Film Courage: From being at Showtime what did you learn about a flat script versus a
viable script?
Paul Joseph Gulino, Associate Professor at Chapman University Dodge College of Film and
Media Arts: To me I’m looking for something that’s pretty basic, does it grab me and
does it keep me (however they accomplish that).
Does it flow, does it have a natural flow?
Does it make me want to turn the pages?
In my training I learned somewhat how to do that and then in subsequent experiences and
study and we talk about it in the books [The Science of Screenwriting: The Neuroscience
Behind Storytelling Strategies and Screenwriting: The Sequence Approach] the techniques that
you can actually use.
There are tools you can use to keep the audience engaged, but essentially that’s it.
I wasn’t looking (nor was I instructed to look for) any particular type of material.
I was just handed things.
And some of the things I did were reading stage plays.
Like can we make this into a showtime on Broadway production.
Sometime they’d send me off to see a theater group and I’d have to give a report on my
judgment on that.
But beyond something that grabs you and keeps your attention that’s pretty much it.
Now there was one script and it will have to remain nameless.
There was one script that I remember for a couple years that I was doing that and I thought
this is funny.
This is smart.
This is clever.
I sure hope this gets made somehow.
And that was 1983-1984.
And time went on and sure enough it got made 20 years later.
And I thought that’s great.
Same title but by that time it had been so rewritten that it was a famous disaster and
that was just too bad.
But that would be all example.
There was one, the cleverness of the writing, the way the characters were so sharp, the
way it flowed, made me remember.
It stood out in a pile of material.
Film Courage: Interesting.
Why do you think so many…whether it’s hands got into the pie or whatever?
Why do you think it had such a fresh voice and then it was almost…these are just my
words by destroyed?
Maybe that’s too strong?
Professor Gulino: Well that’s not too strong.
The mode of production at least for big movies is a problem.
Because when you have a big movie and this wound up being a big studio movie just so
much pressure that it work that there are defensive things that happen that we need
to make sure that “Okay, I’m not sure this draft is right?
Let’s get another writer in.”
There is so much at stake that it has an effect on the product and it can become incoherent
and it is a collaborative medium.
And there is always going to be (even in the best of circumstances) you can have a great
writer, director, producer, cast and script and it can still fall flat (it’s imprecise).
But storytelling tends to flatten out in this situations because one of the elements that
I talk about more in the first book [Screenwriting: The Sequence Approach] is dramatic irony.
Dramatic irony is of course Alvin Hidrock used it to create suspense to create a story
that involves withholding some information from the audience, withholding some information
from the characters when you reveal it.
That requires someone who is really watching it and imagining it in their own mind at the
time.
And if you’ve got a lot of people involved somebody is going to go “Oh my goodness!
Are we sure the audience is going to get this?
Well we better make it clearer.”
And if it’s clear, it risks being boring.
The three questions that Frank Daniel shared with us that I still think apply to any story.
He said there are three questions that you ask when you are crafting a story.
One - what does the main character want and what are they trying to avoid?
That’s question one.
Two - What does the main character know and what does the main character not know?
And then the third question - what does the audience know?
What does the audience not know?
And I don’t think most writers realize that you have control over those second two.
Especially when I work with students, that the audience doesn’t have to know everything
all the time.
And the characters don’t have to know everything all the time.
You can withhold some information, you can play games.
In fact my takeaway from the book that [Chapman Professor Connie Shears] and I did last year
The Science of Screenwriting was applying constructivist psychology to the storytelling
process.
This was something that was in the eighties film critic David Bordwell came out with a
blockbuster scholarly work in which he squarely placed storytelling in the realm of constructivist
psychology.
And that simply means that most of our experience in life, most of our experience in reality
is based not on knowledge but on inferences we make based on clues.
So that you have what is called top down processing.
Bottom up processing is you see things and it goes into your brain and you make note
of it and you store information.
Top down is you see something in the world and your brain automatically compares what
you’ve experienced before with what you are seeing and then you make a conclusion.
There are short cuts that we’re doing all of the time.
You’ve never seen the back of this chair but you’ve seen chairs so you assume the
back looks like any other chair.
It would be a surprise twist if the back of this chair had a dragon hiding out there because
that’s not normal (what you’re normally associating with that concept).
So when you’re telling a story, if you understand that is how audiences are responding, how
they experience a movie is they are looking for clues and they are going to put them together
and they are actively involved in constructing a reality.
You are the one as a screenwriter you are giving them the clues, you are turning them
(and again in Frank Daniel’s terms), you’re making them the smartest person in the room.
You are making them brilliant because they are seeing all of these clues.
You are the one actually giving it to them.
But they think they are figuring it out and they are going to try to anticipate where
you are going because they have seen movies before.
This is a conceptual framework called a schema.
They’ve seen a movie.
They know how movies are.
They know they tend to have a character that does this or that.
And when you know that you can play games with them.
And that’s for me the most fun thing about screenwriting is creating worlds and driving
people crazy and getting in their heads.
And you can learn how to get into their heads.
Just a very simple example suppose I show you a movie and there’s a husband and he’s
buying his wife flowers and chocolate and an anniversary card on his way home from work,
okay?
Then meanwhile you see the wife has got a and she’s hiding it in the bedroom drawer,
okay?
What are you going to think?
Well it’s pretty obvious isn’t it?
He wants to make love and she has other plans.
That’s where the audience is going to go and you could pay it off where he comes home
with the flowers and she pulls out and him.
Or you could then disclose later that he’s a collector and the surprise is this is a
present for him, this is something he’s been looking for.
She saved up for it and she wants to give it to him as an anniversary present.
And then you find out that he poisoned the chocolate.
So you just told a twist which is telling a twist that is telling two stories at the
same time.
The one the audience thinks its seeing and the one it is actually seeing.
And you are relying when you do that kind of thing the audiences propensity to figure
it out and be smarter than you and once you’ve got them going that way you can have all kinds
of fun.
That’s one element of the constructivist psychology that we mentioned in the book and
have examples of the filmmakers doing that kind of thing.