Six
Ideas

Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire

The very first step of writing a good screenplay is to come up with a good movie PREMISE.

From that premise, you will develop a story, expand it to the specific incidents needed to tell that story, determine the proper order of those events, and finally, transform those events into words on a page. We will be getting into all those steps and what Aristotle has to say about them when appropriate, but for now, let’s start with that simple, basic element that starts the whole ball rolling.

Think of the PREMISE as the central idea of the story, the answer to the question, “hey, what’s this movie about anyway?” distilled down to its essence.

That idea might spring from something that’s happened to you, something that’s happened to someone you know. Something you’ve read or seen or overheard or dreamt about. But once that inspiration has struck, how do you know if it is an idea worth telling, if it can go the distance? If it is a good idea for a story?

Fortunately, Aristotle has some very keen insights into what makes for a good premise, starting with the quotation that begins this chapter.

Again, he uses the term poetry here to stand in for drama, for narrative, and for our purposes, screenwriting. But what’s more important than him asserting that dramatic writing is of a higher order than historical writing, is his acknowledgement that the writing of a drama is different than the chronicling of history.

Because movies are NOT LIFE.

Sounds obvious enough. But you’d be surprised by how many of my students think that if they can simply retell some interesting event that actually occurred in their real lives, exactly as it happened, more or less, that it will make for an equally compelling movie.

It won’t.

Because in case you missed it two paragraphs above, movies are NOT LIFE. Though through mimesis, the best ones illuminate something interesting and universal about life.

My first instructor at UCLA, the esteemed screenwriting guru Lew Hunter, used to start each new quarter telling the story of the Golden Buddha (a tale he credited to Hollywood studio chief Sid Sheinberg). I’d be remiss not to pay homage to it here, though I’ll paraphrase:

I remember staring at Professor Hunter on my first day at UCLA and wondering what the heck I was supposed to take away from this. That behind the screenplays we’d be creating, these box office behemoths that would join the pantheon of all the other award winners that emerged from this program, was nothing but crap? Really?

Well, in a word: yes. That’s exactly what he was saying. But a very particular kind of crap.

It took me many years in the professional world to realize the profundity of this simple fact. That as artists, we must embrace the artifice of this medium, that underneath, no matter how well we dress it up and gild it, is the pure leavings of our own creation.

But don’t take my word for it. In his Poetics, Aristotle sums up this reality quite eloquently himself when he refers to the art of dramatic writing as—

So there you have it. Screenplays are lies.

Since I began teaching, I’ve started every seminar by having my students reveal four facts that are unique and interesting about themselves. And I ask that ONE of those facts be a total lie. And I tell them that ideally, we shouldn’t be able to tell which fact is the lie. It usually makes for some lively discussion, as well as a good chance to break the ice and get to know each other.

But more importantly, it allows a segue into the broader discussion of just what makes a good lie, or more precisely, what makes a lie believable (which is what makes it good). Usually the responses I get are the same. That the lie is reasonable within the context it’s told, that it can’t be readily disproved, that it is consistent within itself, that it is based upon truths, that it contains just the right amount of specifics, that the teller conveys it confidently as if he believes it himself.

What is interesting about these qualities that go into making a good lie is that they are the same qualities that go into making a good screenplay, and a good story in general.

As filmmakers we tell a whole mess of lies. But we tell them in order to ultimately tell what Aristotle terms a general truth, a truth about the human condition. It all comes down to a simple precept, the one that makes drama of a higher order than the mere recounting of history, Aristotle’s Guiding Precept #3:

For facts, read a medical journal or watch a slide show of your neighbor’s summer vacation. Then pick this book up after you regain consciousness.

A good screenplay, on the other hand, is not slave to the PARTICULAR, the factual record of what actually happened. It’s concerned with the UNIVERSAL, the truths of the human experience to which we can all relate. So a good story cannot simply be a depiction of another person’s life. It must show our lives reflected back to us in the experiences of that other person.

And for Aristotle, a story cannot accomplish that when it is strictly bound to what HAS happened. Instead, it must dramatize what MIGHT have happened or what MAY happen—what is POSSIBLE according to the same universal laws of probability and necessity that govern all our actions and outcomes. Only then can we relate the events to what COULD happen to us.

So what matters isn’t that a historical Oedipus actually experienced the events depicted in the play, but that a person with the qualities of Oedipus, given those circumstances, would probably or necessarily behave in a similar manner and then those same events would probably or necessarily result.

In this way, we in the audience can see ourselves, not just Oedipus, up on that stage. For if we had those qualities and encountered those circumstances, WE might behave that way, WE might have those outcomes. And it’s a story’s ability to put us in the shoes of its characters that makes it universal, more philosophical, and of a higher order than history. It’s what allows us not only to OBSERVE, but also to PARTICIPATE in it.

Bottom line: The fact that something occurred a particular way in real life is NEVER a legitimate reason to put it in a script. I don’t care what actually happened. Your audience doesn’t care. The only valid reason for any choice you make in a story is because it makes the story BETTER, comedically, dramatically, in any way. In fact, in my classes I have but one rule (other than no texting while I’m saying something pithy), that the phrase “But that’s the way it happened!” is barred from ever being spoken.

Moreover, not only does Aristotle say you mustn’t be slave to the actual events that occurred, he also insists you aren’t obligated to how things WOULD actually occur in the real world. As he puts it so elegantly:

In other words, one must always choose what is most believable within the context of the story regardless of whether or not that’s what would occur in reality.

Or to put it yet another way: MOVIES ARE NOT LIFE.

But now you have to be wondering why I (and Aristotle, for that matter) am so relentlessly beating this clearly dead horse, that screenplays are made of lies, in a chapter about PREMISE.

It’s because I have NEVER taught a screenwriting class without some new writer wanting to write the equivalent of THE HEART-BREAKING EXPERIENCE I HAD AT MY GRANDMA’S FUNERAL or THE ROOMMATE I HAD IN COLLEGE WHO WAS COMPLETELY NUTS. They think that something uniquely interesting or profound has happened to them and if they can just get it down verbatim, it will make an awesome movie.

The reality is that movie will suck (again, loosely translating Aristotle).

No matter how well it is written or how closely the writer hews to the actual events, it will matter to no one but the writer and those who participated in that history. It will have no resonance beyond the particulars, since it is just concerned with recounting the facts, not getting at the universal truths that transcend those facts.

Of course, as Aristotle concedes, you may use history in a story, since things that have happened are certainly probable. You can even use proper names, by which Aristotle means historical figures. But these things don’t have the same value to a screenwriter as to a historian. The historian is interested merely in the details of what happened. The screenwriter is interested in how those events are relevant, not just to the people to whom they happened, but to EVERYONE experiencing the story.

Have I hit you over the head enough with this point? Movie stories are invention. Lies. Make believe.

Before you go pulling some fanciful premise out of the nether regions of your psyche, be warned that the opposite of this maxim is just as true.

For every wacky roommate story, I’m faced with students who think they have a stellar script idea on the order of the next great epic fantasy sci-fi gangster kung fu shoot-em-up extravaganza.

That script will invariably suck too.

That’s because, on the opposite end of the spectrum from THE HEARTBREAKING EXPERIENCE I HAD AT MY GRANDMA’S FUNERAL, the FLYING HOBBITS OF NINJA ALLEY has absolutely nothing of the writer’s life in it. It is complete pretense, with no universal truths possible.

A movie premise based upon pure fiction, or worse, upon other movie premises, is just a snake swallowing its tail. A mere shadow of a reflection of a copy, to crib from Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, far too removed from life to accurately reflect anything of it.

If we are looking for LIES to tell a GENERAL TRUTH then we must find a balance, a sweet spot between reality and artifice that allows truth to be spun from fiction, the universal from the particular.

I’m reminded of that movie written by that guy who grew up in Modesto, California, with dreams of becoming a racecar driver while all his friends spent their dead-end lives simply cruising around the Malt Shop. His dad, of course, wanted him to join him as an office supply salesman and never quite understood his son’s wanderlust, his need to lead a more exciting and purposeful life, leading to increasing conflict between them. As a student at USC film school, this writer actually got to WRITE about that experience growing up, to get at the truth of his tumultuous adolescent experience. What do you think he called this deeply personal work?

If you answered Star Wars, gold star to you.

Or take the case of another young filmmaker who wanted to make a movie about HIS experience growing up. Living in the sun-drenched suburbia of Burbank, California, with its perfectly manicured lawns and soul-sapping nine-to-five jobs, his dreams of being an artist made him feel like an outsider, disconnected from the other kids in the neighborhood. He found it difficult to communicate with them, and as a result, couldn’t maintain any friendships. As he later put it, he had “the feeling people just got this urge to want to leave me alone for some reason, I don’t know exactly why.” So what was the name of the story he wrote, and commissioned screenwriter Caroline Thompson to adapt, to dramatize THAT true-to-life experience? The story of an artificial boy, unfinished, with intimidating blades where his hands ought to be.

Yes, Tim Burton’s story about the truth of his adolescence is Edward Scissorhands.

The point is, these filmmakers made very personal films about their experiences, their lives, their hopes and dreams and fears. And they did it by taking their real feelings and concerns, and placing them within a fiction. By doing so, they made those experiences universal, by dwelling not on the facts of their adolescence, but on the truth of it.

In short, what makes a successful screenplay idea is a proper proportion of CREATIVE INVENTION and PERSONAL TRUTH. That balance allows an audience to laugh and cry and scream, and say, ah, that is my experience up there on the screen. And as we’ve seen, that is our ultimate goal.

The personal truth makes it real, authentic, and believable. But the creative invention makes it universal, relatable, and accessible.

And THAT is what gives us our Golden Buddha.

So while screenplays may contain lies, the spark that creates them MUST be a truth. A truth about YOU, the storyteller.

They say, “Write what you know.” And that admonition is crucial to a good starting point. But what you know isn’t merely your own experiences. It’s your passions and interests. Your fears and obsessions. What you dream about. What repulses or consumes you. But above all, the idea must be predicated on something that you care deeply about. Otherwise, why waste your time?

Base your story upon something that is personal, or else you will never have the necessary investment in it to devote the blood, sweat, tears, and time that will be required to see it through to the end.

That’s why the question you face when first formulating your story premise is never “what will they want to read?” but instead, “what do I need to say?” The only way to remain passionate about a story through the years of rewrites and development and production is simply for it to matter to you, for you to actually have a personal STAKE in it (beyond the anticipation of gobs of cash).

That then is the most basic and essential quality of a solid movie premise: If a screenplay is made of lies to get to general truths, then its foundation must be a truth about YOU that has been transplanted into a fiction, allowing it, through your experience, to relate a universal one.

Still, the question remains: How do we know if that idea will make a good movie?

To answer that, we need to discuss the various qualities that Aristotle says are crucial for one.

So let’s do that.