The World Before Final Draft

Before switching to word processors and computers, most writers wrote on the industry gold standard, the IBM Selectric II typewriter. The way most writers organized their screenplay structure was on index cards with a short description of each story beat and scene laid out on a table or thumb-tacked to a wall or cork board. This allowed the writer to see his or her story and screenplay structure, scene by scene, all at once and be able to switch cards around to place scenes in different order where they might have more impact, to remove scenes or replace them with another scene idea that might be more compelling or better advance the story, and/or introduce a plot twist element. This old-fashioned device allowed the writer to track and highlight plot points and character arcs from beginning to end. The ability to see the entire screenplay, linearly, scene by scene, allowed writers to better scrutinize their structure in a more cinematic way.

As of the writing of this book, I am in development on the screenplay for a 1950s musical project. The script is being written by a screenwriting team, who were previously playwrights. Part of their creative process, after writing a step outline, is to write character breakdowns, utilizing an amalgam of seemingly every screenwriting and acting guru’s teachings. It’s broad in scope, but certainly a good thing for being clear and specific when writing for a character, and even better for an actor playing a role, so that their backstory is specifically from the writer and the purity of the writer’s words more often remain sacrosanct.

Two Sample Writer’s Character Breakdowns

CHARACTER NAME: Big Al Swanson

• ARCHETYPE: Wise Old Man/King/Father
• WEAKNESS: Sweet tooth, gossip, and sometimes he is so optimistic he can fail to recognize how seriously other people take their problems.
• NEED: To respect how seriously teenagers take their lives and to learn how to treat teenagers as adults.
• SUPER OBJECTIVE/DESIRE: To make sure everyone is properly served and entertained.

THREE MAJOR MEANINGS

• The drive-in
• Franklin
• His employees

PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION (PHYSIOLOGY)

• Sex: Male
• Age: 55
• Height and weight: 5′8″ and 280 lbs.
• Hair and eye color: Hair: brown and gray; eyes: brown
• Posture: Straight
• General appearance: Well-groomed and neatly dressed
• Defects: None
• Tattoos or scars: None
• Athletic ability: Below average, but makes up for this with his managerial skills.

SOCIOLOGY

• Class: Middle class
• Education: High school plus a lifetime of experience
• Occupation: Rock-n-roll drive-in theater owner
• Income: Around $8,000 a year, maybe more in a very good year at the drive-in
• Marital status: Single
• Children: None
• Religion: Methodist
• Race: Caucasian
• Political affiliation: Republican
• Hobbies: Film history (he has a hoard of old movie posters and memorabilia); he loves town gossip and to be in the know with the lives of his employees; he collects Lionel model trains and tries to think of new and innovative sales strategies for the drive-in, thus Sugar’s visit to the drive-in (he knows her mother, Norma).

PSYCHOLOGY

• Character sexuality: Heterosexual
• Temperament: Flamboyant and boisterous like a circus ringleader
• Moral code: Do the best you can for as many people as you can.
• Introvert/extrovert: Extrovert
• Leader/follower: Leader
• Complexes: His belief that everything will turn out okay is sometimes so strong that he fails to take things seriously enough.
• Chief disappointments: He never got to meet Humphrey Bogart.
• Chief joys: The satisfaction of owning his own business, movies, town gossip, and being around young people
• Degree of ambition: He wants to run his drive-in successfully until he drops dead of extreme old age.
• IQ: Above average
• General attitude toward life: Optimistic—anything can be done with the proper amount of hard work, discipline, and imagination.
• Character ghost: What happened in the past that still haunts him/her actions? During WWII, Al toured as an actor, who wasn’t very good, via the USO. He met many stars on his tour and became star struck. Realizing he would never be able to be a star on the silver screen, he didn’t quite know how to make a job out of his love for movies until 1946. On a weekend trip, he saw a triple feature at Richard Hollingshead’s original drive-in and it changed his life forever.

CHARACTER NAME: “Black Widow” Margery Plunkett

• ARCHETYPE: Trickster/Warrior
• WEAKNESS: Her belief that her life is as good as it will ever get makes her shortsighted to her true potential.
• NEED: To learn that she isn’t as stuck in a rut as she believes
• SUPER OBJECTIVE/DESIRE: To make sure her position in the social pecking order is as high and as secure as she can make it.

THREE MAJOR MEANINGS

• Reputation
• Friends
• Buzzard

PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: (PHYSIOLOGY)

• Sex: Female
• Age:19
• Height and weight: 5′6″ and 143 lbs.
• Posture: Straight
• General appearance: Rough and rugged
• Defects: None
• Tattoos or scars: She has an old knife scar on the back of her right thigh. She has another small scar on her back from being beaten with a riding crop in her Catholic school from her freshman year of high school.
• Athletic ability: She has two older brothers, Snake and Rodger (the black sheep of the family, who went straight-laced and now lives happily married in the suburbs of Franklin), so she has learned to fight dirty and has had to be able to hold her own from a very young age. She is also very experienced at fleeing the law in high heels, so she is a fast and agile runner in women’s shoes.

SOCIOLOGY

• Class: Lower
• Education: Bishop Joseph Chartrand High School graduate
• Occupation: She works at the Tastee-Freeze part time, although being Buzzard’s squeeze is a full time job in and of itself.
• Income: $1,100 a year
• Marital status: Single
• Children: None
• Religion: Catholic
• Race: Caucasian
• Political affiliation: Her gang and Buzzard
• Hobbies: Doing her hair and nails, the gang, and pool

PSYCHOLOGY

• Character sexuality: Heterosexual
• Temperament: She is the life of the party—unless you cross her.
• Moral code: She believes in keeping promises and getting what you can while you can because the future is uncertain.
• Introvert/extrovert: Extrovert
• Leader/follower: Follower
• Complexes: Vanity, the need to be the queen bee
• Chief disappointments: Not being able to stop her mother from leaving, failing her father, and not being old enough to help him
• Chief joys: Her girlfriends, being the center of attention, Buzzard, and helping Buzzard’s mom, Aggie, run the Tastee Freeze
• Degree of ambition: Low because she doesn’t let herself think much about the future
• IQ: Above average
• General attitude toward life: She tries to be happy but is always uncertain about the future.
• Character ghost: What happened in the past that still haunts him/her actions? Her mother walked out on her father when she was seven
• years old, and watching her father break down afterward taught her to always make sure she never trusted anyone too much.

Examination of Character Breakdowns

As you can see from the above breakdowns, much of the character detail is rudimentary, but very helpful for the writer(s) to be able to refer to maintain clear and consistent traits as characters are developed within the screenplay. If specifics of character breakdowns are shared with actors, this can be very helpful to them in creating a specific character, internal life, and character history that is defined by and in alignment with the writer’s intent. Other elements of the above character breakdowns seem like obligatory clichés that the writers felt compelled to throw in to pay homage to every flavor of the month screenwriting theory. Kind of like my theory of martinis, “One isn’t enough and three are too many,” I believe that one can be inundated with too much confusing jargon.

Archetypes

I graduated from Antioch University in Los Angeles with a bachelor’s degree in psychology, where the majority of my professors were Jungian and Existential psychologists and liberal thinkers, and we studied Carl Jung extensively. Carl Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who was one of the founders of analytical psychology. Jung theorized that the psyche was composed of three elements: the ego (or the conscious mind), the personal unconscious (which contains memories as well as thoughts and memories that have been suppressed), and the collective unconscious, and held that archetypes are representations of people, behaviors or characteristics, temperaments, or personas that are components of the collective unconscious. Jung believed that the part of the psyche he called the collective unconscious contains all of the wisdom, understandings, and experiences we universally share as a species over generations throughout history. Jung also asserted that there are four basic archetypes:

The Four Basic Archetypes

Weaknesses, Needs, and Super Objectives

These clarities of characters are great for actors and are tremendously helpful as actors prepare and are doing homework on creating a specific character. Knowing a character’s weaknesses is as important as knowing a character’s strengths. Needs are often internal and are infrequently disclosed to significant others but are keenly part of the character’s awareness and contribute to vulnerability. Almost every acting school, whether teaching an internal method of preparation or any other variety of methods, teaches actors to define their objective: what specifically is desired, aimed for, or being attempted to attain within the context of each and every scene in a play or screenplay.

Certain acting schools may teach that there are moment to moment objectives; for instance, if your objective in a particular scene is to get another character to say yes or agree to something you may have a moment to moment objective that might be to make them feel guilty in order to ultimately fulfill the objective in the scene, which is to get them to say yes or agree to your desire. One thing that is always present in drama is the obstacle, and any time there is an objective being striven for there is invariably an obstacle in the way. Sometimes, the obstacle might be a person’s internal fear of failure, which is clearly also a character weakness. The super objective is the ultimate desire of the character within the context of the entire play or screenplay, and each moment to moment objective and each scene objective should lead toward and support the character’s super objective. Super objectives could be something as simple as “to be a star” or something as deadly as avenging the murder of a loved one, to something as grandiose as conquering the world.

Physical Description (Physiology)

These are obvious age, gender, height, weight, and appearance suggestions, but even though they may be defined in a breakdown for the writer’s character development they are easily interchangeable, depending on casting choices made by directors and producers, as most often the best actor is chosen over strictly adhering to the writer’s character description.

Sociology

These are great suggestions to fill in the blanks for writers and actors to develop finely drawn character specifics but may or may not have any bearing on the character’s behavior within the context of the script.

Psychology

Obviously defining a character’s sexuality and moral code as well as his or her degree of intelligence is very helpful when defining a character as a writer and or performing a scene as the character for actors.

Use What Works for You

An industry veteran once wryly remarked about method acting that the method is “whatever works for you.” In the instance of writers and the vast tools, structural paradigms, and resources that are currently available, I would make the same assertion: use whatever works for you. Many screen-writing teachers with stellar credentials offer and sell many theories and constructs of screenwriting techniques. If something makes sense to you, resonates with you, and helps you as a screenwriter, then use it, and if it doesn’t, then don’t. Do not feel compelled to try to incorporate every facet of everything you’ve read or studied into your work. Use what works for you.