John August

Charlie

Simple is better than accurate

Charlie, Projects, Words on the page

A story in today’s LA Times about chocolate-making got me thinking about Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and an error I deliberately introduced. Early in the tour of the factory, Wonka says…

  • WONKA
  • The cocoa bean happens to be the thing from which chocolate is made.

    • Wrong. The right word is cacao — it’s not cocoa until it’s partially processed, and as a globe-trotting master chocolatier, Wonka would certainly use the right word. And in the book, Roald Dahl does:

    The cacao bean, which grows on the cacao tree, happens to be the thing from which chocolate is made. You cannot make chocolate without the cacao bean. The cacao bean is chocolate. I myself use billions of cacao beans every week in this factory.

    So why change it? Why be wrong?

    Because cacao is a weird word. It’s sounds like it’s supposed to be funny, but it’s not actually funny in context. Then Wonka uses the word six times in the scene. You generally repeat funny things, so when you repeat something that wasn’t funny to begin with, the stench of failed joke begins to waft in.

    Worse, cacao is confusing. It demands explanation, but the explanation isn’t particularly rewarding. As the audience, we don’t really want to learn about chocolate. We want to see bad things happen to terrible children.

    Cocoa is a synonym for hot chocolate, so it seems reasonable that you’d make chocolate from cocoa beans. For the movie version, changing “cacao” to “cocoa” made it easier to focus on the point of the scene (a flashback to Wonka meeting the Oompa-Loompas), and concentrate on finding things that were actually funny. It’s wrong, but it’s right.

    And that’s true in this general rule:

    In screenwriting, simplicity should almost always trump accuracy.

    I’m going to break that statement down into parts so that it doesn’t get misconstrued.

    In screenwriting — I’m only talking about writing for film and television, stories that race ahead at 24 frames per second, give or take. In novels and playwriting, the writer has the time and opportunity to be far more precise and thorough. And in journalism, accuracy is a fundamental responsibility. The journalist’s challenge is to make that accuracy comprehensible to the readership.

    simplicity — Simplicity is not the same as idiocy, or pandering. If you’re making a thriller set in the world of international espionage, you can’t have the computer expert “dial in” to something. We need to believe that the expert is an expert, that security is difficult, and yet be able to understand roughly what he’s doing. Consider the crew in the first two Alien movies. We don’t know how their spaceships work, but it’s easy to follow what they’re working on.

    should almost always trump — Sometimes, the complicated-but-accurate version is more rewarding than the simple version, so be wary of smoothing out all the wrinkles. And screenwriters aren’t absolved of societal responsibility, either. For example, the pilot episode of Eli Stone had a plotline about childhood vaccines that was widely criticized for its inaccuracies. If there wasn’t time in the episode for a more thorough exploration of the issue, another case should have been substituted, because what remained was inflammatory and (debatably) dangerous.

    accuracy — In archery and life, accuracy is measured by how close you come to the target. For movies and television, the target is pretty wide. Looking back at the derivative challenge, it was more important to give a sense of why derivatives exist than explain exactly what they were. For a medical drama, we’ve come to accept a certain amount of time compression, allowing characters to recover from surgery in much less time than they actually would. But if a character became pregnant and gave birth in the same day, we’d protest. That’s not just inaccurate, it’s implausible, and plausibility is a much higher standard.

    Granted, even plausibility takes a back seat in Charlie. (c.f. Great Glass Elevator)

    Rethinking motivation

    Big Fish, Charlie, Projects, So-Called Experts, Words on the page, Writing Process

    I’m in the planning stages of my next project, which is honestly my favorite part of the writing process. There’s no emotional cost to killing unwritten scenes, no niggling logic flaws, no exhaustion at page 72.

    Plotting a movie is mostly figuring out who the characters are, and what obstacles they’ll face. In film school, we were taught to look at character motivation as the combination of two questions:1

    1. What does the character want?
    2. What does the character need?

    The implication is that your characters should be able to articulate what they want (true love, the championship, revenge) at or near the start of the movie, but remain clueless to what they truly need (self-respect, forgiveness, literacy) until quite late in the story.

    The screenwriter-creator leaves explicit prayers unanswered, but performs subtle psychological revelation so that the characters exit profoundly changed.

    Like most screenwriting hackery, this want-vs-need concept works just often enough to seem useful. You can trot out the familiar examples. Every character in The Wizard of Oz can be addressed this way (the Scarecrow wants a brain, but needs to realize just how smart he is). Ditto for The Sound of Music, though it gets a bit vague amid the younger Von Trapps.

    Of my films, Big Fish and Charlie and Chocolate Factory come closest to fitting this template, though it requires a bit of hammering to get there. In Big Fish, Will Bloom begins the movie wanting to find the truth in his father’s tales, but he ultimately needs to accept that his father is contained within these tales. In Charlie, Willy Wonka wants an heir, but needs a family.2

    Bolstered by these two examples, I spent a few hours this week looking at the characters in my project through the want-vs-need lens, before finally concluding it is complete and utter bullshit. Trying to distinguish between characters’ wants and needs is generally frustrating and almost universally pointless. The fact that I can answer the question for Big Fish and Charlie after the fact doesn’t make it a meaningful planning tool.

    I’ve written about character motivation a few times, but hadn’t thought it necessary to define my objectives. But I think it can be simplified down to a single question:

    Why is the character doing what he’s doing?

    Here’s what I like about this definition:

    • It scales well. You can ask this question about a character in a specific scene (“Why is he trying to get in the bank vault?”) or the entire movie (“Why is he racing in the Iditarod?”)

    • It implies visible action. Characters in movies need to do something. That sounds obvious, but you’d be surprised how many scripts slather motivation on like spackle to fill the holes. ( “He has OCD because his father abandoned him.” Umm, okay, so why is he robbing a bank?)

    • It can be both concrete and psychological. In Go, why is Ronna trying to make the drug deal with Todd Gaines? (A) Because she’s about to be evicted. (B) To prove to her friends (and herself) that she can. Both are true.

    When I started asking this question, many of my concerns with the project I’m writing slipped away. The problem wasn’t character motivation, but how I was looking for it.

    That said, you need to be careful not to stop at the first easy answer: Why is he racing in the Iditarod? “To win the prize money.” The better answer will likely lead to a better story. Why is he racing in the Iditarod? “To beat his ex-wife, the five-time champion.” “To catch the man who killed his brother.” “Because the ghost of his childhood dog is haunting him.”

    For the record, I’m not writing Snow Dogs 4.

    1. My recollection is that these ideas are featured in Syd Field, but I’m not inclined to look it up, for fear of sparking of an enraged tangent about how damaging I think most screenwriting books are. ↩
    2. Charlie Bucket *wants* a Golden Ticket, but *needs*…well, Charlie doesn’t really need anything, which is another argument for why Wonka is the protagonist, and Charlie the antagonist. ↩

    Charlie on ABC

    Asides, Charlie, Projects

    In the U.S., ABC will be “network television premiering” Charlie and the Chocolate Factory on Saturday, Feb. 9th. Theatrical movies aren’t showing up on free television much anymore, but Charlie should work well. It falls into TV act breaks fairly naturally.

    Publicity 101

    Big Fish, Charlie, Film Industry, Follow Up, News

    Last night, the Writers Guild Foundation held a panel discussion about publicity. I was one of the panelists, but I ended up learning a fair amount myself.

    For example, according to a Variety editor, it’s perfectly okay for a screenwriter to pick up the phone and call a writer at the trades when you’ve sold a project.1 It’s strange: in this blog, I’m constantly telling aspiring screenwriters to stop asking for permission and just do what they want to do. But I honestly wouldn’t be ballsy enough to call an unknown writer at the trades to do this.

    Chris Day, who runs publicity for my agency (UTA) brought with him a memo I’d written in the Big Fish era. At his suggestion, I was meeting with publicists, and had listed my goals and messages.2 I promised attendees at the panel that I would find the original memo and post a .pdf of it. So here it is: Big Fish publicity goals.

    One of the questions that came from the audience–but probably should have started out the evening–was, What is the point of publicity, exactly? Most of us aren’t looking to be famous per se, and unlike a novelist, our names alone aren’t going to be selling books.

    The Writers Guild Foundation stresses that any time a screenwriter gets press, that helps all screenwriters. And to some degree, that’s true. There are no famous screenwriters, but it would be nice if the general public had some sense that movies are actually written, and that the actors aren’t making up their dialogue.

    But I’d say the main reason to think about publicity is to help the movies and TV shows you’re involved with. The screenwriter tends to know more about the story than anyone else on the project, so you can be a crucial resource as journalists figure out how to write about the plot. I’ve attended a half-dozen junkets, and have rarely seen myself directly quoted. But I recognize a lot of what I’ve said in the stories that are written. If I can help create a consistent, positive message, then I’ve done my job.

    The other reason to think about publicity is in terms of your overall career. I have no doubt that I’ve gotten meetings with certain directors and actors because of repeated exposure to my name. It’s nice if someone likes Big Fish. It’s even better if they remember I wrote it. Every time a news story includes the phrase, “…August, whose credits include Big Fish, Corpse Bride and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory…” that’s like refreshing the cache on someone’s internal IMDb.

    1. Announcements like this run all the time (c.f. Shazam!). It has to be legit, of course. Optioning a script to your roommate, who is an aspiring producer-slash-drummer, doesn’t count. ↩
    2. I was an advertising major, so this kind of publicity-speak comes naturally. ↩