This week I'm looking at storytelling takeaways from the 2021 Oscar Nominees for Best Original Screenplay.
Aaron Sorkin's Oscar-nominated THE TRIAL OF THE CHICAGO SEVEN is a very traditional kind of film, the courtroom drama. After a brief sequence set just before the Chicago protests that introduces our players, and one more set later that introduces the other main character, the prosecution lawyer, we're right into the trial. And we stay there for the next two hours.
It's a big swing to make a movie like this today. We just don't do full length courtroom dramas anymore. Sorkin has the benefit of a huge and varied cast of characters on trial and their stories to work with, and that's a big part of how the movie is able to be as compelling as it is.
But even so, a straight-ahead two hour legal drama has a pretty high chance of collapsing in on itself. It's too much of one thing.
Three things Sorkin does to avoid that:
1) He cuts from the court back to the actual events.
This is standard issue courtroom storytelling technique, and with reason. Flashbacks/cutaways free us from some of the claustrophobia and repetitiveness of the courtroom. They pump oxygen into the narrative.
Given the fact we've got so many different stories to tell, the flashbacks themselves never get repetitive either.
2) He tells parts of the courtroom proceedings themselves through another point of view.
As we're going through the court case, of course we're also getting scenes between sessions, the guys talking through strategy or arguing or otherwise hanging out.
And Sorkin makes the decision to insert among those moments scenes of Abbie Hoffman doing stand up about what happened that day at trial. Which gives Sorkin another way to tell the story, and also gives us a whole other point of view on the story we're watching.
Part of what can make courtroom dramas so stultifying is they have no point of view per se. The scenes get laid out one after the next. Allowing Hoffman to in effect narrate moments of the trial and the events that came before creates this great sense of liberation in us, a feeling that mirrors the experience of Hoffman and the others themselves, after being trapped day after day in the courtroom.
3) He sets the climax outside the courtroom.
Probably the boldest storytelling choice of the film is the decision to have the big reveal of the damning audio that seems to prove Tom did incite the riots, and his subsequent interrogation and defense all happen not in the courtroom, but "offstage" with his lawyer standing in as the prosecution and his fellow defendants looking on.
In one way it's just another way of shifting gears and keeping the storytelling fresh. And as the sequence kicks into gear, Sorkin starts weaving in his other techniques as well--not only are we cutting back and forth to the actual events, but we get Hoffman doing stand up about them being cornered outside the bar. It's the narrative equivalent of the end of a fireworks show--we're launching all of the rockets now.
The sequence will still end in court, with Hoffman--who is the only one who actually understood what Hayden had said--giving gorgeous testimony about being an American. Which is an important choice: it's still a courtroom drama. There are conventions.
But even then, the scene ends with him being asked whether he was hoping for a confrontation with police and considering his answer, rather than giving it. A last move by Sorkin to breathe new life into this staid and predictable genre.
Takeaway Question: What's a fresh way into my scene? Or my story?
