One story to bind them all... But that's not necessarily a good thing

Last year, Cosby and Major Dad writer/creator Earl Pomerantz bemoaned the general state of American movies on his excellent blog, and more especially because they always tell the same story. It's either 'somebody wants something and gets it' or 'somebody wants something and goes mad'.

Of course, mr. Pomerantz nuances this blanket statement (there are movies in which the protagonist doesn't get his wish, and these are his favourites), but there's more than a little truth in his statement. The underlying story structure of most American films has become extremely uniform over the past two or three decades.

And that underlying story structure is the Hero's Journey.

For those screenwriting enthusiasts who lived on Mars for the last thirty years or who never opened a book beyond Field or McKee: The Hero's Journey is the screenwriting structure developed by Christopher Vogler, who based it on Joseph Campbell's classic The Hero With The Thousand Faces.

Basically, it's about the process of becoming an adult: the hero leaves his home, ventures into the unknown world, is challenged and returns to his home transformed, an adult who adds something to society.
It's a fictionalized representation of the ritual of adulthood, which in primitive societies generally takes place when puberty occurs.

Now, I'm not criticizing the Hero's Journey: it's a story archetype which works, and which appeals to psychological mechanisms and processes in everybody's mental make-up.

Yet there is far more to life than moving from childhood to adulthood.

There are countless stories to tell about the challenges of adulthood, about the slow decline when middle-age sets in, and about old age and facing one's mortality. In James Bonnett's Stealing Fire From The Gods, all of these story types are placed on a story wheel, divided into quadrants. It shows very clearly how much more story material is available to screenwriters.

And these stories were more prevalent in the past (and are also found more often in the films of other countries). For some reason, though, the Hero's Journey model has pushed all others aside.

One of the reasons for this may be that it's the only story structure of its type that is commonly known and described so exhaustively. Bonnet's book is very inspiring and, in its second edition, also attempts to provide practical models of the kind, but the fact remains that Vogler's rightly famous manual is extremely effective in fixing the Hero's Journey model in the reader's mind - and in making it immediately applicable.

Secondly, the whole character arc concept which is so prevalent in screenwriting theory (and which every teacher, myself included, imparts to their pupils), always implies an evolution in the main character. Something is missing in their life, and through their experiences, the flaw is healed. No matter what the genre, this is the 'genetic blueprint' for just about every film protagonist since the '80s - although Bruce Willis in Die Hard 4 and Shia Leboeuf in Transformers had no character arcs to speak of.

In both these cases, the lack of an arc is a weakness: John McClane feels stale, now, and Leboeuf's character is so bland it beggars belief. There are other characters, though, who do not need an arc. James Bond (pre-Brosnan) is the best example. Here is a man who is complete, who has flaws he will never be able to overcome (compulsive womanizer, snob, sometimes overconfident, impulsive). Yet his talents more than outweigh these weaknesses. Similarly, Indiana Jones, Sherlock Holmes, Dirty Harry etc. are characters who are what they are. Their flaws are part of their appeal, and they do not need to 'learn' in order to be effective and entertaining. What is important though, is that they are portrayed with enough multi-dimensionality when they first appear, so they come alive to the audience and create a very strong impression - an impression which overshadows the details of the actual narrative.

This is a huge topic and I've only touched on the surface - I may return to it later to investigate certain points more deeply. What I would like you to take away from reading this is the following: the Hero's Journey is but one story model, which is ideally suited to (many) screen stories, but not all of them. Investigate the alternatives. Learn to fit the structural model to the content of the story, as form and content are one. One size might fit many, but it does not fit all.

A surefire way to fix your scene

Sometimes a scene doesn't work, but you can't put your finger on why. There's conflict, there's a goal, a protagonist and an antagonist, a climax... And still it won't come to life.

The best way I know to tackle this problem is the following, which was taught in my postgraduate screenwriting course by a British script-editor/writer/teacher (and now also drama therapist) called Charlie Moritz. You do need at least one partner for this technique, which makes it perfect for classroom/workshop situations, or when you're working with a regular writing partner.

Basically, the technique is this: you act out the scene, but you let go of the written dialogue - and you take care to notice your natural reactions/impulses in the situation. Do you turn away at a certain point? Does it feel unnatural to skip to a different subject? Do you want to get closer to the other character in the scene, or conversely try to escape their presence? Body language is extremely important here. Often you will physically realize that a certain gesture or action described in the script just isn't right. In this way, you will instinctively be able to determine where the scene starts to go off the rails.

Once you've done this, you can now try to integrate your natural reaction to the events within the scene into the rewrite. Sometimes this will be very easy - a simple refocussing, adding or deleting a scene beat, or taking more time to register a certain (re)action may be enough.

But in other cases, you may be faced with the fact that your natural impulsive reaction totally contradicts what the scene is supposed to convey. And if you're really unlucky, this may have serious repercussions for the script in its entirety.

Nevertheless, the natural reaction is always truthful, and that is extremely important in screenwriting. So paying attention to this truth is highly recommended.

Now, some people may object that this is all well and good, but all you've done is discover your own impulsive reactions. And the character in the scene is a totally different and separate character from the writer!

That's why it's important to translate what you've discovered about your own truth to the character and their situation. Combining your natural reaction with the psychological make-up of your character can lead to discovering a different, perhaps surprising way to get the same story point across.

In any case, you will now be able to rewrite your scene starting from truthful human behaviour, rather than from 'unreal' imaginings which have no discernible basis in psychological reality.

Getting To Know You

Make sure you know who your characters are before you unleash them on the audience.



A couple of years ago, I was involved as script-editor in the creation of a new Flemish comedy series called Urbain. Starring Flanders’ best-known comedian, Urbanus, the series’ premise was a fictitious look at the home life of the comedian. When his wife decides to go back to work, he agrees to look after the kids, helped and hindered by his mother, brother-in-law/manager and his young female chauffeur. Though Urbanus had made a few films and several TV series, he’d never been involved with a sitcom before. As we developed the scripts, one major problem quickly arose which never got solved satisfactorily. The secondary characters never gelled. Urbain’s mother was borderline demented in one episode, sharp-witted and romantically hyperactive in the next. His brother-in-law fancied the chauffeur one moment, and ignored her the next; his relationship with Urbain was never clearly defined, and his central comedic archetype remained maddeningly vague. Despite my best efforts, it proved impossible to get a consensus on these matters. Though ratings weren’t a disaster, the series never found its audience, and a second series never materialized. The reasons for its lack of success were many, but the lack of strongly defined characters certainly didn’t help matters.




It’s not just fairly obscure Belgian sitcoms which suffer from this problem, though. Not Going Out, the new BBC comedy series starring stand-up comedians Lee Mack and Tim Vine, is in exactly the same boat. Now, this show has been successful (series three has been ordered), and it’s a great vehicle for Mack’s stand-up persona. But in series one, Lee’s flatmate and potential love interest Kate (Megan Dodds) was funny, level-headed, and self-assured one moment, humour-impaired, insecure and frankly insane the next (she sincerely tries to turn a dog into a vegetarian, for instance). In season two, Kate was replaced by career-girl Lucy (Sally Bretton), Tim’s younger sister, who moves in with Lee but quickly falls in love with the much older Guy (Simon Dutton). Once again, both characters are ill-defined. Guy is the worst offender : in his introductory episode he’s thought to be gay (he isn’t, but does hang around in a gay club in the afternoon), later he’s discovered to be the owner of a lapdance club (as well as being a successful ‘ordinary’ businessman), and finally he’s sinister enough to be thought a gangster. Simon Dutton struggles manfully with the part, but it’s a relief all around when Lucy (arbitrarily) dumps him in the final episode of season 2. Lucy’s love for Guy is equally unfounded – at no time during the series do we get the feeling that her emotions are based on anything but the dramatic need for there to be an obstacle between her and Lee.

So what are the underlying causes for this phenomenon? I think there are two main offenders:

1) Placing plot before character. The writer(s) come up with a really funny situation for the lead character, and the secondary character is then forced into a role which allows that situation to occur. Two good examples from Not Going Out, season two: in the aforementioned episode which introduces Guy, Lucy and Lee have to think he’s gay. This is so that Lee can pretend to be gay as well in order to go to football matches with Guy as his ‘date’. Guy spends much of the episode ‘testing’ Lee to see whether he’s faking his sexual orientation or not. But since Guy isn’t gay, what does he care if Lee is ‘honestly’ homosexual? What’s really going on is that Lee having to pretend to be gay is a powerful comedic situation. Unfortunately, Guy’s integrity as a character is sacrificed in order to get to the funny stuff. In a later episode Lucy suddenly decides to open an art gallery – just so that Lee can pretend to be an expert and give her disastrous buying advice, which she then foolishly takes. Just for the record, I like Not Going Out, which is one of the only good mainstream UK sitcoms of recent years. It’s just that these weaknesses in characterization keep it from becoming an all-time classic.

2) ‘Fear of commitment’. Once you decide how your characters act and think, a lot of avenues are closed off. And yes, there will be ideas which can no longer be implemented, and yes, sometimes that will be regrettable. But the benefits of clearly defining your characters far outweigh these minor annoyances. Not only are you able to create better plots, which flow from the nature of your characters and therefore are more truthful and affecting, but you will also allow the actor playing the role to really bring the character fully to life. Otherwise, they will have to interpret the role and make some personal choices which might not be good for the script – or for the series as a whole.

How do you remedy this situation, once it occurs? Put the character first. Forget about plots and situations, make sure that you arrive at a psychological profile that makes sense and is multi-layered. In certain cases, you will be able to use what’s written already to help you out. Maybe it’s disjointed, but try to find a psychological model which makes sense out of what you already have. Then it’s a question of filling in the blanks, or finding a basic motivation or contradiction within the character which creates the necessary guiding framework. You may even find that what seems an incoherent mess actually already holds the seeds of the solution within it.



As an example from my own experience: when I rejoined FC De Kampioenen as script-editor after having been away for several years, I was faced with a new character, Maurice, whom I didn't understand at all. The actor playing the character, Tuur De Weerdt, an excellent thespian with a very broad range, managed to make the character work on screen, but nevertheless Maurice was not defined well enough for me to know how he should be used in the storylines. He was polite, lived with a very domineering mother, belonged to the nobility but kept this hidden, and knew everything about anything (sort of a Cliff Clavin who actually got his facts right). He was also deliberatly designed to be mysterious, but the core of his mystery was not known. And this was the main problem: at the heart of the character was an empty space, waiting to be filled.

So we did a brainstorm about Maurice, talking through the several options and trying to find a framework which made all the disparate elements fall into place. The most recent script in which Maurice was featured had him participate in a beer-tasting competition: he knew everything there was to know about the different types of beer but refused to drink any. Once he was forced to, he immediately lost all inhibitions and became roaring drunk.

Using this incident as a springboard, we decided that Maurice used to be a hell-raising playboy when he was young, who managed to lose the family fortune at the roulette table. Feeling guilty, he consciously suppressed his wild side, let his mother dominate him to keep hem in check, and became the opposite of the bad boy he had been before. However, the darkness was still inside him, and in order to satisfy his hunger for intoxicating experiences, he started to read and study voraciously. His encyclopedic knowledge about every topic known to man stemmed from his attempts to experience the fullness of life at one remove.

Once we knew this, it opened up a lot of possibilities. We gave Maurice a dormant gambling addiction, it was revealed he was a frequent visitor of a brothel - where he did nothing but talk to the girls, and he also showed traces of obsessive-compulsive behaviour, an externalization of his need to keep his 'dark side' under control. As a character, Maurice was brought into focus, and every writer now knew what made him tick exactly. And best of all, the new character description still allowed us enormous leeway. We didn't really close off any options, the character was far richer than before and the comedic options increased exponentially.

And in case you're wondering: the audience doesn't know about this backstory at all (though at some point it may be revealed if an episode asks for it). They don't need it to enjoy the character. But for writers, directors and actors, this type of clarity is absolutely essential.

A Blast From The Past 1 reviews of The Comic Toolbos and Which Lie Did I Tell?

In this feature I'll be posting articles and reviews I've written for Screentalk, the now-defunct magazine for screenwriters which began as an ezine and now has become the very excellent Moviescope magazine. Where necessary, they will be expanded and/or updated from the original version.

Today, a few book reviews to get us going:

Anyone who intends to pursue a career in writing comedy would do very well to check out John Vorhaus’ The Comic Toolbox : How To Be Funny Even If You’re Not ( 191 p., Silman-James Press, ). Within this tome the aspiring humourist will find tips and pointers on everything from thinking up silly names to developing a sitcom script.

Vorhaus adopts a very hands-on approach : no other manual I know has captured the flavour of being in a real-world workshop as well as this one. The exercises (of which there are MANY) are part of the text, and the author encourages his readers to do each and every one of them (even pretending to wait around while they’re working on the assignments). As such, anyone can be sure that after having worked through this book, their humour skills will have increased significantly.

The book starts off with a definition of what humour is (see the previous post), and then goes on to explore such topics as developing comic characters, developing comic premises and storylines, and explaining comedy tools which are a part of every pro’s repertoire. The wealth of information is astounding. Moreover, Vorhaus is really concerned about increasing the creativity of his audience, and to get everything off to a good start he offers some very effective ways of silencing the inner critic which so many writers struggle with.

Though it dates from 1994, this book has stood the test of time admirably. And Vorhaus is actually funny throughout the book, making it a delight to read and proving beyond any doubt he knows what he’s talking about. Highly recommended!



Which Lie Did I Tell, William Goldman's semi-sequel to Adventures In The Screen Trade, is a fairly unique hybrid of autobiography and screenwriting manual.
The book is divided in four parts : an overview of Goldman's career from 1980 onwards (when the phone stopped ringing for years), a detailed look at some of his favourite scenes ranging from Bergman to the Farrelly brothers, a section on what makes good cinematic stories and an original screenplay which he developed for the book and then sent out to his peers to critique.

Some of the material in the first section has been available before in the introduction of some of Goldman’s published screenplays for Applause Books, but it is still an interesting read. One does sense that he is more angered and embittered by the Hollywood game now than twenty years ago. In the second part Goldman presents his favourite scenes (excerpted in full) and then explains his reasons for liking them and giving some tips and pointers along the way on why these scenes work. However, the approach is not clinically analytical, but highly personal. The emphasis is not so much on the actual writing as on the emotional links Goldman has with the presented examples.

The third part of the book becomes more hands-on. Goldman offers four story ideas, mostly based on real events, and shares his thoughts on whether they would make good movies and what challenges an adaptation of this material would pose. Here the book becomes more inspiring and actively stimulates the imagination of the reader.

Finally, Goldman lets us peek over his shoulder as he writes a new script. Actually, he only develops it half-way through, but this is still a unique opportunity for the reader to experience the creative process of a world-famous professional.

Now, for some bizarre reason screenplays or treatments developed for screenwriting manuals are generally execrably bad. Amazingly, Goldman’s offering, The Big A (for adventure), is equally dismal. The story of a divorced private eye who trains his two horribly precocious kids (who just happen to be the world’s greatest sketch artist and actress, respectively) in surveillance techniques, is wildly implausible, uninvolving and weak in characterization. Don’t take my word for it - this is the conclusion that all of Goldman’s peers come to as well, and they include the Farrelly brothers, Scott Frank and Callie Khouri, among others. It has to be said that it’s quite brave and honest of Goldman to include these negative reviews of his work. In a way, this part of the book is very reassuring to novice writers : even the biggest names in the business can produce sub-standard work, and wrestle with the same problems as we lesser mortals. I would have preferred to witness the birth of a new masterpiece, though.

Which Lie Did I Tell is somewhat schizophrenic : it doesn’t seem to know whether it’s pitched primarily at a general audience or at screenwriting students and pros. This means that there is less meat to it than one could wish for, while a general reader might want the focus to be exclusively on Hollywood horror stories. Still, it does contain a fair amount of worthwhile information and illustrates how Hollywood changed in the last three decades. It is also very readable, although I must confess that near the end I began to tire of Goldman’s overly manipulative style. While I doubt it will achieve the legendary status of its predecessor, it is certainly interesting and entertaining.

Just a small topic for starters - the secret of comedy REVEALED!!!

Well, maybe not quite.

But close...

Comedy guru John Vorhaus, writer of The Comic Toolbox and Creativity Rules! (both highly recommended), defines comedy as Truth and Pain.

Steve Kaplan, on the other hand, provides the following definition in his Comedy Intensive seminar: comedy is the lie that tells the truth.

Obviously, truthfulness is an essential element of comedy, then. And by truth, we mean the truth about the human condition. The characters have to behave in a way which makes them relatable to us. Comedy (nearly) always fails when it is imposed on the characters by the writer/performer/director, as an external element, or when characters get 'twisted around' so they'll be able to make a certain joke, even when this is in blatant contradiction to their established nature.

But this truth is also a part of every good drama. So this element alone is definitely not enough to create comedy.

Vorhaus adds pain to the mix. All comedy, all humour, is aggressive in a certain way. Slapstick comedy involves physical abuse, comedy of manners puts the characters in awkward or embarassing relationships, farce piles on the complications and humiliations, and so on. The pain can be inflicted on the character, or the character can inflict pain on others, deliberatly or accidentally. The point is, all comedy creates stress in the audience, which is relieved by laughter. It's a release of tension, sometimes in order to protect the spectator from the possible emotional trauma of what they are witnessing (the main reason why gore films provoke laughter rather than fear among their fans). There's biological evidence for this: when chimpanzees laugh, they express fear, not joy.

However, it's perfectly possible to have pain and truth at work in a story, without it being remotely comedic. A story about a family of illegal immigrants who are at the mercy of a criminal organization and suffer terribly at their hands is not funny. It's touching, sad, inflammatory, but it doesn't provoke laughter.

So there's at least one more element missing.

Surprise, perhaps? Most comedy surprises the audience. The unexpected gag often results in the biggest laughs. And even when the audience knows what is coming, the way their expectations are met should generally be totally unpredictable.

However, surprise can work just as well in drama. And the combination of pain, truth and surprise can regularly be found in horror films. And on the other hand, in a number of cases the audience DOES know what's coming, gets exactly what it expects and still laughs at the joke. Partly to relieve the tension, sure, but there must be something else at play as well.

So let me humbly propose a possible solution to the conundrum: incongruity. The inappropriate.

When something happens which does not conform to the 'norm', to usual practices, social mores, or even the laws of physics, coupled with the elements of pain and truth, laughter is usually the result.

As an example, consider the scene in Fight Club (a very black comedy) in which Edward Norton takes revenge on his insufferable boss at the office by beating himself up in front of the man and then blaming him for the inflicted violence. Is it painful? Absolutely, both physically and emotionally. Is it truthful? Well, it's an extreme behaviour, but Norton's decision to strike back at his tormentor is emotionally true. And is it inappropriate? Wildly so. Using extreme violence in the office is not done, beating yourself to a pulp is completely out of the ordinary, and blaming your supervisor for the wounds you've inflicted on yourself is morally inappropriate.

So there you have it. My recipe for comedy: pain, truth, and the inappriopriate. Served with a large helping of surprise whenever possible.

Welcome, bienvenu, welkom...

Hi everyone & hallo iedereen,

First post of my first blog! Wow, talk about a momentous occasion...

Introductions are in order. I'm Wout Thielemans, script-editor, writer and educator, and I've been doing nothing but working on screenplays and scriptwriting since 1991. I've worked on some of the most succesful fiction series on Belgian television of the last 20 years (to wit FC De Kampioenen, the most succesful sitcom ever made in Belgium and now in its 20th year, Thuis, the most popular daily soap and Witse, the number one crime series over here). I've also taught many succesful screenwriters over the years, and have written over 50 TV-scripts .

In this blog, I'll be talking about anything and everything script-related which I find to be of interest. There might be script, book, film and television reviews, there will be insights, reposts of articles, information about projects, possibly even some scripts which for whatever reason didn't get produced (though these will usually be in Dutch).

I hope to be able to provide an interesting, transatlantic point of view on scriptwriting and audiovisual storytelling, and I look forward to reading your comments! And of course, please don't hesitate to ask any questions. Let the screenwriting madness begin!