John August

Story and Plot

Women in film

Film Industry, Story and Plot

Screenwriters: Think back over the scripts you’ve written, and ask yourself three questions about each one:

1. Are there two or more female characters with names?
2. Do they talk to each other?
3. If they talk to each other, do they talk about something other than a man?

This is the Bechdel test, [first articulated](http://alisonbechdel.blogspot.com/2005/08/rule.html) by cartoonist Alison Bechdel and amended by others over the years. ((The origin of the test is complicated, and very Googleable.)) You’d think it would be a very low bar to climb over. You’d be surprised.

Let’s be clear: many, many great movies don’t pass this test, and many terrible movies do. It’s not even a particularly good gauge for determining a film’s feminist content; Transformers 2 meets the requirement because Megan Fox receives a compliment on her hair.

So if this rule doesn’t necessarily speak to quality or content, what’s the point? My friend Beth, who took all the women’s studies classes I never did and therefore yawns at the mention of this old axiom, would argue it’s meaningless checkbox-marking.

But for screenwriters, I think it’s still fascinating. After all, we’re the ones who ultimately put characters in scenes together.

Looking back through my movies, I’m struck by how rarely the female characters actually do talk to each other. In Big Fish, it’s only a brief moment with Sandra and Josephine. In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, it’s a throwaway moment between Violet and Veruca. Titan A.E. fails the test unless you know that the alien Stith is technically female.

In each of these cases, I had to spend a few minutes just to come up with these (admittedly slight) examples.

Also, I find it fascinating that the Reverse Bechdel Test is almost meaningless. Pretty much every movie made includes two named male characters talking about something other than a woman.

Does acknowledging the situation change anything? Maybe. I’ll certainly ask myself these questions about future scripts. For now, my upcoming projects all seem to pass, but they have a familiar paradigm: a single main female who mostly interacts with the men in the story.

Writing from theme

QandA, Story and Plot, Writing Process

questionmarkI’m a produced screenwriter, repped at a big agency. I work regularly, just had a movie released to good reviews, and am fairly confident when talking about the craft. And so it is with some professional embarrassment (and using a pseudonym–he he) that I admit I am plagued by what seems like a rather rudimentary question.

Long ago someone I trust read a script of mine. Something was missing from this script, I knew it, I felt it, I couldn’t quite figure out what it was. I read it and re-read it. Structurally it seemed fine, scene by scene it felt like it was working, the dialogue was tight, the characters well drawn. I took it apart and put it back to together again a couple of times. That missing thing was still missing.

So I gave the script to this trusted person and this trusted person read it and gave me this advice: WRITE FROM THEME. Okay. Now, that sounds very simple. And maybe it is for clever people like you. But I don’t seem capable of integrating this approach into my writing. And the reason, I’ve decided, is because I don’t really know what it means — at least in any practical sense.

Complicating matters further, a friend of mine, a better writer than I will ever be, the late novelist Lucy Grealy, shrugged off the notion of writing from theme. We were sitting in an airport bar drinking beer and I said, hey, so, do you write from theme? No, said she without hesitation, tell the story honestly and its theme will emerge. Trying to impose theme on story gives the story an agenda. She accented the word agenda with a dubious little rise in her voice.

Ten years later, as I sit down to write, wishing I were better than I am, hoping the next script will be the one where everything finally clicks and art is achieved, I hear a voice in my head saying, Write from Theme. Write from Theme.

Please make the voices stop, John. Do you write from theme? If so, how?

— JT
Los Angeles

“Theme” is a word screenwriters use without defining it clearly, so yes, it’s bound to be frustrating. But I’m not sure we should be using it at all.

In high school, we were taught that a theme is usually about opposing forces, e.g. “man vs. nature” or “the struggle for independence.” I don’t know that this kind of analysis is all that useful when you’re talking about a screenplay, however. It’s helpful for writing an essay *about* a movie, not for writing the movie itself.

I suspect what your pro-theme writer friends were talking about was some essence that permeates every moment of a good film. Something that’s in its DNA. You feel it when it’s there, and notice it when it’s missing — even when the script otherwise seems solid.

Think back to one of your favorite movies. Chances are, you could pick any moment in it, and it would “feel like” the movie. That is, you could take that little slice of it, plant it in some cinematic soil, and it would grow into something resembling the original.

My favorite movie is Aliens, and it meets this test easily. Pull out any sequence — even before Ripley has agreed to join the mission — and it would grow into a story that fits its universe.

I don’t know that “theme” is really the best word for this DNA quality I’m describing. But I think it’s what we mean when we say it.

Theme as the essential idea
—-

At the Austin Film Festival this year, I’ll be doing a detailed breakdown of Big Fish and my process writing it. Back in 1998, while trying to convince Sony to buy the book rights for me, I had a lot of conversations about “what it was about.” Not the plot, really, but what the point of it all was. I talked about the difference between *what is true and what is real.*

I don’t know that I ever articulated it quite that way, but this was definitely the underlying idea that informed every moment and every character in the script. And for most of my projects, I can point to the DNA ideas:

* Charlie’s Angels: Three princesses must save their father, the King.
* Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: Charlie Bucket was lucky even without the ticket, because he was surrounded by family who loved him.
* The Remnants: The end of the world isn’t so bad.
* Snake People: Mother is a monster.
* The Variant: You are still your younger self.
* The Nines: A creator’s responsibility to his creations.
* Go: You cross a line, then your only way out is to accelerate.

For the first four projects, I remember saying these things aloud before I started writing. For the others, I probably didn’t. But I could definitely feel the edges of their core ideas before I put pen to paper. I won’t start writing until I know it.

When you really understand a project’s DNA, it’s much easier to write and rewrite. You know exactly what types of scenes, moments and lines of dialogue belong in your movie, and which don’t.

Every scene in your screenplay can change, but it still feels like the movie.

I think one reason movies with multiple writers often feel disjointed is because the writers aren’t working from the same DNA. They might agree on “what it’s about,” but they’re never going to emotionally approach it the same way. They can’t.

TV series, which by necessity have a bunch of writers, benefit from having a few filmed and finished episodes to create a baseline. We all know what an episode of Friends is supposed to feel like. But those first few scripts? Those can be brutal, and it often takes a lot of rewriting from the showrunner.

From that point on, “theme” is often what drives a given episode — storylines will radiate out from an abstract idea like “hope” or “false promises.” All shows work differently, but if you peek in a writers’ room, you’ll often find a theme word written high on the whiteboard, circled a few times.

Theme as a shibboleth
—-

Like “structure,” I see theme thrown around as a term meant to separate artists from hacks. So my eyes generally narrow when someone uses it, because I’m not sure exactly what they mean, or why they’re using it.

One screenwriting teacher made us state the theme of our scripts as a question. Which was difficult and, in my opinion, pointless.

The alternate version I’m positing above — the core idea or DNA — is practical and actionable. Once you feel confident what your unwritten movie wants to be, you make sure every scene and character and line of dialogue services that ideal. That’s the work of screenwriting, and it’s hard, to be sure.

But if you don’t pick a target, you’re unlikely to hit anything worthwhile.

Screenwriting and the problem of evil

Projects, Story and Plot, Writing Process

One of the joys of screenwriting is putting childhood terrors into words. The screenplay I’m currently writing has monsters. Not werewolves and vampires (as my last three have had), but otherworldly forces of darkness and destruction.

In this case, the heroes’ goals are relatively straightforward, but the antagonists’ agenda is — by dint of their nature — extraordinarily bleak.

So what’s challenging for this script has been writing against a backdrop of indifferent oblivion. Nihilism is not a crowd-pleaser.

Bad isn’t that bad
—–

In most movies, the villain isn’t really “evil” — he’s just at cross-purposes with the hero. Darth Vader does not perceive himself to be doing wrong. The queen in Aliens is protecting her brood. The shark in Jaws is, well, a shark. ((Never forget, every villain is a hero.))

The villains/monsters of most films can be found to have one or more of the following motivations:

1. Self-preservation
2. Propagation
3. Protection of an important asset
4. Hunger/Greed
5. Revenge

I’ve ranked these on a scale from “least evil” to “closest to evil.”

A monster acting in its own defense might be terrifying, but it’s morally understandable. A spurned lover on a killing spree steps closer to the big E, but it’s still relatable to normal human emotions. We’ve all lashed out irrationally, though to less fatal degrees.

A sixth motivation is something I’ll call bloodlust/sociopathy. The villain’s actions serve no direct need; bloodlust is its own motivation. Slasher films often fall back on this. Jason Voorhees wants to kill you *just because.*

As an audience, it’s unsettling. It feels genuinely Evil.

Slasher films usually have one bad guy. What happens when the whole world is similarly bloodthirsty?

Some movies dip their toes into this big pool of bleakness. [Zombie class situations](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2009/zombie-class-situations), for one. Even if you survive this one moment, do you really want to live in a world overrun by the living dead?

And then there are robots. One could argue the machines of both the Terminator and Matrix franchises are acting out of self-preservation in terms of why they come after the hero. But their greater agenda for enslaving humankind is kind of murky, [even if we make good batteries](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2009/matrix-needs-humans).

They seem intent on wiping us out *just because,* the treads of their war machines crushing our blackened skulls.

Making oblivion cinematic
—–

The villains I’m writing fall somewhere in between zombies and robots: more sentient than the shambling dead, but less purposeful than Skynet. The challenge has been figuring out how to articulate What They Want in a way that makes sense in a popcorn movie.

If I were writing a junior-year philosophy paper, I’d be able to fold in some Nietzsche and Sartre quotes and call it a day. But that won’t play at 24 frames per second. It needs to be satisfying without external support. So I’m left to look for parallels in other successful movies.

* What do Satanic cultists hope to achieve?
* Why does Hannibal Lecter eat people?
* If Sauron won, what would Middle Earth become?

In looking for my answer, I’m trying to be careful not to explain away the darkness. Or to humanize it. There’s something compelling about evil with the indifference of an earthquake or a tidal wave.

The closest I’ve come is an ant’s perspective of eight-year-old boys, smashing and destroying without apparent motivation or qualm. Scale that up, and it feels like a movie. But not an easy one to write.

How to logline a dual-plot story

Big Fish, Go, Projects, QandA, Story and Plot

questionmarkWhat is the best way to write a short logline for a screenplay with dual storylines, especially if both storylines are crucial to the telling of the story?

I feel like scripts with multiple storylines (3+ stories) like Pulp Fiction or Crash can rely on simple loglines that get across the overall theme of the story. But what about scripts with two distinct storylines that parallel one another…do you pack both storylines into the logline? Or do you pick one and focus the on it?

— Mac
Los Angeles

Some movies are really difficult to logline. Go is one. When forced to give a short description, I try to chart the three main threads: “It’s about a really tiny drug deal, a wild night in Vegas and two soap opera actors — all of which cross paths at LA’s underground rave scene.”

Again, not great. But it gets the job done.

For something like Big Fish, I make the parallel structure clear: “It’s the story of a man’s life, told the way he remembers it: full of wild, impossible exaggerations. At the same time, his grown son is trying to separate the truth from the fantasy before his dad dies.”

Julie and Julia has dual storylines, yet summarizes easily: “It’s the story of a young woman determined to cook her way through Julia Child’s famous cookbook, intercut with the adventures of Julia Child’s life.”

If both plotlines are key to your story, you need to make that clear in the logline. Otherwise, you risk future readers feeling like you bait-and-switched them.