A story is compounded of desire plus danger. It begins when the central character commits himself to attaining a story goal in the face of opposition. It ends when he either succeeds or fails in his efforts.
This means Character starts a story with one state of affairs and state of mind. He ends with another.
The Great Gatsby begins with Gatsby seeking new contact with his first love. It ends with him betrayed and dead in his own swimming pool.
Lady Sings the Blues begins with Billie Holiday working as cleaning girl in a whorehouse. It ends with her singing at Carnegie Hall, with newsclip flash-forwards to her continued drug addiction and death at 44. Chinatown begins with Jake Gittes agreeing to check on an allegedly unfaithful husband. It ends with both husband and wife dead and Gittes in a state of shock.
How do you move Character from State of Affairs/State of Mind 1 to State of Affairs/State of Mind x?
You impel him forward on twin wheels of confrontation and transition.
A confrontation is a unit of conflict; a time-unified meeting of opposing forces.
A transition is a change from one condition, one state of development, to another. In the sense I use it here, it’s a topic-unified passage from one confrontation to another.
Story-wise, each confrontation and each transition changes the state of affairs and state of mind of each character involved, to some degree. In so doing, it moves the story forward towards its climax and resolution.
Thus, your story opens with your hero faced with a predicament, an emotionally disturbing situation.
In the typical film, you have approximately 90 minutes in which to resolve this predicament… replace Hero’s disturbing situation and unpleasant emotions with something more satisfactory.
To this end, you link together a chain of confrontations alternating with transitions until, timed out, they add up to 90 minutes of screen time.
Indeed, there are worse questions to ask yourself before you start on any script than “Does my idea offer good opportunities for building confrontations? That is, will my protagonist have to fight to get what he wants, and can I devise incidents to dramatize that fight?”
Next question: How do you build confrontations and transitions?
Confrontation, first. It breaks down into three elements: goal, conflict, and disaster.
CONFRONTATION DYNAMICS: GOALS
Confrontations are the backbone of your script; the big moments in which your story advances.
A confrontation is a meeting of opposing forces; a time-unified clash between them. It’s based on a conflict of goal-oriented actions: Someone wants to do something. Someone else doesn’t want him to succeed. They struggle.
“To do something” = the attaining of a new, different, changed state of affairs.
Or, the retention of an old, same, unchanged state.
So. A confrontation starts with goals. Mutually incompatible goals. Which is to say, if Character A gets his way, Character B can’t have his.
A successful confrontation must first of all bring the two—or more—participants together in such a manner that they can join combat. Ordinarily, this means a face-to-face encounter. But variations are possible—witness the wars between lovers waged by telephone. The issue is merely one of imagination; the degree of creativity the scriptwriter brings to bear.
Beyond this, the confrontation should offer conflicting goals which are
a. Specific and concrete.
b. Immediate.
c. Strongly motivated.
d. Established early.
A few examples will clarify the issues.
a. Specific and concrete.
Suppose Character’s goal is to win the acceptance—indeed, friendship—of the woman in the riverfront house next door, despite her tight lipped antagonism. How can the audience know whether or not he’s really succeeded? How can the cameraman film appropriate footage of anything as abstract as acceptance, or friendship?
On the other hand, let’s assume the same situation—but this time, Character’s goal is to borrow Woman’s car. Not only is this a photo-graphable act, instantly comprehensible to viewers, but it also demonstrates the working fact of Woman’s acceptance of Character far better than could any abstraction or generality.
In addition, Character’s goal should be
b. Immediate.
A good goal, for confrontation purposes, is one you can take action to attain right now.
In fact, it’s even better if you must take immediate steps to achieve it. Time pressure adds urgency to any scene.
Take the case above of Character, Woman, and the car. If Character merely thinks it would be nice to be able to borrow Woman’s car some day, we haven’t got much to work with.
If, on the other hand, Character’s infant child has just gulped down some lethal fluid, and getting Child to the hospital fast is a matter of life or death, and Woman’s car is the only available transport—well, the confrontation over borrowing the vehicle is going to come on hard and fast.
Which brings up yet another important point: The goals in a confrontation should be
c. Strongly motivated.
Frivolous, unmotivated, or weakly motivated goals seldom throw a confrontation into appropriately high gear. Those strongly motivated, in contrast, may speed your story to new peaks of tension.
Back to Character and Woman. Character, with Child’s life at stake, obviously is highly motivated. He’ll fight to get use of Woman’s car.
What about Woman, however? Where does she stand?
Suppose, for example, that refusing to loan her car isn’t just a matter of whim with her. Rather, her earlier antagonism is an intentional ploy designed to hold contacts at arm’s length. She’s rented this waterfront house because the state prison is just across the river and her convict husband’s planning an escape. He’s slated to make the break this very afternoon. Unless she and the car are here and ready when he scrambles from the water, he’s a cinch to be captured and dragged back.
Now: What will be her reaction to Character’s demand for loan of the car?
As noted previously, it takes specific, concrete, immediate, strongly motivated goals to build a proper confrontation!
Finally, said goals should be
d. Established early.
The earlier someone involved in a confrontation demonstrates that he has a goal, the earlier said confrontation can get under way.
Next question: How does a character demonstrate he has a goal? By getting up on a soapbox and sounding off about it?
Sometimes, maybe. But not very often.
Far better, let Character create the impression that he has a goal by what he does. Let his actions show it.
Exhibit A, from our sample episode: The door of Character’s house bursts open. He lunges out onto the porch … looks frantically this way and that… pivots abruptly and, leaping the railing, sprints towards Woman’s house.
Not one word has been spoken, note. We don’t know that Character has a child, let alone that Child’s been poisoned.
But because of the way Character’s behaving, we do know something’s going on, and we have reason to believe it’s on the important side.
Naturally, there are other ways this can be handled. Opening on Child’s scream, for example, or Child’s face, or even the can of drain cleaner. Or earlier, perhaps, with Character watching TV, or setting down a bag of groceries and unloading items which include the can.
Why make such a fuss about establishing goals early and in action? Because once said action’s under way and conflict develops, a confrontation may go in any number of directions.
CONFRONTATION DYNAMICS: CONFLICT
Mutually incompatible goals bring characters into conflict. Which seems simple enough, save that too often too many writers fail to remember that conflict comes in a variety of shapes and sizes.
Thus, a clash may be brief, or it may be protracted. It may be major, or minor. It may be taut, or almost lackadaisical. You build it to fit the requirements of your developing story.
How do you expand or contract a confrontation, a unit of conflict?
You add intensity, time pressure, twists, complications, or whatever else comes handy, as needed.
In the case of Character, for instance, he might come charging into Woman’s house without knocking. “Quick!” he gasps. “Your car keys! Buddy—I gotta get him to the hospital!”
What now? Does Woman refuse, cry out, flee, faint, or what?
And how does Character react?
Let’s suppose Woman flatly refuses to loan the car. Character grapples with her. Breaking free, Woman tries to flee. Character pursues. Woman—a desperate type, obviously—hauls out a gun. Character knocks it aside, wrestles Woman for keys.
And that’s the way it goes, in confrontation.
Though it should also be noted that this horrendous battle might, under other circumstances, have been brought to an end before it started had Woman said coolly, “Oh, I’m sorry. The battery’s down. That’s why I haven’t been driving this week.”
Or, were we dealing with comedy rather than melodrama, an involved scheme on Character’s part to get car away from Woman for whatever reason might have ended with the vehicle—Character at the wheel—rolling into the river.
CONFRONTATION DYNAMICS: DISASTER
Confrontation starts with goal. Then conflict’s added.
It ends, finally, in disaster.
Disaster: a new and unanticipated development which worsens Character’s situation.
Or, if you prefer, one which offers unforeseen consequences for Character.
Or, one which raises intriguing questions in regard to Character’s future.
Consider the potentialities in our car loan episode: Character knocks Woman’s gun aside; wrestles her for the keys.
Only then—new and unanticipated development—Woman jerks free for the fraction of a second—and hurls the keys out the window, into the river.
Disaster, right? Character’s situation is worsened. Confrontation has ended with him the loser in the conflict, just at the moment he thought he’d won.
Also, happy day, it’s given us a strong curtain.
A “strong curtain”—obviously, the term is of the theater—is a striking, unanticipated development that, coming suddenly, in effect acts as a cliff-hanger, a shock device to freeze the audience’s attention with an implicit “Ai! What on earth will Character do now?”
Well, what will he do? It’s a vital question.
Further, it brings us to our second dynamic element, transition.
Transition is a bridge between battles: non-conflict action that carries your characters from one confrontation to another. For all practical purposes, it takes in everything in your film which isn’t confrontation, conflict. The trivia of living—the chance meetings, the casual chats, the buying of groceries and eating of meals and brushing of teeth—goes into transition.
Yet it isn’t all quite as loose as it seems, for transition has its own unifying element.
That element is preoccupation: preoccupation with the “What-will-I-do-now?” factor that’s the aftermath of the preceding confrontation’s disaster.
In other words, Character may drift from here to there; talk of this and that; involve himself in which or wherever. But always, one way or another, whether by implication or oblique reference or side-issue development, you the writer see to it that he’s still pondering his future, his next step.
This being the case, transition constitutes a dynamic element in your story just as much as does confrontation. By no means is it mere waste space or empty lines. For through its tacit focus on the future, transition provides the motivation/justification/springboard from which Character plunges into his next confrontation.
Just as confrontation breaks down into goal, conflict, and disaster, so transition subdivides into three elements: reaction, dilemma, and decision.
TRANSITION DYNAMICS: REACTION
Reaction works this way: Overwhelmed by the disaster of Confrontation 1, Character reacts to it in characteristic fashion.
Let’s take the case of a specific character and situation—a female character, this time, an executive in her mid-30s whose doctor has just told her that what she though was a touch of stomach trouble actually is liver damage brought on by years of excessive drinking. She can lay off the booze and go on a strict diet plus medication, or she can watch her condition deteriorate to cirrhosis.
Exit Executive. Back out on the street, what is her reaction? Shock? Rage? Incredulity? Helplessness? Hopelessness? Panic?
That will depend, of course, on her character, the kind of person she is—a matter which you, the writer, should already have pretty clearly in mind. Whatever the answer, you’ll need to devise ways to reduce her response to photographable form: some sort of doings a cameraman can capture on film.
Let’s make it simple. What would you do, if you were a long-time heavy drinker, reeling under the impact of a sudden, paralyzing shock?
Habit says: Grab a quick drink. Right? So you scuttle into the nearest cocktail lounge, there to gulp down a double vodka (vodka’s an old rule with you, to keep you “breathless” on the job, as the ads say), in the same moment calling for another.
By the time Number Three’s down the hatch, a greasy-looking type has moved to the stool beside yours, smiling in appropriately unctuous fashion. How’s about letting him buy the next one?
You cut him off with a tart, “No, thanks.” But his try shakes you. Do you look that bad? And whether the answer’s yes or no, one thing’s certain: You’ve got to bring yourself under control. You’ve got to face the salient question: What do I do now?
It’s a state of affairs we label dilemma.
TRANSITION DYNAMICS: DILEMMA
On film, dilemma may take the form of anything from deliberation to discussion; from driving down endless roads or walking across endless landscape to praying for divine guidance.
Female Executive has her own pattern. Abandoning the cocktail lounge, she hurries home to her apartment. There, ignoring a convenient vodka bottle, she sets about stirring up a batch of thick, gooey, chocolate pecan fudge. That at least will get her away from the vodka … keep her hands busy while she thinks things out.
Only then a wave of guilt overwhelms her. Holding down her weight is an eternal battle for her. She even suspects there’s a link between that and her drinking.
Yet here she stands, mixing bowl in hand, stirring in more brown sugar and more chocolate.
Anguish, erupting. With a choked cry, she hurls the fudge-to-be into the trash-pail, bowl and all, bursts into tears, and rushes to the bathroom.
Now, however, she finds, she can’t even be satisfactorily sick. All that’s left for her is to stand leaning on the washbowl, staring into the mirror at her tortured, tear-streaked face.
The real problem, she knows, is that drinking’s not just a pastime for her; it’s a defense. Fighting her way up through the ranks to a top executive post in a male-centered world has taken far more nerve than her background gave her. So, she’s drawn courage from a bottle. And when tension stretched her too tight, she’s relaxed the strain with more of the same.
Now, if the doctor’s to be believed, that period’s over. If she wants to live, that is.
Yet how can she quit? Popularity has never been her strong suit; the fights she’s fought to get where she is have bred far too much bitterness for that. Particularly, the male chauvinist pig-type rival who covets her job is ever hovering close, alert for any opening, any hint of weakness.
Decision comes, finally. That is, Executive makes up her mind what to do next, what course of action to pursue: She’ll quit drinking, cold turkey. Right now, effective tonight, without benefit of Antabuse, A.A., or any other crutches.
Executive’s decision, please note, provides her with a new goal, something to strive for.
Further, to prove to herself that she really means it, she’ll attend a beach-house party tonight as scheduled, despite the fact that it will put her right in the sights of her hated rival.
It’s a frightening thought. A drink would do so much to bolster her resolution….
Her knuckles go white as she grips the washbowl. Then, with a convulsive twist, she pivots … strides to the kitchen, seizes the vodka bottle … and pours its contents down the sink.
And there you have the pattern on which is based the art of confrontation: goal-conflict-disaster; reaction-dilemma-decision. It’s a sequence which you repeat, time after time, till you reach the end of your film.
Now, one word of warning: In developing this example, note that I’ve left Executive alone most of the time. This can be dangerous. The screen offers few opportunities for neat asides of explanation. That means the actor must convey his inner world through action … must show us his thoughts and feelings, drives and conflicts.
A fine actor, well directed, can do this. A poor or mediocre one, ill guided, may fail, or turn us off, or win wild gales of mirth with what he hoped would be a scene of tenderness or anguish.
Be careful of asking too much in this regard, then. Better to write the bit for two, not one, most of the time, or to plan on cutting away to parallel action. The neck you save may be your own!
WHAT ABOUT RIGIDITY?
New writers sometimes make the plaint that the confrontation/transition pattern is unduly mechanical. Actually, however, the events of your own life fit within it. The only difference is that, because of time/length limitations, film forces a certain compression and neatness of ordering which life foregoes.
Thus, in life, I may spend weeks or months debating whether to quit my job, or move, or marry. On film, quite possibly I’ll have only a couple of minutes’ running time to do so. But the decision, if presented convincingly, is no less valid.
Take the case of our female executive. Her reaction, dilemma, and decision are perfectly logical. The only issue is how to present them most effectively on the screen. For though, in print, it’s easy enough to describe Executive’s thoughts and feelings, film demands that we devise ways to dramatize them; to externalize her inner turmoil.
Can such be done? Of course it can—and that as crudely or subtly as your talent will permit. We’ve already seen how reaction translates itself into a cocktail lounge and double vodkas. Dilemma becomes fudge and tears and mirror; decision, potables poured down the drain.
Now obviously this isn’t the only way the situation could be handled. Some writers might have developed it in a bedroom with the greasy type from the bar. Others would have brought in concerned friends, or telephone dialogue, or psychedelic d.t.’s, or ambulances screaming through the night.
Indeed, elimination of any or all parts of a transition is sometimes not only possible, but advantageous. Thus, Doctor might have curtain-lined his session with Executive with a blunt “There it is, Miss Jones: Quit drinking, or quit breathing.” She stares at him, face stiff with shock. Whereupon we dissolve to the beach-house party. Someone offers Executive a drink. She shakes her head. “No, thanks. I’m on the wagon.” A crisis has been met; a decision has been made. All we see are the results.
The same principle holds true for confrontation. Instead of Character wrestling Woman for the car keys two falls out of three, Woman might simply have let his door-pounding go unanswered, leaving him no choice but to take off in a new direction.
What about the business of cliff-hangers, strong curtains? I acknowledge freely that there are those who object to such. On occasion, they’re left out, by some writers and in some pictures. Yet by and large, audiences do favor them—simply because said audiences go to the theater far less for intellectual enlightenment than emotional experience. They buy tickets because they enjoy the ebb and flow of tension; and nothing brings tension into sharper focus than does the build to an unanticipated twist that threatens pure disaster.
Another conclusion easily jumped to is that the use of confrontation and transition to build rising action applies only to certain types of picture—the thriller, the chiller, the action epic.
Nothing could be farther from the truth. The moment purpose becomes apparent, whether that purpose be explicit or implicit, there stands confrontation. Wherever a character struggles to reach a decision, transition is aborning. And this is as true when a child climbs a forbidden tree, then tries to decide whether to tell the truth as to how he tore his shirt, as when a woman seduces her best friend’s husband, then strives to make up her mind if she wants to marry him as well.
In a word, the patterns of confrontation and transition are eminently fluid. To assail them as false or mechanical or rigid is pure self-delusion. It indicates only that we ourselves feel so engulfed and overwhelmed by life as to convince ourselves that life itself is formless—an obvious enough misreading of the facts, if you stop to consider that all of us are born, do live, and finally die.
In much the same way, and because death and tragedy do come to each of us, we pretend that life has no strivings, no triumphs, no happy endings. Yet who among us hasn’t known happiness, even if only briefly? To demand that film show only aimlessness or defeat is to distort life grossly.
THE MATTER OF SECONDARY FUNCTION
Failure to understand and use the secondary functions of confrontation and transition in your film script is to throw out some of your most helpful tools.
Thus, in addition to moving your story forward, confrontation and transition perform three valuable services:
1. Regulation of excitement and acceptance.
2. Establishment and exposition.
3. Spacing and pacing.
What can we say about each of these categories?
1. Regulation of excitement and acceptance.
Conflict, confrontation, is what creates tension in your viewers. So, to add excitement to a dragging screenplay, you increase the proportion of confrontations to transitions, in terms of number, or running time, or both. For cases in point, consider the well-nigh obligatory car chases, karate combats, and mattress maulings in a host of recent pictures.
If your script lacks logic and believability, on the other hand, the solution often is to build up the transitions. Particularly, emphasize the logic of your hero’s actions and the clear good sense—nay, inevitability—of his choice of goals.
The usual word of warning, though: You can always run a good thing into the ground. Let the confrontations crowd too fast and furious on each others’ heels, and the film becomes a joke. Stretch out your transitions to too great length, in striving for greater believability, and the audience goes to sleep.
2. Establishment and exposition.
I group these elements together because, by and large, they’re two sides of the same coin.
Establishment, as noted in previous chapters, is making some aspect or component of your film in some way recognizable and identifiable in your audience’s eyes.
Exposition is providing your viewer with information about the past which he needs in order to understand and appreciate the present and future of your story.
In general, it’s desirable to limit your use of confrontation for purposes of establishment and/or exposition, except insofar as said establishment and/or exposition are an integral part of the action. Or, to put it another way, avoid explanations of anything in confrontation: It breaks the flow of the action.
However, it’s hardly desirable to overload your transitions with background either. So, herewith a few hints on how to get maximum mileage with minimum pain:
a. Limit what your audience needs to know.
Remember what we said in Chapter 9 about building yourself a private picture of the background of the action?
Now is the time at which this homework comes in handy. Why? Because now you know all the things you need to know about what’s gone before … so you can, without confusion, choose from that mass those items essential to your viewers also.
Which means you can leave out all the rest, with no fears or worries or qualms of conscience.
Well, at least not too many.
b. Make your viewers want to know the past.
The picture that sticks in my mind in this regard is an old Spencer Tracy vehicle, Bad Day at Black Rock. Tracy, as a one-armed World War 2 colonel, drops off a train in a sun-baked desert town in the west. Virtually from the moment he arrives, he’s under attack by forces within the tiny community. Yet the town has raised a wall of silence against him. Consequently, both he and the audience are writhing in paroxysms of frustration as to just why all this should be so. And you don’t get the answer till you’re at least two-thirds through the picture.
c. Make your characters need information and have to fight to get it.
A variation on b, above, this concept takes off from the old saw that nothing is duller than information someone forces on you.
Corollary: Few things are more intriguing than information someone’s trying to hold out.
Apply this principle to exposition. Instead of having Aunt Susie volunteer information about her impending gall bladder operation, let her make a secret of it. Since she’s a key figure in an inheritance squabble around which our story centers, various people—probably including our central character—are going to try to worm the facts from her. Result: What might have been insipid exposition is transformed into taut confrontation. How so? Because that exposition is now an integral part of the film’s action and progression.
Back in our section on the fact film, I made mention of the importance of translating information into terms of people doing things.
That same principle applies in features. Instead of telling about or discussing the height of a tower, show us the darn’ thing. Even better, make someone have to climb it.
If you want to see a master’s hand at work in such, drop by your nearest Hitchcock festival and see how he handles the issue in Vertigo and in the Mount Rushmore sequence of North by Northwest.
3. Spacing and pacing.
There are going to be times in your film when crises crowd too close together.
On other occasions, interest sags because they’re too far apart.
Elsewhere, things move too fast or too slow.
In each instance, manipulation of confrontation and transition are virtually sure-fire solutions to your problem.
If the crises are too close together, the answer may be to insert a minor confrontation or two—foothills we have to climb before we reach the mountain, as it were. And each confrontation, in turn, will make necessary a bridging transition, a decision to be reached which provides the goal for the next confrontation. Or, if things really are on the frantic side, you might even consider a little cutting—reducing one of your confrontation peaks to foothill size.
Crises too far apart? Same remedy.
Things moving too fast? Slow ‘em down by needling in transitions.
Too slow? Build or add confrontations.
Where do you get the raw material for insertions?
Well, imagination can be a help, of course. But I assume you’re already using all you’ve got of that. Merely to tell you to find more would be a cop-out.
But there is a trick that can help, upon occasion. All it calls for is a list of characters to refer to.
Check said list, character by character. Ask yourself: What’s this man—or woman—doing, right this moment of the picture? Or, if that comes out dull: What MIGHT he or she be doing, in view of role and background and motivation? Will it make for an insert or, perhaps, cutting to a parallel line of action?
So much for confrontation and transition. Master them, and you’ll have tools that will serve you well in many a crisis.
As a case in point, consider the problems you’ll face when you break your story treatment down into a step outline, the script phase we’ll examine in the next chapter.