6
Killing Your Darlings
We all want our movies to be compelling. We want to engage audiences and make them want to keep watching. One of the enemies of good storytelling is boredom, and heaven forbid we should inflict that on our audiences. So let’s consider how we might be doing that in spite of ourselves.
One of the most common mistakes writers make is to include useless transition scenes, which may seem fabulous and necessary when they “see” the movie in their heads but are actually entirely useless, expensive, time killing, and boring!
I took on a project in the Arctic years ago where I taught Inuit and Dene artists to make films about their own culture. That’s because network television had moved in north of the 60th parallel and was destroying Inuit and Dene culture. Kids were no longer speaking to their parents in their native language and violence portrayed on television was, for the first time, creeping into heretofore peaceful and tight communities.
My partner and I assembled Inuit and Dene artists from all over the Arctic and began by showing them short films as examples of what they might do. Some of them had never seen a film or a TV show before. When the first film was over we asked the Inuit and Dene what they thought. They gasped in awe. One of them finally spoke. “That man in the story must have been a great wizard,” he said reverentially. “What makes you say that?” I asked. The movie had to do with a detective finding a body in a hotel room, jumping into his car and running all over trying to find the killer. “Well, he certainly had magic,” said the man, “because one minute he was in a room and the next minute in his car. He must have been able to do this by magic!” They had a similar reaction when we showed them non–Hollywood-type films. When I showed them a short I had written about a girl at a birthday party, they wanted to see the entire party play out. They didn’t understand why the piece had to be edited for pacing and story efficiency.
My partner and I were astonished. We never realized we had to define edits because these people didn’t know what they were! We had to explain that those mundane parts (traveling, eating, sleeping) were intentionally left out of the movie and happened in the spaces between scenes.
This kind of thinking is foreign to all of us who grew up with movies and TV and that we all understand the nature and purpose of cuts. Really? In spite of all they know, most writers still include scenes that are entirely unnecessary just to get from one location to another.
For example, lots of my beginning students make the following common mistake:
Int. Bedroom – Morning
FRANK, 21, looking like a train hit him, is wrapped up in sheets in his bed SNORING loudly when the alarm RINGS. He groans, pounds the clock, and stretches.
Int. Bathroom – Continuous
Frank looks in the mirror and growls. He splashes water on his face, brushes his teeth, and pats down his hair.
Int. Bedroom – Continuous
Frank stands in front of his open closet door looking at a rack of identical black suits. He squints at each one carefully and then chooses the suit nearest the wall.
Int. Hall – Continuous
Frank, fully dressed and looking sharp, walks down the hall.
Int. Stairwell – Continuous
Frank is halfway down the stairs when the DOORBELL RINGS followed by LOUD KNOCKING. A few seconds later, five police dressed in riot gear, break the door down, YELL, rush up the stairs, drag Frank down to the ground floor, push him onto the carpet, and cuff him.
Whew. Okay. I suppose you could make the argument that we needed to see Frank’s routine to get a bit of character. We needed to see all those identical suits and we needed to be just as surprised as he was when the cops break in. Maybe in a feature. But in a short you don’t have time for all of this. You have time for ONLY what’s necessary to the story, and that early stuff isn’t really necessary.
Many of my students don’t believe they can get their story down into 8 to 10 pages, but after they outline and think a lot about their story, they find they can do that. And especially in the second draft, after they’ve written 12 pages when they needed 10, they can see what to cut and usually it’s the unnecessary transition scenes. They can combine scenes to make a greater impact and create faster pacing, and that’s what we want in a short.
Remember that when you shoot, you’ll have to do a setup for every slug. That means not only will you have to get a house that has stairs, but you’ll also have to light and set up in a bathroom, in a hall, and on a staircase. What a hassle and time killer.
The really important part of this scene is that a guy is surprised by the cops who break in and arrest him. And we can get some of Frank’s character in other ways as you’ll see in the following fix:
Int. Bedroom – Morning
FRANK, 21, looking like a train hit him, is wrapped up in sheets in his bed SNORING loudly. Next to his bed is a clothes horse fitted out with an immaculate expensive black suit, a crisp white shirt, and an expensive-looking tie. A Rolex watch is on the bedside table next to a bottle of Jack Daniels and a vial of prescription pills.
Frank’s own SNORE wakes him slightly and he gulps and turns over.
Suddenly, the bedroom door bursts open and three cops, dressed in riot gear and YELLING WILDLY, drag Frank out of bed, throw him on the floor, and cuff him.
Now we only have one setup (the bedroom) and we have cut our cost by having only one suit instead of a rack. Also, we’ve found out even more about Frank by having the booze, the Rolex, and the pill vial next to him. And, by the way, Rolex knock-offs are cheap. If you can’t afford that, simply lose it and you can fill an empty booze bottle with tea, saving even more money.
We’ve also cut down the number of cops to save us uniform money and actors! Obviously, this is much more efficient and can be shot quickly. It’s a fast, exciting opening for a short film and gets the audience involved right away.
This also saves you looking for a location that includes staircases. Your next scene can be an exterior when the cops throw Frank into a squad car, or to save even more money and time you can simply cut to the cop shop’s interrogation room if you want. You don’t need those pesky transition scenes. If you do want to give us information before you get to the cop shop, you can do that in a car, but if for some reason you need them to talk in the car (for example, Frank could make a break for it at a red light somehow) and it’s an important part of the plot, then by all means write the scene. Just know that you’ll be paying for that car.
Remember, it’s also true that, as some say, the editing process is a second chance at directing, but that’s also true for writing. Removing information rather than adding it can sometimes make for a better story, and knowing how to do that will make you a better writer.
Marry Locations
Think carefully about why you need multiple locations to make your point. If you’re telling a story that requires a passage of time, you will need various locations to show that. But if your story can be made shorter and more efficient by having lots of the action and dialogue take place in one or two locations, you should do that. If the characters are compelling and the writing tight and interesting, your short will still impress. The idea is to demonstrate how you can tell a story visually and by what characters do and say and not necessarily the number of places they inhabit while doing and saying.
If two characters are in a house having an argument, keep the argument in one room rather than spreading it all over the house. The dialogue should be sparkling enough to indicate movement so that you don’t need your actors to change physical locations. Think about the classic film Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? In that movie director Mike Nichols shot arguing people so dynamically and Ernest Lehman wrote such compelling dialogue that audiences forgot the location and concentrated on the characters’ interaction. We didn’t need to see the characters running from room to room flinging insults at each other.
Shun Remote Locations
Shooting in a faraway location (even if it’s only a few hours’ drive away) can be dangerous because if you miss something when you look at your footage, pickups aren’t easy to do. Nor is sound. I had one graduate student who wrote her graduate thesis film script with a specific location in Ohio. She shot it there and when she got back realized that her sound was so bad she had to loop all her dialogue because she didn’t have the money to go back and reshoot. Horrible! Not only was this hideously stressful, but it also added an additional expense she hadn’t considered.
And sadly, while she was in Ohio she ran into some significant location problems and because her shooting schedule was tight, she quickly decided to cut scenes from the script she later realized were more crucial to her story than she realized. It was too late to do anything about that because she couldn’t afford to go back to Ohio to reshoot.
The trick is to consider again how desperately you need the scene to be a particular location and how much that will add to the story and the atmosphere. Sometimes it’s necessary to go to a certain specific place, but usually that place can be cheated or perhaps re-created locally. You need to decide if that remote location is in the best interests of your film and your pocketbook. I had a student set on shooting in snow simply for the effect it would create. She was like a dog with a bone on this one and hung onto this notion until I finally showed her how much it would add to her budget (many thousands of dollars!). She gave it up because it wasn’t essential to her story, and letting go of snow would help her get her movie made. That’s the important thing after all.
Get Rid of Side Characters
Short films can’t have lots of characters. Because you don’t have much time for character development, you’ll need to follow Short Bible Rule #6 and kill your characters or combine them. Ask yourself if you really need a brother and a sister to demonstrate family dynamics. Maybe you can do just as well by having just a brother or a sister or even just mom and dad. I had one graduate student who had a dinner scene with mom, dad, and his main character. He realized he could get along without the mom and just have the dad and son talking. Mom could be in the kitchen off-screen shouting a comment or simply absent in the scene if her existence was never an issue.
Another student had a sheriff stopping a car on the highway and then speaking with the driver. The scene was meant to convey only that the sheriff was crooked and stopped people unnecessarily, taking a bribe to let them go. The student realized he could get rid of the conversation with the driver by showing the sheriff walking up to the car, pausing, taking a roll of bills from an “invisible” passenger, and then walking back to his own vehicle while counting the money. One fewer character and no extra dialogue to lengthen the scene! And he didn’t have to show the exterior of the cop car. He could simply show the sheriff inside his car bearing down on the other vehicle with his siren blaring.
Often writers put in extra characters because they think a scene will be made more “realistic” by including them. Frankly, the audience won’t notice their absence if you write an action the audience can focus on, an action that will further character or story.
Lose Unnecessary Establishing Shots
Do you really need that establishing shot? Often these shots tout location, location, location when you really want to focus on character, character, character. Establishing shots take up movie and shooting time and don’t always add to the story. Unfortunately, they are often boring too. Unless your film is location-centric and unless location functions like a character in your story (e.g., Vegas in a story about gambling), you should consider losing establishing shots.
However, if your establishing shot is a character indicator and helps your subtext, you can use it. For instance, if your establishing shot is an empty bedroom (before a character appears in it) and its decor is very character revealing (posters of Cary Grant, Ninja Turtles, The Mars Rover and assorted naked cover girls on walls painted black and windows covered with aluminum foil), then you probably need that establishing shot to indicate your character is an eclectic strange type. Make sure that you can use this information later in your script (maybe the character’s arc dictates that he change the look of his room, ripping down the posters and exchanging them for elaborate banks of fish tanks). Otherwise, we don’t really need to see cityscapes, tall office buildings, or acres of saguaros.
Nix the Exotic
Exotic shots take time and money and are just so much eye candy. Do you really need an aerial shot? Do you really need to use a drone to get a fly-by or overhead? Do you really need a helicopter? Do you really need exotic plants or animals? Do you really need a GoPro shot? Do you really need a chase scene involving cars, motorcycles, boats, ocelots? I bet you don’t.
Lots of filmmakers get carried away with the groovyness of trick shots and the exotic and waste time and money getting them even though they don’t add much to the story. Don’t write them in hoping you’ll somehow be able to figure out how to use them.
Keep Phone Conversations Short and Visual
For some reason, lots of novice screenwriters love writing one-sided phone conversations without realizing that the shot they create by doing so is a soul-crushing static one. I’ve read scripts where phone speak goes on for nearly a page with nary a line devoted to movement. I don’t care how important you think that phone conversation is, it usually doesn’t make for good filmmaking. That’s why you should keep these conversations as short as possible and write them in such a way that they hold the audience’s interest and contain some movement.
The following is an example.
Int. Bedroom – Day
Doris, wearing a skimpy leopard bikini and Lucite high heels is stretched out on a window seat dialing her phone. She listens and then talks fast.
She pauses as LOUD SQUAWKS come from the other end of the line. She looks out the window and sighs.
Another SQUAWK. Doris opens the window, sticks her head out and waves.
A young man cleaning the pool below waves back and throws her a kiss. Doris looks pleased.
More SQUAWKS. Doris leans out the window and takes her top off. The man grins and falls into the pool.
There are no more squawks. Doris smiles the smile of victory, walks to the door, and lets in the soaking wet pool boy.
We’ve added some more visual interest to the shot here by moving away from the static shot of Doris simply talking on the phone. We could have also added visual interest (and lost the pool boy) by including the person on the other end of the line. The intercutting between the two conversations in two separate locations creates movement. I know that you’re probably thinking that adding another location and character is a direct contradiction of what I’ve already told you. In this case, however, the story centers around the relationship between two characters, and so the second character has been seen in the film already and/or will appear in the rest of the film too.
You can use a location where we’ve already seen the second character, or you can use one that adds depth and scope to the character. In the following example, I used a massage room to indicate that here’s a guy who likes to pamper himself and expects to be taken care of.
Int. Bedroom – Day
Doris, wearing a skimpy leopard bikini and 6-inch Lucite heels is stretched out on a window seat dialing her phone. She listens and then talks fast.
Int. Massage Room – Same
Harvey is lying face up on a massage table, draped in a white sheet, his cell phone in his hand, while a gorgeous masseuse rubs his feet.
Intercut Phone Conversation
We can also stoke the visuals by including some action for each character. Doris can still wave at her pool boy, and Harvey can be doing some business with his masseuse (leg lifting, slapping her arm away, screaming in pain or pleasure).
In any case, you’ve got to make sure that your phone conversations are interesting, visual, and important to the story.
Choreography
The same is true for shot orchestration or choreography. If you write specific choreography in your scenes (with the exception of chase, dance, or fight choreography), you’ll help yourself later in the shooting process. Because the script is a shooting blueprint, careful orchestration of movement can really stand you in good stead. For example, a student wrote a scene where characters keep appearing from doors on either side of a long hallway. Their appearances were sporadic and important to be timed to coincide with certain events taking place at one end of the hall. The student initially wrote the scene this way:
Int. Hallway – Day
A long hallway lined with doors. Every few seconds, heads would pop out of each door and then quickly retreat.
Instead of writing that, I encouraged the student to make the scene seem more exciting and specific by actually describing each character’s pop-out as connected with the other pop-outs to make shooting much easier and take less time. By writing the scene specifically, a kind of shot list was already in place.
Int. Hallway – Day
A long hallway with two doors on either side. Helen pops her head out of door one and quickly withdraws it just as Ben pops his head out of door three. Just as he withdraws it, Ira pops his head out of door two and then withdraws it a little before Stella pops her head out of door four.
Now it’s clear what the order of popping is. Because it’s all figured out beforehand, there is no need to take time during shooting to figure this out.
As I mentioned earlier, beware of writing too much description of an actual fight. Your fight choreographer will figure that out so you don’t need to describe punches or specific moves.
Character Descriptions
Be careful not to describe your characters too exactly unless it’s important. For example, if your character has to be blond, okay. But otherwise, hair and eye color should not be included. The same is true for body type and costume. You need to generalize. You do have to describe the person to give wardrobe hints where it is essential. For example, if your character is a Goth drummer you might write something like:
ERIC, 20, mohawk, chains, fake leathers, and tats, is pummeling his drum set.
NYLA, 17, shaved head, black lips, and mesh clothes, is staring at him with the hunger of a starving lioness.
We now get what these two are into. But you certainly don’t need this:
BRENDA, 17, dressed in a white shirt, black slacks, and a red vest, is behind a desk holding a steno pad.
Do we really care what Brenda is wearing? Not specifically. As a character point … if she’s a naughty secretary, you might say:
BRENDA, late 20s, dressed like a Vegas hooker trying to look legit—white shirt provocatively unbuttoned, too-big hair, and chandelier earrings, leans forward over her desk and flashes her cleavage while she licks her glossy lips.
Brenda might set the office tone and she might be “important” in the story if we need her to have an affair with the hero or the boss. But if she’s just a casual character we won’t see again but need her to perhaps stop our main character from entering the office, we can simply say:
BRENDA, 30s, tight lipped and dressed like a business commando, is sitting ramrod straight behind the front desk.
You can work out your business attire with wardrobe later. It usually means a dark suit but will be simple and telegraph the message you want to send regarding the office and the scene.
If you can give your descriptions this kind of flavor you’ll provide an interesting read of your script and at the same time give the subtext you want for that particular scene. It’s better to write descriptions that indicate character than strictly wardrobe and appearance, particularly for your main characters. This will give your actors more to work with as well.
Just in the description, the characters can understand attitude without having to wait for the dialogue. This is another way of making your script more visual. Sometimes you don’t even need dialogue to make your point.
For example, in the scene with the drummer and Nyla, you could simply have the drumming stop, the drummer get down from the bandstand, grab Nyla, and give her a big sloppy kiss after which she slaps him.
Isn’t that better than:
Eric stops drumming, walks down from the bandstand, and approaches Nyla.
He grabs her and kisses her.
If you do that it extends the scene unnecessarily when you are looking for space to do other things. You can get to the point faster. These two feisty people are going to have a powder keg romance, and we might as well start with the explosion!
Too much time in short films is taken up by setting up scenes and situations, and all that setup might be unnecessary to the point you’re making. Get to it! Sometimes you do need transitions and longer scenes to make things flow. I’m not saying that every scene needs to be short and punchy. It depends on your story and how you’re playing it out.
Take that abortion scene in Juno that we highlighted earlier. You could omit the inside of the abortion clinic and just have her see Su-Chin’s sign, say nothing, and leave right there, but we need to see her character and bravery and the idea that she has had mental issues in the past. You can still use that in a short version of Juno (we’ll tackle that later), but you need the scene even though it takes more time, just as you need the transition fingernail scene in the clinic.
You have to decide what’s important to set up and what isn’t, and sometimes that means you might have to write long and then cut. But if your outline is very detailed, you won’t have to struggle with cutting for length. This can get downright impossible. Once again I’m harping on the fact that you have to ask yourself every time you write a scene if it is really necessary to the story. Every scene and every bit of dialogue must serve that story in a short script.