John August

QandA

Writers on art direction and cinematography

Charlie's Angels, QandA

I am a film school student in southern CA, and I just saw
a preview for CHARLIE’S ANGELS. I was very intrigued with the mis-en-scene
of the picture and I wonder: How much influence does the writer (in this case)
have
over the
art direction
and style of photography?

–Anonymous

Well, clearly you’re a film student because you used the term "mis-en-scene."
In the case of CHARLIE’S ANGELS, I was more involved than usual during pre-production because of the overall coolness of the director, McG, and production issues
that would end up affecting the script. So I saw storyboards and got to know
Russell Carpenter, the director of photography. But that’s the exception, rather
than the rule.

In general, a writer doesn’t have a lot of direct input on the art direction
or photographic style of the movie. Unless it’s important, you don’t mention
the color of the walls or whether the light is incandescent or fluorescent.
Not only would all these details piss off the people whose job it is to make
these decisions, they would make your screenplay unreadable.

That said, remember that it is the screenwriter’s job to evoke the experience
of watching the movie through words. Somehow, you have to give a sense of the
visual style of the movie without mentioning it all the time. For instance,
CHARLIE’S ANGELS tweaks a lot of the conventions of the original TV show, with
triptychs and wipes, so when appropriate I included those in the movie. And
the plot itself lent a lot to the visual style, setting it entirely in Southern
California and featuring three beautiful women who go undercover in all sort
of disguises.

How much description is too much? The first time your script visits a location,
you can give a sentence or two to describe it. More if you really have to.
And if a character is wearing something important to the plot, you absolutely
need to describe it.

Copyrighted materials in your script

QandA, Rights and Copyright

I had some questions about copyrighted materials. I
know you have to pay the recording companies for the rights to songs. What
if I have a character singing
Foreigner’s "Urgent" in the shower? Will I get sued?

In the same vein, can I have a character argue the
merits of McDonald’s Big and Tasty or will I have Ronald’s team of lawyers
calling me up? I know different
films have portrayed companies negatively before, most memorable (in my mind)
being RAIN MAN, which had Tom Cruise proclaiming "K-Mart sucks!" But
I don’t know if that was somehow approved by K-Mart or not.

–David Scott

Here’s the difference between writing a screenplay and making a movie: as
the screenwriter, you can do anything you damn well please. You can have your
hero urinating on the Pillsbury Doughboy while smoking crack with Mr. Clean.

Now, when the time comes to actually make the movie, there may be a legal
team offering very cogent arguments for why that can’t happen. The Pillsbury
folks might sue, and even if they wouldn’t win, the threat of a lawsuit might
be deterrence enough. And in the case of Foreigner, they might ask for too
much money. It happens.
But by the time it comes to make the movie, you’ll hopefully have strong producer and director who are so entranced by your brilliant writing that they’ll help
you fight to get your vision on screen. (More likely, they’ll cower and capitulate
and blame other people, but let’s just pretend.)

In short, David, worry about writing the best scenes and not about lawsuits
or song rights.

Split-screen

Formatting, QandA

How would you go about writing two scenes in a script
that run at the same time in split screen, but don’t necessarily have
anything to do with each other? Basically like a scene from the movie
TIMECODE.

–John

That’s a real challenge to do in standard screenplay format. While someone
watching a movie can follow the action happening in multiple sections
of the screen at once, the reader simply can’t. Reading is a left-to-right,
top-to-bottom process. So you’re going to have to figure out another
way to communicate the same idea.

Your approach depends on how crucial the split-screen timing becomes.
For instance, in an earlier draft of the first CHARLIE’S ANGELS, there
was a chase sequence between Alex (Lucy Liu) and the Thin Man (Crispin
Glover), in which they were both trying to get to the roof of the building
in order to reach the satellite dish that Eric Knox was using. The chase
started with the two characters on opposite sides of an iron fence, which
formed the dividing line down the middle of the screen. We then followed
each character on separate, sometimes overlapping paths, as they fought
their way to the roof. Finally, Alex kicked the Thin Man "through" the
center dividing line.

In this example, the exact timing of who-is-where-when was important,
so I chose to write the action as two parallel columns on a horizontal
page. It was a pain in the ass to format, because Final Draft couldn’t
handle it, so each time I printed out the script I had to make sure to
leave blank "filler" pages in which to insert the properly-formatted
side-by-side pages. Still, it was a fun challenge.

Ultimately, the split-screen stuff was dropped and the sequence became
about Alex and the Thin Man kicking the crap out of each other.
For TIMECODE, Mike Figgis apparently didn’t work off a traditional screenplay
at all. The entire movie was rehearsed and reshot more than a dozen times.
To figure out who-is-where-when, Figgis used musical score sheets.

For your script, since the two sides don’t necessarily have anything
to do with each other, I would recommend writing the scenes out straight.
If it’s important to indicate to the reader that certain scenes are playing
side-by-side, just put a note in parentheses in the first line of a scene’s
description. It’s not a perfect solution, but in most cases that’s as
straightfoward as you’re going to get.

Characters w/ multiple names

Formatting, QandA

I have a character name question. Without giving anything away, I wrote a
screenplay that involves one character that has to use two names during the
duration of the script. You could probably say the same for when Superman or
Batman are Clark Kent or Bruce Wayne. What I was doing was just using the name
that the character is at that time.
My question is – am I right? I figured since I give an explanation a head
of time, that I could easily just call the character by his name or alias,
and there would be no confusion.

–Andy

You’re right in assuming that the most important thing is to avoid confusing
the reader. Every script finds its own way of doing things, so there’s no hard
and fast rule. If I were writing the next BATMAN, I suspect I would call use "Bruce
Wayne" when refering to the awkward billionaire, and "Batman" when
refering to the Caped Crusader. In a movie like this, the two different versions
of the character rarely appear in the same scene, so it would probably be less
confusing.

In the case of a movie like TOOTSIE, I’ve never read the original script,
but I suspect that when Dustin Hoffman’s character is dressed as either a man
or a woman, the script refers to him as Michael. When he’s in drag, his dialogue
headers probably read like, "MICHAEL (as DOROTHY)" to make it clear
which persona he’s playing at the time.

In the case of a movie like FIGHT CLUB (warning, spoilers
follow), since
the reveal that Brad Pitt and Edward Norton are actually the same person comes
so late in the story, you would obviously treat them like two completely separate
people.