which can be found at the bottom of each page. It’s not a great way to browse. Adding tags could help (maybe a ‘101′ track, or ‘character’ track), but my hunch is that it’s going to take more human work than semantic upgrading to really be worthwhile.¹

Don’t be shy with crazy suggestions. Even if it’s 100 hours worth of work, it’s no challenge to bring in a cadre of film students to implement it.

1. The wiki was supposed to handle some of this, but it has lain fallow for quite a while. ↩

Time spent thinking

My post on the six-hour scene dovetails nicely with this speech by Clay Shirky, which argues that we’re living in an era that’s wrestling with a cognitive surplus:

So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

Where this line of reasoning gets fascinating is when you factor in other ways people spend their surplus, such as television:

Let’s say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That’s about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that is 10,000 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.

I haven’t read Shirky’s book yet, but the article is worth a look.

(Thanks to John Gruber for the link.)

The six-hour scene

I spent the end of last week in Des Moines, where I had a trustees meeting for Drake University. It was also a good excuse for barricading myself in order to get some more pages written on my current project. (The thing I went to Maine to research.)

In How To Write a Scene, I explained my basic process for getting a scene on paper, which consists of looping it in my head, doing a “scribble version,” and then writing up the final thing. But like all workflows, there’s something a little best-case-scenario about the way I described it. So in the interest of myth-busting, I want to explain how some scenes are a lot more work.

(Note that I’m only promising to explain “how,” not explain “why.” After a decade doing this, I’m still sure not why some scenes are exponentially more difficult to write than others. Many times, you don’t see the monsters coming.)

In this case, it took six hours to get one scene written. And it wasn’t, on the surface, a particularly challenging scene: Two characters in a room, talking. A very clear in and out point, with the bookending scenes already written. But it was a beast to get on paper.

In general, when I reach a scene that seems unyielding, I’ll happily skip ahead to write another scene. ¹ But in this case, I knew I needed to crack this scene before writing any others, because it introduced a major character’s primary goal, his cri de coeur that would set the tone for much of the movie. That’s something you don’t get in an outline — the emotional drive. I needed to feel it in order to write any of the major scenes later in the script.

So I needed to write it.

The scene looped in my head pretty well. I could see the basic action, and had a sense of what the characters were saying. But when I tried to do a scribble version, it refused to come together. I had a notepad full of dialogue, mostly just single lines, with arrows trying to arrange them into a meaningful sequence. I spent two hours on the flight to Des Moines trying to make the pieces fit before finally putting it aside.

After writing three comparatively easy scenes, I took another stab at it. I asked some obvious-but-necessary questions:

• Was I starting at the right place?
• Was I ending at the right place?
• Could another character drive the scene?
• Would changing the location help?
• Did it need to be two scenes, rather than one?
• Did the scene even need to exist?

The answers confirmed my frustration: it was the right scene. It was just a bitch to write.

I went back to looping it in my head, and tried to forget about the half-written dialogue. If you’ve ever watched a movie with the sound turned off, that’s basically the effect: you don’t know what they’re saying, but you know they’re saying something. And you can tell what the tone is.

Tone ended up being the variable that needed tweaking. By cranking one character up to a near-manic state, his leaps of thought made a lot more sense. I did a new scribble version on a clean sheet, this time with half the arrows.

On the flight back to Los Angeles, I finally wrote the scene itself. It was still tricky, but it hit all the points in an agreeable way. It felt like a scene you could see used as a clip on a TV review show, in that it embodied the tone and ambition of the story.

So now it’s done, and I can continue on the remaining 60-odd scenes left.

Why screenwriters have it so good

Here’s the thing: You don’t always have six hours to write a single scene. In television, that level of output would get you fired. Even on features, there is real time pressure. Spending six hours on two-and-a-half pages is a luxury problem.

So what do you do if you have to write the scene, and you only have an hour?

You muscle it. A good writer with enough experience can get a version of the scene on paper that will range from unobjectionable to pretty damn good. Particularly on production rewrites, I’ve had to muscle scenes that in a perfect world would have been handled more artfully. But the results aren’t terrible. Given the needs of the director, cast, production and studio, you do the best you can with resources you have. Time is finite. So is mental energy.

But when it’s your own script, you owe yourself the time and effort to let each scene be the best it can be. The first 10 pages of Big Fish took three solid weeks of work. I’m convinced that almost any lesser version would have significantly hurt the movie.

The six-hour scene is now typed up, and I’m happy with it. In the cold light of Courier, I know it still needs tweaking, but I’m pretty confident it will remain in the movie in largely the shape I wrote it. If I’d brute-forced it, I’d always wonder if it was the right scene.

1. Actors and directors generally have to shoot the scene listed on the schedule, whether it suits their mood or not. The writer, working independently, can check his inner barometer and determine which scene would be most fun to write. “Fun” being relative. At some point, all the easy scenes are finished, and it’s only the sight of the finish line that gets those last scenes written. ↩

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